Talk In New York

Catastrophic Spiritual Consequences of New Economic Exploitation Made Painfully Clear

Docs on Fluoride, Food Reform, Porn Workers Coming Up

Two gentleman of the Social Enlightenment: Harry Gantz and Andrew Tilson, of American Winter and the Workers Unite! Film Festival, respectively.

Walk into the Workers Unite! Film Festival (at Cinema Village until Friday, when it moves to the Brecht Forum at Bank Street and the West Side Highway) and you enter a different world from the commercial insanity that grips much of US society today.

This is the second time the tireless Andrew Tilson with the able help of his wife Rose has mounted this exceptional tribute to the human spirit, which is now under assault from those who run late phase capitalism. Those ruthless bosses seem to value the ordinary worker and now even the middle class jobseeker less than ever before, and there are many tales of their predatory blindness in Tilson’s parade of our system’s obscenities.

Suffering of redundancy

One film chosen to illustrate this moral disaster is American Winter, a bitter saga which documents the panic and despair felt by families who until recently had no idea they would ever be unable to find work before their unemployment and savings ran out, leaving them and their children to starve if they didn’t have the blessing of food stamps and the fortitude to dwell in unheated garages or in their cars.

Sometimes it all begins when their credit rating is bust by the stratospheric cost of illness after they fail to pay their insurance premiums, or even when they do, and that failing alone will prevent them from getting a job of any kind, even at minimum wage.

The invisible millions

These and other films at this unique festival are the stories of the Second World, the people who form the invisible but growing portion of rich societies around the world who cannot ever escape poverty, because their wages aren’t high enough to allow savings. The competition of ultra cheap labor from the Third World means that once unemployed they lose the chance to get any job above minimum wage, and may not get that.

Such is the insanity of those inside the corporate fortress that they cannot see far enough outside their hermetically sealed windows to understand that paying labor decently is the only way to ensure there are enough consumers for the products they make. The health and success of the US economy has been founded on this principle for a hundred years, ever since Henry Ford made the first Model T and paid his workers enough that they could afford to buy one.

But this practicality, which argues that it is actually in the self-interest of the rich to pay the poor and the middle class more than the bare minimum of economic slavery, is ignored as boards and CEOs often pay themselves obscene sums even while their businesses founder. Meanwhile, some forty nine million Americans live below the poverty line, including over 18 million children.

It is more than economic logic which is being flouted. As the documentaries in this festival make clear, when societies are over commercialized and even art and education are increasingly matters of price rather than value it is the human spirit which suffers, and its humanitarian values are lost.

Where is the kindness?

Those values include such things as kindness and goodwill towards others, and a willingness to serve rather than exploit the weak. Despite the claims of such self satisfied Randians such as John Mackay of Whole Foods, who claim to balance their capitalistic role as owners by offering health insurance to their hard working staff, genuine communal concern is not widespread among the one per cent. Even the amiable Warren Buffett, who recognizes that his secretary shouldn’t pay a higher rate of tax than he does, merely hands over his excess riches to Bill Gates to dispense, rather than take his own time to help the needy.

The spirit of the Workers Unite! festival is precisely that kindness, however, as is pretty clear when you encounter Andrew Tilson and his wife Rose who run it. The photo above may show what we mean, since we believe that the faces of both Andrew and the filmmaker Harry Gantz, the co director of “American Winter” exhibit the kind of good humored, relaxed and gentlemanly quality we have in mind, which is becoming so hard to find among the wealthy and their highly paid managers, and other cogs in the capitalist machine.

Participants in the festival will enjoy the relief of this oasis in the City of Mammon which this spirit of kindness and concern brings, since it is the spirit in which most of the films to be shown are made, the spirit which seems to have mostly left US capitalism.

Remarkable high quality Web video streaming of Energy for Tomorrow

Jeremy Irons Discusses Options in World Garbage Crisis with Andrew Revkin

Jeremy Irons is depressed by his world tour of garbage and how its attempted disposal is adding to the horror, but he hopes that grass roots movements will turn the trend around before dioxins become a standard kitchen ingredient

Tonight (April 24) Jeremy Irons presents his new film on the global garbage crisis to attendees of the New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference held at the Times building tomorrow. The public is invited to occupy any additional seats which may be available (55E59 St).

The film is presented by the actor in a measured voiceover as he tours the sites of horrors ranging from the huge beachfront dump that now decorates the seaside of a Lebanon city to the maimed and deformed children in Vietnam who still suffer from the effects of Agent Orange fifty years ago used to defoliate the jungles hiding the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters in Vietnam and Cambodia.

The film, as the increasingly weary sounding Irons suggests, is a guide to the abysmal future in store for us if the mountain of plastic and toxic refuse continues to build worldwide, poisoning the whole food chain including human fetuses, as the gathering volume of autism allergies and other symptoms may indicate is already happening in the US.

Tomorrow the Times Conference at the Times building on Energy for Tomorrow: Building Sustained Cities will gather experts from cities around the US and the world to discuss new ideas in the field.

An impressive aspect of the $800 event will be that it will be streamed in high definition video accessible for free worldwide. Go to this link for the video either real time streaming or post conference reference.

Among the speakers will be Mayor Bloomberg, his Transportation CommissionerJanette Sadik-Kahn and Columbia professor Klaus Jacob.

http://www.nytenergyfortomorrow.com/#

UPDATE April 25: STreaming and playback operating perfectly today, save for one problem: the strip which allows going back and repeating is missing even on some filed videos.

Three premieres in evening of rhythm, striving, laugh out loud satire

Heart and strength in varied program by talented troupe

Annabella Gonzalez’ well established dance troupe outdid itself on Saturday night (Mar 23 2012) with a program of dance numbers ranging from evocative abstractions to highly readable riffs on themes as familiar as Adam and Eve, though always with new twists as in the finale, a fine amusing satire on New York runners warming up.

The audience was immediately stirred at the outset by the premiere of Path, a rhythmic study by a group of four dancers (Lucia Campoy, Jorge Fuentes, Marcos Emanuel de Jesus and Carolina Santos Read) in purple in a kind of conga line jerking and swaying their broad shoulders and pleasingly rounded bottoms to a warm and catchy Latin beat (specially composed by Peter Sivalia) while intermittently breaking apart to perform interactive dance sequences of uplifting, joyous spirit as they proceeded along their journey.

Three more essentially music driven pieces followed, the first in sharp emotional contrast, a solo by Ms Gonzalez herself in a reprise of her Tableau from 1985 which struck a more introspective note, as she emerged, to the music of a string quartet by Elzbieta Sikora, first toe and finally whole body from behind one of a pair of Japanese screens to portray internal anguish under pressure from without, a punishing struggle to stand up never quite achieved before quietly giving up and reaching stillness on the floor.

The premiere of Talk Back, created by choreographer-dancer Jinah Parker, gave us a couple (Shauntee Henry and Carolina Santos Reid) in broad black tops and bottoms accompanied by an ominous soundtrack (by Justin and Jade Hicks) of drumming music with hummed and growling words seemed to pursue the same escape from oppression of some kind, perhaps from each other, before the essentially abstract depiction gave way to Pastoral Latino (2012) with three couples (Campoy, Juan Echazarreta, Fuentes, de Jesus, Heather Panikkar and Parker) that suggested much the same search for substance amid turmoil, accompanied by a soundtrack of unresolved modernist rumination (a sonata for two cellos and piano by Seymour Barab), both dance and music without obvious narrative framing but rewarding as a sequence of interesting explorations of possibilities.

From Adam and Eve to Central Park, through guilt to fun

Post intermission, metaphor was reasserted with Genesis, a highly readable version in three parts of Adam and Eve and the Fall, where the lights turned up to reveal a large red bean bag all alone on the stage resembling a huge tulip from which emerged Eve (Panikkar), her struggle (to music by pre-Colombian instruments) to be born ending at her waist, until a naked Adam (Echazarreta) appeared. When he managed to strip away this concealment of her nether regions, their joyful dance (to bird songs arranged by Panikkar) was interrupted by an apple, plucked by Adam from the tree projected on the back wall of the stage, handed to Eve and finally rolled across the ground to Adam. The sequence culminated with Eve pulling Adam off stage left in gleeful anticipation of sexual mischief. After a minute, they appeared from stage right rear, parted, and then an unexpected turn – a solo Adam exploring the red bag, heaving it on his shoulder and staggering off stage with its heavy burden of puritanical guilt.

A brief performance by the often intriguing choreographer Maxine Steinman of her premiere of Upon the Air, where dressed in a loose cream top and long black pants she twirled lightfooted to Thai flavored gong music in a dance to the idea of floating in air on a ray of light, was followed by the piece de resistance of the evening, Joggernot, from 2005, the company’s irresistible study of a group of New York runners warming up, and occasionally even speaking up, as they humorously flounced and postured through a set of satirical routines fondly exaggerating the behavioral tropes of their subjects to a level of foolery that had Whitney, a suntanned young dancer sitting in the front row next to me, giggling and even bursting out in a laugh at one point.

This irreverent riff on runners in New York assembling, stretching, and interacting with a view to finding partners came unexpectedly with snatches of spoken script from the dancers (Campoy, de Jesus, Fuentes, Panikkar, Parker), in what is always a stimulating departure from conventional art dance. A superb Bach-like violin and harpsichord sonata (String Quartet #1 by the exquisite 17 Century composer Elisabeth Jaquet de la Guerre) played a continuous lively background as dancers briefly standing in a group stretching and chatting (Lucia Campoy coquettishly extended her straight leg over the shoulder of Jorge Fuentes from behind, provoking a hilarious level of exaggerated appreciation from that comic master) made remarks like “Where are you from?”, “Arkansas!” or even – a male to another using a cellphone – “Use text! You’re so in the past!”

Not only was it amusing satire as dancers pretended to wobble or flay their arms when they fast walked or stretched in splits far wider than possible for most real runners, but there was much about it that had the visual flavor of a Feiffer cartoon, a comparison we had noticed earlier – Ms Gonzalez’s earlier emergence from behind a screen into angst on the floor, and the hand of Eve slowly emerging from the red bean bag, had something of that witty cartoonist’s vein of observation about them. That sociological comment can be implied in an art of purely physical expression, even as in this case with voice added, is always illuminating, even if the anti-war The Green Table blazed this trail eighty years ago.

A key satisfaction of the last piece came from the paradoxical placement of poised and athletic performers in a context where they ape the clumsiness and dating distractions of the deskbound as the latter go for their daily run around the Central Park reservoir, a contrast in the physical realm which pointed up how beautifully dance tunes the bodies of those who dedicate themselves to the art, especially those with the heart and strength of these dedicated young performers.

Hard to describe effectively in words, this fine entertaining finale can be sampled in an FZ35 video excerpt of some six minutes (Talk in New York Photocalendar Mar 23 Sat Video #53) which conveys pretty well why such departures into full mimicry and voice from the conventional silent restraint of standard stage dance promise much for the art as it is expanded to touch musical theater, and even musical comedy.

Dance as essential art

After prolonged applause from the packed theater Ms Gonzalez and the dancers greeted all in the foyer where at one point we asked Carolina Santos Read what kind of description she would like for her dancing. “Dynamic, fearless artistry, and character driven!” she replied in a burst of enthusiasm characteristic of the company as a whole.

All in all, an evening of continuing achievement for a perennially young and talented touring group that may be limited by time and money from equaling the biggest international companies but who embody the dedication and passion for the art that allows them to work at a high level to inspire the same satisfactions and joys in their audience, and serve as a model of how important it is that dance remain a lively and productive element in schools and in society.

Disturbing Grotesquerie, Nightmarish Dreams, Varying Techniques

Stunning, Rich Collection, Launched by LA Museum, A First for New York

The Morgan Library is the supreme treasure house and exhibitor of the finest drawings in the US, but it seems that Leslie Jones, curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was apparently the first to come up with the idea of an important show of the drawings of the surrealists, which played a major role in the development of the strikingly provocative movement of the early 20th Century.

Whether that curatorial priority be the case or not, the Morgan’s Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings, has fortunately brought the LACMA show (which ran from October to early January) in all its variety to New York with only a few changes. It is a stunning and rich exhibition. The 175 works form a revelatory account of how the seeds of Surrealism sprang up in the minds of its major practitioners. Drawings clearly took the lead in pushing the boundaries of conventional art and essaying new approaches and techniques in this Freudian, mystic, symbolic movement exploring the unconscious.

Love or loathe it, or both, at first sight, or simply find it as we do, after extended acquaintance, simultaneously intriguing and uncomfortable (and remarkably lacking in sanguinity – were these Parisians and others self-censorious in publicly excavating their innermost responses? there are not many provocative images of eroticism or lust in this collection), but always fascinating in its attempt to let the unconscious speak first without controlling mediation, this viewing is seminal.

One of its striking revelations is how far and wide the movement spread from Paris. Sheets from Eastern Europe, Tokyo, the US and Latin America are included. Works from the Morgan, LACMA, Tate Modern, the Pompidou Center and the Menil Collection join a number of items from private collections rarely accessible to the public.

There are over 160 works by Dali, Ernst, Magritte, Miro and many others in this must-see show which will run only from tomorrow till April 21 this year. Just how intriguing these are can be gathered from the pics in this post (either from the Morgan or from our Panasonic FZ35 in low exhibition light) which can be clicked to enlarge, or double clicked to super-enlarge for enormous detail. Additional pictures may be seen at Talk In New York Photo Calendar – Fabulous Morgan Surrealism

Meanwhile the Times today calls the show “sensational”, as indeed it is, repaying close attention endlessly with its extraordinary variety store of unexpected, stirring, often alien dissections of the strange unconscious visions which these artists might persuade us are always informing our emotional life:

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The New York Times (Pics added by AL)

January 24, 2013
Squiggles From the Id or Straight From the Brain
By ROBERTA SMITH

Surrealism was very, very good to drawing. Or maybe it was the other way around. In any case, shortly after a young poet named André Breton issued his first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 the movement and the medium — aided and abetted by a large cohort of talented artists and writers — joined forces, to extraordinary mutual benefit. That art continues to reap the fruits of this union is one of the many lessons of “Drawing Surrealism,” a sensational exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Drawing was an ideal art form for the Surrealists, with their initial opposition to painting as bourgeois, cumbersome and requiring too much skill. (Nearly anyone, after all, could make a decent drawing, or a few; several by the writer Georges Bataille, possibly scratched out during therapy sessions around 1925, are among the show’s high points.) And being the art medium connected most directly to the brain, it also fit with and furthered the Surrealists’ wide-ranging interests in the id, dreams and language; chance, speed and fun; and disturbing juxtapositions.

The Surrealists, like this show, defined drawing very broadly. They invented or breathed new life into drawing techniques like frottage (pencil rubbings) and the game of exquisite corpse. They commandeered collage and took it places the Cubists never dreamed of. They also tended to crossbreed such techniques (as well as photography) in all sorts of enriching ways.

But despite drawing’s centrality to Surrealism’s many explorations, there have been very few exhibitions devoted exclusively to Surrealist drawings. The Morgan’s survey is the largest yet, and also the most international. Organized by Leslie Jones, curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it had its debut last fall, and Isabelle Dervaux at the Morgan, the show is somewhat smaller than the Los Angeles version, with several substitutions because of the fragility of paper. Even so, it contains 165 works by 70 artists from 15 countries, and is accompanied by a handsome catalog with an especially informative essay by Ms. Jones.

If some of the inclusions on view serve historical clarity more than visual scintillation, the show as whole nevertheless provides plenty to occupy the eye. The stage is set with four works by important precursors of Surrealism, all from before 1920: a dreamlike drawing by Giorgio de Chirico, a poem-drawing by Apollinaire and two collages that Jean Arp arranged using chance. After these the largely chronological show is arranged according to techniques, which changed and expanded over time as more artists joined the cause and as Breton’s edicts endorsed, dismissed and reratified various methods.

This approach makes “Drawing Surrealism” a great introduction to the movement and a valuable break with the fashion for thematic displays. It serves as a reminder that few things are more important to an artwork’s ultimate effect than the way it is made, while also giving the show a variety and briskness unusual to exhibitions of drawings.

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Breton’s first manifesto was directed at writers, but its call for “pure psychic automatism” whether “by writing, or any other means,” which would take expression beyond reason and “all aesthetic or moral preoccupation,” was general. Drawing, clearly, was another means, and within months André Masson, Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró were experimenting with automatic drawing. Still, the several works by them here suggest that absolute automatism was rarely achieved, if it was even desired.

Surprisingly (or maybe not), the most convincing example here is by that epitome of fussy drawing, Salvador Dalí. An untitled ink drawing from 1927, three years before he descended on Paris, is a superb tangle of lines and splatters that looks like nothing so much as an early Pollock. Also good is the fusion of sense and nonsense achieved in two drawings of Henri Michaux, with their lettucy rows of illegible cursive and symbols.

The show makes clear the importance of Max Ernst’s ingenuity to Surrealism. For example, he set in motion frottage, another way of introducing chance and avoiding conventional skill. Drawings were made by placing a paper on a textured surface — leaves, a wood floor — and rubbing it with graphite. Even before meeting Breton, in 1921, Ernst began using images from 19th-century store catalogs, medical textbooks and popular science magazines to fashion collages of Victorian interiors fraught with all kinds of disorienting warpings of space and behavior.

Both these developments reverberate and mutate throughout the exhibition. (The show includes works by two early adapters of Ernst’s old-fashioned images, Joseph Cornell and the Peruvian artist César Moro.)

The other echoing influence is the refined technique of Dalí, who single-handedly reversed the Surrealist aversion to meticulous realism and the old masters. His “Study for ‘The Image Disappears’ ” of 1938, in which the form of a beautiful woman doubles as the features of a bearded man, is echt Dalí. But the real gem is “Les 50 Secrets,” whose malformed creatures are seamlessly added to a page from a children’s reading manual.

The game of exquisite corpse offered new ways to embrace chance, downplay skill and avoid a unified style. This show has a clutch of the aberrant figures produced by the game, in which two or more players take turns drawing on paper folded so that most of what came before is invisible. Especially striking is a pink elephant head with a highly sexualized torso, boxy feet and a wandering tail, contrived in 1926 by Breton, Marcel Duhamel, Max Morise and Tanguy. Soon collage was added, with more hard-edge, mechanistic results.

A large 1930 charcoal by Miró merges aspects of the exquisite corpse and automatic drawing. Fringed with polyps, this gangly biomorphic creature concludes with a large toenail. It was inspired by the contention of Bataille (an early dissident, who disagreed with Breton’s idealization of the unconscious) that the big toe was the basest part of the body, farthest from the brain, closest to the dirt and often, as here, more than vaguely phallic.

A fertile bedlam prevails in the second half of the show, as techniques continue to be discovered and grafted, and other countries are heard from. The British artist Eileen Agar adds an automatist figure to a large photograph of a nude woman in a 1939 work that presages Sigmar Polke. The Japanese photographer Kansuke Yamamoto riffs on Dalí with photographs from around 1938 that combine drawing, collage and rephotography. Jindrich Heisler, a Czech artist, does something similar in 1943, but with softer, charcoal-like results.

In 1935 the Spaniard Oscar Dominguez started using decalcomania, which involves spreading ink over a sheet of paper that is then pressed with another sheet. When they are separated, strange, often geological textures result, inviting further fiddling. Proof positive of its rich potential comes in a beautiful, pink-spotted work from 1936 by Georges Hugnet, who also effectively merged frottage and collage.

In the mid-1930s both the Chilean Roberto Matta and a little-known British artist-psychiatrist Grace Pailthorpe created hairy landscapes that are a little too solidly fleshy in ink. Nearby Frida Kahlo dashes off a dense constellation of her motifs in pencil.

Soon we start seeing the early glimmerings of both Abstract Expressionism and its discontents: strong works by Pollock and Arshile Gorky; dissenting figuration by John Graham and Alfonso Ossorio (the latter presaging Mad magazine’s vehemence); and febrile strangeness from the delicate Wols, alone here in his debts to Klee and Bosch.

Among the surprises is a maplike drawing by Leonora Carrington that evokes Ree Morton and a fluffy yet glowering orb of black lines by Lee Mullican. It brings us full circle, back to Dalí’s automatist outburst.

“Drawing Surrealism” is on view through April 21 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org.

Here’s the press release from the Library:

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The Press Release (see end for Talks, Film, Dance program)(Pics added by AL or from PR disc):
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SURREALISM AND THE ART OF DRAWING IS THE SUBJECT OF A MAJOR EXHIBITION AT THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM

OVER 160 WORKS BY ARTISTS SUCH AS DALÍ, ERNST, MAGRITTE, AND MIRÓ OFFER EXCITING, NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE IMPORTANCE OF DRAWING TO THE SURREALIST MOVEMENT

Drawing Surrealism January 25–April 21, 2013
**Press Preview: Thursday, January 24, 2013, 10–11:30 a.m.**
RSVP: (212) 590-0393, media@themorgan.org

New York, NY, December 14, 2012—Few artistic movements of the twentieth century are as celebrated and studied as surrealism. Many of the works of its best known practitioners—including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, and Leonora Carrington—have become touchstones of modern art and some of the most familiar images of the era.

Critical to the development of surrealism was the art of drawing. For those involved in the movement, it was a vital means of expression and innovation, resulting in a rich array of graphic techniques that radically pushed conventional art historical boundaries. Yet the medium has been largely overlooked in visual arts studies and exhibitions as scholars and institutions have focused more on surrealist painting and sculpture.

Now, for the first time in New York, the central role drawing played in surrealist art will be explored in a large-scale exhibition at The Morgan Library & Museum entitled Drawing Surrealism. The show will include more than 160 works on paper by 70 artists from 15 countries, offering important new understanding of surrealism’s emergence, evolution, and worldwide influence. The exhibition is co-organized with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and will be on view at the Morgan from January 25 through April 21, 2013.

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Occupying two of the Morgan’s largest galleries, Drawing Surrealism will be presented chronologically with interwoven thematic sections devoted to the surrealists’ principal drawing techniques and to international developments. Important drawings will be shown from countries beyond the movement’s Western European geographic roots, including sheets from Eastern Europe, Japan, the United States, and Latin America.

Drawing Surrealism includes works from the Morgan, as well as from the collections of LACMA, Tate Modern, the Musée national d’art moderne at the Pompidou Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Menil Collection. It also includes drawings from a number of major private collections in the United States and abroad, which are rarely accessible to the public.

“Because the Morgan’s collection of works on paper is of such international renown, one of the principal goals of our exhibition program is to present new insight and fresh perspectives on the medium of drawing,” said William M. Griswold, director of the Morgan. “Drawing Surrealism is an example of just such an exhibition. The show breaks new art historical ground by demonstrating the fundamental importance of drawing to the surrealist movement on the worldwide stage.”

ORIGINS OF SURREALISM

Surrealism emerged as a literary movement in Paris in 1924 with the publication of André Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism. Inspired by Freud’s theories of the unconscious, nineteenth-century mysticism, and Symbolist art and literature, surrealists sought to liberate the imagination through an art that involved chance, dreams, and the unconscious, as well as the play of thought itself.

Almost at once, the movement’s proponents realized the potential of the visual arts for expressing the imagery of dreams and the unconscious mind. The practice of drawing, which offers the advantages of immediacy and spontaneity, became the most fertile medium of expression and innovation among the surrealists, allowing them to bypass the conscious mind and produce new ways of seeing.

AUTOMATIC DRAWING

Central to the exhibition will be examples of the diverse drawing techniques that the surrealists used in their efforts to bypass the conscious mind and access the subliminal realm. The first graphic process adopted by the surrealists was automatic drawing. In this technique, inspired by André Breton’s definition of surrealism as “pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express . . . the actual functioning of thought . . . in the absence of any control exercised by reason, beyond any aesthetic or moral concern,” the artist simply allows his hand to meander across the sheet. According to André Masson, who was the first to develop the process, “the hand must be fast enough, so that conscious thought cannot intervene and control the movement.” Afterwards, however, Masson would alter his drawings according to suggestions emanating from the original web of lines. Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and Yves Tanguy also practiced a form of automatism that combined chance with a more deliberate approach.

DREAM IMAGERY

Denouncing the passivity of automatism, a few surrealists relied on more traditional techniques to create dreamlike images and express their fantasy. Chief among them was Dalí, who sought to materialize his “delirious phenomena” and dream imagery with the utmost detail in the academic style of the old masters.

This illusionistic mode was predominant in American surrealism of the 1930s, notably in the work of Federico Castellon, one of Dalí’s most successful followers. Artists seeking to express the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and World War II also often adopted this style to create images as disorienting and destabilizing as the atrocities they represented.

FROTTAGE

Max Ernst was the main surrealist to explore the technique of frottage, which consists of rubbing graphite or other drawing media on a sheet of paper placed over a textured surface, such as a wood floor, strings, or leaves, in order to reproduce that texture on the paper. For Ernst, frottage was equivalent to automatic writing because of the mechanical and unconscious way in which the imagery surfaces. Several frottage drawings by Ernst will be on view, including Le Start du Châtaigner (The Start of the Chestnut Tree), 1925, recently acquired by the Morgan, which belongs to the first series in which the artist systematically explored this technique. Ernst later adapted the frottage technique to canvas in what he called “grattage.”

EXQUISITE CORPSE

Some of the most striking surrealist drawings were exquisite corpses, a game that involved collaboration and chance. In the game—the name of which derives from a sentence created when the surrealists first used the process to write poetry: The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine—each participant made a drawing on a section of a folded sheet of paper without seeing the others’ drawings. The resulting hybrid creatures generated by the game influenced surrealist imagery, reappearing in artists’ individual works, as can be seen, for instance, in the strange anatomy of Victor Brauner’s figures on view. While the earliest exquisite corpses were drawn in graphite, ink, or colored pencil on ordinary writing paper, later examples could be in pastel or tempera on black paper. Beginning in the mid-1930s, collage was also used.

DECALCOMANIA

In the mid-1930s artists developed new automatic techniques to bypass the rational mind in the creative process. One of the most popular was decalcomania, which involves applying a wet medium (ink or gouache) to a sheet of paper and then pressing it against another sheet. When the sheets are pulled apart unexpected patterns appear on the transfer image. Originally a decorative technique—used notably in nineteenth-century ceramic design—decalcomania was rediscovered in 1935 in the context of surrealism’s exploitation of chance effects by Spanish artist Oscar Dominguez. Nearly ten decalcomania drawings by Dominguez and other surrealists who employed the technique—including Yves Tanguy, Georges Hugnet, and Marcel Jean—are included in the exhibition.

COLLAGE

Although collage was used earlier in the twentieth century by the cubist and dada artists, the technique took on particular importance with the surrealists. The odd juxtapositions and dislocated imagery it produced were particularly effective in conjuring a dream world or suggesting the irrationality of unconscious desire. Miró, Ernst, Ei-Kyu, Breton, and Arp are among the many artists whose works are featured in this section of the exhibition.

INTERNATIONAL IMPACT

The 1930s marked surrealism’s growing internationalization. Artists outside of Paris approached and adapted surrealist drawing techniques to their respective cultural and political contexts, and active surrealist centers developed in London, Prague, Tokyo, and Mexico. Although surrealism was envisioned as an international movement, rarely have works by these artists been presented alongside their European cohorts centered in Paris.

On view will be drawings by such masters as René Magritte of Belgium, Roland Penrose and Eileen Agar of England, Gunther Gerzso and Frida Kahlo of Mexico, Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský of the Czech Republic, Federico Castellón, Arshile Gorky, and Kay Sage of the United States, Cesar Moro of Peru, and Yamamoto Kansuke of Japan.

LATE SURREALISM

In the 1940s automatism played a major role in the elaboration of new forms of lyrical abstraction. In Europe, Henri Michaux and Wols created fluid images in washes and watercolor in which barely recognizable shapes suggest a visionary world. In the United States, stimulated by the presence of European surrealists in exile during the war, artists such as Arshile Gorky, William Baziotes, and Jackson Pollock explored freer techniques to make drawings that fuse visions of nature and of an interior universe. These works on paper laid the groundwork for what would become abstract expressionism.

Although surrealism as a movement lost its vitality at the end of the forties, its tenets remained a springboard for several postwar developments, as can be seen in Ellsworth Kelly’s abstract compositions based on chance and Louise Bourgois’s expression of subconscious psychological states through symbolic imagery.

RELATED PROGRAMS

DANCE
Inner Landscape: Martha Graham and the Surreal
Thursday, February 7, 7pm
The Martha Graham Dance Company will perform three of Graham’s masterworks that touch on surrealism and demonstrate how the choreographer made the workings of the mind visible in dance. Every Soul is a Circus (with Katherine Crockett performing the lead), Satyric Festival Song, and “Moon” from Canticle for Innocent Comedians will be featured with commentary by the Company’s Artistic Director, Janet Eilber. Drawing Surrealism will be open at 6pm especially for program attendees.
Tickets
$20; $15 for Members
www.themorgan.org/programs; 212-685-0008 x560
This program is supported in part by Alan M. and Joan Taub Ades.

FILM
L’Age D’Or
Friday, February 22, 7pm
(1930, 60 minutes)
Director: Luis Buñuel
Directed by a master of Surrealist cinema and co-written with Salvador Dalí, this avant-garde surrealist comedy is a gleeful fever dream of Freudian unease, bizarre humor, and shocking imagery. Starring Gaston Modot and Lya Lys, and the famed surrealist painter Max Ernst.
Free

FAMILY PROGRAM
Leave It to Chance: Surrealism 101 for the Family
Saturday, February 9, drop-in from 2–5pm
In a combination of games and art projects, artists and educators Nicole Haroutunian and Lisa Libicki will introduce the entire family to the most playful side of surrealism. Families will explore automatic drawing, frottage, collage, decalcomania, and collaborative chance drawing, all techniques made famous by Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Salvador Dali, and many others represented in Drawing Surrealism. This workshop is limited to families with children. There is a limit of two adult tickets per family. Appropriate for ages 6 and up.
Tickets
$6; $4 for Members; $2 for Children
www.themorgan.org/programs; 212-685-0008 x560

GALLERY TALK
Drawing Surrealism
Friday, February 1, 7pm
Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings, leads this casual tour of the exhibition she co-curated.
Free with admission

TOURS
Between the Lines
Saturday, February 2, 11am
8
Saturday, March 2, 11am
Written or drawn, lines are to be read and interpreted. In this new series of interactive gallery conversations, a museum educator will lead participants in a forty-minute discussion based on a selection of works from Drawing Surrealism.
Free with admission

Stroller Tours
Wednesday, February 6, 10:30am
On the first Wednesday of each month, docents lead lively one-hour tours of the museum and current exhibitions for new parents and family caregivers and their children. In February, participants will explore Drawing Surrealism. For parents and family caregivers with children 0–8 months. Single strollers, tandem strollers, and front carriers are welcome.
Free with admission

ORGANIZATION AND SPONSORSHIP

Drawing Surrealism was organized at the Morgan by Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the organizing curator was Leslie Jones, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings. The exhibition was on view at LACMA from October 21, 2012–January 6, 2013.

Lead funding for this exhibition is provided by the Ricciardi Family Exhibition Fund and by the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, with further generous support from the Sherman Fairchild Fund for Exhibitions.
The programs of The Morgan Library & Museum are made possible with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

The Morgan Library & Museum

The Morgan Library & Museum began as the private library of financier Pierpont Morgan, one of the preeminent collectors and cultural benefactors in the United States. Today, more than a century after its founding in 1906, the Morgan serves as a museum, independent research library, musical venue, architectural landmark, and historic site. In October 2010, the Morgan completed the first-ever restoration of its original McKim building, Pierpont Morgan’s private library, and the core of the institution. In tandem with the 2006 expansion project by architect Renzo Piano, the Morgan now provides visitors unprecedented access to its world-renowned collections of drawings, literary and historical manuscripts, musical scores, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, printed books, and ancient Near Eastern seals and tablets.

General Information
The Morgan Library & Museum 9
10
225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016-3405
212.685.0008
www.themorgan.org
Just a short walk from Grand Central and Penn Station
Hours
Tuesday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; extended Friday hours, 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; closed Mondays, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. The Morgan closes at 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.
Admission
$15 for adults; $10 for students, seniors (65 and over), and children (under 16); free to Members and children 12 and under accompanied by an adult. Admission is free on Fridays from 7 to 9 p.m. Admission is not required to visit the Morgan Shop.
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Documents Include George Washington Order to Vaccinate Troops

Mystery of Why it Worked in Original Form Unsolved

The current wave of rebellion against vaccinations doesn’t seem to show any signs of weakening, but the new exhibition starting today drawing on the rich collection of New York City artifacts at the New York Historical Society might give adherents pause. It recounts how mass vaccination scored one of the greatest triumphs in medical history.

The documents and photos, along with models of the ghastly results of smallpox, also show that resistance to this public health measure is not new, but has plenty of historical precedent, although this City was the first to apply it in such gigantic numbers. Over six million were vaccinated against smallpox in 1947 in little over a month – that it became the first battle won in the complete eradication of that disease worldwide.

“Be Safe! “Be Sure” Be Vaccinated!” was the City propaganda theme at the time, and the Society has borrowed the title for a show about the progress of vaccination here from the eighteenth century till today, which pairs illustrative models of the grotesque symptoms of the once rampant disease with photos, portraits and letters of prominent people in the City and country who championed and in some cases resisted the antidote.

One paper is the order of George Washington in 1777 to inoculate all the soldiers of the rebel army, when he found he was losing more men to this debilitating and often fatal scourge than to the guns of the British. The rural Americans who made up the bulk of his army had rarely been exposed to a malady which the British had often survived, and they were felled as frequently as the North American Indian tribes who were also being decimated by the new biological threat to which they had no immunity.

The disgusting ailment left its victims permanently scarred, if they were lucky enough to survive it.

One remarkable fact the show records is that in the earliest days of do it yourself vaccination the method was to rub some of the pus from the pustules covering the skin of a victim into an open wound of the person to be protected. Why this direct blood infection didn’t result in a full blown case of the dread disease but only a mild infection is not explained. Considering the ailment was transmissible by mere contact with a sick patient, it seems inconsistent that a more direct method involving a high dose of the germ merely yielded a mild form of the disease.

While we intend to research this points further, the show can be recommended to all as a vivid historical reminder of how this appalling and disfiguring infection ruined the appearance of many prominent figures in history, including the great English author, literary critic and dictionary maker Samuel Johnson, who caught it as a babe in arms from his nursemaid.