The Centre Pompidou couldn’t pass up a chance to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the Surrealist manifesto for one of its last blockbuster exhibitions before it shuts down for a major renovation (from summer 2025 to 2030). The museum has gone all out to create a highly stylish show worthy of the occasion.
Visitors enter the exhibition through the maw of a monster modeled on the entrance to the Cabaret de l’Enfer, which used to grace the Boulevard de Clichy in Montmartre, and was directly in the line of sight of the apartment of Surrealist ringleader André Breton. They then pass through an amusing gallery of photo-booth images of some of the movement’s major protagonists – the machine was a novelty in the late 1920s when the Surrealists mugged for it, just as we still do today – then enter a multimedia presentation in the round of Breton’s 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, including the manuscript itself, projected images and sound.
Then the parade of artworks begins. For this new look at Surrealism, I was expecting to see the usual suspects – Dalí’s melting clocks, Magritte’s “this is not a pipe,” etc. – but while some of those familiar canvasses are present, this is primarily a fresh presentation of Surrealist works from 1924 to ’69, when the movement was officially dissolved. The show also takes into account works from beyond Paris, where the movement was founded and blossomed.
Visitors can practically feel the joy of the artists who were given permission by the movement to delve deep into their stifled subconsciouses and to cut the ropes that fettered their imagination. Their dreams and nightmares came flooding out, along with visual puns, monstrous creatures and all manner of hallucinatory visions. They truly seem to be having fun, except perhaps when Breton was expelling them from the movement or making new rules for it.
In this show, Magritte, Dalí and de Chirico remain stalwarts of the movement, the first always quick with humorous anomaly, the second deeply strange in a way that somehow makes him enormously popular and the third unmistakably himself thanks to the telltale inclusion of antique statuary.
A friend who saw the show before I did had complained that there were hardly any works by women, but I found the opposite to be true. I was truly impressed by their strong presence, especially of artists rarely encountered in Paris, including Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Ithell Colquhoun, and Dorothea Tanning. Dora Maar, better known in France and the subject of a show of her own at the Centre Pompidou in 2019, was also represented.
To encompass national variations on Surrealism, this touring exhibition will be adapted to each place it is shown in – the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Don’t miss it.
See our list of Current & Upcoming Exhibitions to find out what else is happening in the Paris art world.
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