Room 507

 Surrealist Objects

'Beginning in the 1930's many artists associated with Surrealism turned to object making with vigor.  Freud's psychoanalytical theories - which suggested objects could function as projections of unconscious sexual desires - served as an important touchstone.'

Osamu Shiihara ' Shampoo' 1930s

Rene Magritte 'The Portrait' 1925

Germaine Dulac stills from the film 'The Seashell and the Clergyman' 1928

Alberto Giacometti ' Hands Holding the Void' [invisible] 1934

Salvador Dali 'The Little Theater' 1934

Brassai 'Man sleeping Along the Seine' 1932

Leonora Carrington 'And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur' 1953

Pablo Picasso 'Girl Before a Mirror' 1932

Man Ray 'Minotaur' 1939

Salvador Dali 'The Persistence of Memory' 1931

Roberto Matta 'Untitled' 1942

Salvador Dali 'Retrospective Bust of a Woman' 1933 

Yves Tanguy 'Untitled' 1947

Frida Kahlo 'Fulang-Chang and I' 1937

Oscar Dominguez 'Untitled' 1936

Max Ernst 'Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale' 1924

Joseph Cornell 'Untitled' 1940

Rene Magritte 'The Menaced Assassin' 1927

Frida Kahlo 'Self-Portrait' 1940

Joan Miro 'The Birth of the World' 1925

Meret Oppenheim 'Object' 1936

Remedios Varo 'The Juggler' 1956

Joan Miro 'Object' 1936

Andre Breton 'Untitled' 1936

Marcel Jean 'Untitled' 1936

I always think of Federico Garcia Lorca together with Salvador Dali.  They were friends along with Luis Bunuel before and during the Spanish Civil War.  Dali and Bunuel made the film 'The Andalusian Dog' which Lorca believed was an insult to himself because of his outspoken socialist and homosexual views when those views could get you murdered.  Federico Garcia Lorca was murdered in 1936 after last being seen taken under arrest by Franco's nationalist forces.  The circumstances of his death and his body have never been discovered.  He is credited with introducing Symbolism, Surrealism and Futurism into Spanish Literature:

Ode to Walt Whitman                            

by Federico Garcia Lorca

Along East River and the Bronx.

The young men were singing, baring their waists,

with the wheel and the leather, the hammer, and the oil.

Ninety thousand miners whittled silver from the rocks

and the boys traced ladders and perspectives.

But nobody slept

or wished to be: river;

none loved the big leaves

or the beach's blue tongue.

Along the East River and Queensborough,

the young men were grappling with Industry.

The Jews sold the faun of the river

circumcisions rosette;

and the sky, over bridges and rooftops,

emptied its buffalo herds to the push of the wind.