Exhibition review

Abstract

Jonathan Wallis: jwallis@moore.edu Surrealism, for its first two decades, is bookended by war. That fact wasn’t loss on André Breton, who acknowledged war’s persistent historical relevance to Surrealism in 1942 during a lecture at Yale University. Speaking on the one-year anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, during his own period of self-exile from the conflict of World War II, Breton told his audience: “I insist that Surrealism can be understood historically only in relation to war; I mean—from 1919 to 1939— in relation at the same time to the war from which it issues and the war to which it extends.”1 For Breton and his fellow Surrealists who served in the First World War such as André Masson and Max Ernst, close and personal experience of physical conflict and unimaginable slaughter was a tragic but necessary ingredient and catalyst for the formation of surrealist philosophy. But the “war to end all wars” didn’t achieve its desired result, and by the mid-1930s the rumblings of nationalist politics in Europe would haunt the minds of the Surrealists. Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and the spread of Fascism, the internal strife and eventual outbreak of civil war in Spain, and an inevitable Second World War that extended its reach globally, threw all those involved with the cause for total revolution of mind and society into sobering external realities comprised of physical horror that rivaled those conjured up within the unconscious. The result, according to Oliver Shell and Oliver Tostmann, who cocurated the exhibition, “Monsters and Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s,” was an outpouring of the monstrous in Surrealist art. Oliver Shell, associate curator of European painting and sculpture at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and Oliver Tostmann, Susan Morse Hilles curator of European Art at the