By Marie-Louise Gumuchian
LONDON (Reuters) – From Salvador Dali’s “Lobster Telephone” to Ted Joans’ massive “Long Distance” drawing, a new exhibition at London’s Tate Modern explores the global span of surrealism over 60 years.
Opening on Thursday, “Surrealism Beyond Borders” features more than 150 artworks, ranging from paintings and sculpture to photography and film.
On show are Rene Magritte’s “Time Transfixed” painting of a train coming through a fireplace as well as Joans’ 36-foot (11 m) drawing “Long Distance”, which took nearly 30 years to complete and features artists from around the world.
Pablo Picasso’s “The Three Dancers”, Malangatana Ngwenya’s untitled painting of people fighting for independence in Mozambique and “Deification of a Soldier” by Japan’s Yamashita Kikuji are among the artworks showcasing the 20th century movement’s geographic reach.
“As you walk through these galleries you can see artists from Cairo, from Seoul, from Haiti, from Tokyo, from London, from Paris, from Prague and beyond,” Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern, told Reuters.
“What the show depicts is a kind of ecosystem of contact and tentacles linking artists (through) friendships and belief systems and by their absolute commitment to freedom. Freedom of expression and freedom from constraint … It feels very now.”
Also on display are two pictures by American model, war photographer and surrealist Lee Miller, acquired by the Tate Modern. The photos, “Portrait of Space” and “The Cloud Factory”, were taken in the late 1930s when Miller was living in Cairo with her Egyptian husband Aziz Eloui Bey.
“It’s very emblematic of her wanting to escape and her sense of adventure and how you see things in different ways when you’re a surrealist,” Ami Bouhassane, Miller’s granddaughter and co-director of the Lee Miller archives, said of “Portrait of Space”.
“I mean this is just the broken fly screen on the window, of the doorway in the rest house, in the middle of the western desert. But she … noticed it and set up the shot.”
“The Last Voyage of Captain Cook”, a sculpture by Miller’s second husband Roland Penrose also features at the exhibition.
“Surrealism Beyond Borders” runs from Feb. 24 until Aug. 29.
(Reporting by Marie-Louise Gumuchian; Editing by Alison Williams)
