The At the Heart of Change: Surrealism and Anti-Fascism exhibition at the Polish capital's Museum of Modern Art brings together works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Toyen, Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, René Magritte and Remedios Varo.
The show is an expanded version of an exhibition held at Lenbachhaus in Munich, Germany from October 15, 2024, to March 30, 2025, under the title But Live Here? No Thanks. Surrealism + Anti-Fascism.
It was put together in cooperation with Lenbachhaus and the Museum of Art in Łódź, central Poland.
For the Warsaw show, curators Dorota Jarecka and Magda Lipska broadened the exhibition with research into Polish and East European surrealism.
Paweł Polit, a curator at the Museum of Art in Łódź, authored a chapter on the collection of the a.r. group, a Polish avant-garde group that gathered works from leading surrealists for the Łódź museum, founded in 1931.
The exhibition challenges the familiar view of surrealism as an art movement centered on dreams, imagination and the unconscious.
Its curators present it as a global movement that used art and literature to argue for political and social betterment.
"'Transform the world,' said Marx; 'change life,' said Rimbaud: for us these two aims are one," surrealist founder André Breton declared in 1935, in a statement quoted in the exhibition materials.
Lipska said the show presents surrealism as "an international movement, and above all a political movement," made up of artists who opposed fascism in Europe and the European colonial project.
Jarecka said many surrealists took consciously anti-fascist positions and that their views were often shaped by anti-colonial politics. She said this can be seen both in their manifestos and in works by international surrealist artists.
From the 1920s onward, surrealists opposed European colonialism, organized against fascists, fought in the Spanish Civil War and joined resistance movements during World War II.
Some were branded "degenerate" by the Nazis, interned, persecuted, forced to flee Europe or killed in war and concentration camps.
Their resistance was carried out through many disciplines of art, including poetry, painting, photography, collage and exhibitions, and their aim was to expose the contradictions of a Western civilization that presented itself as rational while producing war, oppression and empire.
Lipska said it is the first major exhibition in Poland to bring together works by various surrealist artists, including Picasso, Carrington, Ernst and Varo.
The exhibition also includes less widely recognized figures, among them Kurt Seligmann, Wolfgang Paalen, Eileen Agar and Stanley William Hayter.
The show also features artists active in the former Czechoslovakia before, during and after World War II, including Jindřich Heisler, Jindřich Štyrský, Toyen, Alois Wachsman, Emil Filla, Václav Tikal and Mikuláš Medek.
The exhibition is arranged in 12 chapters and follows geography rather than strict chronology. It begins in Paris around 1930, moves to Prague in the 1930s and 1940s, and then takes in London, Cairo, Berlin, Marseille, New York and other centers of surrealist activity.
One chapter focuses on artists who fled Germany under Adolf Hitler, while another, titled "Restless World," looks at postwar Europe, especially Central and Eastern Europe.
The show also includes Polish-born artists who worked in Paris before the war and later dispersed across the world, including Franciszka and Stefan Themerson and Teresa Żarnower.
Another section looks at the Algerian war of independence, which became an important reference point for surrealist art in the 1960s.
The exhibition presents surrealism as its members understood it: a movement demanding absolute freedom and seeking to extend it into every area of society.
At the Heart of Change: Surrealism and Anti-Fascism runs at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw until January 10.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP