PANEL. Modes of Exhibition"Monsters & Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s"
Oliver Tostmann
Wadsworth AtheneumOliver Shell
Baltimore Museum of ArtA presentation of the exhibition
Monsters & Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s ad 1940s. As Europe lurched toward fascism and America fought in the Second World War, no other artists produced images more powerfully disturbing than the Surrealists.
Monsters & Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s ad 1940s will be the first major exhibition to focus on the interrelationship between Surrealism and war in both Europe and America during this period. Monsters and myths became some of the Surrealists’ most favorite subjects, as they often took recourse in mythological themes to depict the horrors of war and capture dark premonitions. This exhibition will examine key works in a variety of media by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Max Ernst, juxtaposing them with works by lesser known artists such as André Masson, Wolfgang Paalen, and Wifredo Lam.
Monsters & Myths will build on the Wadsworth Atheneum’s storied history as the first American museum to exhibit Surrealist art. Co-organized with The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), the exhibition will also travel to the BMA and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee.
"Breton Online: Here and There"
Constance Krebs
Association Atelier André BretonFrom his studio in Paris, André Breton organised exhibitions, edited journals and wrote. His books have been everywhere and his letters have reached numerous friends across the globe. He kept in his studio every work he had read, published, written or exhibited. Today, everything has been digitized and put online. But how does one use the digitized resources? The Breton website is full of works indexed in categories, events, series, localisations. Tools are organized as: wikis, comments, bibliography, Zotero library, and portfolios. For this conference, if you choose to introduce me to one of your selected candidates, we could update the works of the website the candidate refers to. Thus, we would be able to create an album in which notices could be organised. For Malcom de Chazal, for example, some notices need to be updated, others that exist have to be translated from French to English. If someone wishes to talk about Chazal's letters to Breton we need to publish them online. A map will soon show the works' origin places, and where they were collected. For the bibliography, a Zotero tool is defined on every page. As long as the project is evolving, the album stays private, and is only visible to his creator. Once the project ready to be announced, the album will become public and appear on the
homepage. This website is here to help you create an exhibition, a catalog or a class as it indexes every single Breton's work and object.
"Curating the Catalogue Raisonné"
Jessie Sentivan
Curator, Kay Sage: Serene Surrealist and Editor, Kay Sage Catalogue Raisonné The catalogue raisonné is meant to provoke, delight, and intrigue. It is a publication that generally stands alone. Painstaking research and careful organization pave the way, inspiring others to develop new scholarship and exhibitions. Yet in a recent installation at the Williams College Museum of Art,
Kay Sage: Serene Surrealist demonstrates what it looks like to exhibit the catalogue raisonné. Based upon eight years of research for the
Kay Sage Catalogue Raisonné (2018, Prestel),
Serene Surrealist recreates Sage’s inaugural 1950 exhibition with the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York. Of the fourteen original paintings on display, one was destroyed in a fire and one was sold to a private collector and has since gone missing.
Serene Surrealist comprises the twelve extant paintings, marking their first showing together in over 65 years. This case study exposes the challenge and triumph of an object-based presentation.
