A vernacular vanguard: surrealism and the making of American art history

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A VERNACULAR VANGUARD:
SURREALISM AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN ART HISTORY

by

Sandra R. Zalman

_______________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)

December 2008

Copyright 2008 Sandra R. Zalman
ii

Acknowledgments

Many people and institutions made this dissertation possible, and it is a pleasure
to thank everyone. While at USC, the McClelland Memorial Fellowship allowed me a
year to conduct dissertation research at the archives of the Museum of Modern Art in
New York, the Julien Levy archives in Connecticut, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida
and the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas. My time at these institutions was greatly
aided by the careful attentions of diligent and intelligent archivists, especially Michelle
Harvey, MacKenzie Bennett, and Stacey Flatt at the Museum of Modern Art, Marie
Difilippantonio at the Julien Levy Archive, Marisa Bourgoin at the Corcoran, and
Geraldine Aramanda at the Menil. Wonderful friends – Nora Lawrence, Tatiana Oseroff
and Tania Garbe – kindly hosted me while I was in New York, Washington D.C., Florida
and Texas, providing much needed laughter and distraction whenever I wasn’t buried in
the archives. With the help of a Del Amo Grant for study in Spain, I visited the Dali
Museum and Foundation in Figueres and Dali’s home in Port Lligat. A version of
Chapter One was published in the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas thanks to the
editorial guidance of Claudia Mesch. Stephanie Barron and Toby Tannenbaum provided
me with the opportunity to present part of Chapter Two at the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, in conjunction with the exhibition Magritte and Contemporary Images,
for which I am grateful. Sabine Schlosser at the Getty Research Institute hired me as a
research assistant, giving me access to incomparable library resources. Colleagues in the
art history department have been good friends, valuable critics and close confidants
iii
throughout: Katya Kudriavtseva, Nicholas Cipolla, Nora Lawrence, Kate Heckmann
Hanson, Priyanka Basu and Rachel Middleman.
My professors at USC fostered an excellent learning environment. Karen Lang
and Todd Olson provided encouragement and shared their impressive intellectual gifts at
key stages in my graduate career. I also benefited greatly from Richard Meyer’s advice
and expertise in American art, drawing out the exclusions our discipline often makes. I
pursued the argument of this dissertation in a seminar with Vanessa Schwartz in the
history department at USC. Vanessa pushed my thinking further with her conception of
visual culture, teaching me the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries. Vanessa’s
energy has been a positive influence not only on my own work but also on our entire
department. The seeds of this dissertation were developed in a seminar with Thomas
Crow, whose tremendous intellect and innovative approach to art history I have long
admired. His critical engagement with this project at all stages has made a huge
difference. This project would not have been possible without the consistent and dynamic
support of my advisor, Nancy J. Troy whose unflagging commitment to my academic
development makes her a model mentor and advisor. Her careful criticism challenged me
in important ways at every turn and moved this project forward at critical moments.
My parents, Leora and Franklin Zalman, and grandparents, Natalie and Jacob
Shaltiel and David Zalman, have supported me in every way throughout the duration of
this project. They have instilled in me a love of learning and an intellectual curiosity that
has sustained my work. My husband, Ted Rubenstein, has been a loving partner and my
iv
best friend. I couldn’t have done this without him (especially because he is formatting
the dissertation as I write this). I am so lucky to spend my life with him at my side.
v
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii

List of Figures vi

Abstract ix

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Surrealism as Vernacular Vanguard 29

Chapter Two: The Disputed Legacy of Surrealism in the 1960s 119

Chapter Three: A Postmodern Surrealism 213

Conclusion 295

Bibliography 312
vi
List of Figures

Figure 1: Installation photograph, Modern Art in Your Life 1

Figure 2: Installation photograph, Modern Art in Your Life 2

Figure 3: Reinhardt, How to Look at Low (Surrealist) Art, 1 946 7

Figure 4: Barr, chart, 1936 22

Figure 1.1: Installation photograph, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism 30

Figure 1.2: Installation photograph, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism 30

Figure 1.3: Oppenheim, Breakfast in Fur, 1936 35

Figure 1.4: Blume, Key West Beach, 1940 42

Figure 1.5: Dali, The Endless Enigma, 1938 42

Figure 1.6: Dali, I Dream of an Evening Dress, 1937 51

Figure 1.7: Blue Grass Perfume advertisement, 1937 55

Figure 1.8: W & J Sloane advertisement, 1937 56

Figure 1.9: Bonwit Teller advertisement, 1936 56

Figure 1.10: Time magazine, 1936 63

Figure 1.11: Dali, Persistence of Memory, 1931 65

Figure 1.12: Dali exhibition catalogue, 1939 72

Figure 1.13: installation photograph, Dali 73

Figure 1.14: Eric Schaal, Dali’s Dream of Venus, 1939 78

Figure 1.15: Miro, Rope and People I, 1935 98

Figure 1.16: Blume, Eternal City, 1934-1937 104

Figure 2.1: Life magazine, 1965 128
vii

Figure 2.2: Ruscha, Surrealism Soaped and Scrubbed, 1966 130

Figure 2.3: Magritte, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1935 137

Figure 2.4: Johns, Canvas, 1956 139

Figure 2.5: Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955 140

Figure 2.6: Magritte, The Shooting Gallery, 1925 140

Figure 2.7: Warhol, Two Jacquies, 1966 145

Figure 2.8: Warhol, 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962 147

Figure 2.9: Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1929 148

Figure 2.10: Magritte, The Cripple, 1948 151

Figure 2.11: photograph of Magritte with Magritte, The Great War, 1964 152

Figure 2.12: Magritte with Le Barbare, 1938 153

Figure 2.13: Magritte, The Sorcerer, 1951 157

Figure 2.14: installation photograph, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage 177

Figure 2.15: installation photograph, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage 177

Figure 2.16: Life magazine, 1966 183

Figure 2.17: La Révolution Surréaliste, 1928 183

Figure 2.18: Eric Hudland, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, photographs 190

Figure 2.19: Magritte, Personal Values, 1952 192

Figure 2.20: Rothko, Slow Swirl by the Edge of the Sea, 1944 197

Figure 2.21: New York Free Press, 1968 203

Figure 3.1: Magritte, Edward James in front of Au Seuil de la Liberté 214

Figure 3.2: Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978 215
viii

Figure 3.3: Benglis, Artforum advertisement, 1974 226

Figure 3.4: Krauss, Robert Morris poster, 1974 229

Figure 3.5: Adams, General Loan Executing a Vietcong Suspect, 1968 237

Figure 3.6: Atget, Avenue des Gobelins, n.d. 242

Figure 3.7: La Révolution Surréaliste, 1924 255

Figure 3.8: Atget, L’Eclipse, 1912 257

Figure 3.9: Man Ray, Return to Reason, 1923 284

Figure 4.1: installation photograph, Magritte and Contemporary Art 303

Figure 4.2: Hirst, For the Love of God, 1999 307

ix
Abstract

This dissertation contends that Surrealism in the United States came to represent a
meeting point of art and society that persistently affected developing theories of
modernism and attitudes toward common culture. As such, it represents a major
underlying force of American art history, a localized site where ongoing debates – about
abstraction and representation, consumerism, the place of politics in art, the role of the
museum, the aesthetics of photography and visual culture – are all tested and contested.
Approaching Surrealism from the perspective of the audience – the networks of critics,
collectors, and the public, who all come together not only in the context of an exhibition,
but also in the market – this dissertation re-evaluates the impact of Surrealism in the
making of an American artistic culture, as it was used both to define and dismantle
dominant critical theories in American art history, from Alfred Barr and Clement
Greenberg in the 1930s, to William Rubin, Max Kozloff and Harold Rosenberg in the
1960s and Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp and Hal Foster in the 1980s. Because
Surrealism represents an important site of debate for contemporary artistic practice,
especially as a crossroads of high and low culture, this dissertation explicitly takes on the
question of Surrealism’s value not as much as an art movement in and of itself, but for art
criticism, mass culture, and the art market in the United States. Broadly conceived, this
study asserts that the landscape of American art history would look fundamentally
different without Surrealism’s persistent presence, buttressing, and coming up against,
the arguments that make art modern.
1
Introduction
In recent years, art critics have seen the Museum of Modern Art as providing a
hermetic narrative of the history of modern art. In 1949, however, the Modern presented
an exhibition that embodied its original mission in many respects, a display of the fusion
of art and life. The occasion was the Museum of Modern Art’s twentieth anniversary, in
honor of which the Modern presented the exhibition Modern Art in Your Life, “designed
to show that the appearance and shape of countless objects of our everyday environment
are related to, or derived from, modern painting and sculpture, and that modern art is an
intrinsic part of modern living.”

Surrealism, one of five sections of the exhibition, was
represented by six dramatically-lit full-scale recreations of Fifth Avenue department store
windows mainly from the 1940s installed within the museum’s galleries (Figures 1 and
2). For the moment, Surrealism had, in a way, come full circle, its avant-garde status co-
mingling with blatant consumerist packaging, here returned to the space of the art
museum.
Figure 1
2
Figure 2
Robert Goldwater in collaboration with René d’Harnoncourt organized and
installed the exhibition according to formal characteristics of modern painting and
sculpture that had influenced the design of everyday life. While most examples of
“abstract geometric form” in daily life were useful objects such as chairs and desks and
other designs such as homes and skyscrapers, the Surrealist section of the exhibition was
given over to the role Surrealism had played in advertising and commodity culture.
Displays behind plate glass windows featuring mannequins draped in bizarre
configurations of merchandise – ties, hats, furs, and feathers – visually dominated the
section. In contrast to the functional applications of abstraction, the exhibition implied
that Surrealism’s applications were frivolous and fun. And though the walls throughout
most of the exhibition were white, the Surrealist section was painted in dark hues, the
theatricality of Surrealism highlighted by the dimly lit ambiance as a whole and the bright
spotlights on the window displays. The installations, show windows from Saks Fifth
Avenue (1945, 1948), Bonwit Teller (1938, 1944, 1946), and Lord and Taylor (1945),
were nestled within a dark gallery to which the viewer gained passage by walking
through an entrance flanked by two oil paintings, Salvador Dalí’s Persistence of Memory
(1931) and Yves Tanguy’s Slowly Toward the North (1942). Though the Surrealists had
3
been interested early on in mannequins and window display and Dalí himself had created
window displays for some of these very stores, MoMA maintained a tenuous division
between art and society, as the windows the Modern chose to recreate were originally
designed by commercial window dressers who did not have affiliations with the avant-
garde movement.
1
Even if Surrealism’s role in its own commodification went
unacknowledged, the movement’s commercial appeal is here fully accepted within the
walls of the museum; with its aesthetic principles diminished to “incongruity,”
Surrealism according to Goldwater “contradicts usual habits of seeing and accepted ways
of ‘good’ design. It is in this sense that surrealism is ‘inartistic’ and gradually becomes
‘artistic.’”
2
Surrealism is put on display to illustrate the way good design can be
subverted, contorted to attract viewers’ attention. Unlike the formal lessons of “simplicity
and clarity” learned from such abstract artists as Mondrian, whose own works had
nonetheless inadvertently inspired linoleum designs, Surrealism represented a certain
ungainliness in the transition from modern art to commodity culture, superficially uniting
the desire to shock with the desire to shop. Surrealism was not only manifested as a
commodity within mass culture, but lent a powerful strategy for that culture’s
perpetuation.
This is a study of the complications and contradictions in Surrealism’s role in
shaping the discourses of American art and art history – a relationship that was
articulated within such traditional art institutions as museums and galleries but was also

1
Among these was Tom Lee, who had been Bonwit Teller’s display director in 1939 and had helped Dalí
install his infamous “Night and Day” windows there. I discuss this incident further in Chapter One.

2
Robert Goldwater, Modern Art in Your Life (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949), 34.
4
expressed in other aspects of American culture, via films, trade magazines, department
stores, the fashions of high culture and counterculture, and photography. This is, of
course a mutual construction between the realms of high and low culture, as Surrealism’s
reception reflects changing critical perspectives that I trace as they evolve with respect to
Surrealism to create a framework for understanding major trends in American art history
and criticism. Ever since Surrealism’s introduction to American audiences in the mid-
1930s, most prominently through the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition
organized by Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, critical debates about
Surrealism’s aesthetic philosophy have emerged at decisive moments in the formulation
of American artistic practice, its criticism and its history. However, the enduring
relationship between Surrealism and American critical discourse has been only
superficially understood, if considered at all. My dissertation addresses the complex
nexus of museum exhibitions, the art market and mass culture as they inflect the driving
interests of American art criticism around Surrealism, not so much during the familiar
chapter of the genesis of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, but throughout much of
the twentieth century. In each of the periods examined in depth in this study – the years
around 1936, 1968 and 1985, when prominent Surrealism exhibitions were displayed and
debated in the United States – my dissertation explores how specific critical and art
historical pressures are manifested in the changing reception and reputation of Salvador
Dalí in the 1930s, René Magritte in the 1960s and art photography in the 1980s. I
demonstrate that at each of these moments of historicization, Surrealism presented a
challenge to contemporary art culture; because of its open resistance to art historical
5
classification, Surrealism continued to attract critics and art historians who, in each of the
moments I examine, wanted to compose, to concretize, or to question the narratives of
modern art in which Surrealism has never quite settled down.
Surrealism was dealt a severe critical blow when in 1939 Clement Greenberg’s
enormously influential article, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” condemned commodity
culture—and with it, many aspects of Surrealist production—to the kitsch side of his now
notorious dialectic. According to Greenberg, in order to maintain its identity, the avant-
garde had to autonomously resist the proliferation of consumerist production that
threatened the preservation of culture. While Greenberg insisted that modern art had to
reject the growing pressures of commodity culture, the Surrealists’ production was not
only actively engaged with popular culture, it offered, by 1939, a set of visual strategies
in concert with those of the consumerist dreamworld. While Greenberg’s formalist
position has long been problemetized, it dominated the landscape of modern art criticism
in the 1940s and 50s. Part of Greenberg’s agenda was the legitimization of an avant-
garde American art, the development of an American art market, and the establishment of
art in contradistinction to the increased proliferation of the mass arts. Despite
Surrealism’s popularity during the 1930s, as abstraction gained increased prominence and
Abstract Expressionism emerged as the dominant American avant-garde movement after
World War II, Surrealism’s position as predominantly European, fundamentally Marxist
and frequently figurative became more and more problematic to its acceptance, especially
as McCarthyism and the Cold War progressed.
6
For a literal illustration of how tainted Surrealism had become after World War II,
one can look at the cartoon that the artist Ad Reinhardt created in March 1946, published
in the newspaper P.M. as the third in a series explaining modern art (Figure 3). The nine-
paneled comic is entitled “How to Look at Low (Surrealist) Art.”
3
In the penultimate
panel, Reinhardt depicted a caricature of a European Surrealist, lying down, wearing a
smock, a beret atop his head and balancing a wine bottle on his nose. A similar character
had been used by Reinhardt in the opening panel of “How to Look at a Cubist Painting,”
which disavowed realism and included the parenthetical that the art of illusion was “(later
satirized by surrealist painters who make something look not only like one thing but like
six or seven other things).”
4
In that cartoon, Reinhardt had included the trademarks of
academicism – the mahl stick and palette, as well as stereotypes of Frenchness, the beret
and wine bottle, that appear here. A corpulent bow-tied capitalist with a dollar sign on
his jowl stands atop the horizontal Surrealist. In the next panel, the comic concludes with
a moral, “anything that requires no effort from you is not worth anything….” The
implication is that while abstract painting asks the critical questions of representation, the
Surrealist, content to dream life away, is overtaken by market forces.

3
The cartoon was published in P.M. (March 24, 1946), M6. Reinhardt was a staunch supporter of
abstraction and believed, “you can’t respect Cubism unless you realize that all that Surrealism and Dadaism
is baloney” (Ad Reinhardt, quoted in Lucy Lippard, Ad Reinhardt (New York: Jewish Museum, 1966), 15.
The comic followed “How to Look at a Cubist Painting” P.M. (January 27, 1946), M5 and “How to View
High (Abstract) Art,” P.M. (February 24, 1946), M6. Reinhardt’s series was well-regarded by artists.
Thomas Hess writes that “How to Look at Modern Art in America” was “pinned to the studio walls of
artists all over America for years” (Thomas Hess, “The Art Comics of Ad Reinhardt,” Artforum, v. 12, n. 8
(April 1974), 47).

4
Ad Reinhardt, “How to Look at a Cubist Painting,” P.M. (January 27, 1946), M5). This is most likely a
direct reference to the work of Dalí.
7
Figure 3
However, by the mid-1960s, as a result of the near simultaneous rise of both
Minimalism and the Pop art movement, the criteria of what defined the avant-garde
demanded re-assessment, in part because these two movements seemed antithetical to
one another, both stylistically and theoretically. The Vietnam war, student uprisings,
political upheaval, and a burgeoning drug culture fostered a sense in many people that
contemporary life was irrational and bizarre. Culturally, Surrealism once again seemed
socially significant, even vital. Aesthetically, Surrealism’s hybrid quality became a point
of interest in the 1960s, especially when MoMA’s new curator, William Rubin,
presented Surrealism as a crucial forerunner for contemporary art. Surrealism’s
exclusion from the formalist modernism advocated by Greenberg and younger scholars
such as Michael Fried clashed with the increased relevancy of Surrealism’s fantastical
and everyday vision of modern life. The understanding of Surrealism was expanded in
8
the 1960s by seminal texts which began to be widely available in translation, especially
Maurice Nadeau’s definitive The History of Surrealism (1965), originally published in
French in 1945, and André Breton’s Manifestoes of Surrealism (1969).
5
As performance
art and the rise of the feminist movement introduced a new body politics into the
aesthetic field, the end of modernism began to be theorized. When, in 1974, conservative
critic Hilton Kramer stated, “Surrealism is one of the great success stories of the avant-
garde era”
6
he was noting Surrealism’s utter infusion into American life a half-century
after the Surrealist revolution had been declared. But Surrealism’s so-called success was
at best double-edged – it could just as easily be read as a subversion of its own avant-
garde ideals. It was not until 1985, when art historian Rosalind Krauss helped to
redefine the aesthetics of Surrealism through its photography in the exhibition L’Amour
Fou, co-curated with Jane Livingston at the Corcoran Gallery, that the movement’s status
within art history’s conception of modernism was firmly secured, opening the study of
Surrealism to a variety of psychoanalytic, political, theoretical and eventually visual
cultural accounts of the movement. In his review of the L’Amour Fou exhibition, art
historian Hal Foster writes that this was Krauss’s goal all along, “to displace the

5
Reviewing the book in the New York Times, Harold Rosenberg quoted Nadeau’s claim that “‘the problems
that the surrealists attempted to solve are those that still face the younger generation today.’ …As such,
regardless of the value assigned to the poems and paintings, it has a vital place in the modern intellectual
tradition” (Harold Rosenberg, “A State of Mind,” The New York Times Book Review (December 26, 1965).
The History of Surrealism was published again in English in 1968.

6
Hilton Kramer, “Surrealism, Now Turning 50, Has Lost Its Euphoric Innocence,” The New York Times,
(September 15, 1974), 111. Kramer continued, “What had begun as an arcane metaphysical adventure
among a small circle of young poets and painters ended – if, indeed, it can be said to have ended even now
– as the common cultural currency of an entire civilization” (Ibid.).

9
formalist model of modernism by means of its ‘cursed part,’ Surrealism.”
7
Barr had
introduced Surrealism to help present modernism, Rubin had attempted to characterize it
to preserve modernism, and Krauss accounted for Surrealism to provoke modernism and,
I will argue, to exemplify the theories that would lay the groundwork for postmodernism.
In presenting episodes based around influential Surrealism exhibitions, it is
necessary to address the institutions at which those exhibitions were held. Therefore, this
study is grounded in the history of the Museum of Modern Art as it developed under Barr
and Rubin. I also engage with the institutional critiques of the Museum of Modern Art
that began to appear in the 1970s, including those by art historians Carol Duncan and
Alan Wallach. As Duncan has more recently observed, the history of modern art has
been skewed toward movements that privilege the trend toward abstraction:
progress in modern art, especially the art of the first two-thirds of the
century, is gauged by the degree to which art achieved greater abstraction
– the distance it traveled in emancipating itself from the imperative to
represent convincingly or coherently a natural, presumably objective
world. …The pursuit of abstraction (or the distance achieved from
traditional pictorial constructions) thus becomes the supreme sign of an
artist’s liberation from the mundane and commonplace.
8

The thrust toward abstraction as represented in the traditional narrative of modern art is
one that brings the artist toward purity and truth. In failing to be abstract, or strictly

7
Hal Foster, “L’Amour Faux,” Art in America, v. 74, n. 1 (January 1986), 117. In the 1990s, Robert
Pincus-Witten, an editor at Artforum, recalled that prior to Krauss, important young critics had “as an
article of faith, this resistance to Surrealism. Now clearly the worm has turned. Ros is all Georges Bataille,
and it’s all this visceral, underbelly kind of side to Surrealism which she’s largely valorized as the cynosure
of graduate studies, displacing Breton. Now we’re all grown up so that we don’t have the same feeling. But
then Surrealism was absolutely to be handled with tongs. And back then, no one studied Bataille” (Robert
Pincus-Witten, quoted in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New York: Soho Press,
2000), 193). I further explore the context for this development in Chapter Three.

8
Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge, 1994), 108-109.

10
abstract, Surrealism then comes to represent a corrupted version of modern art, muddied
by its relation to a world outside of art – a world referenced through figurative works and
the ideologies guiding those works. Not only were many Surrealist paintings impure by
the standards set in place by formalism, but the Surrealists’ interest in common culture
was evident not only in their commitment to Marxism, but also in their production –
from novels to found objects; this interest was manifested not as a formal exercise of
representation, but as a reverence for – even a fetishization of – the beauty of (often
commercial) detritus.
Because the Museum of Modern Art played a major role in constructing ideas of
modernism, I investigate the complex history of that institution in addition to other sites
where debates about modernism were expressed, including the New York World’s Fair
and the magazine Artforum. Though the scholarship on the Museum of Modern Art is
extensive, crucial oversights remain. Even the revisionist histories of the 1970s and
1980s take on MoMA as a unilateral entity, failing to acknowledge the Museum’s history
as an institution that, for at least the first quarter-century of its existence, had been deeply
committed to exploring the visual vernacular and maintained an often experimental
outlook toward its exhibitions, as exemplified by such exhibitions as Modern Art in Your
Life. While Surrealism came to represent a set of attitudes that were against the grain of
dominant theories of avant-garde art, I show how the Museum of Modern Art continued
to showcase Surrealism, though often in ways that failed to account for the political and
cultural implications of the movement.
11
Though recent scholarship on Surrealism has made efforts to emphasize Surrealist
exhibitions, it focuses, almost unilaterally, on the exhibitions organized specifically by
the Surrealists themselves, rather than by curators unaffiliated with the movement. In his
recent book Displaying the Marvelous, Lewis Kachur mentions the major MoMA show
of 1936 only briefly because, though he regards the exhibition as “a crucial forerunner,”
he considers Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism as merely “a foil—to the Surrealists’
practice.”
9
Instead, Kachur’s primary interest lies in reconstructing what he terms the
“ideological spaces” of Surrealist experience.
10
Though useful as a historical enterprise,
Kachur’s methodology does not allow him actively to incorporate Surrealism (apart from
its installation practices) into the larger milieu of the American art context, despite the
fact that the Surrealists’ exhibitions he discusses occur within it. My goal is not to
recreate the Surrealist exhibition experience or to analyze, as Kachur does, the
installation as a Surrealist product itself, but rather to use key Surrealism exhibitions
within the history of the American reception of Surrealism to identify social, historical
and ideological shifts in the development of American art history that have not heretofore
been correlated with debates surrounding Surrealism.
Art historian Dickran Tashjian’s study, Boatload of Madmen, offers a textured
reading of the Surrealists’ interaction with various aspects of the American art scene,
covering the years 1920 to 1950. Tashjian attends to Barr’s 1936 Surrealism exhibition

9
Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition
Installations, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), xv.

10
Ibid., 4. For Kachur, ideological spaces “present a polemic in the format of the display itself” meaning
that the Surrealists are actively aiming for a subjective exhibition experience on the part of the viewer, one
reinforced by their own creative involvement in its conception.
12
in terms of prominent critical responses but does not probe the exhibition for what it
reveals about MoMA’s attempts to construct modern art for American audiences.
Tashjian also foregrounds particular artists, Surrealists and Americans – Dalí, Man Ray,
Joseph Cornell, Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock – to examine the close relationship
between the reception of Surrealist ideas on the development of American artists, filling
in much more the already familiar story of Surrealism’s presence in the production of
American art. Useful as Tashjian’s work is, he does not discuss the ways in which
discourses on Surrealism were constructed, or the interaction of these discourses with
developing theories of modern art in America – Clement Greenberg is conspicuously
absent except in the chapter on Jackson Pollock.
Art historians such as Tashjian and Martica Sawin have thoroughly treated the
Surrealist émigrés’ interaction with the American artists in New York, especially at
Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century gallery. As Sawin convincingly argues in her
study Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, many “art experts”
of the 1940s “held that the new American art could attain its manhood, so to speak, only
by rejection of the European art and artists closest at hand: the Surrealist émigrés.”
11

Sawin devotes a great deal of space in her book to highlighting the Surrealists’
innovations in artistic practice as they continued during the years in exile. She discusses
the activities of the Surrealists who emigrated, including aspects of their collaboration,
publications and production. Though she attempts to integrate aspects of the
international political climate as well as the localized American art scene, these fields

11
Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile, 342.

13
only really cohere in the final chapter when Sawin recounts the now well-known
narrative of the rise of the New York School concurrent with the dissolution of the
Surrealist group, a moment of transition that has been thoroughly explored using a variety
of methodologies and first historicized in accounts from the late 1960s, including Rubin’s
Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (1968) and Irving Sandler’s Triumph of American
Painting (1970).
I show how when World War II ended in 1945, the critical taste for Surrealism,
which had been closely tied to social issues such as the Depression and then the war
effort, evaporated as New York began to be considered the art capital of the world.
Because the rhetorical moves made to establish the New York School have been
elaborated extensively, I only briefly examine Surrealism’s critical and commercial status
during the decade after World War II. The complexity of Surrealism was such that while
Surrealism from an American standpoint holds the rhetorical position of inaugurating the
discourse of the dominance of American art, most other aspects of its influence on both
aesthetic theories and American culture have been obscured. I contend that Surrealism is
not just useful as a link between French modernism and a coherent American avant-garde
in the 1940s, but had been integral to the development of American art history since the
1930s and continued to be so long after and well into the 1980s. Therefore, the present
study both parallels and departs from these accounts. By taking a longer view of
Surrealism in American art, a much richer picture emerges of the complications and
contradictions that Surrealism presented as critics and historians worked out definitions
of modern art.
14
For this reason, the subject of the present study is not Surrealism per se. I do not
analyze manifestos, though there were numerous tracts, beginning with the first in
December 1924 that officially brought the movement into being; nor do I examine the
activities of the Surrealists in Paris, the birthplace of the movement; and for the most
part, I do not evaluate the influences on, or origins of, the Surrealists’ production.
Instead, the present study is one that focuses on the inconsistent and dynamic
consumption of that production at certain salient moments, beginning with how
Surrealism was understood by American audiences after it had been unmoored from the
original intentions of its leader, the poet André Breton, and identified instead with
Salvador Dalí, a latecomer to the group who, by 1939, had been officially dismissed from
the movement by Breton. While in Europe Surrealism was dominated by Breton,
numerous journals, and an open commitment to politics, it was never free from
commercial infiltration and participated in its own mass cultural manifestations as the
recent exhibition Surreal Things (2007) has shown.
12
In the United States, the situation
was even more pronounced, for Surrealism was absorbed by an American public who had
little knowledge of Breton’s philosophies, but understood Surrealism as a broad
conceptual program, fashionable because of psychoanalysis and the inclusive notion that
the world was fundamentally irrational. While this study is not meant to be
comprehensive, I contend that, by looking at the historiography of Surrealism in the
United States, we are confronted with a major underlying force of American art history, a
localized site where ongoing debates – about abstraction and representation,

12
Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, edited by Ghislaine Wood (London: V&A Publications, 2007).

15
consumerism, the place of politics in art, the role of the museum, the aesthetics of
photography and visual culture – are all tested and contested. This dissertation takes on
the implications of Surrealism’s myriad positions within American culture, arguing that
discourses surrounding Surrealism have had a formative impact on the development of
American art and mass culture.
In his book Cubism and its Enemies, art historian Christopher Green characterized
Dada and Surrealism as “counter-Modernist movements”
13
because they do not fit, and
actively formulated themselves against, Cubism’s ideals. As Museum of Modern Art
Curator William Rubin wrote in 1966, “we cannot formulate a definition of Surrealist
painting comparable in clarity with the meanings of Impressionism and Cubism.”
14

Surrealism simply – and self-consciously – predicated itself on thwarting the model that
Cubism provides for modern art, a model that for a long time seemed to deny anything
more than a formal engagement with common culture. As art historian David Cottington
points out in his Cubism and its Histories, Cubism has become more complicated since
Rubin made his statement in 1966, when Cubism’s core principle according to American
art critics and historians was a belief in art’s autonomy.
15
Like Surrealism in recent years,
Cubism has also been treated to political, social and semiological analyses, but continues
to be understood as the root of modern art in America. In contrast, part of the volatility
of Surrealism’s place in art historical discourse is due to its lack of a singular style,

13
Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916-1928
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 3.

14
William Rubin, “Toward a Critical Framework,” Artforum, v. 5, n. 1 (September 1966), 36.

15
David Cottington, Cubism and its Histories (New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), 226.

16
medium, and a far broader group of practitioners than was recognized by the self-
proclaimed leaders of the movement itself. These dissonances of mediums and theories –
and the goal of blending art and life – have also led to the difficulty of Surrealism’s
historicization, but they also testify to its continued renewability, its persistent
contemporaneity. Surrealism in the United States came to represent a meeting point of art
and society that persistently affected developing theories of modernism and attitudes
toward common culture. Originally a literary movement with political aspirations,
Surrealism encompassed not just a multiplicity of ideological concerns but a set of visual
concepts that were readily assimilated in the fields of advertising, film, fashion, and even
architecture. While many forms of avant-garde art including Cubism have taken up, and
been absorbed into, common culture, as Thomas Crow has pointed out in his insightful
essay on the historical interdependence between the avant-garde and mass culture, “the
case of Surrealism is perhaps the most notorious instance of this process. …in retrieving
marginal forms of consumption, in making the latent text manifest, they provided modern
advertising with one of its most powerful visual tools: that now familiar terrain in which
commodities behave autonomously and create an alluring dreamscape of their own.”
16

Given Surrealism’s goal of revolution, it might not be surprising that Surrealism actively
infiltrated mass culture; Surrealism’s impact was never meant to be exclusively in the
realm of modern art. My dissertation explores how Surrealism’s ability to cross media
(and its inability to be aesthetically confined) was a large part of its critical challenge,

16
Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” Modern Art in the Common Culture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 36.

17
forcing conservative and liberal art critics alike to re-evaluate the standards of the avant-
garde throughout the twentieth century.
From its introduction to American audiences in the 1930s, Surrealism has proven
to be one of the most pervasive art movements ever to be absorbed into American mass
culture. In part because Surrealism’s visual language was so readily relatable to a
modern world, Surrealism became a sort of catchall when it was first introduced to the
United States, a country where many of the artists did not speak the language, but whose
visual practices were intuitively absorbed.

At a time when art historians in America were
struggling to locate the dual parameters of American art and modern art, it mattered then,
that the Surrealists were, by and large, European. Nonetheless, their work was taken up
by American critics as symptomatic of the age – representing universal apprehensions of
modern life. However, as I discuss in Chapter One, the Museum of Modern Art
eventually came under attack by certain American artists and critics in the 1930s and 40s
for not promoting American art assiduously enough. Surrealism’s foreignness was
subject to the same pressure – it helped to legitimate the movement as modern, but also
kept it at a distance from American art, even as American artists were readily influenced
by Surrealism’s introduction to the United States, as such studies as Surrealism and
American Art 1931-1947 (1976), Surrealism and American Art 1932-1949 (1997) and
Surrealism USA (2004) have documented.
17
In 1939, Edward Alden Jewell, art critic at
The New York Times, published a book entitled Have We an American Art? For Jewell,

17
See Jeffrey Wechsler, Surrealism and American Art 1931-1947 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers
State University, 1976); Michael Rosenfeld, guest curator, Surrealism and American Art 1932-1949 (Boca
Raton, Florida: Boca Raton Museum of Art, 1997); Isabelle Devreaux, editor, Surrealism USA (Ostfildern-
Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2004).

18
the question was provoked by the European estimations of American art in the summer of
1938. While Jewell was careful to explain that:

it should, of course be borne of mind, if disagreement result, that in the
conclusions reached Europe is not perforce right, America wrong, and vice
versa. However…the European public was equipped to bring to that
outspread ‘sampling’ an unjaded eye, whereas we who with steadfast
interest have year in and year out followed the fortunes of what
(hypothetically at this stage) may be called our ‘native’ art – is it possible
that we have watched in, to some extent, a mood of wishful thinking?
18

Indeed, Jewell spends the first 80 pages of his book examining European assessments of
American art, summarizing, finally “we begin, then, to see where we stand—how our
culture ‘rates,’ that is – in the opinion of the Old World.”
19
Throughout his book, Jewell
works at distinguishing the American character of American art in relation to European
models. Each of the re-evaluations of Surrealism that I analyze might ask similar
questions about what the conception of American critical discourse means and how the
institutions I examine might perpetuate the concept of American art criticism, while that
criticism is nonetheless influenced by European art and continental theoretical
frameworks. I want to examine both what is distinct about American art criticism while
keeping in mind the ways in which that criticism intersects with a broader discourse on
art. Jewell wants to proclaim the ascendancy of American art, writing, “the appearance of
a truly American archetype as exemplified in all the arts…can no longer, I think, be

18
Edward Alden Jewell, Have We an American Art? (New York: Longmans, Green & Company, 1939),
14.

19
Ibid, 79.

19
missed except by those who refuse to see…The dawn is at hand.”
20
Nonetheless,
Americans, he advises, should strive to create good art, rather than American art, and
through that endeavor, American art will be best served. While defining American art in
the first half of the 1940s became a matter of distinguishing it from European practices,
as American studies scholar Elizabeth Johns has written,
21
by the end of the decade
American art and modern art could refer to the same thing. Art history in America
developed through transatlantic dialogue with Europe, even as it maintained its rhetorical
independence from European art. Surrealism, in being a cultural interloper, offers a
provocative vantage point from which to examine these conceptions.
In her recent book Surrealism and the Visual Arts (2005), art historian Kim Grant
returns the movement to its theoretical origins, tracing the Surrealism’s attitude toward
visual art by reading closely the texts and tracts written by the movement’s practitioners
and critics in Europe.
22
Taking seriously the Surrealists’ commitment to articulating a
visual language, Grant focuses on the group’s writings from the 1920s and 1930s in
France, but she is concerned more with establishing the theories of the Surrealists, and
the responses of the French art critics during this time, than with the longer-term
dissemination of these theories. Grant argues that Surrealism was only accepted as an

20
Ibid., 205

21
Johns writes, “The dominating historical point of view – that American society was totally different from
that of Europe, and that American art had its origins in a unique social and political setting – was expressed
in exhibition catalogues, book-length studies, journal articles, and even radio programs (another new
development in the 1930s) on American art during the period” (Elizabeth Johns, “Histories of American
Art: The Changing Quest,” Art Journal, v. 44, n. 4 (Winter 1984), 341).

22
See Kim Grant, Surrealism and the Visual Arts: Theory and Reception (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).

20
avant-garde movement once it had been relegated to the past; my dissertation disagrees
fundamentally with such a statement – instead, I argue that it is the flux of Surrealism’s
position – its inability to be historically confined – that has allowed it to remain a potent
force for subsequent avant-gardes.
While Surrealism has been studied through many methodological lenses, its
historiography has not been rigorously analyzed for the motivations behind these various
re-examinations or the way pressures of particular historical moments have rewritten
Surrealism. It is, then, my contention that Surrealism’s changing critical fate coincides
with key periods in the establishment of an American art world and helps to expose the
tensions and investments of creating an artistic culture based on an interaction of high
and low that have not yet been sufficiently acknowledged. By approaching Surrealism
from the perspective of its reception as opposed to its production, this dissertation will re-
evaluate the impact of Surrealism in the making of an American artistic culture and
demonstrate how and why Surrealism has been useful as a movement that has been co-
opted as a counterpoint to dominant art critical theories in American art history.
The first chapter focuses on the introduction of Surrealism to a large audience at
Alfred Barr’s 1936 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Fantastic Art, Dada,
Surrealism, and the decade following that exhibition.
23
This exhibition was the second in
Barr’s series of important exhibitions of modern art, following the now more famous
Cubism and Abstract Art show, in which Barr had unveiled his didactic chart depicting

23
Though he does not discuss the exhibition in detail, Professor of History Michael Kammen described the
show as “quite possibly, the most controversial museum show of the decade” (Michael Kammen, Visual
Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 101).

21
the lineage of styles that led to abstract art (Figure 4). Barr had also attempted to give
Surrealism an art historical genealogy, tracing the fantastic impulse as far back as the
fifteenth century. By contrast, the lineage Barr created for abstraction only extended back
to the late-nineteenth century, neatly coinciding with the beginning of modern art as
framed by MoMA’s collection policies, thus positioning abstraction as decidedly and
specifically modern.
24
This chart has long been read as evidence of Barr’s privileging of
abstraction, and a subscription to a stylistic march through modern art. Though Barr was
very much attentive to formal characteristics of art, his enormous (and enormously well-
attended) Surrealism exhibition at the end of 1936 demonstrates his engagement with the
fantastic and figurative tradition in modern art, though his decision to present such a vast
amount of material (including handicrafts and drawings by insane asylum patients) added
to critics’ and the public’s confusion about what in fact Surrealism was. While I argue
that Barr never intended the chart to diagram anything more than the development of
abstract art – that is, one tendency of modern art, rather than modern art’s entirety –
nonetheless, by the end of the decade, the only type of Surrealism considered worthy of
merit for the next generation of critics was that abstract subset designated by Barr’s chart.

24
As John Elderfield has noted, “1880 was eventually recognized as an appropriate date for the Modern’s
collection to begin because it was then that Cézanne founded classic modernism, in [Richard] Fry’s and
Barr’s interpretation” (John Elderfield, Modern Painting and Sculpture: 1880 to the Present at the Museum
of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 13). Cézanne tops Barr’s “Cubism and
Abstract Art” chart.

22
Figure 4
As Surrealism was introduced to America in the mid-1930s, in large part through
Barr’s exhibition (as well as through a handful of such New York dealers as Julien Levy
and Sidney Janis, who I examine further in their role as gallery owners
25
), its literary and
political engagements were downplayed. Surrealism was typically portrayed as
psychological play made visible, though politics often seemed to bubble beneath the
surface. Decrying the rise of totalitarian regimes, one reporter at the New York Times
likened Surrealism to other popular pastimes of England and America, writing “It is
getting to be a world in which almost any day now Governments may issue a decree

25
Julien Levy was an early and ardent supporter of Salvador Dalí and hosted Magritte’s first one-man show
in the United States in 1936. He published the first American account of Surrealism in 1936. This book was
reprinted in 1968 during the next wave of American interest in Surrealism. In 1944, Sidney Janis published
Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, a large-scale attempt to publicize the fluidity between the two
dominant vanguard trends. This will be discussed in detail in Chapter One.

23
prohibiting surréalisme, or the Culbertson system, or the 5-3-3 formation for a plunge
between guard and tackle.”
26
The author presents the potential ban of these strategies for
art, for cards, for sports as a hyperbolic example of government control, for he equates
Surrealism with other nationally well-liked but ultimately harmless games. As art
historian Keith Eggener has shown, Surrealism was for the most part divorced from its
Marxist agenda and absorbed into popular culture as a playful diversion,
27
though I argue
that at the same time, it continued to reflect contemporary mores.
Those authors who now wish to claim a place for Surrealism in American art, and
vice versa, have continued to focus on the specific transitional period of the contact
between the Surrealists in exile and their American counterparts, generally ending their
studies with the establishment of the New York School.
28
But in actuality, an
examination of the years after the New York School’s rise to prominence yields an even
more productive view of what Surrealism had come to mean for American art. The
second chapter focuses on curator William Rubin’s 1968 exhibition Dada, Surrealism
and their Heritage and explores the accusations leveled at MoMA (for example by critic
Harold Rosenberg) for the institution’s partisan intrusion into – some called it regulation
of – the interpretation of contemporary art. Rubin’s presentation of Surrealism as a
source for later art, especially Abstract Expressionism and Pop, split the art world, as

26
“Topic of the Times,” New York Times, December 22, 1936, 26.

27
Keith L. Eggener, “‘An Amusing Lack of Logic’: Surrealism and Popular Entertainment,” American Art,
v. 7, n. 4 (Autumn 1993), pp. 30-45.

28
See for example Martica Sawin’s account, as well as Dickran Tashjian’s and Lewis Kachur’s. Though the
latter does not make explicit claims to link the Surrealists with the New York School, Kachur does propose
that Surrealist exhibition techniques profoundly influenced the later installation practices of American
artists.
24
those who recognized this affiliation accused Rubin of diluting Surrealism’s legitimacy
as art in its own right while resisting the innovativeness of Pop. Surrealism became a
contested possibility for countercultural expression wherein Magritte could be called
upon to represent the concerns of Pop art while he himself rebutted these concerns. The
recent exhibition Magritte and Contemporary Art (2006) at the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art exemplified the scenario of interpretation in which the formal influence
of Magritte’s paintings on later works, often expressed through direct visual quotation. I
argue that not only was Magritte’s work regarded by the critics of the 1960s as a defiant
locus of figuration, but it also offered strategies of iconicity (and irony) that lent Pop an
artistic genealogy stemming from a common ideology. The criticism surrounding the
1968 show also revealed rifts in how the Museum of Modern Art functioned within the
American art scene even before the revisionist histories of the 1970s and 1980s, such as
Serge Guilbaut’s groundbreaking How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art exposed
MoMA’s ideological allegiances.
In the third chapter, I study the impact of Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston’s
1985 L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in
Washington, D.C. to show how its intersection with theories of postmodernism and
media coincided with yet another commercial phenomenon – the developing photography
market. Correlated with the medium’s rising prices at auction, photography began to be
re-theorized in the 1970s, and contemporary art photography was often described in
terms of its surrealistic qualities. At the Museum of Modern Art, curator John
Szarkowski was also attempting to definitively locate photography as a fine art using
25
formalist values, and in the 1980s began vigorously promoting the photographs of Atget,
whom the Surrealists themselves had discovered in the 1920s. Meanwhile, Surrealism
was being reconceptualized as a postmodern movement – already pitted against
modernism from its inception, the movement now seemed theoretically viable for art
historians. Tracing Krauss’s development as a scholar, I analyze the reasons for her break
with Artforum as an example of the issues that would come to shape Krauss’s
scholarship, and the founding of the journal October, a transition that foregrounded
theory, particularly those that challenged traditional understandings of modernism, such
as Bataille’s theories of Surrealism. In her persuasive writing, Krauss marshaled
continental philosophy to play a powerful role in articulating the fissures in American
modernist theory and theorizing a postmodern condition. Even as theoretical as Krauss’s
writings have been understood to be, however, they too coincide with a commercial
dimension, pointing to a larger, even institutional, interrelation between art and
commerce that has been integral both to Surrealism specifically and modernism in
general. Recent art has capitalized on its commercial dimension.
Writing about Surrealism as it was seen in the last twenty-five years becomes a
more complicated procedure, as my own views have been affected by the same
discourses that re-wrote Surrealism. To write about the historiography of Surrealism in
the 1980s is also to review the legacy of art history as it was presented to me in
introductory courses in the late 1990s. Many of these art historians remain major figures
in the field, and my own introduction to the discipline is obviously inflected by the
impact their scholarship has had on it. While it could be argued that the Surrealist
26
movement is in the past in a way it was not in the 1930s and the 1960s, historiography
remains a methodology always inflected by the present. The recent debates over the
intersection of high and low art in the 1990s and the current trend toward the inclusion in
art history of various narratives of visual culture (and vice versa) lend new significance to
the critical conversations that have arisen over the past half-century about Surrealism’s
aesthetic philosophy.
29
Indeed, it is the aftermath of such a dialogue that makes the
present study possible, with the expansion of art history through visual culture, which
occurred in large part because of the persuasiveness of the Marxist methodology best
embodied by the work of T.J. Clark in the 1970s and 1980s that examined the
relationship between socio-historical context and high art. Though Clark’s scholarship
concentrates on canonical works of art, the strategies he introduced eventually helped to
broaden the discipline’s focus to include extra-aesthetic factors, including mass culture
and the art market. The proliferation of scholarship on Surrealism in recent years attests
to the plethora of methodologies that replaced a formalist hegemony that would not (or
could not) account for Surrealism. Since 1985, almost 400 titles have been published in
English concerning Surrealism, compared to only 100 studies on Cubism.
30
Surrealism
continues to represent a locus of modern art that stands outside of traditional art historical
narratives, and thus represents a fruitful site for new scholarship. Likewise, this
dissertation cannot help but participate in these discourses as it maps them out.

29
For more on the visual culture debates of the 1990s, see The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas
Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1998) and Visual Culture: The Reader, edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart
Hall (London: Sage Publications, Ltd., 1999). For positions on visual culture, see “The Visual Culture
Questionnaire,” October, v. 77 (Summer 1996), pp. 25-70.

30
Library of Congress online catalogue.

27
Approaching Surrealism from the perspective of the audience – the networks of
critics, collectors, and the public, who all come together not only in the context of an
exhibition, but also in the market – my dissertation re-evaluates the impact of Surrealism
in the making of an American artistic culture, as it was used both to define and dismantle
dominant critical theories in American art history, from Alfred Barr and Clement
Greenberg in the 1930s, to William Rubin, Max Kozloff and Harold Rosenberg in the
1960s and Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp and Hal Foster in the 1980s. What has
passed uncritically in previous accounts – accounts which do not address the
historiography of Surrealism after the 1950s – is the subject of this dissertation, that is,
the critical and mass cultural reception of Surrealism during episodes when American art
critics were struggling to locate and legitimize the criteria of an American avant-garde.
Because Surrealism represents an important site of debate for contemporary artistic
practice, especially as a crossroads of high and low culture, this dissertation explicitly
takes on the question of Surrealism’s value not as much as an art movement in and of
itself, but for art criticism, mass culture, and the art market in America.
Through its American reception, Surrealism became a subtext to the history of
both modern art and mass culture. These moments of historicization are deeply
intertwined with their contemporary contexts, each one opening up a larger question
about the constitution of legitimate artistic practice through the problem that Surrealism’s
objects presented. Surrealism complicates art historical discourse because it does not
allow for the accepted criteria of judgment upon which art historical evaluation has
conventionally depended: with regards to style, Surrealism is both abstract and illusionist,
28
automatic and academic, visual and literary; and with regards to culture, it shifts between
high and low, transcendent and absurd, avant-garde and kitsch. Surrealism’s politics, its
commercial aspects, its insistence on collectivity, its totemic obsessions, its paranormal
psychology, its desire to question not only the perception of objects but also of life—all
of these factors contribute to Surrealism’s difficulty. But the persistence of the memory
of Surrealism clearly contradicts traditional readings of the development of modern art in
which Surrealism’s centrality is not emphasized. What this dissertation presents is a
historically grounded study that examines Surrealism’s variable construction in American
art history and the motivations fueling that construction. Broadly conceived, this study
asserts that the landscape of American art history would look fundamentally different
without Surrealism’s persistent presence, buttressing, and coming up against, the
arguments that make art modern.

29
Chapter One: Surrealism as Vernacular Vanguard

In one of the earliest assessments of Surrealism in America, in response to the
Surréalisme exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in January 1932, Edward Alden Jewell,
the New York Times art critic, asked, “How much of the material now on view shall we
esteem ‘art,’ and how much should be enjoyed as laboratory roughage?”
1
The question
encompassed the problem Surrealism was to pose for art history for the next decade, in
part because it essentially went unanswered. Four years later, Surrealism’s critical
reception was still up for grabs. At the Museum of Modern Art’s mammoth 700-object
show, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism in 1936, Alfred Barr, the founding director of
MoMA, presented Surrealism as a leading movement in avant-garde art, though, by
displaying Surrealist works alongside cartoons by Walt Disney Productions and drawings
by insane asylum patients, he was already suggesting that the movement resonated
beyond the scope of aesthetics alone (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). Barr’s ambivalence about the
nature and status of the movement was evident in the introduction he wrote to the
catalogue, in which he stated that once Surrealism was “no longer a cockpit of
controversy, it will doubtless be seen as having produced a mass of mediocre and

1
Edward Alden Jewell, “From Fatin-Latour to Surrealisme,” New York Times (January 17, 1932). Levy’s
exhibition included painting, sculpture, photography, collage, books and film. It was the first exhibition of
Surrealism in New York, following the first show of Surrealism in the United States, Newer Super-realism,
held at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut in 1931. The latter show was organized by A.
Everett Austin, the director of the museum, and James Thrall Soby, with the cooperation of Julien Levy,
whose gallery then hosted a version of the show. In an interview, Julien Levy discussed how he had been
the one to import all the works that had been in the show, and for commercial reasons had let Austin host
the first Surrealism show, hoping that a museum exhibition would bring prestige to the movement which he
could then capitalize on when he displayed the works in his gallery (Julien Levy, interview with Paul
Cummings, Archives of American Art (May 30, 1975). For more on this exhibition, see Deborah Zlotsky,
“‘Pleasant Madness’ in Hartford: The First Surrealist Exhibition in America,” Arts Magazine, v. 60, n. 6
(February 1986): 55-61.

30
capricious pictures…, a fair number of excellent and enduring works of art, and even a
few masterpieces.”
2
The inclusiveness of the show might seem surprising today,
considering the later history of the Museum of Modern Art as an arbiter of exclusive
taste, but, as this chapter argues, in the 1930s, Surrealism was a site where high and low
existed in a collaborative, rather than oppositional, dialogue, where avant-garde
production mixed readily, if uneasily, with kitsch, and as such, was actively absorbed into
American mass culture.
Figure 1.1
Figure 1.2

2
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Preface,” Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
December 1936), 8. These words were also reproduced in a “Brief Guide to the exhibition of Fantastic Art,
Dada, Surrealism” that was available to museum visitors (Alfred H. Barr, “A Brief Guide to the Exhibition
of Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,” (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), n.p.)

31
The Surrealism show that opened at MoMA in December 1936 marked the
introduction of Surrealism to a wide audience in America,
3
twelve years after André
Breton published the first Surrealist manifesto in Paris. In the Manifesto, Breton had
defined Surrealism as:
Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—
verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual
functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control
exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of
previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the
disinterested play of thought.
4

From the beginning, the aims of Surrealism were broadly defined, its scope even more so.
Even its membership was constantly in question, as Breton routinely excommunicated
those whom he suspected of not subscribing wholeheartedly to Surrealism’s changing
ideologies.
5
But because Barr wanted to include works illustrating the fantastic and anti-
rational art historical antecedents of Surrealism, ranging from the fifteenth to the
twentieth centuries, Breton and Paul Eluard, a leading poet in the group, felt that the
exhibition would not be an accurate manifestation of Surrealism. Ostensibly to protect
the integrity as well as the specificity of the group, Paul Eluard wrote to Barr, asking that

3
The Newer Super-realism show at the Wadsworth Athenaeum was a much smaller show (approximately
50 objects compared with MoMA’s 700) and did not garner nearly as much attention. Unlike Barr’s show,
Newer Super-realism featured only European artists.

4
André Breton, “The First Surrealist Manifesto” (1924), in Surrealists on Art, ed. by Lucy Lippard
(Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970), 20. By 1936, the Surrealist group had founded three
successive journals in Paris and issued multiple manifestos and tracts.

5
In the second Surrealist manifesto, published in 1930, Breton included an extensive list of
excommunications. As Dawn Ades points out, “some of the strongest language in the ‘Second Manifesto’
was reserved for Bataille” who Breton found threatening, and around whom, as will be seen in Chapter
Three, Rosalind Krauss later re-theorized the Surrealist movement (Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism
Reviewed (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), 198).

32
he agree to a number of points, the first of which was not to include the works of other
movements: “It is essential that you commit formally for the exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art to the following points: 1) The exhibition would be announced under the title
‘Exhibition of Surrealism’ without anything else.”
6
When Barr rejected these requests, he
noted that it was presumptuous of Eluard and Breton to assume they could control the
exhibition, writing to Hans Arp, “I have explained to him [Breton] that we cannot arrange
an official surrealist manifestation at the Museum. …Believe me I am very much
distressed at this disagreement with Eluard and Breton but I am also surprised at their
assumption of the right to dictate either to artists or to the Museum.”
7
Breton and Eluard
withdrew their support for the show, at first refusing to lend important works from their
own collections and insisting that other Surrealists do the same. One of the reasons Barr
refused to comply with the Surrealists’ demands was that for him, a Surrealism exhibition
needed to inform the public and the best way to do that would be to establish
Surrealism’s relevance through its specific art historical depth and its wide-spread
present-day dissemination. Thus, Barr’s exhibition was intended from the start to be far
broader both in its approach and in its appeal than the French Surrealists themselves
intended, and in the end, it displayed objects that covered the entire range of visual

6
Paul Eluard, letter to Alfred Barr, my translation (July 13, 1936) Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism
exhibition files, MoMA archives.

7
Alfred Barr, letter to Hans (Jean) Arp, August 7, 1936, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition files,
MoMA archives. Eventually, a resolution with Breton and Eluard was reached, as they are listed in the
Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism catalogue among the lenders to the exhibition.

33
culture from oil painting to film, from Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup (1936) to
an “object made from a Sears-Roebuck catalog.”
8

Barr met with defiance not only from the Surrealists themselves, but from the
Museum’s administration too. When Museum President A. Conger Goodyear objected to
the inclusion of several objects in the show, Barr defended the exhibition by
distinguishing it from all previous exhibitions that the Modern had displayed. He wrote:
I think that you will agree with me that the Museum has not in the past,
except in architecture and industrial art, played the role of the pioneer in
its exhibitions. It has rather shown things which have been generally
accepted or which in any case are already fairly familiar to the interested
public. The present exhibition is in most of its aspects an exception to this
rule….
9

While the Cubism and Abstract Art show had been the first in a series of five important
exhibitions in which Barr planned to lay the foundation of twentieth-century art, for Barr,
the Surrealism exhibition was among the first to test the Modern’s ability to frame an
unfamiliar aspect of modern art, forging it for public consumption. Barr was conscious
that the aesthetics of Surrealism as he was presenting them ran counter to what had been
accepted as modern art:
I think that the heart of the misunderstanding lies in the fact that the
exhibition has been assembled upon a Fantastic-Surrealist aesthetic rather
than the more usually accepted aesthetic of form and technique expressed

8
From the beginning it seems that Barr understood Surrealism broadly and saw elements of Surrealism in
popular culture. He sent an issue of the humor magazine Ballyhoo to Paul Eluard, explaining, “The cover
and pages 15-17 may be under the influence of Surrealism but they are just as likely a spontaneous product
of American humor” (Alfred Barr, letter to Paul Eluard (April 20, 1937), Exhibition #55, MoMA archives).
Ballyhoo regularly published doctored advertisements satirizing advertising techniques and cultural norms.

9
Alfred Barr, letter to A. Conger Goodyear (January 1937) A. Conger Goodyear Scrapbook, MoMA
Archives. In the preface to Cubism and Abstract Art, Barr had specifically commented on the
retrospective, and therefore non-experimental, nature of the exhibition: “Except in a few of its aspects this
exhibition is in no sense a pioneer effort” (Alfred Barr, “Preface,” Cubism and Abstract Art (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 9).
34
through the conventional media of painting and sculpture. A good many
people will always object to any new aesthetic… The aesthetic of form
and color and of distorted or disintegrated objects which so exasperated
people in the Armory Show is now generally accepted but the aesthetic of
Surrealist fantasy, incongruity, spontaneity and humor, though it is already
a dozen or twenty years old, is still exasperating to some of our friends,
who are likely to call it silly or absurd (the adjectives I think have not
changed since 1913).
10

It was within this other vein of art – “incongruity, spontaneity and humor” – that Barr
was ready to stake the reputation of the Museum of Modern Art as a pioneer, even in the
face of internal “misunderstanding.” Writing of the disagreement in 1943, Goodyear cited
reviews of Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism with headlines such as “Farewell to Art’s
Greatness” and “Museum of Modern Art Resembles Penny Arcade,”
11
before recalling
that “when the exhibition was about to go on its travels over the country, I tried to get
certain of what seemed to me the most ridiculous objects eliminated but Alfred Barr was
opposed to the procedure, and, in line with the Museum’s policy of not interfering with
the decisions of the director of any exhibition, the objects remained.”
12
The most famous
of the objects in question, Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936), also titled by Breton,

10
Alfred Barr, letter to A. Conger Goodyear (January 1937) A. Conger Goodyear Scrapbook, MoMA
Archives.

11
A. Conger Goodyear, The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years (New York: A. Conger
Goodyear, 1943), 62. The headlines were from The New York Sun and The New York Post respectively.

12
A. Conger Goodyear, The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years (New York: A. Conger
Goodyear, 1943), 64. In a 1955 internal report, the exhibition would again be described as occurring
against the wishes of the trustees: “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism was the name of this show put on
by Barr over the protests of the trustees. It was a historical survey of the strange, the outré, and the
ridiculous in art…” (Rudi Blesh, Fifty Years of Modern Art in America (1955), “Meret Oppenheim,
Object,” Museum Collection Files, MoMA archives). The notion that Barr had gone against the ideas of the
trustees in putting on the show would come to a fore in the Emily Genauer article “The Fur-lined Museum”
(1944), which will be discussed later in this chapter. Goodyear resigned as president of the Modern in
1939, in part over Barr’s acquisition of a Rothko (Jason Edward Kaufman, “The Memoir MoMA declined
to publish,” The Art Newspaper, v. 15 (March 2006).

35
Breakfast in Fur, was one of the highlights of the New York exhibition, reproduced
extensively in newspaper reviews of the exhibition (Figure 1.3). Covered with the fur of
a Chinese gazelle, the teacup, saucer and spoon conflated a tactile pleasure with an oral
one, destabilizing the mundane domesticity of the dining room with the exotic pelt of the
Asian animal. The teacup became a symbol of both the psychosexual dynamics of daily
life and a crowd-pleasing send-up of the seriousness associated with fine art and
sculpture.
Figure 1.3
In large part because of Surrealism’s dynamic relation to popular culture, the
movement’s significance within art history was not easily defined. Indeed, the
historiography of Surrealism in the United States presents an underevaluated alternative
to the critical dominance of abstraction and Cubism, and one that we have not come to
understand with the same level of complexity. Instead, Surrealism has often been
presented in the western art history survey taught in American universities as a bridge
between European and American art during World War II, when many of the Surrealists
immigrated to the United States at the genesis of Abstract Expressionism.
13
But

13
For example, in the 1987 edition of H.W. Janson’s textbook, after legitimating Miró by comparing his
“formal discipline” to the rigors of Cubism, the author writes, “Under the influence of existentialist
36
Surrealism’s influence on the development of an American artistic culture not only
begins earlier, as I want to show in this chapter, it also lasts far beyond the post-war
period as I will demonstrate in later chapters. Since it was introduced to American
audiences in the 1930s, Surrealism has continued to be embroiled in contemporary
culture long after its practitioners ceased their involvement in the movement; seemingly
resistant to art historical classification, Surrealism’s malleability offers a way to question
the narratives of modern art that it has managed to traverse. Particularly interesting is the
disjunction between Surrealism’s somewhat subversive art historical position and its
widespread visual impact outside of high art. It is possible that Surrealism was almost
too accessible to a mainstream audience to allow its avant-garde status to be maintained,
especially as the notion of avant-garde came to be defined in opposition to mass culture.
This dissertation explores the question why has Surrealism been so difficult to rein into
an account of modern art?
Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism was billed both in press releases and in the
exhibition catalogue’s preface as the second in what was to be a series of five exhibitions
designed to highlight important movements in modern art to the American public. The
first in this series was Cubism and Abstract Art, also mounted in 1936, in which Barr

philosophy, the Abstract Expressionists—or Action Painters—developed from Surrealism a new approach
to art” (H.W. Janson and Anthony Janson, A Basic History of Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987),
383. In H.W. Janson’s 1968 edition A History of Art and Music, the author illustrates only Max Ernst and
Joan Miró as part of his half page on Surrealism, not mentioning André Breton, Dalí, or Magritte. Janson
writes, “Surrealist theory is heavily larded with concepts borrowed from psychoanalysis, and its
overwrought rhetoric is not always to be taken seriously” (H.W. Janson, A History of Art and Music (New
Jersey and New York: Prentice-Hall Inc., and Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1968), 201). Miró’s work, which
closes the section on Surrealism, is immediately followed by Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism.
For a detailed account of this period, see Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New
York School (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995).

37
unveiled his influential, and now infamous, chart tracing the development of abstract art.
As Barr set about conceptualizing the trajectory of recent art in 1936, he conceived of
interrelated strands of artistic production that led to two divergent aesthetic results – these
he labeled non-geometrical abstract art on the one hand and geometrical abstract art on
the other. The chart leaves no place for the figurative tradition of modern art, but it is
important to remember that Barr conceived the diagram specifically for the Cubism and
Abstract Art exhibition, as a way to describe the evolution of the abstract tendency in
modern art, divorced, for the purposes of didactic coherence, from other stylistic,
historical and social conditions. Barr was hardly unaware of these conditions, however,
and his aim with the exhibition seems to have been both to justify the importance of
abstract art, but also to protect abstract artists from political persecution. He devoted a
comparatively long section of his essay to “abstract art and politics” and wrote in the
introduction, “This essay and exhibition might well be dedicated to those painters of
squares and circles (and the architects who influenced them) who have suffered at the
hands of philistines in political power.”
14
Barr was personally aware of the role of
politics in the lives of the Russian avant-garde, after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1928,
and he and his wife had visited Germany, witnessing some of the first Jewish
persecutions and “became very ferociously anti-Fascist.”
15
The language of instruction is

14
Alfred Barr, “Introduction,” Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 18.

15
Margaret Barr, interview with Paul Cummings, Spring 1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution, 16. Art historian Susan Noyes Platt proposes that the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition
sprang from a sense of urgency Barr felt about the “threatened condition of the avant-garde” in the face of
the extreme soviet and fascist politics of 1936-1937 (Susan Noyes Platt, “Modernism, Formalism, and
Politics: The ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ Exhibition of 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art,” Art Journal, v.
47, n. 4 (1988), 291).; this seems evident, especially in light of Barr’s detailed description of the current
38
built into the dedication, as abstract paintings are simplified to “squares and circles” in
order for Barr to communicate more directly. While abstract Surrealism makes an
appearance in this schematized parade of styles, it became clear from Barr’s introduction
to the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism catalogue that he construed Surrealism in many
ways as the irrational alternative to his Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition, which he
described as “diametrically opposed in both spirit and esthetic principles to the present
[Dada and Surrealism] exhibition.”
16
This he did despite the fact that many of the same
people – at least 22 artists—were represented in both shows.
17
Barr was not alone in
contrasting Surrealism and abstraction. In his 1936 book Surrealism, the first American
book published on the subject, gallery owner Julien Levy wrote, “In the history of art
surrealism is a revolution, first against the bondage of realism, secondly against the snob
monopoly of abstract painting.”
18

political capability of abstract art in the “Abstract art and politics” section of the exhibition catalogue. Platt
suggests that it was “perhaps in reaction to Hitler’s rise to power and the beginning of the oppression of the
avant-garde in Germany [that] Barr now praised the ‘Abstract paintings’ including the Cubists…as ‘the
most striking.’” (Ibid., 289).

16
Barr, “Introduction,” Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936), 9.

17
Among these were Hans Arp, Alexander Calder, Giogrio de Chirico, Alberto Giacometti, Marcel
Duchamp, Max Ernst, Vasily Kandinksy, Paul Klee, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, André Masson, Joan
Miró, Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Kasimir Malevich, Maholy-Nagy, Wyndham Lewis, Kurt Schwitters, Henri
Rousseau, Julio Gonazles, César Domela-Nieuwenhuis, and Herbert Bayer. This overlap means that about
20 percent of the artists exhibited in the Cubism and Abstract Art show, were re-positioned in Fantastic
Art, Dada, Surrealism. Of the reaction the American artists at the time had to these two exhibitions, art
historian Robert C. Hobbs writes, “…many of the stylistic distinctions did not make sense to them.
Picasso, for example, was both a Cubist and a Surrealist, but some of his most Cubist works seemed more
Surrealist to the Americans than his so-called Surrealist works” (Robert C. Hobbs, “Early Abstract
Expressionism and Surrealism,” Art Journal, v. 45, n. 4 (Winter 1985), 299.

18
Julien Levy, Surrealism (New York: The Black Sun Press, 1936), 9. Original emphasis.

39
Barr’s chart has been read as privileging the march of modern art toward
abstraction, and has been reproduced countless times since its initial presentation at the
Cubism and Abstract Art show, and on the dust jacket of the show’s catalogue.
19
Though
it was clearly labeled “The Development of Abstract Art” and appeared within the
context of the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition, the chart claiming only to describe the
origins of abstraction – one tendency within modern art – continues to be conflated with
all of modern art in general.
20
However, the next exhibitions subsequent to Cubism and
Abstract Art in MoMA’s series of important movements in modern art could hardly be
understood to privilege abstraction. Following Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which I
will discuss in depth in this chapter, the museum displayed paintings by self-taught artists
called Masters of Popular Painting in 1938, followed in 1943 by American Realists and

19
In a review of the exhibition in The New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell illustrates the chart with the
caption, “what happens to the modern movement when all three valves are pushed down” (Edward Alden
Jewell, “Shock Troops in Review,” New York Times (March 8, 1936), X9). The idea that the chart
explained all of modern art as a result of various movements coursing through chronological piping
illustrates the appealing clarity of Barr’s chart, but also one of its first mis-readings.

20
Among recent readings of the chart, art historian Sybil Gordon Kantor describes it as a “genealogy of
modern art” that “traced the unfolding of modernist art chronologically, nationally, and stylistically” (Sybil
Gordon Kantor, Alfred Barr and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002), 325). W.J.T. Mitchell has described Barr’s chart as “provid[ing], most
conspicuously, a narrative dimension to the perception of modern art…the myth of the absolute presence
of the individual painting is articulated side by side with an even more insistent emphasis on the temporal,
narrative sequence” (W.J.T. Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and the Repression of
Language,” Critical Inquiry, v. 15, n. 2 (Winter 1989), 366). Terry Smith has written that “Barr’s reduced,
decontextualized, and exclusionary view of Modern art’s history was immediately institutionalized in the
exhibitions program and the slowly growing permanent collection” (Terry Smith, Making the Modern:
Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 387). Alan Wallach,
while acknowledging that MoMA was quite experimental in its construction of a “complex modernist
aesthetic” nonetheless argues that MoMA “produced a history of modernism that justified this aesthetic and
made it seem historically inevitable” using Barr’s chart to illustrate this point without further explanation
(Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art: The Past’s Future,” Journal of Design History, v. 5, n. 3
(1992), 208). Even in the compilation of Barr’s writings, published in 1986, the chart is given its own
chapter entitled “Chart of Modern Art” (Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.,
edited by Irving Sandler and Amy Newman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 92).

40
Magic Realists.
21
The latter exhibition seems to have insisted on the similarity between
American realistic painting and Magic Realism, which Barr described in terms that could
just as easily apply to Surrealism. Magic Realism, Barr wrote, was “the work of painters
who, by means of an exact realistic technique, try to make plausible and convincing their
improbably, dreamlike or fantastic vision.”
22
Art historian Ingrid Schaffner describes
Neo-Romanticism and Magic Realism as “two of Surrealism’s cousins”
23
and collector
and MoMA administrator James Thrall Soby discussed the two movements together,
contrasting them with Cubism: “Surrealism, as well as Neo-Romanticism, is entirely a
romantic movement, and in order to appraise its art we must abandon the criteria…which
were applicable to Cubism.”
24
Gallery owner Julien Levy, who gave Salvador Dalí his
first one-man show in America, also supported this type of painting and may have been
the only New York dealer at that time to do so.
25
Peter Blume’s work in particular stands
out as related to Surrealism, so much so that Soby was compelled to argue that it was not,
writing in the catalogue, “The evident fantasy of certain of [Blume’s] works…has related

21
This exhibition has also gone by the title Americans 1943: Realists and Magic Realists. There were
shows in between these main exhibitions, but Barr takes care to highlight these five as occurring in
dialogue in his introductions.

22
Alfred Barr, Jr., quoted in Dorothy Miller “Foreword and Acknowledgment,” American Realists and
Magic Realists, edited by Dorothy Miller and Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1943), 5.

23
Ingrid Schaffner, “Magic Realism and Neo-Romanticism,” Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery, edited
by Ingrid Schaffner and Lisa Jacobs (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998), 122.

24
James Thrall Soby, After Picasso (New York: Dodd, Mean & Company, 1935), 6.

25
James Thrall Soby, “The Changing Stream,” (originally c. 1971) The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-
Century: Continuity and Change (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 193. Soby states that Levy’s
gallery was one of the two galleries that he visited frequently and described Levy as being “as close to
being an official Surrealist himself as one could come without signing one of André Breton’s guidelines to
the Surrealist faith” (Ibid.).

41
his art in the public mind to Surrealism, with which he has actually little association.
Blume’s technical probity and devotion to craftsmanship are exceptional in American
art.”
26
But despite Soby’s disavowals, Dalí’s precise academic way of picturing his
visions particularly fits such a characterization. In Blume’s painting Key West Beach
(1940), which appeared in the American Realists and Magic Realists exhibition and was
owned by Soby,
27
the low horizon line and barren landscape seem very much akin to the
atmosphere of Dalí’s paintings (Figure 1.4). A rocky formation rises from driftwood to
resemble a giant bird’s head, but at the same time gives the impression of being an egg in
a nest. Such doubled depiction was a well-known hallmark of Dalí’s repertoire, and his
multiple-image painting The Endless Enigma (1938) had been the centerpiece of his 1939
exhibition at Julien Levy’s gallery, where it is likely to have been seen by Blume, whose
work also was shown at Levy’s gallery (Figure 1.5). Of the next exhibition in the MoMA
series, Romantic Painting in America (1943), Barr wrote that this tradition “now seems to
have been at least as strong as the much advertised American love of fact and detailed
local color.”
28
Surrealist painting – particularly Surrealist figurative painting – fit quite
readily into this alternative “home grown” artistic milieu. Indeed, it seems doubtful that

26
James Thrall Soby, American Realists and Magic Realists, edited by Dorothy Miller and Alfred H. Barr
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943), 28.

27
Soby bequeathed this painting to the Museum of Modern Art in 1979, along with works by Eugene
Berman, Giorgio de Chirico, Dalí, Dubuffet, Ernst, Giacometti, Matta, Miró, Picasso, Rousseau, Ben
Shahn, Tanguy, and Tchelitchew. Based on the coherence of Soby’s collection and his life-long interest in
Surrealism and Magic Realism, it seems that these artists are more similar than not, having in common the
sense of the romantic and fantastic. “Appendix: The James Thrall Soby Bequest,” Museum of Modern Art
at Mid-Century (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 228-229). Soby had purchased Blume’s work
from the artist the year after it was painted for $600 (“Peter Blume: Key West Beach 1203.1979,” Museum
Collection Files, MoMA archives).

28
Alfred Barr, Jr., “Preface,” Romantic Painting in America (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943), 5.

42
Barr ever intended to privilege abstraction over figuration, especially considering
MoMA’s clear commitment to the Realists and Magic Realists, who were pitted against
abstraction in the show’s catalogue, much as Barr had made a point of contrasting
Surrealism with Cubism in Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.
Figure 1.4
Figure 1.5
Besides the distinction between the broad categories of figuration (including
Surrealism, Magic Realism, and Romanticism) and abstraction (including Cubism),
another categorical differentiation was at play in the organization of MoMA’s shows.
The museum has often been criticized for favoring European artists over American
artists. Recently, art historian Judith Zilczer wrote of Barr’s Cubism and Abstract Art:
“the show embodied the genealogical model of modernism. …Barr virtually excluded
43
American art from that distinguished history.”
29
However, in the preface to Cubism and
Abstract Art, Barr explained that “the exhibition is confined to abstract art in Europe
because only last year a large exhibition of Abstract Art in America was held at the
Whitney Museum of Abstract Art.”
30
The Abstract Painting in America exhibition at the
Whitney from February 12 to March 22, 1935 showed the work of 65 American artists.
Though both exhibitions included living artists, they were criticized by the American
Abstract Artists group as being “closed and ‘historical.’”
31
The accusations leveled at the
Modern were such that in 1940, MoMA dedicated an entire issue of its Bulletin to
examining the relationship between American art and the Museum. Again, the Modern
explained its exhibition practices in relation to the Whitney: “In its exhibition schedule
the Museum has tried to avoid duplication of effort on the part of the Whitney Museum
which gives large exhibitions of American painting or sculpture and prints each year.”
32
It
was not until the early 1950s that MoMA became identified with contemporary abstract
American art, beginning with the show Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America,
which ran from January 23 to March 25, 1951.
Though 29,000 people saw the now more famous Cubism and Abstract Art show,
the Surrealism show was attended by more than 50,000 visitors while it was at MoMA

29
Judith Zilczer, “Beyond Genealogy: American Modernism in Retrospect,” American Art, v. 15, n. 1
(Spring 2001), 4.

30
Alfred Barr, Jr., “Preface,” Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 9.

31
George L.K. Morris, “The American Abstract Artists,” The World of Abstract Art (London: Percy Lund,
Humprhis & Co., 1957), 134.

32
“American Art and the Museum,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, v. 8, n. 1 (November
1940), 7.

44
and garnered extensive attention in the media;
33
Universal Pictures and Paramount
Pictures even issued newsreels featuring the show.
34
Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism was
in circulation for the better part of 1937. It traveled to the Pennsylvania Museum of Art,
the Boston Institute of Modern Art, the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, the Milwaukee
Art Institute, the University Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and the San
Francisco Museum of Art. In 1938, another incarnation of the exhibition, Fantastic Art,
Past and Present traveled to several smaller museums: Grand Rapids Art Gallery,
Michigan, Middlebury College, Duke University, Junior League of Binghampton, New
York. The eleven venues helped to make the impact of the exhibition felt nation-wide.

33
The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, v. 4, n. 5 (April 27, 1937), 12. The exact attendance number is
50,034 (Ibid., 8). The shows were both up for six weeks, though Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism ran
through Christmas and New Years, days on which the museum was closed. Fantastic Art, Dada,
Surrealism was at that point the sixth best attended show in the museum’s seven-year history and the
largest show of the 1936-1937 season. Additionally, 23 works were acquired by MoMA from Fantastic
Art, Dada, Surrealism in comparison with 3 works acquired from Cubism and Abstract Art (Ibid., 6-8) and
by 1940, the catalogue for Cubism and Abstract Art was out of print, while Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism
was in its second edition. (In all Cubism and Abstract Art has now been re-issued three times). Edward
Alden Jewell predicted that Cubism and Abstract Art would “pile up quite as grand an attendance total as
did the recent Van Gogh show” which would have been quite a feat, considering the Van Gogh show of
1935-1936 had been attended by 123,309, making it the most popular show in the Museum’s history
(Edward Alden Jewell, “Shock Troops in Review,” New York Times (March 8, 1936), X9; Attendance
Ledger, November 1929 – April 1936, Records from the Department of Public Information II.A.14,
Museum of Modern Art Archives). A. Conger Goodyear cites the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition
attendance at 30,388 though the number 29,272 had been recorded in the Museum ledger (A. Conger
Goodyear, The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years (New York: A. Conger Goodyear, 1943),
appendix H).

34
The 1937 short film Even as You and I, directed by Roger Barlow, Harry Hay, LeRoy Robbins, features
Surrealism prominently as the characters in the film (played by its real-life directors) are inspired to finish
the script they had been working on after seeing an article on Surrealism in a newspaper (possibly a review
of MoMA’s 1936 show). Using reproductions of Surrealist paintings, including Dalí’s Persistence of
Memory, which fills the frame for a prolonged moment, the directors foreground Surrealism prominently in
the creative process as they set about making a movie. The resulting film within a film, entitled “Afternoon
of a Rubberband,” is a send-up of avant-garde cinema that includes an homage (or satire) of Dalí and
Buñuel’s famous eye-cutting scene from Un Chien Andalou, now transfigured into a soft-boiled egg, sliced
to reveal its runny yolk.

45
Despite a concern among some critics of the period that “much has yet to be
explained ere the layman can comprehend the ideals and endeavors of the Surrealist
painters,”
35
the public response to Surrealism was very accommodating. Deliberately
divorced in the public eye from its engagement with Marxism, its numerous manifestos,
and its European intellectualism, Surrealism was typically portrayed as psychological
play made visible. And, as art historian Keith Eggener has pointed out, when Marx was
mentioned in conjunction with Surrealism, the reference was not to Karl, but to Groucho
and Harpo.
36
It seems probable that the lack of historical and art historical context that
was the norm for the reception of Surrealism in America was fostered by the first edition
of the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism catalogue, which only included Barr’s preface
(quoted above and barely more than a page) by way of explanation for the extremely
broad body of work, leaving the 227 plates to speak virtually for themselves. Barr had
originally asked Breton to write a short piece for the catalogue, but it seems that the poet
ignored the request.
37
While the catalogue’s succinct chronology of the two movements
does briefly concede Surrealism’s involvement with the Communist party in conjunction
with the founding of the Surrealist journal Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution,

35
Alexander Watt, “The Art World of Paris,” Studio, v. cxii, n. 521 (August 1936), 64.

36
See Keith L. Eggener, “‘An Amusing Lack of Logic’: Surrealism and Popular Entertainment,” American
Art, v. 7, n. 4 (Autumn 1993): 30-45. Specifically, the author writes that Surrealism was “drained of its
political content and reconstituted as entertainment” by popular critics in the U.S., which “is also striking
for its neglect or ignorance of Surrealism’s sources, aims and thematic content” (Ibid., 32, 33). Dalí
particularly admired Harpo, in part, I suspect because he did not need to know English to understand
Harpo’s humor and met with him about the possibility of collaborating on a project together.

37
Alfred Barr, letter to Tristan Tzara, November 6, 1936, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition files,
MoMA archives. Barr reported, “Following the reconciliation with the Surrealist poets, I asked André
Breton to write a short statement on the present position of the Surrealists. He has not, however, found time
to do so” (Ibid.)

46
the pamphlet guide to the exhibition, though longer and meant to supplement the
catalogue, makes no mention of Surrealism’s political aims. George Hugnet’s essays on
Dada and Surrealism, which had been commissioned for the catalogue, were not ready in
time for publication. They were instead distributed to MoMA members in the Museum’s
bulletin (by far the lengthiest edition then published
38
) and made available only in a later
edition of the catalogue, but here too, Hugnet stressed Surrealism as an investigative
process rather than an aesthetic undertaking, insisting that “Surrealist painting must not
be judged by artistic quality.”
39
When discussing Le Surréalisme au Service de la
Révolution, Hugnet wrote that “the Surrealist painters refuse to bow to the exigencies of
politics”
40
and he failed to acknowledge the complicated relationship between the
Surrealists in Paris and the Communist Party. Thus, as Surrealism was introduced to
America in the mid-1930s, its literary and political engagements were downplayed,
partially on account of their being expressed in French (the majority of Breton’s writings
were not available in English until the mid-1940s);
41
instead, automatic processes and the

38
The Bulletin of The Museum of Modern Art had been growing in length during the mid-1930s, but
previous issues had never exceeded 8 pages. By contrast, the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism edition of the
Bulletin was 32 pages.

39
George Hugnet, “In the Light of Surrealism,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, v. 4 n. 2-3
(November-December 1936), 29. Original emphasis.

40
George Hugnet, “In the Light of Surrealism,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, v. 4 n. 2-3
(November-December 1936), 26.

41
Martica Sawin notes that the brief excerpt of Breton’s L’Amour Fou, published in Transition in 1938,
was an exception to the lack of material in translation (Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the
Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995), 101). A one-page
excerpt from Breton’s Soluble Fish and a poem, “The Spectral Attitudes,” from The White-haired Revolver
are translated in David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism (Great Britain: Shenval Press, 1935).

47
psychological content of the group’s paintings became the focus of both academic and
popular assessments of the movement.
Surrealism was presented as universalizing and even personal as Life magazine
assured its readers, “Surrealism is no stranger than a normal person’s dream….When you
scribble idly on a telephone pad you are setting down your irrational subconscious.”
42

But it was not only on an individual level that the public was able to relate to Surrealism.
In the New Yorker, critic Lewis Mumford concluded that, “it would be absurd to dismiss
Surrealism as crazy. Maybe it is our civilization that is crazy. Has it not used all the
powers of rational intellect…to universalize the empire of meaningless war and to turn
whole states into Fascist madhouses?”
43
An unsigned article in the New York Times
expresses a similar opinion: “A view of what’s going on under the name of surrealism in
the Museum of Modern Art suggests the thought that the artists of the lunatic fringe,
however they rank in their own field, are better than the political commentators at
describing what’s going on in other spheres. Outside the galleries…the contemporary eye

42
“Surrealism on Parade,” Life, v. 14 (December 1936), 24. Doodling and caricature were common
comparisons that journalists employed to make surrealism seem accessible. The Milwaukee Journal
reported: “The child who puts an unconscionably long nose on a man, the boy who places a moustache on a
feminine portrait, may carry over the same trait into adulthood. If artists paint curious pictures out of sheer
whim, as they seem to have done in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they merely create “fantastic”
art. If they allow themselves to be hypnotized by the thing they themselves create, they are surrealists (“A
Show of Surrealism and What Led Up to It,” The Milwaukee Journal (May 17, 1937). While relating to the
work, the author also seems to want to paint the activity of the Surrealists as self-important impulsiveness.
The arbitrary aspect of Surrealist intentions taints the reception of Surrealism by the masses.

43
Lewis Mumford, “Surrealism and Civilization,” The New Yorker v. XII, n. 44 (December 19, 1936), 79.
Mumford also both personalizes and universalizes Surrealism’s audience, writing that Surrealism “helps
break down our insulating and self-defeating pride” (Ibid.).

48
must rest on objects and images much more grotesque…”
44
It was not going to be a given
then that Surrealism was art, but it also did not seem to matter because Surrealism so
often was taken up by critics as a social phenomenon.
Even in an artistic context, Surrealism often was treated as a symptom of social
circumstances. Critic Henry McBride, comparing Dalí to Hieronymus Bosch, wrote, “I
have always suspected that he [Bosch] lived in a jittery time, something like ours, with all
sorts of uncertainties about his finances, the state of his soul, &c., &c., and consequently
had a perfect right to have nightmares. … But anyway, Mr. Dalí goes him miles better.”
45

By 1936, Surrealism was societal in its implications. It had almost entirely lost its French
spelling – which had been widely used in the American press in 1932
46
– and now was
being actively framed as both the escape from and the antidote to the anxieties Americans
faced about the Depression, the state of world politics, or even modern life in general. So
while in the United States Surrealism lost its intended commitments to Marxism and
revolution, it nevertheless maintained a secondary social resonance.
47

As early as 1931, Chick Austin, the director of the Hartford Atheneum where the
first Surrealism exhibition in the U.S. had been held, had acknowledged the trendiness of
Surrealism by comparing it to ephemeral entertainment and the fashion industry.

44
“Surrealism,” New York Times (January 2, 1937). The author mentions the war in Spain and the Chinese
government as examples of “surrealism translated into politics” (Ibid.).

45
Henry McBride, “The Battle of the Surrealists,” New York Sun (December 19, 1936).

46
According to Merriam-Webster’s American Dictionary, the word “surreal” entered the English language
in 1937.

47
In France, Surrealism was much more complex both in its internal politicking as Breton often staged
purges of his group, and externally in its relationship to the French Communist Party, which ultimately
rejected the Surrealists.

49
Surrealism was “sensational, yes, but after all the paintings of our present day must
compete with the movie thriller and the scandal sheet. … We do not hesitate to dress in
fashion because we fear that next year the mode will alter. We know it will; but we take
pleasure in what we have today and pride in knowing that we are in fashion.”
48
With the
MoMA exhibition’s opening, Surrealism also became increasingly relevant to advertisers.
As the journal The Commonweal reported, not only was Surrealism in fashion, it had
passed “from radicalism to this final stage of modishness.”
49
At the Advertising and
Marketing Forum in New York in January 1937, the art director of Condé Nast
publications declared that Surrealism “deals primarily in the basic appeals so dear to the
advertiser’s heart.”
50
Six weeks later, a set of three photo-paintings by artists affiliated
with Surrealism - Dalí, de Chirico and Tchelitchew - advertising evening dresses,
appeared in Vogue. Described by the magazine as an “experiment,” the photo-paintings
“tried to eliminate the Subject and the Technique, and to present the artist’s Conception

48
A. Everett Austin, quoted in Deborah Zlotsky, “‘Pleasant Madness’ in Hartford: The First Surrealist
Exhibition in America,” Arts Magazine, v. 60, n. 6 (February 1986), originally in “Surrealisme has its day
in Hartford Art Gallery,” Springfield Union Republican (November 15, 1931).

49
Barry Byrne, “Surrealism Passes,” The Commonweal, v. XXVI, n. 10 (July 2, 1937), 262. This is one of
the very few contemporaneous articles that specifically focuses on Surrealism’s Communism, its European-
ness and the American reaction to the movement. Forecasting the American reception, the author writes,
“There will be the anxious, cultured fringe who have acquired the names and the patter, who will attain the
thrill of sophistication...They will be unaware that the art on display pillories them and their fragments of
culture. Last, there will be that most hopeful group, fortunately a large one, who will find the whole matter
a sort of art circus, and who curiously enough will have in their amusement a common ground with the
artists themselves” (Ibid., 263).

50
Dr. M. F. Agha, quoted in “Links Surrealism and Ads,” New York Times (January 23, 1937). In a 1936
article, M. F. Agha wrote that “The Surrealist school (or rather, Dalí, because he is the Surrealist school of
today) has such immense capacity for propaganda…that its influence is felt everywhere. … What is
snobbish art scandal to-day, is an accepted style to-morrow, and a merchandizing style the next day” (M.F.
Agha, “Surrealism or the Purple Cow,” Vogue, 1936).

50
in a pure and isolated form.”
51
Titled I Dream about an Evening Dress, Dalí’s
collaboration with the Vogue editors is accompanied by the language of a fashion spread,
picturing a “chiffon dress from Bonwit Teller (and I. Magnin, California) and jewels
from Olga Tritt” (Figure 1.6).
52
In addition to such collaborative efforts, advertising
companies openly availed themselves of images that appeared in the Fantastic Art, Dada,
Surrealism exhibition, in at least one instance without the knowledge of the artist himself.
The Henry Sell Advertising Agency plagiarized the cover artwork of Herbert Bayer’s
Wunder des Lebens (1934) for a campaign on behalf of its client U.S. Vitamin
Corporation. Upon discovering that versions of his work were hanging in American
pharmacies, the artist requested a copy of the advertisement, which Barr procured from
the agency, explaining that the museum would simply like a copy for its files of “any
material that might indicate the influence it has had upon the American commercial
design.”
53
Barr presents the museum as hoping to affect – and eager to document –
instances of the mixing of high art and commercial culture.

51
“Vogue’s 3 Man Show,” Vogue (March 15, 1937), 80.

52
Ibid.

53
Alfred Barr, letter to Henry Sell Advertising Agency (February 19, 1937), Fantastic Art, Dada,
Surrealism exhibition files, MoMA archives.

51
Figure 1.6
A distinction should be made however, between images used for advertising that
were designed by the Surrealists themselves (with or without their knowledge), and those
advertisements that appropriated Surrealist strategies.
54
On December 31, 1936, Women’s
Wear Daily reported that Surrealist colors would be useful in negligee designs, thanks to
the “surrealist color card brought out by the Celanese Corp. of America,” which included

54
Already in 1935, Breton had become aware of the attraction of Surrealism’s visual language and wanted
“to establish a very precise line of demarcation separating what is Surrealist in its essence and that which
attempts to pass itself off as such for the purposes of advertising and other forms” (André Breton, originally
‘Situation surréaliste de l’objet: Situation de l’objet surréaliste (March 1935), quoted in Krzysztof
Fijalkowski, “Black Materialism: Surrealism Faces the Commercial World” Surreal Things: Surrealism
and Design edited by Ghislaine Wood (London: Victoria and Albert Publications, 2007), 112) Breton even
entertained Man Ray’s suggestion for a trademark to be placed on authentic Surrealist works, “C’est un
objet surréaliste” (Krzysztof Fijalkowski, “Black Materialism: Surrealism Faces the Commercial World”
Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design edited by Ghislaine Wood (London: Victoria and Albert
Publications, 2007), 112).

52
“such unusual combinations as orchid, lilac and Bagdad [sic] blue.”
55
Though a company
named Gunther Furs claimed to be the first to use Surrealism in commercial copy in
advertisements seen at the end of February 1937, Elizabeth Arden perfumes debuted an
advertisement using Surrealist motifs for their Blue Grass Perfume that appeared on
February 7, 1937 (Figure 1.7).
56
The Elizabeth Arden ad concentrates on Surrealism’s
associations with love, depicting a half-dozen hearts struck with arrows that cling to a
cracked wall. Two hands reach toward each other, but one of them is only a shadow. In
the distance, a lone figure with a long shadow stands alone in front of a series of brick
archways, reminiscent of de Chirico’s eerily underpopulated landscapes. An eye with a
cupid for a pupil looks on, to remind viewers that Blue Grass Perfume “is the perfect
Valentine.”
57
The Gunther Fur ad, which uses a Chirico-esque landscape as its setting,
depicts a woman practically dripping in furs, casting a perpendicular shadow in a
landscape that appears barren. A few stylized clouds hover in the sky, vaguely
reminiscent of the floating lips seen in Man Ray’s large-scale painting L’Heure de
l’Observation (1932), which had hung prominently across from the entrance door in

55
“Surrealist Colors Offer Fresh Ideas for Negilgee [sic] Promotions,” Women’s Wear Daily (December
31, 1936). Dalí (rather than Surrealism as a whole) had been cited as an inspiration for new color choices
two weeks earlier: Lord and Taylor “while not acknowledging the show itself, professes indebtedness to
Dalí for the color inspiration of woolen evening capes…capes which contrast vivid and pale shades, like
Tarantella red with hyacinthine blue, or intense green with faded pink, in the Dalí technique” (“Dealing
with Dalí,” Women’s Wear Daily (December 15, 1936).

56
“Fur Copy Goes Surrealist,” New York Times (February 12, 1937), 43. Though ads had already
incorporated paintings and photographs by Surrealists, I believe this was among the first to use the visual
language of Surrealism, or Surrealism as a concept that would be recognizable as such, without actually
being affiliated with a Surrealist artist or artwork.

57
Elizabeth Arden Company, “Blue Grass perfume Ad,” New York Times, February 7, 1937.
53
MoMA’s exhibition.
58
The exaggerated perspectival landscape of de Chirico was also put
to use in an advertisement by the high-end furniture company W & J Sloane, in a scene
set off from the text with a plain border that depicted a fallen Dionysian bust, a
disembodied hand (or plaster cast) at a café table, and a leafless tree on which to hang
wine glasses (Figure 1.8). A clock – not melting – is traced over the clouds in the sky.
The company seemed to want to use Surrealism simply to cover all bases, equivocating
about its universal appeal – “Your taste in decoration may not run to Surrealism…But if
you wanted a room done in the manner of exaggerated reality, Sloan could do it for
you.”
59
The message seems to be that no matter how outlandish a client’s taste, the
company would be accommodating. Most ads that used Surrealism emphasized
Surrealism’s outlandishness, but they presented it not as an option, but as the only choice.
Bonwit Teller department store designed an advertisement to promote a “Fashion Fantasy
for New Year’s Eve” that depicted fashion sketches of women in dramatic gowns, not
unlike their usual advertisements, though the text promises that the “finishing touch” was
to be “fresh flowers, touched with the zany cloud-cuckoo mood that has set the world
talking about the Surrealist art exhibitions and our current Surrealist windows” (Figure
1.9).
60
The Surreal aspects that made the ad different from Bonwit Teller’s pre-1936

58
Margaret Scolari Barr recalls that the picture shocked the trustees who felt that the painting should be
displayed less prominently (Margaret Barr, “‘Our Campaigns,’” The New Criterion, special issue (Summer
1987), 49). Man Ray himself had used his painting in a fashion photograph of a beach coast by Heim that
appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in November 1936, just before the exhibition opened (“Flaunting their Faith,”
Harper’s Bazaar (November 1936), pp. 60-62, 126).

59
W & J Sloane Company, The New Yorker, v. XII, n. 51 (February 6, 1937), 57.

60
Bonwit Teller, New York Herald Tribune (December 27, 1936). The ad publicizes not only the Surrealist
floral coiffures, but the exhibition at MoMA, as well as the Bonwit Teller windows that Dalí had designed.
54
layouts were mainly a mix of motifs taken from paintings by Dalí and Magritte scattered
between the women: drawings of a melted timepiece at five minutes to midnight and a
floating eye with a clock face at five minutes past 12, melding Magritte’s The False
Mirror with Dalí’s Persistence of Memory to comment both on the eye of the beholder
and the importance in the world of fashion of being à la mode. According to store
management, the windows designed by Dalí mentioned in the ad “not only attracted large
crowds of passers-by, but also sold far more of the dresses shown than was the case with
a more usual form of display.”
61
The New York World Telegram reported that “there were
crowds six deep around Bonwit Teller’s windows last week of people wondering what all
this attractive madness was about.”
62
Surrealist windows, designed by Copeland
Displays, Inc., were used at Filene’s in Boston and Blum’s in Philadelphia.
63
Indeed,
Dalí’s window for Bonwit Teller can be credited with assuring the success of using
surrealist techniques in window display, a practice which continued through the 1940s.
64

Art Historian Angela Miller has recently described how Surrealism was used in
advertising: “its irrationalism was now linked to another kind of desire, liberating the

Alfred Barr kept a copy of this ad in his personal files (Alfred H. Barr Papers, Folder 71 “Surrealism, Dada,
etc.,” Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York).

61
“‘She was a Surrealist Woman – Like a Figure in a Dream,’ The New Art in Show Window Display,”
The Daily Telegraph (January 9, 1937).

62
“Fifth Ave. Crowd Stops to View Dalí Window,” New York World Telegram (December 26, 1936).

63
Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (New York:
Atheneum, 1973), 146.

64
Leonard S. Marcus, The American Store Window (New York: Billboard Publications, Inc., 1978), 31.

55
imagination not in the service of revolution, but of consumption.”
65
However, while this
seems very much to characterize how Surrealism was marketed toward women, for men,
the case was different. Using Surrealism to sell men’s accessories, Macy’s Men’s Store
declared that “Surrealism makes sense in these full-silk lined foulards! The designs are
startling, gay and forthright – but sensibly so.”
66
Here, Surrealism for men is framed not
as bizarre or irrational, but its opposite – sensible, tempered for male consumption.
Figure 1.7

65
Angela Miller, “‘With Eyes Wide Open’: The American Reception of Surrealism,” Caught by Politics:
Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture, edited by Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick (New York:
Palgrame Macmillan, 2007), 68.

66
Macy’s Men’s Store advertisement, New York Times (May 3, 1937).

56
Figure 1.8
Figure 1.9
57
Surrealism’s appropriation in advertising, coming at a time when it was still
unclear which works were to be considered art and which were not, could only cause
more confusion. Analyzing this trend in 1938, a writer for Scribner’s noted that while
Surrealism was currently being used to promote luxury goods, “come a few more years,
and we may be examining Surrealism in Macy’s bargain basement.”
67
Surrealism’s status
here seems conflated with the audiences for those products it was being used to promote.
Paralleling Surrealism’s unstable status in art history, in the realm of advertising, the
more common the use of Surrealism as an advertising motif became, the more its ability
to speak to and for high culture seemed threatened. A 1941 article on modern art in
modern living noted that “when surrealist technique is used to tell the public that a
chemical company [Monsanto Chemicals] makes a variety of unrelated objects,
surrealism is no longer a monopoly of the sophisticated.”
68
Many years later, in a 1979
interview, Julien Levy reflected on the prejudice against Surrealism, saying, “the only
time it was really popular—and then it wasn’t called Surrealism—was when Madison
Avenue picked it up, and very successfully. Obviously it’s a must for advertising public
relations because it’s a study of human motivations. … Madison Avenue made
‘surrealistic’ advertisements with ease for years and it became a commonplace.”
69
In
Levy’s mind, when Surrealism was used in advertising, it ceased to represent an art

67
Frank Caspers, “Surrealism in Overalls,” Scribner’s, v. 104, n. 2 (August, 1938), 20.

68
“Modern Art and Modern Living,” Fortune, v. 24, n. 6 (December 1941), 114.

69
Julien Levy, quoted in Nancy Hall-Duncan, “Surrealist Photography at the New Gallery: A Conversation
with Julien Levy,” Dialogue, v. 2 (September-October 1979), 25.

58
movement and became a common tool for enforcing capitalist relations between viewer
and object.
70

While the public response to Surrealism was very accommodating, the notion that
Surrealism was worthwhile artistically was very much contested. The reviewer for the Art
Digest wrote of Barr’s show, “If you’ve misplaced anything around the house, trot into
the Modern; chances are you’ll find it there.”
71
Critic Emily Genauer declared that “the
real value of this show…rests on the good pictures in it. And there are probably only a
few dozen such out of the 700 items in the whole exhibition.”
72
It was just such a reaction
that led the collector Katherine Dreier, an important advocate for Dada and co-founder
with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray of the Societé Anonyme,
73
to write to Alfred Barr
complaining that his inclusion of the art of the insane was deleterious to Surrealism’s
reception. Barr had explained his decision to display the work of children and the insane
in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, suggesting it as appropriate comparative

70
Robert Hughes argues that it was not only the capitalistic aspects of Surrealist advertising that were
objectionable, but that “the absorption of Surrealist devices into homosexual chic, via the couture houses
and the pages of Vogue, appears to have cost him [Breton] some sleep from the middle thirties” (Robert
Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Alfred Knopf, Inc., 1980), 249).

71
Art Digest, v. XI, n. 6 (December 15, 1936), 6.

72
Emily Genauer, “Drawings by Lunatic Asylum Inmates as Good as Most of the 700 Items in Museum’s
Fantastic Exhibit,” New York Herald Tribune, 1936. Others within the museum echoed similar sentiments.
A. Conger Goodyear communicated to Abby Rockefeller that several of the objects in the show were
“ridiculous and could hardly be included in any definition of art” (A. Conger Goodyear, quoted in Alice
Goldfarb Marquis, Alfred H. Barr: Missionary for the Modern (New York: Contemporary Books, 1989),
160). Goodyear had wanted Meret Oppenheim’s Object (Fur Teacup) (1936) removed from the traveling
exhibition.

73
The Societé Anonyme was an organization founded in 1920 by Dreier, Duchamp and Man Ray to bring
avant-garde art to American audiences. Under the auspices of the organization, the founders hosted over 80
exhibitions, lectures and educational programs during the 1920s and 1930s. For more on the Societé
Anonyme, see The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: A Catalogue Raisonné,
edited by Robert L. Herbert, Eleanor S. Apter, Elise K. Kenney (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
59
material for the exhibition because “Surrealist artists try to achieve a comparable freedom
of the creative imagination, but they differ in one fundamental way from children and the
insane: they are perfectly conscious of the difference between the world of fantasy and
the world of reality, whereas children and the insane are often unable to make this
distinction.”
74
Dreier wrote, “The fact that you claim that from the Surrealist point of
view a person’s insanity only adds greater interest – shows how confused they are as to
what is art. ……Personally I considered it very dangerous for our American public who
are not art-conscious to present such a fare. Most people left your exhibition feeling
wuzzy!!”
75
Dreier also mentions how dangerous this confusion can be at a time “when
R.W. Ruckstull’s Great Works of Art – with its many illustrations is selling for $1.99....
You may scorn this book – but after all the general public does not. And since there are
so many illustrations and since he considers us all insane and sadistic – you played it
seems to me right into his hands.”
76
To perpetuate the popular dismissive explanation that
modern artists were simply crazy – an argument taken up by conservative art critics such
as Ruckstull who was an editor at the journal Art World – seemed to Dreier the opposite
of responsible exhibition practice. To reinforce her protest, Dreier withdrew the objects

74
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Introduction,” Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, edited by Alfred Barr (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1936).

75
Katherine Dreier, letter to Alfred Barr, February 27, 1937, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism files, “Folder:
#55 United States A-H,” MoMA archives.

76
Katherine Dreier, letter to Alfred Barr, February 27, 1937, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism files, “Folder:
#55 United States A-H,” MoMA archives. Indeed, in Ruckstull’s book, originally published in 1925, he
states that, “The main purpose of “The Art World” [the magazine from which many of the entries are
taken] was to strike a body-blow at the insanity, sham, and degeneracy in the Modernistic art movement”
while promoting what he considered to be good American painting (R.W. Ruckstull, Great Works of Art
and What Makes Them Great (New York: Garden Publishing Company, 1925), x).

60
she had lent to the exhibition when it traveled to several other museums across the
country the following year. Instead of fostering the movement as Dreier believed the
Museum should, she felt that the “potpourri of sane, insane and children’s works”
encouraged the movement’s “derision by the public.”
77
Indeed, Dreier’s fears may have
been prompted by a New York Times article on art education for the masses. Describing a
recent public tour of Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism sponsored by the Works Progress
Administration, The Times reported that “everybody seemed relieved when Miss
Richardson [a WPA lecturer], asked anxiously to relate what some of the works meant to
her, had to confess that they meant nothing.”
78
Such attempts to make art accessible to the
general public not only often had the effect of diluting the meaning of the works in the
eyes of the public, they almost encouraged distorted interpretations.
A large part of the confusion over Surrealism’s status in the popular realm was
due undoubtedly to Dalí’s co-option of the movement. Instead of founder André Breton,
or the universally respected Joan Miró, at the center of the movement in America, Dalí
and his limp watches were advertised heavily. Of course, in part, Breton’s low profile in
the United States was due to the fact that he was a poet, and moreover that his literary
output was in French. Art historian Dickran Tashjian suggests that Breton was excluded
from American fashion magazines “by virtue of his outspoken revolutionary stance,” but
considering that fashion magazines were inherently visual productions and were eager to
exploit the visual, rather than literary, dynamics of Surrealism, a painter such as Dalí

77
Katherine Dreier, quoted in “Exhibits by Insane Anger Surrealist,” New York Times (January 19, 1937).

78
Charlotte Hughes, “Education in Art Taken to Masses,” New York Times, January 10, 1937, 45.

61
seems a much more obvious choice than a Freudian poet to represent the movement.
79

Tashjian rightly suggests that the revolutionary aspects of Surrealism as represented by
Breton had to be suppressed for Surrealism to be palatable to the elite and bourgeois
readership that fashion magazines hoped to cultivate, and again Dalí’s overt decadence
was able to mitigate any truly revolutionary Surrealist aims.
80
Miró, though lauded by
critics, was easily overshadowed by the flair with which Dalí caught the attention of the
popular press by assuming the role of an idiosyncratic artiste, a dandy-ish personality
quick to charm with his broken English. Of course Dalí’s persona (and his refusal to
speak grammatical English) was quite carefully cultivated and his relationship to the
press, in which he took personal pride, was a central component of this persona.
81

Complimenting the reporters who met him in 1936, upon his second New York
debarkation, Dalí wrote, “These reporters…had an acute sense of ‘non-sense’…They had
a merciless flair for the sensational which made them pounce
immediately…and…nourish the casual curiosity of millions of psychologies…”
82
By
contrast, Miró did not make his way to the United States until after World War II, in
1947, but others associated with Surrealism, such as Pierre Roy who came to the United
States in the same years as Dalí – 1934, 1936, and 1939 –still did not garner the same

79
Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde 1920-1950 (New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 75.

80
For more on the fashion industry’s relationship to Surrealism’s politics in the 1930s, see Dickran
Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen, pp. 73-77.

81
Demonstrating the importance of publicity in their lives, at the Dalís’ home in Port Lligat, Spain, Dalí
and his wife Gala had covered the walls of her dressing room with a huge collage comprised of Dalí’s
magazine appearances and their photographs with celebrities.

82
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (New York: Dial Press, 1942), 330-331.

62
popularity.
83
In 1935, in his book After Picasso, which aimed to clarify contemporary art,
James Thrall Soby had predicted that “Dalí is the artist who seems likely to lead the
Surrealist movement from now on.”
84
Dalí literally became the face of Surrealism on a
cover of Time that coincided with the MoMA exhibition’s opening (Figure 1.10). The
photograph, taken seven years earlier by Man Ray, shows Dalí’s face emerging from
darkness. His eyes appear black, highlighted by dark shadows (or was it eyeliner?) that
rhyme with a thinner version of his distinctive moustache, rendering Dalí’s gaze all the
more entrancing to create an image that resembles a Hollywood glamour photo.
85
Not
only was Dalí a frequent subject of articles published in the United States, he also both
wrote and illustrated his own. In 1935, Dalí illustrated a series of full-page American
Weekly articles (unsigned) with such titles as “New York as Seen by the ‘Super-Realist’
Artist, M. Dalí,” “The American City Night and Day – By Dalí,” and “American Country
Life Interpreted by M. Dalí” – all despite the fact that at this point he had only visited the

83
According to Marshall N. Price, Miró came for a mural commission at the Terrace Plaza Hotel in
Cincinnati (Marshall N. Price, “Chronology of Surrealism in the United States, 1931-1950,” Surrealism
USA, edited by Isabelle Devreaux, (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2004), 184). Roy
was included in several Surrealism exhibitions but maintained his independence from the Surrealism group,
which may have decreased his cachet with the American popular press, though he had a “large following”
among artists (Seymour Menton, Magic Realism Rediscovered 1918-1981 (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Associated University Presses, 1983), 66).

84
James Thrall Soby, After Picasso (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1935), 112. Soby was also one
of Dalí’s first American collectors.

85
Whether due to poor reproductive quality or the choice of Time’s editors, when the photograph was used
earlier in a 1932 poster for Barbaouuo, Dalí’s hair is highlighted and his ears receive more of the camera’s
light, reducing the intense focus on Dalí’s eyes. It is also interesting that a photograph of Dalí (one in
which he was not pictured painting), rather than a reproduction of his work, was used to represent
Surrealism, conflating his persona, more than his production, with the movement.

63
United States once.
86
Nonetheless, Dalí was taken up as an expert on American life,
playing the role of both insider and outsider at once. In 1936, Newsweek attributed the
“worldwide notoriety of the group…to a single past master of publicity, Salvador Dalí.”
87

Time called Dalí’s work “a headliner” and noted that as an artist he “has a faculty for
publicity which should turn any circus press agent green with envy. …He was taken up
by swank New York socialites and in his honor was held a fancy dress ball that is still the
talk of the West Fifties.”
88

Figure 1.10

86
Dalí and his wife Gala first arrived in New York on November 7, 1934 and left the United States on
January 19, 1935. Julien Levy’s Gallery issued a press release announcing the artist’s arrival in America.
See “New York Seen by the ‘Super-Realist’ Artist M. Dalí,” American Weekly (February 24, 1935), 3;
“How Super-Realist Dalí Saw Broadway,” American Weekly (March 17, 1935), 5; “The American City
Night-and-Day – by Dalí,” American Weekly (March 31, 1935), 5; “American Country Life Interpreted by
M. Dalí,” American Weekly (April 28, 1935), 7.

87
“Giddy Museum Exhibit Dizzies the Public with Dada,” Newsweek, v. 8, n. 25 (December 19, 1936), 25.

88
“Marvelous and Fantastic,” Time, v. xxviii, n. 24 (December 14, 1936), 62. Indeed, the organization of
the article also underscores Dalí’s perceived centrality to the movement, as his name is one of the piece’s
three subheadings: Dada, Surrealism, Dalí.

64
Though later in life he would hawk such products as Alka-Seltzer (and,
posthumously, Gap khakis), in 1936, Dalí was still making headlines principally on
account of his art. His most iconic work, The Persistence of Memory (1931), had by
1936 been shown in nine American exhibitions, including the Chicago World’s Fair of
1933, and it had been reproduced in countless American newspapers and magazines
(Figure 1.11). Julien Levy had brought the painting to America in 1931, after purchasing
it that year from Pierre Colle’s gallery for $250 – “more than I had ever spent on a
painting,” he wrote in his memoirs.
89
As a testament to its status as an icon, an agreement
for the painting’s purchase for MoMA was apparently arranged by Barr before the buyer,
Mrs. Stanley Resor, had even seen the painting in person.
90
Acquired by MoMA for $350
in 1934, The Persistence of Memory became the first Dalí painting to enter an American
museum collection.
91

89
Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977) 71. Though he
purchased the painting at a trade price, Levy writes that $250 was a very high price in those days (Ibid.)
“Pierre had three of the new paintings, they were sans ordure, and certainly masterly and startling
enough….Two were already sold to American collectors, one to Philip Goodwin, another to Mrs. Murphy
Crane, both of whom were to be most generously involved with the Museum of Modern Art in years to
come. That Mrs. Crane had bought a Dalí indicated that even the old ladies might approve. The third,
unsold, was about $250 prix de marchand- price to the trade. So I bought the Persistence of Memory”
(Ibid.).

90
On July 12, 1934, Alfred Barr wrote to Julien Levy that the anonymous donor buying “the Dalí Watches”
would be “sending her check” and “also, incidentally, she is passing through Chicago and will see the
picture there. If she likes it she tells me she may want another one for herself” (Alfred Barr, letter to Julien
Levy, July 12, 1934, Julien Levy Archives). In an interview with Paul Cummings, Margaret Barr recalls
that in the mid-1930s, the Museum did not have money to make purchases, but in 1934, “for the first time a
beneficiant woman, Mrs. Stanley Resor, gave Alfred about two thousand dollars for the summer to buy so
that at least we were able to buy smitches of things. …That was the beginning of when we could at least
spend a few pennies” (Margaret Barr, interview with Paul Cummings, Spring 1974, Archives of American
Art, Smithsonian Institution, 11). In retrospect Margaret Barr does not seem to consider The Persistence of
Memory a major purchase, instead citing Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror, bought for $10,000 as Barr’s first
important acquisition (Ibid., 12).

91
James Thrall Soby, “Persistence of Memory (Correspondence),” Museum Collection Files, Museum of
Modern Art Archives. Marshall N. Price cites Dalí’s painting La Solitude, bought by the Wadsworth
65
Figure 1.11
The Persistence of Memory is a very small painting. While it looms larger than
life in the cultural imagination, it is in fact 9 and a half by 13 inches, only slightly bigger
than a standard sheet of paper. The original is arresting today in part because it is tiny,
and it hangs in MoMA in with brown velvet backdrop that allows it to occupy more
surface area while mimicking the way precious jewels are often displayed. The brown
velvet frames the painting and is itself also framed, marking the velvet itself as part of the
viewing experience. From the time of its creation, the image has been well-known to
contemporary viewers, as this particular image has so resonated with an American
audience in 1931 and still continues to do so today.
92

Underneath a bright blue and yellow sky, the jagged cliffs of the Catalan coastal
town of Port Lligat contrast with the nondescript architectural elements in the foreground.

Atheneum, as the first Dalí painting to enter “any museum collection,” but James Thrall Soby maintains
that this painting was not purchased until 1935, the year after Persistence of Memory entered MoMA’s
collection (Marshall N. Price, “Chronology of Surrealism in the United States,” Surrealism USA
(Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2004), 172).

92
In a short account of his early history with comedy, Steve Martin recounts how the painting’s size made
it stand out from among the French masters: “Saucer-eyed, we hustled over to the Museum of Modern Art,
where we saw, among the Cézannes and Matisses, Dalí’s famous painting of melting clocks, the shockingly
tiny ‘Persistence of Memory’” (Steve Martin, “Personal History: In the Birdcage,” The New Yorker v.
LXXXIII, n. 33 (October 29, 2007), 52).

66
Several mundane aspects in the landscape buffer the shock of the central motif. A blue
plinth seems to be a geometric recasting of the ocean it partially occludes, and the
rectangular block in the foreground seems cast from the same brown matter as the barren
landscape from which it rises. From this block grows a leafless, perhaps also lifeless, tree,
which extends a long and thin branch that barely supports the limp watch draped across
it. In addition to another relatively intact timepiece swarmed with ants, there are three
wilted watches in the painting. One of the three melted watches has attracted a fly, and as
Michael R. Taylor points out, was “soon to become the butt of a thousand jokes about
‘time flies’ that the artist could not have foreseen.”
93
In the middle of the painting, there
is a strange slug-like creature, and, though it has been understood as a stand-in for Dalí
and despite its position as the central element of the work, this figure was rarely, if ever,
mentioned in reviews of Levy’s 1932 exhibition, where the painting made its New York
debut. Even invented and imagined aspects of the painting had more of an impact on
viewers. As one critic described the painting, it was “edged with queer little sparkling
icicles of terror.”
94
Indeed, it was the undoing of the psychology of time – the thawing
and teasing of it – that transfixed viewers.
While the subject matter of the painting was very modern, expressing the era’s
sense of the irrationality of life by decomposing the timepiece as the most methodical
enforcer of daily routine, Dalí’s distinctly un-modern, academic way of painting also
caught reviewers’ attention. More often that not, mention was made of Dalí’s painterly

93
Michael R. Taylor, “The Persistence of Memory, 1931,” entry in Dalí, edited by Dawn Ades and Michael
R. Taylor (New York: Rizzoli, 2004), 148.

94
“Surrealisme,” New York Times (November 26, 1933).

67
skill. As Edward Alden Jewell put it succinctly, “subject put entirely to one side…the
color is extremely beautiful; the craftsmanship superb,”
95
and, he added in another article,
“how the man can draw!”
96
The New York Post, after the requisite praising of Dalí’s
craftsmanship, also reported that “Dalí’s flair for effective artistic expression gives [the
surrealist tenets] esthetic congruity at least.”
97
Because Dalí came to personify
Surrealism, even, in the eyes of the Post critic, giving the movement its aesthetic
cohesiveness, it became all the more problematic for Surrealism’s artistic status that
Dalí’s own work branched out into so many commercial areas. But as his reputation as
an artist declined at the end of the 1930s and during the 1940s, first as he was criticized
for his publicity seeking and later because of the persistence with which he churned out
pictures on the same Dalínian themes, Dalí was still hailed, perhaps somewhat
begrudgingly, as a master technician, though paradoxically this also marked him as part
of an increasingly retrograde academic tradition.
98

Dalí’s debut in America could hardly have been more fortuitous, but by 1939,
Dalí began to represent a challenge to the notion of high art as he actively combined art
and commerce at a moment when the burgeoning American art world began to insist that

95
Edward Alden Jewell, “Dalí Surrealisme Rampant at Show,” New York Times (November 22, 1934).

96
Edward Alden Jewell, quoted in “Fashionable and Very Disputed,” (1934).

97
Margaret Breuning, “Surrealistic Paintings of Salvador Dalí Not Overlooked in Busy Art Week,” New
York City Post (November 29, 1933).

98
In a typical review from the time, Edward Alden Jewell writes, “On the craft side this talent of his
continues to appear, as the French say, formidable. …On the subject side a spectator’s enthusiasm will, I
suppose, stand in ratio to the spectator’s capacity to appreciate this sort of thing. Your reviewer confesses it
beyond his depth, shares Queen Victoria’s candid attitude toward amusement that doesn’t amuse and
wonders whether it may not perhaps be time we kissed the psyche’s ants, at any rate, good-bye” (Edward
Alden Jewell, “Despiau and Senor Dalí,” New York Times (March 26, 1939)).

68
a division be made between them. It was not that art and commerce could not co-exist.
Indeed, several paintings in the Modern’s shows were explicitly for sale off the
museum’s walls. For Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, the museum had issued a
price list for at least 50 objects and requested “that the buyer leave his purchase in the
traveling show until the end of the tour in August, 1937.”
99

The Museum of Modern Art had also shown industrial objects as early as 1934 in the
exhibition Machine Art and regularly displayed objects in its galleries that were for sale
(often quite blatantly and for very affordable prices, as in the Useful Household Objects
Under $5 exhibition of 1938). However, MoMA’s design shows emphasized modernist
tenets, foregrounding the formal qualities of everyday objects in order to direct
consumers toward objects of formal clarity and function.
100
Dalí may not have been
unique in uniting modern art with commodity culture, but his unmodern, academic
aesthetic was most likely the most prominent, and profitable, example of it at the time. In
1939, Dalí was the talk of the town not for his art, but for his antics at the Bonwit Teller
department store, where he either fell or hurled himself through the glass window he had

99
“List of Items for Sale,” folder 59(1), Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition files, Museum of
Modern Art Archives. The document continued, “If this is inconvenient however, a charge of 5 to 10
percent will be added to prices given in order to pay the Museum of Modern Art’s expenses of
transportation, insurance and so forth if the object is removed by the purchaser before the end of the tour.
An additional charge of from $5.00 to $25.00 will be made for expenses incurred in making a substitution
for the item removed” (Ibid.). For some items, the price was listed simply as “make offer.”

100
A most telling example of MoMA’s modernist sensibility toward objects is illustrated by the text
beneath the heading “All Change is Not Progress”: “Toaster of 1940 which is streamlined as if it were
intended to hurtle through the air at 200 miles an hour (an unhappy use for a breakfast-table utensil) and
ornamented with trivial loops, bandings and flutings.” (“Useful Objects in Wartime,” Museum of Modern
Art Bulletin, v. x (December 1942-January 1943), 9). In contrast to the toaster of 1940, is the toaster of
1934, whose “forthright, clean and simple” design was showcased in the museum’s Machine Art exhibition
of 1934. The 1940 toaster is pictured only to illustrate the “wrong” design – one of ornamentation and
curvature—and consequently “has never been exhibited by the Museum” (Ibid.).

69
been designing, once he saw the alterations made to his display by the store’s
management.
101
According to Dalí, the management at Bonwit Teller had altered his
displays on the themes Night and Day because it was “too successful; …there had been a
constant crowd gathered around them which blocked the traffic.”
102
What was
problematic for Dalí’s aesthetic reputation was not that he had been designing a window
for a 5
th
Avenue department store – a job he had undertaken once before without
criticism, in 1936 – but that the incident appeared to be a publicity stunt;
103
indeed, when
a show of Dalí’s paintings opened less than a week later at the Julien Levy gallery, the
exhibition almost sold out, with total sales achieving between $15,000 and $25,000, with

101
“The Talk of the Town: Surrealist Episode,” New Yorker, v. XII, n. 48 (January 16, 1937), 13. The
events as described in the trade journal Retailing were as follows: “The display was finished Thursday at
nine, it was in until noon, at one it was revised, Dalí came along at five, he and the bathtub came through at
five-thirty, the curtain came down on the windows for good at six” (quoted in Leonard S. Marcus, The
American Store Window (New York: Billboard Publications, Inc., 1978), 33).

102
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, translated by Haakon M. Chevalier (New York: Dial
Press, 1942), 374. Given the natural bias of the author, the veracity of Dalí’s statement is unclear, however
Surrealism continued to be a popular marketing device and the following year, the Marshall Field’s
department store opted to bypass the artist in favor of the technique. As reported in Retailing magazine,
“For fresh display inspiration, to dramatize the new series of decorator colors, Marshall Field & Co. went
to the Surrealistic school, and here are the striking results! Objects arranged in the Dalí manner cleverly
build up various schemes” (“Displays at Field’s Go Surrealistic,” Retailing (April 29, 1940)). Dalí is also
mentioned in conjunction with another 5
th
Avenue department store display: “‘Styles that will bloom in the
spring,’ is the theme of the Manhattan shirt display in the widows of John David, Inc., Fifth avenue store.
The spring motif is carried out by miniature figures of men lounging in the sturdy branches of a Dalí tree in
the background” (“Shirts that Will Bloom in the Spring,” News Record (April 3, 1940)).

103
James Thrall Soby recalled how Dalí’s actions were “widely written off as a publicity stunt” but that
rumors that Dalí alerted the press before crashing through the window were unfounded (James Thrall Soby,
“The Changing Stream,” The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1995), 197). While Dalí found his reputation as an artist threatened by his involvement with the store
window, professional displaymen were improving their position “as management became more aware of
the sales effectiveness of well-designed windows,” often through surveys conducted by the stores (Leonard
S. Marcus, The American Store Window (New York: Billboard Publications, Inc., 1978), 41). In the 1950s
and 1960s, several artists participated in creating Bonwit Teller window displays. In 1956, Bonwit Teller
displayed Jasper Johns’ White Flag in its first state, in a window designed by Gene Moore (Kirk Varnedoe,
editor, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 126) and in 1961,
Warhol followed suit.

70
lines of interested viewers winding around the corner, waiting to get into the show.
104
In
addition, Dalí was to receive an estimated $600-700 for designing Bonwit Teller’s
window.
105
According to art historian Robert Lubar, the only two paintings (out of more
than 20) that did not sell were “The Endless Enigma, which was offered at the exorbitant
price of $3000, and The Enigma of Hitler,” priced at $1,750, which failed to find a buyer
presumably due to its depiction of Hitler, whose image appears on a scrap of paper at the
bottom of an oversized bowl.
106
Both paintings were reproduced in Life’s April 17, 1939
issue, perhaps to encourage a buyer and to rouse even more last-minute publicity.
107

Even before Dalí and Levy opened “Dalí’s Dream of Venus” pavilion in the Amusements
section of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the two were being described as a publicity
team and Levy was identified in articles, not as Dalí’s dealer, but his manager.
108
It was
Levy who bailed Dalí out of jail following the Bonwit Teller incident.
109
And just as the

104
Paul Bird, “The Fortnight in New York,” Art Digest, 1939. Bird estimated the sales from the exhibition
to be $15,000, though according to the New Yorker, sales were $25,000. Time reported that “In the first five
days sales totaled five drawings ($300 - $800) and 14 paintings ($400 - $3,000)” (“Dreams, Paranoiac,”
Time (April 3, 1939).

105
“Dalí Comes Out Store Window with a Bathtub,” New York Herald Tribune, March 17, 1939.

106
Robert Lubar, “Salvador Dalí in America: The Rise and Fall of an Arch-Surrealist,” Surrealism USA,
edited by Isabelle Dervaux (Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag Publishers, 2005), 24. Lubar gives the number of
paintings in the show as 23, while Life states that there were 29 paintings.

107
“Salvador Dalí: New Yorkers Stand in Line to See His Six-in-One Surrealist Painting,” Life (April 17,
1939), 44-45.
108
Levy was quite a showman in his own right. Attempting to court critics, he often wrote reviews of the
exhibitions he hosted in a particular art critic’s style, sending it to a critic with a note offering, “in case you
want to use this in toto, this is not sent to other critics” (Julien Levy, interview with Paul Cummings (May
30, 1975), Archives of American Art). It was also Levy who “invented the cocktail party” in order to attract
crowds, and while “it filled the gallery and made it look very crowded. It did not help sell pictures” (Julien
Levy, interview with Paul Cummings (May 30, 1975), Archives of American Art).

109
Because Dalí was considered an artist, officials at Bonwit Teller reduced their original charge of
“malicious mischief” to “disorderly conduct” and the magistrate presiding over the case suspended the
71
Bonwit incident garnered more attention for Dalí’s exhibition at Levy’s gallery, the
gallery show, in turn, was offered up as a tie-in to what was to be Dalí’s next project, the
New York World’s Fair.
Dalí’s show at the Julien Levy Gallery ran from March 21, 1939 to April 17,
1939, preceding his World’s Fair pavilion by one month. The New York World’s Fair
was designed as a site where “everyman” could be educated about the “wonders of
contemporary life” but would also ensure “the means by which Everyman may be
entertained or amused.”
110
The ambitious project was under the direction of the
businessman Grover Whalen, who was the Fair’s president and co-founder. The cover of
the Dalí exhibition catalogue featured a play on the Fair’s icons – and central
construction – the Trylon and Perisphere (Figure 1.12). For the World’s Fair
Corporation, their conception was, in the words of its president Grover Whalen:
something new in Fair Architecture…something radically different and
fundamentally as old as man’s experience….These buildings are
themselves a glimpse into the future, a sort of foretaste of that better world
of tomorrow…We feel that simplicity must be the keynote of a perfectly
ordered mechanical civilization.
111

When they were actualized, the Trylon was a 610-foot high tower, the Perisphere was a
sphere with a 180-foot diameter, while the Helicline, 950 feet long and 18 feet wide,
encircled them. These served as an architectural introduction to the Fair’s central exhibit:

sentence (“Dalí, Surrealist, Has a Nightmare While Wide Awake,” New York World Telegram (March 17,
1939).

110
Memo, not dated but probably late 1938, Box 15, File A1.153 Entertainment Department, General
Managers Division – Administration, New York World’s Fair Archives, New York Public Library.

111
Grover Whalen, president of the Fair Corporation, quoted originally in New York Times (March 16,
1937), 25 in Terry Smith, Making the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 405.

72
“each hour, more than 8,000 spectators entered through the Trylon…and ascended to
Democracity on the world’s two largest escalators. Six minutes later, they exited down
the Helicline, a curving ramp from which they would glimpse their first overview of the
Fair.”
112
The giant structures emphasize the centrality of spectacle and spectatorship in
visitor’s (viewer’s) experience of the Fair. Made of steel and reinforced concrete, they
were covered with white gypsum board so as to appear shimmering and weightless.
113

Figure 1.12
Though the Fair’s organizers intended the colossal structures to represent architecture of
the future, their oversized geometric simplicity also clearly evokes the monuments of the
past. Dalí’s drawing undoes the Fair official’s hope for a “perfectly ordered mechanical
civilization” by rendering the Fair’s symbols anthropomorphically so that the phallic
trylon, illustrated with two breast-like formations, is both groped and penetrated by the
elastic arms of the helicline, which also wrap around and break through the rounded

112
Steven Heller, “Introduction,” The 1939 New York World’s Fair: Trylon and Perisphere (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 2-3.

113
Terry Smith, Making the Modern (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993), 405.

73
perisphere. Perched in the palm of the Helicline is a Dalínian automobile, atop which
springs a horse – evoking a contrast between the organic transportation of yesterday and
the mechanical production of 1939. Dalí’s drawing was not the only popular (and
unaffiliated) illustration to incorporate Fair’s icons, but his is one of the very few that
openly subverts their message.
114
In the center of the gallery was another re-casting of
the Trylon and Perisphere, now in white plaster, and covered with Dalínian motifs
(Figure 1.13). The plaster trylon, which nearly grazed the gallery’s ceiling, is painted
with keys and ants, and the perisphere is remade into a pedestal for Dalí’s Venus de Milo
with Drawers. Dalí had not yet officially signed on to do the Surrealist pavilion at the
Fair, but he had already declared his mark on the World of Tomorrow, the theme of the
Fair.
Figure 1.13

114
Popular magazines such as Collier’s, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, House & Garden, The New Yorker,
Esquire, and The Magazine of Art pictured versions of the Trylon and Perisphere on their 1939 covers.

74
It was Levy who first proposed the Surrealist pavilion to the World’s Fair
Committee and with the architect Ian Woodner drew up the initial plans in early 1938.
115

In addition to funhouse effects, such as distorting mirrors and confusing corridors, Levy’s
original vision also included “a small art gallery of Surrealist paintings” and “peep shows
of Surrealist films”
116
elements that, because they would have displayed original
Surrealist works, might have mitigated the blatant theatricality of the pavilion, though
certainly Levy’s language in the proposal was deliberately designed to do anything but.
Certainly, the Fair’s organizers understood art broadly, as the 1,200 works on view in the
Gallery of American Art Today, chosen by a committee headed by A. Conger Goodyear,
attest. Holger Cahill introduced the exhibition by advancing the idea that the entire “New
York World’s Fair may be called an expression of the contemporary arts. …The Fair as a
whole is a vast mosaic of our present-day culture which everywhere shows the skill and
talent of the artist.”
117
Art and culture mixed fluidly at the Fair. So too, it seems, did
American art and European influences. Cahill acknowledges that in art, “our country, in
the main, has followed the path of the European tradition” and Surrealism (with Neo-
Romanticism) formed a distinct category of the American Art Today exhibition. Even in

115
In addition to Levy, the pavilion was sponsored by William Morris, a theatrical agent; Edward James, an
art collector and Dalí patron; I.D. Wolf, a backer of the Pennsylvania exhibit at the Fair; W.M. Gardner,
who owned a rubber company; Ian Woodner, an architect; and Philip Wittenberg, Dalí’s attorney (Margaret
Case Harriman, “A Dream Waking,” New Yorker (July 1, 1939), 22). Ingrid Schaffner described Woodner
as a “World’s Fair insider” who he had been involved with the design of the architecture of the Fair since
1936 and oversaw the selection of artists who would paint murals for the Fair (Ingrid Schaffner, Salvador
Dalí’s Dream of Venus (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 46). These men signed a contract
creating the corporation Dalí World’s Fair (DWF) on April 10, 1939.

116
Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 207.

117
Holger Cahill, American Art Today: Gallery of American Art Today New York World’s Fair (New York:
National Art Society, 1939), 19.

75
his discussion of Surrealism as a facet of American art, Cahill discusses “straight
Surrealism, as practiced by the European adept” which he distinguishes from Surrealism
as a method, concluding that “a good many of the works exhibited indicate that surrealist
ideas and technique have been assimilated into the stream of contemporary American
expression.”
118
Unlike the other categories in the exhibition – abstraction, conservatism,
and regionalism among them – Surrealism is singled out as an intermingling of American
and European aesthetics, a confluence that Levy capitalized upon in his proposal for a
Surrealist pavilion in the Amusements section.
In his proposal Levy focused unequivocally on the widespread popularity of
Surrealism:
The public potential and drawing power of surrealism has been proven
beyond doubt, by its appeal to millions of readers of the Hearst syndicate of
newspapers for which Dalí has made weekly surrealist cartoons, by
“Harpers Bazaar” and “Vogue”, by the extraordinary attendance at
exhibitions such as the one held at the New York Museum of Modern Art
last year and the current surrealist exhibition in Paris, by the statistics on
sales results from a Show Window dressed by Dalí for Bonwit Teller, etc.
Surrealist House for the World’s Fair should far excel in quality the present
surrealist exhibition in Paris, and should be adopted and modified to satisfy
American taste.
119

In a memo from the Fair’s Director of Exhibits and Concessions to the General Manager,
the project was recommended for approval on the basis of Surrealism having “great mass
as well as class attractions. It is one of the very few amusement projects which will
interest the Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar set and it is essential that the Fair in New York

118
Ibid., 27.

119
Julien Levy and I. Woodner, letter to the Fair Committee, undated c.1938, Box 178, Archives of the
1939-1940 New York World’s Fair, New York Public Library.

76
should have some of this type of appeal.”
120
For the World’s Fair, a mass cultural
extravaganza that was aimed at visitors across the socio-economic spectrum, an
association with Surrealism was considered a boon that could still attract the highly
cultivated while appealing to the general public. In this context, Surrealism’s dual
position as both a high and low cultural phenomenon would be put to the test.
The license granted by the Fair on May 27, 1938 was for a “Surrealist House” in
the shape of an eye, “symbol of Surrealism….. The building is to contain a Nightmare
Corridor; a Surrealist Walk…, Human Kaleidoscope, Surrealist Gallery and Exhibition
and a Photograph Booth.”
121
Mentioned twice by Levy as part of the public appeal of
Surrealism, Dalí was not brought onto the project until May 1939, a year after the license
was granted, at the suggestion of the theatre agent William Morris.
122
Though the project
was a constant headache for Dalí, his display, which eventually was called Dalí’s Dream
of Venus, included a tank of half-naked women swimming in rubber fish tails, and would
attract even more American attention to his interpretation of the movement.
123
The New

120
Memo from Director of Exhibition and Concessions to General Manager, March 21, 1938, Box 178,
New York World’s Fair Archives, New York Public Library. Indeed, Vogue did publish some of Dalí’s
drawings of the pavilion in its June 1939 issue.

121
Concession Agreement (May 27, 1938), Box 178, New York World’s Fair archives, New York Public
Library.

122
According to art historian Lewis Kachur, “chronologies of Dalí indicate that he signed onto the project
in May, rather late for a projected opening at the end of that month” (Lewis Kachur, Displaying the
Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Pres, 2001), 233).

123
For a detailed look at the construction of the pavilion and the business aspects of its inception, see Lewis
Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition
Installations (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001) and Fèlix Fanés, Salvador Dalí: Dream of
Venus (North Miami, FL : Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002). Early on, the pavilion was described as
“Dalí’s Bottom of the Sea: Real diving girls splash into a Surrealist pool and come up with the strangest
77
Yorker reported that Dalí instructed those in charge of the logistics of his World’s Fair
exhibition to lower William Morris’s proposed forty-cent admission. “‘No,’ said Dalí,
‘you will charge a quarter. I paint,’ he said warmly, ‘for the masses, for the great
common man, for the people.’”
124
Despite such overtures, Dalí’s Dream of Venus proved
to be a financial failure, bankrupt by the end of the 1939 season of the Fair, even as the
entertainment zone proved itself “the Fair’s most popular attraction.”
125
In practice,
Levy’s original conception was overtaken by financial and creative constraints, and even
Dalí himself recognized that, in the end, “the pavilion turned out to be a lamentable
caricature of my ideas and my projects.”
126
Not only was the pavilion taken over by
corporate enterprise, but once Dalí’s Dream of Venus developed into a “girlie show,” as

things—creations of Dalí, the Surrealist painter and decorator” (“The Amusements: Right this Way!” The
New York Times, April 30, 1939, 135). Dalí’s listed dual occupations again recall the blending of high and
low embodied in the artist.

124
Dalí, quoted by Margaret Case Harriman, “A Dream Walking,” The New Yorker, v. 15 (July 1, 1939),
27. In fact, nearly all the amusements charged either a quarter or ten-cents admission, so a 40-cent
admission would have been quite ill-received and in their initial 1938 proposal for the Surrealist House,
Levy and Woodner had mentioned a 25-cent admission.

125
Barbara Cohen, Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast, The 1939 New York World’s Fair: Trylon and
Perisphere (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 54. The authors continue, “It [The entertainment zone’s
overriding popularity] was actually somewhat of an embarrassment to the Fair’s planners, who had hoped
that the educational exhibits would be enough fun” (Ibid.). Robert Lubar incorrectly states that Dalí’s
“pavilion was a resounding commercial success” (Robert Lubar, “Modern Art and Mass Culture in
America: The Case of Salvador Dalí in 1939,” Dalí Mass Culture (Barcelona: Fundación "la Caixa,” 2004),
241). In 1940, the Pavilion re-opened under the direction of Gardner without Dalí’s participation. Under the
new name “20,000 Legs Under the Sea,” the Pavilion – externally still resembling Dalí’s original
conception – was cited by Fair management for its lack of upkeep and sloppy management. The Fair’s
Director of Amusements wrote to the Pavilion’s manager, “every patron of the ‘American Jubilee’ coming
over the bus line sees one of the poorest advertisements that you could present when he looks at the back of
your building. We must ask you to remedy these conditions at once so you will not continue to be the only
concession in the Great White Way out of step with the march of progress” (George P. Smith, letter to
Alfred Stern, May 22, 1940, Box 178, World’s Fair Archives, New York Public Library).

126
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, translated by Haakon M. Chevalier (New York: Dial
Press, 1942), 377.

78
art historian Lewis Kachur has pointed out, it was in direct competition with most of the
other shows in the Amusement Area – from Crystal Lassies to the Ice Girls – themes
which also pandered to sex. A color photograph by Eric Schaal of the exterior of the
pavilion shows not only the crustaceous plaster undulations of the façade, with its
prominence of three-dimensional female bodies and organic coral-like protrusions, but
also the attention of six male fair-goers in the foreground, who are struck by the display
(Figure 1.14). Two female attendees, who stand apart from the men and boys, seem more
ambivalent in their attention, as one plays with her hair, in contrast to the firm stances of
two of the males (perhaps a man and his son), who openly regard the display with arms
akimbo. In this photograph, Dalí’s name has not yet been added on top of the “Dream of
Venus” signage that adorns the façade, but in later pictures it will appear above in
matching red letters, lit up with its own spotlight at night. As Dalí later recognized,
“what they wanted of me was my name, which had become dazzling from the publicity
point of view.”
127

Figure 1.14

127
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, translated by Haakon M. Chevalier (New York: Dial
Press, 1942), 376.

79
The events of 1939 – the near sell-out show at Julien Levy’s gallery sandwiched
between the crashing (or smashing) of the Bonwit window and the Dream of Venus
pavilion at the World’s Fair – demonstrated both Dalí’s inability to control his creative
contributions to commercial projects and ensured that it would be for publicity that Dalí
would become best known in the U.S. As the critic in P.M. complained, artists were no
longer to be trusted - “our confidence has been shaken by a clever young mountebank
named Salvador Dalí who turned out to be a window impresario at Bonwit-Teller’s and a
sideshow impresario at the World’s Fair….The element of freakishness in art…has
finally succeeded in reducing art to the level of a rather highbrow honky-tonk
attraction.”
128

In his book Boatload of Madmen, art historian Dickran Tashjian has thoroughly
documented Dalí’s co-option of the Surrealist movement in America; however though
Tashjian explores Dalí and Surrealism’s relationship to fashion and, to a lesser extent,
advertising, he does not explore the movement’s relationship to the changing art critical
landscape. In many ways a predecessor to Warhol, Dalí, both in his art and in his persona,
articulates the infiltration of market forces and mass media that the influential critic
Clement Greenberg would see as contaminating the status of high art that becomes
central to the problem of Surrealism’s critical fate. Dalí’s centrality to the reception of

128
Ben Crisler, “Critic at Large,” P.M. (August 19, 1940).

80
Surrealism in the United States is difficult because his position represents a negotiation
between the concepts of high and mass culture, avant-garde and kitsch.
129

Only weeks before Dalí’s pavilion was to open at the New York World’s Fair,
Paul Sachs, art history professor at Harvard and former advisor to both Barr and Levy,
addressed the Museum of Modern Art’s trustees at the inaugural banquet for MoMA’s
new building at 11 W. 53
rd
Street. Sachs’s courses at Harvard had fostered a generation
of museum directors, including Barr whom he had suggested for the position of director
at MoMA, and Sachs now urged the Modern “to resist pressure to vulgarize and cheapen
our work through the mistaken idea that in such fashion a broad public may be reached
effectively. …in serving an elite [The Museum of Modern Art] will reach, better than in
any other way, the great general public by means of work done to meet the most exacting
standards of an elite.”
130
To Sachs, “in unstable, troubled and disturbed times like our
own,”
131
the possibility for preservation of high culture lay in scholarly activity that
catered to an elite who could help guide the public in cultivating a discriminating taste. In
the shadow of the World’s Fair, which had opened just a week earlier, the mixing of the
roles of museum and amusement may have seemed urgent to distinguish for the trustees.
But the question of elite taste, to which Sachs recommended that MoMA cater, remains

129
The 2004 exhibition Dalí and Mass Culture addresses this link explicitly. Displayed in the United
States by the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, the exhibition highlights aspects of Dalí’s work that
intersected with the world of mass culture, such as the World’s Fair pavilion mentioned above, his
Hollywood collaborations of the mid-1940s, his designs for the fashion industry and his interactions with
the popular press. See Dalí: Mass Culture, edited by Fèlix Fanés (Barcelona: Fundación "la Caixa,” 2004).

130
Paul J. Sachs, “Address to the Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art,” delivered May 8, 1939, Museum
of Modern Art Bulletin, v. 6, n. 5 (July 1939), 11.

131
Ibid., 4.

81
somewhat ambiguous. According to Barr’s wife, Margaret Scolari Barr, it was Barr, four
days after visiting the Fair, who suggested to Sachs, that “not lower[ing] the standards in
order to reach a wider public” be one of the themes that Sachs speak about at the trustees’
dinner.
132
Paradoxically, however, the selection and scope of Barr’s exhibitions seem to
demonstrate a strong commitment to reaching a broad audience, capitalizing on the swell
of visitors that the Fair’s proximity promised. In the introduction to the exhibition that
opened to coincide with the Fair, Art in Our Time, Barr assured visitors, “The Museum is
keenly aware that visitors at the time of a Worlds’ Fair would be exhausted by any effort
at academic completeness” all the while pointing out that the exhibition included not only
painting, sculpture and graphic arts, but also “architecture, furniture, photography and
moving pictures.”
133
Despite the inclusion of these aspects of visual culture that Barr
knew set the Museum of Modern Art’s focus apart from other exhibitions of modern art,
such as that at the Whitney, he still considered the exhibition to be highly selective and
acknowledged that critics might suggest that MoMA change the exhibition’s title to
“Some Aspects of the Visual Arts of Our Time and the Recent Past.”
134
It may have been
this necessity for exclusion that Barr had in mind when writing Sachs, a selectivity that
happened to cut broadly across the visual cultural spectrum. The more cumbersome title

132
Margaret Scolari Barr, “‘Our Campaigns,’” The New Criterion, special issue (Summer 1987), 54. Barr
writes to Sachs on May 3, 1939 with this suggestion, after visiting the World’s Fair on April 30
,
1939.

133
Alfred Barr, “The Plan of the Exhibition,” Art in Our Time (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1939),
13.

134
Ibid. By contrast, the Whitney’s exhibition that coincided with the World’s Fair, Twentieth-Century
Artists, consisted only of paintings, sculpture and graphic arts. The Whitney also had the World’s Fair in
mind when selecting works for display, which the Museum asserted offered “a valuable supplement to the
panorama of American painting provided by the Contemporary American Art Exhibition at the World’s
Fair…” (Twentieth-Century Artists (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1939), n.p.).

82
may have been more appropriate, but Barr’s acknowledgment did little to buffer the
museum from the complaints of the American Abstract Artists group who protested the
museum’s long view of modernism which included 19
th
-century American works by
Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent alongside modern European painters like
Picasso and the Surrealists, together with examples of American realism and regionalism
while “continu[ing] to ignore American abstraction.”
135
As art historian Susan C. Larsen
has pointed out, such exhibitions seemed to indicate “that the museum’s acceptance of
abstract art extended itself no further than to 20
th
-century European abstraction.”
136
The
following year, when the American Abstract Artists accused MoMA of favoring
Surrealism, Neo-Romanticism and Magic Realism, one of the questions they posed to the
Museum was, “Shouldn’t ‘Modern’ conceivably include the ‘Avant-Garde’? What about
the hundreds (literally) of modern and non-objective artists in America?”
137

As it happened, the figurative works that the museum chose to display, works of
realism, magic realism and surrealism which vastly outnumbered abstract works,
appealed not only to the general public but also to the elite collectors at the time who
were central to MoMA, such as Sidney Janis, James Thrall Soby, Abby Aldrich

135
George L.K. Morris, “The American Abstract Artists: A Chronicle 1936-1956,” The World of Abstract
Art (London: Percy Ludn, Humphries & Co., 1957), 139. Instead, Morris characterizes MoMA at this time
as “riding a surrealist wave that followed the American scene…” (Ibid). In his review of the exhibition,
Morris wrote of the show’s title, “the exhibition itself suggested more accurately ‘Art in our Grandfathers’
Time’” (George L.K. Morris, “Art Chronicle: The Museum of Modern Art (as surveyed from the Avant-
Garde),” Partisan Review v. 7, n. 3(May-June 1940), 202.

136
Susan C. Larsen, “The American Abstract Artists: A Documentary History 1936-1941” Archives of
American Art Journal, v. 14, n. 1 (1974), 5.

137
American Abstract Artists, “How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art?” (April 15, 1940), distributed
on the occasion of the P.M. Competition exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art.

83
Rockefeller, and Nelson A. Rockefeller, who were buying such work for their private
collections.
138
Indeed, in 1941, the Museum displayed an exhibition New Acquisitions:
Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, works which were acquired through purchase funds and
donations by the afore-mentioned, as well as J. B. Neumann, Cary Ross, Stamo Papadaki,
and John McAndrew.
139

The institutional endorsement of the diverse spectrum of Surrealist art as granted
by Barr was also implicitly attacked with the 1939 publication of Clement Greenberg’s
essay, “Avant-garde and Kitsch” in the journal The Partisan Review. Greenberg had
been working at the New York City Port Authority, and had previously published poems
and a small review of Bertold Brecht’s work. Writing to a college friend about the
response to “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg announced, “My piece has been a
‘success,’ according to the editors of Partisan Review. Everybody ‘likes’ it. James
Burnham says it’s one of the best articles they’ve published. … I’m not surprised that it’s
good but I am surprised that people ‘like’ it. In fact, many people say they ‘enjoyed’ it.
Now, the PR wants me to write more articles for them.”
140
Greenberg’s skeptical stance
toward those who claimed to “like” the article demonstrates how truly polemical he
intended it to be. In a letter dated December 12, 1939, Greenberg wrote of what was

138
Sidney Janis, who was also a collector who later opened his own gallery, recalled that the number of
collectors in New York was really quite small at the time: “There weren’t very many collectors. I did meet
the ones that were around. They came to the Museum of Modern Art openings. … It was a little private
world” (Sidney Janis, interview with Paul Cummings, Tape 2, Side 2 (April 11, 1972), Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

139
Edward Alden Jewell, “Museum Displays ‘Fantastic’ in Art,” New York Times (July 30, 1941).

140
Clement Greenberg, letter to Harold Lazarus (November 29, 1939), The Harold Letters 1928-1943: The
Making of an American Intellectual, edited by Janice van Horne (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000),
211.

84
probably a more satisfying response to his article, “Dwight Macdonald tells me that no
other article printed in the P.R. ever stirred up so much comment as mine and received
such universal praise. The only dissent came from Meyer Schapiro, who says in addition
that I borrowed some of his ideas.”
141
Such a statement may be surprising given
Schapiro’s scholarly attention to social-historical factors and Greenberg’s strong
identification with formalism, but as art historian Thomas Crow has pointed out, both
Schapiro and Greenberg recognized in mass culture “a negation of the real thing….both
believed that the apparent variety and allure of the modern urban spectacle disguised the
‘ruthless and perverse’ laws of capital; both posited modernist art as a direct response to
that condition, one that would remain in force until a new, socialist society was
achieved.”
142
While Schapiro had advanced the theory that historically, the avant-garde is
hardly independent from consumer society, marked first by Impressionism’s alliance with
bourgeois leisure, nonetheless, both he and Greenberg begin from the identical
indictment of the marketing of culture.
143

According to Greenberg’s views, Surrealism, in contrast to the work of modern
abstract artists such as Picasso, Braque, or Mondrian, was an aberrant outlier in an
otherwise progressive narrative, a representative of a decadent and impure academicism.
Greenberg is compelled to point out (fittingly enough in a footnote) that “surrealism in
plastic art is a reactionary tendency which is attempting to restore ‘outside’ subject

141
Clement Greenberg, letter to Harold Lazarus (December 12, 1939), Ibid., 212.

142
See Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” Modern Art in the Common
Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 14.

143
Ibid,. 12-16.

85
matter. The chief concern of a painter like Dalí is to represent the processes and concepts
of his consciousness, not the process of his medium.”
144
Dalí is not criticized by
Greenberg for his extra-aesthetic activities (though that critique is virtually built into the
essay), but for his style – one which, though it was meant to convey an internal state of
mind, relied on representations of the “outside,” that which is external to the painted
surface. And it was not only on the picture plane that Surrealism reached beyond
Greenberg’s new a-political definition of the avant-garde, since Greenberg also insisted
upon the distance of the avant-garde from politics; instead of taking form in relation to
life, the avant-garde’s preoccupation would be with the form of art.
145
As Barr had stated
in the preface of the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism catalogue, “Surrealism as an art
movement is a serious affair and that for many it is more than an art movement: it is a
philosophy, a way of life, a cause to which some of the most brilliant painters and poets
of our age are giving themselves with consuming devotion.”
146
The attention to these
issues that Surrealist art maintained (factors that also contributed to its stylistic diversity)
made it susceptible to formalist critiques of its avant-gardism, for it lacked the self-
referentiality that Greenberg privileged in abstract art.
147

144
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
Criticism, edited by John O’Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 9.

145
See Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, “Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed,” Pollock and After: The
Critical Debate, edited by Francis Frascina (New York: Routledge, 2000), 218-219.

146
Barr, “Preface,” Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936), 8.

147
In his 1940 article “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” Greenberg specifies his conception of value in art, that
is, “to restore the identity of an art, the opacity of the medium must be emphasized” (Greenberg, “Towards
a Newer Laocoon,” (1940), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Edited by John
O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 32).
86
Barr himself has often been perceived as a formalist, and he certainly was very
much attuned to formal qualities in art. Art historian Sybil Gordon Kantor describes Barr
and Greenberg as “the two formalist critics,” claiming that Barr paved the way for
Greenberg.
148
But Barr was also deeply committed to vernacular culture, as evidenced by
his early interest in the less well-established arts at this time, such as photography and
film, and by his willingness to display objects not conventionally seen in an art
museum.
149
Even at the height of formalism, in 1953, The New Yorker attributed the
Museum’s multifarious exhibitions to Barr because “his was the flair for showmanship,
the conviction and drive, the notion of a ‘multi-departmental’ museum that would rove
far beyond the classic confines of the fine arts.”
150
Barr’s double-edged gambit—that
Surrealist art could be both pedigreed by establishing its genealogical lineage within the
history of art, while also representing a movement that had relevance because of its
associations not with art but with everyday modern life—proved to be irreconcilable for
Greenberg. The centuries-long art historical lineage that Barr established for Surrealism

148
Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred Barr and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002), 324.

149
Barr approved exhibitions of dance, industrial design, graphic arts, and the very well-attended Indian Art
of the United States (1941). Barr also displayed works by those who might not have traditionally been
considered artists - high-school students, children and insane asylum patients, and especially untrained
artists – the “modern primitives” that had been the subject of MoMA’s 1938 exhibition Masters of Popular
Painting, the third in Barr’s five-exhibition series. In a profile on Barr, The New Yorker, attempting to
explain Barr’s 1943 demotion, commented that “some of the trustees had long felt that strange things were
being done at their Museum in the name of modern art” and draws a direct connection between objects in
Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, and the unpopular exhibition of The Most Beautiful Shoe Shine Stand in
the World (1942) and Morris Hirschfield (1943) (Dwight MacDonald, “Profiles: Action on West Fifty-
Third Street, Part 1,” New Yorker v. 29, n. 44 (December 19, 1953), 46).

150
Dwight MacDonald, “Profiles: Action on West Fifty-Third Street, Part 1,” New Yorker v. 29, n. 43
(December 12, 1953), 62. The same article reports that Barr first became interested in modern art “partly
because he liked what he saw of it in Vanity Fair and the Dial…” (Ibid, 70).

87
only confirmed that Surrealism was not very modern after all, and implied, conversely,
that perhaps abstract art was the only art that was uniquely modern.
151

As his first significant piece of writing, “Avant-garde and Kitsch” establishes
Greenberg’s primary polemical position.
152
While originally, the avant-garde referred to
“a novel form of culture produced in bourgeois society in the mid-nineteenth century and
the novel force which advances and keeps culture at a high level,” Greenberg’s aim in the
essay was to withdraw the avant-garde from its political associations in order to advance
culture through the murky terrain of capitalism and commercial interests.
153
Greenberg is
also influenced in part by the debased treatment of art in Stalinist Russia and Fascist
Germany, to which he devotes the final quarter of the essay, though he is quick to point
out that kitsch is predominant in these countries because kitsch is the culture of the
masses, and therefore an easy, “inexpensive way in which totalitarian regimes ingratiate

151
In 1941, Edward Alden Jewell called Surrealism “ageless” (Edward Alden Jewell, “Fantastic Ghosts of
Yesteryear,” New York Times (August 3, 1941). As Robert Motherwell would later say at the Museum of
Modern Art’s symposium on abstract art, held in connection with the 1951 exhibition Abstract Painting
and Sculpture in America, “abstract art is uniquely modern. …One of the most striking aspects of abstract
art’s appearance is her nakedness, an art stripped bare. How many rejections on the part of the artists!
Whole worlds – the world of objects, the world of power and propaganda, the world of anecdotes, the
world of fetishes and ancestor worship. One might almost legitimately receive the impression that abstracts
artists don’t like anything but the act of painting…” (Robert Motherwell, “What Abstract Art Means to
Me,” The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, v. XVIII, n. 3 (Spring 1951), 12. Not only does Motherwell’s
characterization fit the general precepts of formalism, the sites of abstract artists’ rejection that he lists
describe preoccupations of the Surrealist artists.

152
See Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, “Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed,” Pollock and After: The
Critical Debate, edited by Francis Frascina (New York: Routledge, 2000), 218-219.

153
Ibid., 219. As David and Cecile Shapiro allude, points of Greenberg’s argument seem to have been
influenced by Leon Trotsky and André Breton’s “Manifesto toward a Free Revolutionary Art” which
argued that art needed to remain independent of outside authority (David and Cecile Shapiro, “Abstract
Expressionism: The Politics of Apoltical Painting,” Pollock and After, 184).

88
themselves with their subjects.”
154
According to art historian Francis Frascina,
Greenberg’s focus on the purity of art “prevents him [Greenberg] from making an
historical analysis of the avant-garde’s engagement with particular subjects and images
from urban leisure and ‘mass culture.’”
155
Instead, Greenberg’s article pushed to doubly
preserve art’s purity both in form—by navigating it through a murky world of illegitimate
mediums and industrial commodities—and content—in which any mass message art
could embody would be effectively evacuated.
Greenberg saw the advances of the industrial West, namely universal literacy and
the urbanized masses, as having fostered an environment in which kitsch could thrive as
it became more difficult to “distinguish an individual’s cultural inclinations, since it
[literacy] was no longer the exclusive concomitant of refined tastes.”
156
Greenberg too
stresses the necessity of art being understood by an elite. Because for Greenberg kitsch is
so deceptive, the line between avant-garde and kitsch must remain firm and steadfast.
But the important point for my purposes is that when Greenberg describes some
characteristics of kitsch, he does so in terms that recall Surrealist artistic practice. For
instance:
Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of
genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. … Kitsch is

154
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, 2
nd
edition
(New York: Routledge, 2000), 57.

155
Francis Frascina, “Introduction,” Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, 2
nd
edition (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 42, original emphasis. Frascina also discusses the similarities and differences between
Greenberg’s and Meyer Schapiro’s contemporaneous writings.

156
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Pollock and After, edited by Francis Frascina (New
York: Routledge, 2000). 52.

89
vicarious experience and faked sensations. … It draws its lifeblood, so to
speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience.
157

By including in their ideology an acute awareness of the streets of Paris, particularly the
flea market and its forgotten objects, the Surrealists tried to invoke fleeting experiences
and communal fantasy in their work. There is a telling parallel between Greenberg’s
description of kitsch and James Thrall Soby’s description two years later of Dalí’s hold
on the popular consciousness: “In America, where Dalí’s fame has been the greatest,
large sections of the public have acquired a taste for vicariously experiencing all manner
of violent sensations. The tabloids, radio and moving pictures have fed the taste with a
cunning hand…”
158
By the time Dalí received his first (and, until 2008, only) one-man
show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941, it was impossible for the museum not to
address Dalí’s ambivalent, even fallen, status in the art world.
With his paintings having developed into a stand-in for Surrealism in the United
States, Dalí’s persona, especially the flashy antics he was responsible for orchestrating at
the World’s Fair, easily (and intentionally) became enmeshed in a commercial
articulation of the avant-garde movement. Perhaps because of Dalí’s flamboyant

157
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
Criticism, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 12. These are, it seems, the very
experiences the Surrealists wished to express in their art. The simulacrum was something to be
investigated, captured, and materialized. And the insensibility of everyday objects was fodder for many a
Surrealist experiment that sought to de-familiarize the so-called “reservoir of accumulated experience.”
Compare this also to the leaflet that Dalí disseminated via airplane to the streets of New York City the same
year: “Man is entitled to the enigma of simulacrums that are founded on these great vital constants: the
sexual instinct, the consciousness of death, the physical melancholy caused by time-space” (Salvador Dalí,
quoted in Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 78).

158
James Thrall Soby, Salvador Dalí (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1941), 27. Soby writes in his
memoirs that “in 1941, the memory of [Dalí’s] fracas with Bonwit Teller was still fresh in mind” (James
Thrall Soby, “The Changing Stream,” 197).

90
expression of the infiltration of market forces and mass media, he was also recognized as
dramatizing the constraints of a circumscribed art world. As a writer for Art Digest
pointed out:
Dalí is a bombshell in art: he can’t be ignored, for all the petulant, ostrich-
like attitudes of those who intensely dislike his art. …the fellow is doing a
real service and that is why it hurts. He is dramatizing, as it has not been
dramatized in years, the fact that the art world is a tight little field in the
habit of issuing a lot of self-satisfying little dictums and ukases that ought
to be upset.
159

Indeed, Dalí’s relationship with publicity constituted an open challenge to the art world,
and one that was especially effective as a critique because it was so public. The reviewer
for The New Yorker seemed to agree with the Art Digest wrtiter, “to me, [Dalí’s work]
remains a kind of slapstick commentary on life in general and particularly on aesthetic
tradition…” continuing, “It is simply a form of social satire.”
160
But, as the Art Digest
critic points out, this too was a dramatization, a performative gesture, that like everything
connected with Dalí, was susceptible to being dismissed as disingenuous.
With the World’s Fair, Dalí cemented his association with Surrealism (from
which, ironically, he had been officially expelled) in the minds of the public. The New
Yorker proclaimed, “We tend too much, I’m afraid to think of surrealism as a private
manifestation of Dalí’s…it also tends to get us mixed up in our minds between surrealism
as art and as surrealism as an escapade of Dalí’s, such as hanging pianos in trees or

159
Paul Bird, “The Fortnight in New York,” Art Digest (1939), 18.

160
Robert M. Coates, “The Art Galleries: Dalí—Despaiau—Art Young,” The New Yorker v. XV, n. 7
(April 1, 1939), 56.

91
arranging peep shows at the World’s Fair.”
161
Dalí had left New York soon after the
opening of the botched World’s Fair project, not returning to the city until April 1941
when Julien Levy mounted another one-man show of Dalí’s work, this time displaying
his new classical phase.
162
Levy issued a dramatic press release for the exhibition, which
speculated on Dalí’s wartime whereabouts and his paintings’ safety before
acknowledging that Dalí had actually spent the winter comfortably in Virginia.
163

Despite Levy’s attempt to rouse curiosity, the show was treated lightly by the press.
Critics seemed to see Dalí as an easy entertainment especially because psychoanalysis
had become a part of mainstream life. As Henry McBride wrote rather cavalierly of
Dalí’s latest pictures, “If you hate psychoanalysis you will have a lovely time hating
these pictures. If you love psychoanalysis you’ll have a gorgeous time loving them. So a
good time will be had by all.”
164
Robert M. Coates thought Dalí charming, concluding
that “one can get a good deal of fun out of [Dalí’s works] too”
165
after writing, “I’m

161
“The Art Galleries” The New Yorker (November 29, 1941).

162
The show traveled to the Chicago Arts Club from May 23 – June 14, 1941 and to the Dalzell Hatfield
Galleries in Los Angeles from September 10 – October 5, 1941. The paintings that remained unsold were
then to be shipped to New York for MoMA’s Dalí exhibition, which opened the next month. Dalzell
Hatfield wrote to Monroe Wheeler that, “Our Dalí Exhibition is meeting with tremendous success and we
have had the largest crouds [sic] attending that we have ever had for any exhibition we have shown”
(Dalzell Hatfield, letter to Monroe Wheeler (September 25, 1941), Dalí exhibition files, Museum of
Modern Art archives).

163
Levy mentions several “several false rumours” in the press release (Julien Levy Gallery, Press Release,
April 21, 1941). Just a few weeks earlier, Life magazine had run a spread of photographs documenting
Dalí’s time at Caresse Crosby’s mansion in Virginia (“Life Calls on Salvador Dalí, Life (April 7, 1941): 98-
101). The Richmond Times-Dispatch also ran a series of photographs in its own full-page story on Dalí’s
time in Virginia (Parke Rouse Jr., “Spiders – That’s What Fascinates Dalí Most About Virginia,” Richmond
Times-Dispatch (April 6, 1941).

164
Henry McBride, “The Classic Dalí,” New York Sun (April 26, 1941).

165
Robert M. Coates, “Spring and the Sculptors,” The New Yorker (May 10, 1941).
92
convinced most of Dalí’s theorizing is just done as a gag anyway, and the angrier we get
the merrier he gets.”
166
The New York Times was less jaunty: “Salvador Dalí is back
again…with the old bag of tricks. …So dated, somehow.”
167
And the reviewer for P.M.
called Dalí’s paintings “hack jobs” and his multiple-image technique “a favorite stunt.”
168

It seemed that critics were either tired of Dalí’s attempts at serious artistry or they had
decided that they would rather be in on the joke.
Dalí maintained a seemingly perpetual place in the spotlight, but despite this,
when he received his first solo exhibition at MoMA in November 1941, his work was
suddenly considered shocking once again. Henry McBride reported that Americans
enjoyed being shocked by Dalí and “Dalí has shocked them more deeply and more often
than any other artist of modern times.”
169
Echoed art critic Emily Genauer, “I must still
report that I have not seen a more shocking exhibition than the retrospective of Salvador
Dalí’s work which has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art.”
170
Ten years after The
Persistence of Memory had made its American debut, it seems shocking only that critics,
who seemed to have digested and disengaged with Dalí’s antics, were still capable of
being shocked by the artist.

166
Ibid.

167
New York Times (April 27, 1941).

168
“Dalí,” P.M. Weekly (April 27, 1941), 51.

169
Henry McBride, “Dalí and Miró,” New York Sun (November 11, 1941).

170
Emily Genauer, “Miró’s an Antidote to Shocking Dalí,” New York World-Telegram (November 11,
1941).

93
Part of the reason for increased interest in Dalí’s work was the clout that MoMA
itself had by this time established and thus automatically lent to its shows. But McBride
offers, perhaps, a more compelling reason – that Dalí’s work might represent a visual
correlation to modern times: “When life again becomes sweet Salvador Dalí will be the
first to paint Vermeer interiors for us. But in the meantime, why lie about the
situation?”
171
Just as Vermeer might have been characterized as recording the daily life of
17
th
-century Holland, Dalí, with his technically meticulous works, was represented by
McBride as mirroring a shocking world back to itself. Genauer too acknowledges this
more obliquely: “If Dalí were to proclaim that certain examples of his work were
deliberate representations of the Nazi subconscious with its deep-seated visions of torture
chambers and concentration camps, those pictures would assume the characteristics of a
most powerful anti-Nazi manifesto.”
172
Art Digest also found Dalí to be a “voice of his
time. When times change and humans return to sanity, the vogue for his exquisitely
painted and temptingly titled nightmares will change with them.”
173
Monroe Wheeler in
his foreword to the exhibition’s catalogue also acknowledged the ties between Dalí and
the contemporary political scene: “this is a day of wrath in many ways and even in his
youth Dalí obviously saw it coming. He offers no solution for the ills of the age. But even
excessive feeling in art is useful to humanity in crisis…Dalí’s dream of the present is

171
Henry McBride, “Dalí and Miró,” New York Sun (November 11, 1941).

172
Emily Genauer, “Miró’s an Antidote to Shocking Dalí,” New York World-Telegram (November 11,
1941).

173
Peyton Boswell, “Mr. Dalí Goes to Town,” Art Digest (December 1, 1941).

94
tragic, and we should not shrink from the shock and discomfort of it.”
174
The exhibition at
MoMA ran from November 19, 1941 until January 11, 1942 and though each of these
reviews was published before the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the
imminence of America’s entry into World War II must have seemed inevitable, no more
so than to Museum administrators who had been personally involved in Dalí’s departure
from Europe the year before.
175

The exhibition was not only Dalí’s first solo show at MoMA but also Miró’s. The
exhibitions – both with a retrospective air – were arranged in tandem, so that the Miró
works were displayed in outer galleries that received natural light which then encircled
the darker artificially-lit galleries of the Dalí show, forming a sort of Surrealist nautilus.
The Miró galleries were also larger with walls painted white, while Dalí’s paintings were
shown in smaller galleries painted black, dark red and dark grey.
176
The installation
encouraged a comparison between the two Spanish Surrealists, yet the critics, even while
welcoming Miró’s work, devoted more space to discussions of Dalí’s, often contrasting
the gravity of Dalí’s work (which only months prior had been in question) with the levity
of Miró’s. Edward Alden Jewell wrote that Miró “skips gaily barefoot through a quaint
and sometimes roguish labyrinth of fancy” but that “Scores of canvases seem to me

174
Monroe Wheeler, quoted in “Museum of Modern Art Opens Dalí Exhibition” press release, 1941,
MoMA archives.

175
Dalí had written to M.F. Agha of Conde Nast Publications, asking for help to expedite the visa process
for Gala and himself and Agha in turn appealed to Barr (M.F. Agha, letter to Alfred Barr (July 29, 1940),
Exhibition 158, Correspondence A-L, MoMA archives).

176
Monroe Wheeler, letter to Gala and Salvador Dalí (November 15, 1941), Exhibition 158,
Correspondence A-L, MoMA archives. A diagram of the exhibition layout labels the colors in the Dalí
section as being black, black-grey, dark grey-blue, dark grey-green, dark red (Exhibition 157, MoMA
archives).

95
frivolous and negligible.”
177
After devoting three-quarters of her review of the exhibitions
to Dalí, Genauer finally comments that Miró’s “capricious hieroglyphics are like
sunshine and fresh air.”
178
It was true that Miró’s works were literally exposed to sunlight
in the MoMA installation, but the contrast was evoked more from Miró’s liberal use of
shapes and lines that seemed to float free on the canvas while Dalí’s compact works
maintained their carefully controlled contortions. For the most part, the critics were
favorable toward Miró, but his work was not perceived to be as serious as Dalí’s. Despite
Dalí’s antics of the previous decade, in the shadow of the second World War, in the dark
coils of the exhibition space, represented by his earliest paintings and his latest jewels,
Dalí’s work resonated once again with critics.
The two shows, though installed together at MoMA, traveled separately. The
Dalí exhibition eventually was seen at nine other venues, while Miró’s traveled to four.
179

Monroe Wheeler wrote to the Dalís, thanking them for lending their works for the two-
year duration: “in traveling so extensively, the pictures have reached an entirely new
public and aided in satisfying a natural interest in Mr. Dalí’s work throughout this
country.”
180
He estimated that 35,000 people had seen the exhibition while it had been in

177
Edward Alden Jewell, “In the Realm of Art: Hectic Week Full of Contradiction,” New York Times
(November 23, 1941).

178
Emily Genauer, “Miró’s an Antidote to Shocking Dalí,” New York World-Telegram (November 22,
1941).

179
“Circulating Exhibitions 1931-1954,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, v. 21, n. 3/4 (Summer
1954), 21.

180
Monroe Wheeler, letter to Gala Dalí (June 16, 1943), Exhibition 158, Correspondence A-L, MoMA
archives.

96
New York.
181
This number may have been larger had it not been for a brief drop in
attendance after Pearl Harbor.
182

The public seems to have had a slightly different reaction than the critics. Edward
Alden Jewell devoted the better part of his column a week after publishing his review to
respond to the immense amount of “scorched and blistered” mail from readers on the
subject of the Dalí and Miró retrospectives.
183
To Jewell too, it seemed surprising that
Surrealism still shocked the public. Jewell wrote, “You might think that by this time
surrealism would be accepted or repudiated in one’s stride, without the risk of getting
high blood pressure over one’s response. But no. It seems that reactions are just as violent
now as they were when this sort of thing was new and strange and startling.”
184
Jewell
then goes on to recount the reactions of his readers, including one who saw
“indescribable filth,” not in Dalí’s work, but in Miró’s.
185
“Any attempt to describe its
indecencies would make this letter unmailable,” quoted Jewell.
186
The piece that so
offended the reader was Miró’s Rope and People I (1935), a work of oil that incorporated

181
Monroe Wheeler, letter to Gala and Salvador Dalí (January 12, 1942), Exhibition 158, Correspondence
A-L, MoMA archives. As testament to the exhibition’s popularity, in 1946, the Dalí catalogue went into its
second printing.

182
Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern, 237.

183
Edward Alden Jewell, “Layman and Artist Cudgel Paintings and Attack the Museum of Modern Art—
The Institution’s Relation to the Public” New York Times (November 30, 1941), X9.

184
Ibid.

185
Ibid.

186
F.W. James, quoted in Jewell, “Layman and Artist Cudgel Paintings,” X9.

97
an actual coil of rope at its center (Figure 1.15).
187
The work features four amorphous
figures, three with dilated pupils, gaping mouths, short gimpy arms and bodies that
simultaneously evoke both sexes. The red and black accents on the figures’ faces, breasts,
torsos and legs emphasize the bodies’ rawness, while the rope re-enacts the twisting
roughness of the painted forms in three dimensions. Perhaps inured to Dalí’s graphic
mutations of the bodily subconscious, some readers now found in Miró a psychosexual
violence that contradicted the critics’ claims that Miró was gaiety and sunshine. The
exhibition at MoMA also prompted reader Saul Ruskin to write and ask “what is the
function of the Museum of Modern Art?” offended that MoMA persisted in showing
Surrealist artists who, in Ruskin’s opinion, had already proven to be a bad influence on
young American artists. His question echoes the ones brought up by the American
Abstract Artists a year earlier, when they protested the Museum’s exhibition policies on
the grounds that abstract American artists were excluded from MoMA. Jewell answers
the question by proposing that the Modern’s role is to present modern art to the public
and that “the museum, quite rightly I believe, recognizes that the art of certain modern
artists has become a historic part of the whole modern saga.”
188
In 1941, Dalí’s place
within the “modern saga” seemed assured, yet after Abstract Expressionism rose to
prominence in the 1950s, Dalí’s significance for the history of modern art would be
almost completely obscured by Miró’s.

187
The work had been reproduced in Jewell’s column upside down, a mistake that Jewell, by way of
apology, explained “these things happen late at night” (Edward Alden Jewell, “Layman and Artist Cudgel
Paintings and Attack the Museum of Modern Art,” New York Times (November 30, 1941), X9). The
painting is owned by the Museum of Modern Art.

188
Ibid.
98
Figure 1.15
Though America’s entry into the war may have brought to critics a brief feeling of
kinship with Dalí’s works, by 1943, the taste for Surrealism in painting had decidedly
diminished as dependence on Europe for direction in the fine arts began to seem both
unattainable and undesirable. As MoMA set about addressing the new pressures faced by
American art, Alfred Barr and Dorothy Miller conceived the exhibition American
Realists and Magic Realists, which was displayed at MoMA from February 10 to March
21, 1943. Like the Museum’s previous exhibitions presenting important tendencies in
modern art with which it would be later grouped, Realists and Magic Realists began with
a historical retrospective, in this case featuring artists of the nineteenth century, followed
by “20
th
Century Pioneers,” by way of establishing the roots of the contemporary
99
painters, who were the exhibition’s focus. Works such as Raphaelle Peale’s After the
Bath and Thomas Eakins’ Max Schmitt in a Single Scull were presented in the first
section, and only two artists – Edward Hopper and Charles Sheeler – comprised the 20
th

Century Pioneers, though the works with which they were represented were roughly
contemporary with the artists comprising the Contemporary section.
Because the show was also the second in a recently initiated annual series
designed to survey American art, all the artists were active in the United States; however,
eight out of 26, or nearly a third, of the artists in the contemporary section, were born
abroad, a point which might demonstrate the difficulty of even defining the category of
American artist. The series of American exhibitions may have been influenced by the
war, which made borrowing works from abroad virtually impossible, but also by the
desire to support the American war effort by promoting American culture, an endeavor
with which the Museum was actively involved.
189
The series’ first exhibition, Americans
1942: 18 Artists from 9 States, had not had a unifying theme other than making a
geographical distinction by showcasing artists from outside of New York City. That
American Realists and Magic Realists aimed to define what Barr and Miller saw as the
most characteristic trend in American painting proved to be its most problematic aspect.
As Miller described it, “The exhibition will, we believe, be a very interesting one,
bringing together for the first time a type of painting which is being done by many of the
younger painters today but which has not yet been made the subject of a large

189
A few of the artists were serving in the United States military at the time of the exhibition. For a
discussion of the Modern’s involvement with the war effort, see Russell Lynes, “Musical Chairs and Other
War Games,” Good Old Modern (New York: Atheneum, 1973).

100
exhibition.”
190
Monroe Wheeler had urged Barr, who had named the show, to use
Surrealism in the show’s title instead, for:
…As can be seen in the daily press and in conversation everywhere, the
word “surrealism” has now entered into everyone’s vocabulary with
complete disregard of any organized group. It has taken our general public
ten years to learn the term, and to disregard it now and start them on
another inaccurate word may, I am afraid, appear to be arbitrary and
confusing. I have asked a number of people about this and they all seem to
feel that he word “surrealism” has passed into the language and can no
longer be used in the restricted sense of the little group around Breton. To
those who know nothing about it, it means Dalí, and more and more it is
coming to mean all pictures of irrational, dreamlike or fantastic subject-
matter….
191

Barr refused to change the title, however, citing that though Surrealism had surely
entered the popular vocabulary, he saw no reason to participate in the further
vulgarization of the term, as Surrealism was wholly inaccurate to explain the trend in
American painting that he wanted to designate.
192
Indeed, as Seymour Menton has
recently observed, “identifiable as the magic realist tendency may be, the lack of a
precise definition has hindered its being widely accepted.”
193
However, as Wheeler had
pointed out, the fantastic already had been colonized, and in the minds of the pubic,
conquered by Surrealism, and in effect, the show became a presentation of Americans

190
Dorothy Miller, letter to Alexander J. Wall, Director, New York Historical Society, January 28, 1943,
Exhibition 217. 217. Americans 1943 Realists and Magic Realists Correspondence N-Z, MoMA Archives.

191
Monroe Wheeler, Memo to Alfred Barr re: Title of the American Show, Dorothy Miller Papers I.4.b,
Museum of Modern Art Archives.

192
Alfred Barr, Memo to Monroe Wheeler re: The American Show, Dorothy Miller Papers I.4.b, Museum
of Modern Art Archives.

193
Seymour Menton, Magic Realism Rediscovered, 1918-1981 (East Brunswick, New Jersey: Associated
University Presses Inc., 1983), 17.

101
practicing, or at the very least, revising the Surrealist mode. As Lincoln Kirstein wrote in
the catalogue’s introduction, “Magic realists try to convince us that extraordinary things
are possible simply by painting them as if they existed. This is, of course, one of the
several methods used by Surrealist painters—but none of the artists in this exhibition
happens to be a member of the official Surrealist group.”
194
The casualness of Kirstein’s
distinction between the newly characterized Magic Realists and the Surrealists – that the
Magic Realists are not, by happenstance, officially Surrealists – underscores the difficulty
of distinguishing the European movement, as epitomized by Dalí, from the American
trend.
The critics’ responses to American Realists and Magic Realists were decidedly
negative. The Art Digest described the show as “the dullest exposé of lesser things and
decadence of thought, downright pedestrian and inartistry, musclebound paintings by
little circles of artists facing inward...If this is America 1943, let’s give up the struggle
and let the evil forces move in.”
195
In the midst of world war, reviewers were disturbed by
the weaknesses they perceived in this vein of American art, and several disdained the
notion of realistic painting that did not reference the facts of the wartime situation.
Another wrote:
It is truly strange to apply to word realist to artists who, in these days,
seem unaware of the major realities of global war. Unable to face and
grapple with the problems besetting humanity, these ‘realists’ and magic
realists create for themselves little temples of security in a world rocking

194
Lincoln Kirstein, “Introduction,” American Realists and Magic Realists (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1943), 7.

195
Maude Riley, “Americans 1943: Realism & Magic Realism,” Art Digest, v. 17, n. 10 (February 15,
1943), 6; also quoted in “Magic Brickbrats,” Newsweek (March 1, 1943).

102
on its very foundations…. away from the growing necessity of creating an
adequate language to express the ideals, the struggles, the realities of our
age.”
196

That some visual language needed to be developed by American artists seemed
imperative to reviewers, who noted that realistic painting could work if it departed from
the mundane and carried a message.
197
Critic Henry McBride wrote of Americans’ love
of facts, asserting that the show “…seems like a stab at Europe. …Americans, not having
had lengthy enough experience in the arts to recognize good painting when detached
from story-telling, never cottoned to any great extent to abstract painting.”
198
Without
Europe to provide strong examples of abstraction or realism, Americans were left to forge
a national art that could address the concerns of a uniquely American situation. But as
Maude Riley of the Art Digest commented, “we suspect the museum of choosing artists
they wished to advance, then designing a suit of definition for them which, if it fits one,
cannot possibly fit the next.”
199

The Museum’s choice to foreground, and, if briefly, to anoint, the Magic Realist
style seemed to come in direct contradiction to the increasing shift toward abstraction in
American art. However, as art historian Isabelle Dervaux has pointed out, it was an idea
of abstraction that was itself in the process of being redefined in relation to another aspect
of Surrealism’s visual vocabulary – the movement’s automatism. “The association

196
Mayer Symason, “Realism as an Escape,” NM (March 9, 1943), 30. Symason does single out Louis
Guglielmi as “the only one in the entire exhibition who displays a consciousness of social facts” (Ibid.).

197
This sentiment was anathema to Greenberg’s prescription for avant-garde art.

198
Henry McBride, “The Magic Realists,” The New York Sun (February 12, 1943), 19.

199
Maude Riley, “Americans 1943: Realism & Magic Realism,” Art Digest, v. 17, n. 10 (February 15,
1943), 6.
103
between abstraction and spontaneity signaled a change in the definition of the word away
from its exclusively Cubist and Constructivist connotations.”
200
American Realists and
Magic Realists had been initially conceived to contrast the figurative and the abstract
201

(as Sidney Janis’s Abstract and Surrealist Art in America show would attempt to do the
following year), but was later revised as a showcase for “the extreme, meticulous, sharp
focus technique which so many artists today seem to be interested in.”
202
In a letter to a
collector, Curator Dorothy Miller added, “Naturally Blume is the star of the occasion”
203

and indeed, while the show was up, MoMA purchased his painting Eternal City (1934-
1937), calling it “probably the museum’s most important American acquisition to
date.”
204
The Eternal City pictures a detailed scene of modern sorrow amidst the ruins of
ancient Rome (Figure 1.16). The background of the painting features the crumbling
balustrades of Roman architectural endeavors, but the foreground shows a bandaged

200
Isabelle Devraux, “A Tale of Two Earrings: Surrealism and Abstraction, 1930-1947,” Surrealism USA,
edited by Isabelle Devreaux, (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2004), 53.

201
In December 1942, Dorothy Miller wrote to Peter Blume, “Remember last summer (was it?) when I
spoke to you about this year’s show “Americans 1943” – at that time plans were very indefinite but I
believe I told you the Committee was interested in a show contrasting painting of the extremely meticulous
objectivity, or whatever you want to call it, with abstract work” (Dorothy Miller, letter to Peter Blume
(December 1, 1942), Correspondence A-G, Exhibition 217, Museum of Modern Art Archives). It is unclear
when the show became limited to only figurative painters.

202
Dorothy Miller, letter to Daniel Catton Rich (December 11, 1942), Exhibition 217, Museum of Modern
Art Archives.

203
Dorothy Miller, letter to Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. (December 14, 1942), Correspondence H-M, Exhibition
217, Museum of Modern Art archives.

204
“Important Acquisition,” Newsweek (March 16, 1943). The quotation is unattributed in the article, but
the statement was most likely made by James Thrall Soby. In an internal memo, Soby writes of the
painting, “Is there any single canvas by a young, living American painter of greater courage, concentration
and distinction than the Eternal City?” James Thrall Soby, “Statement in Reference to ‘The Fur-Lined
Museum,’ by Emily Genauer, Harper’s Magazine, July 1944,” August 18, 1944, Dorothy Miller Papers
III.10 Museum Matters; Genauer, Emily, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

104
beggar sitting amidst a pile of rubble – like the cracked and broken fragments of
sculpture, he too has been betrayed by current circumstances. From the once-solid
foundations pictured in the middleground, springs a jack-in-the-box dragon of
Mussolini’s head, green and mottled, with bright red lips, puckered into a frown. Easily
legible, the scene conveys the current plight of Europe, specifically Italy, threatened by
the monstrosities of fascist dictatorship. But if 1943 could be, as the Modern claimed,
characterized by American artists’ interest in realism and magic realism, it also marked
Jackson Pollock’s first one-man show (November 9 through 27 at Art of this Century
with a catalogue by MoMA curator James Johnson Sweeney) and the dawn of Abstract
Expressionism.
Figure 1.16
That Barr was fired from his position as MoMA’s director shortly after American
Realists and Magic Realists closed seems to testify to the unstable position of such work
and the desire by those in power at the Museum not to endorse Barr’s far-reaching
105
taste.
205
Margaret Barr remembers Alfred Barr’s firing as occurring “in the midst of
[Americans 1943: Realists and Magic-Realists]. He continued to hang it with Dorothy
Miller.”
206
The letter from Stephen Clark, MoMA’s president, demoting Barr to the
position of Advisory Director at half his original salary, is actually dated October 15,
1943, which would have been a few months after the exhibition had closed and a month
before Romantic Painting in America was to open, but the fact that Margaret Barr
associates the firing with the exhibition remains significant. And according to art
historian Serge Guilbaut, “In fact, it was the attempt to ‘Americanize’ the surrealist taste
for the bizarre, the primitive, and the art of madmen that had been responsible for Barr’s
ouster as director of the MOMA in 1943.”
207
As World War II made the establishment of

205
Margaret Barr, Alfred Barr’s wife, recalls that Barr was committed to being “understood by everybody,”
and that he spent considerable time re-writing passages of What is Modern Painting? (1943) to make sure
that housewives, farmers and maids would be able to understand it (Margaret Barr, interview with Paul
Cummings, Spring 1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 17). Barr was also concerned
about the retail price of the book, and wrote to Monroe Wheeler that he was “counting on 25¢ to students”
(Alfred Barr, memo to Monroe Wheeler, August 5, 1943, Alfred H. Barr correspondence, roll 2170,
Museum of Modern Art Archives). Barr was also concerned with the marketability of the works of art he
presented in What is Modern Painting? and made a tentative list of works for illustration in the book,
grading paintings based on their artistic value and their saleability. Only Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night
(1889) and Seurat’s Port en Bessin (1888) received an A in both categories (Alfred Barr, “List of
Suggested Color Reproductions – almost all from Museum collections,” Alfred H. Barr papers, Museum of
Modern Art archives).

206
Margaret Barr, interview with Paul Cummings, Spring 1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution, 19.

207
Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the
Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 84. Barr’s decision to hang an exhibition of the
self-taught so-called “primitive” artist Morris Hirschfield, directed by Sidney Janis, who later became an
important dealer of Surrealism, also contributed to Stephen Clark’s decision to fire Barr, according to
Lynes. James Thrall Soby, who had recently been named Assistant Director of the museum was appointed
Director of Painting and Sculpture upon Barr’s dismissal, and was the only high-level member of the
museum staff publicly to offer support to Barr. Years later, Soby recalled that “[The Hirschfield show]
horrified Goodyear and Clark,” but continued, “I liked it very much…” (James Thrall Soby, letter to Grey
Williams, Publications Department (September 16, 1967), Collectors Records, Janis 37, Museum of
Modern Art archives). It was also Soby who fielded and responded to the criticism from the group
American Abstract Artists who attacked the Realists and Magic Realists show “on the grounds that, as
106
a national identity ever more crucial, American artists found themselves needing to
identify themselves not only apart from untrained popular artists but also apart from the
established European movements. Figurative surrealism, with its foreign origins,
commercial manifestations and associations with the insane, seemed the most prevalent
example of what American art, if it was going to exist as such, would have to define itself
against. Perhaps as an early sign of that, Miller dropped the “Americans 1943” prefix
from the title of the show’s catalogue, and as Lynn Zelevansky has noted, Miller did not
include American Realists and Magic Realists as part of the Americans series when she
edited an anthology of the Americans exhibitions in 1972.
208

The instability of Surrealism’s status and its associations with the Modern came to
the fore in Emily Genauer’s article, “The Fur-lined Museum,” published in Harpers in
July 1944, eight months after Barr was removed from his position as Director of the
Museum and only a month before Clement Greenberg’s essays condemning Surrealism

Soby paraphrased the complaint, ‘realism as the show defined it didn’t amount to much’ and that ‘it wasn’t
the Museum’s business to define tendencies in modern art’ but to ‘search for true art’” Soby, quoted in
Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (New York:
Atheneum, 1973), 230). Barr’s and Soby’s support of figurative art was then a primary instigation of
attacks on the Museum and consequently, Barr’s dismissal as director. For more on Barr’s dismissal, see
the most comprehensive account in Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern, 240-263). Margaret Barr refers to
Lynes’ account of Barr’s firing as “so extremely correct and intelligent” (Margaret Barr, interview with
Paul Cummings, Spring 1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 18).

208
Americans 1942-1963: Six Group Exhibitions, edited by Dorothy C. Miller (New York: Arno Press,
1972). Additionally, American Realists and Magic Realists is mentioned only in passing in Lynn
Zelevansky’s article outlining Miller’s “Americans” shows (Lynne Zelevansky, “Dorothy Miller’s
‘Americans,’ 1942-1963,” The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad (New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 1994)). At the time of the exhibition, it was very clear that American Realists
and Magic Realists was the 1943 installment in the “Americans” series, so its elimination from the history
of these exhibitions is telling. Another instance of this occurs in John Gruen’s article on Miller, in which
the author calls “Fourteen Americans (1946), the second of Miller’s highly controversial contemporary
group shows” (John Gruen, “Dorothy Miller in the Company of Modern Art,” ArtNews, v. 75, n. 9
(November 1976), 57). It was, in fact, the third.

107
appeared in The Partisan Review.
209
Genauer’s article, which read as an exposé on the
Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition and collecting practices and a condemnation of
Barr’s tenure as Director, proposed that MoMA had purposely confined itself to “1)
Those Sure Things which it has inherited, and which as time has gone on have become
accepted as classics…and 2) Those Shockers (the fantastic, the precious, the bizarre and
the decadent) which excite the crowd that might be called the Café Society of Artists.”
210

The article’s title itself – clearly referring to Oppenheim’s fur-lined cup and saucer
211
and
thus Surrealism – already aimed to posit the Museum as a space of decadent indulgences
based on its associations with, and support of, Surrealism. Opening her article by
questioning the legitimacy of the works on display in the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism
show that had occurred eight years earlier, Genauer then states that it is “because the
Museum’s façade is so glittering and its influence upon the general public so persuasive
that its critics are so caustic in their charges that it has betrayed their trust.”
212
Genauer
also raised the contention that the Modern had failed adequately to display current
American works, a familiar criticism of the museum, and one that James Thrall Soby, in

209
Genauer’s article was summarized by Peyton Boswell in an Art Digest column which appeared the same
month as Genauer’s article. Based on the Museum of Modern Art’s figures from 1950, Genauer’s criticism
would have been widely read. The circulation of Harper’s was 151,312, while that of Art Digest was
15,790, and the Partisan Review was 10,000 (“Report of the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the
Magazine of Art,” (May 15, 1950), Alfred H. Barr papers roll 2174, Museum of Modern Art archives).

210
Emily Genauer, “The Fur-lined Museum,” Harper’s Magazine (July 1944), 131. As further examples,
Genauer later cites the Museum’s choice in purchases of Van Gogh’s Starry Night (for $25,000) and Peter
Blume’s Eternal City, which she groups in the respective categories.

211
Though Oppenheim’s Object figures largely in Genauer’s piece, MoMA did not acquire the work until
1946, two years after the article appeared.

212
Emily Genauer, “The Fur-lined Museum,” Harper’s Magazine (July 1944), 130. She also describes the
fur-lined cup as “an apt symbol of the Museum’s aberrations from its essential purpose” (Ibid., 129).
108
his 16-page internal memo defending MoMA’s and Barr’s record dismissed outright,
saying that “though the Museum owns more works of art by Americans than by artists of
other countries, though its loan exhibitions have as often been devoted to American art as
to foreign – still, the critics of the chauvinistic school will probably never be satisfied
until the Museum has relegated foreign art to a secondary role or even followed the
pattern of the Whitney Museum and become a museum for the support of American art
only.”
213

The anti-Surrealist implications of the article – and its linking of Surrealism with
criticisms of Barr’s tenure at MoMA – also struck a particular chord with Soby, who had,
along with Barr, been a major supporter of both Surrealism and Magic Realism. Arguing
that Genauer ignores the impact of Surrealism, Soby took particular exception to the
article’s title, which he found:
chosen to appeal to Philistine prejudice both lay and professional,
particularly in these times of war…The fur-lined teacup did take a
tremendous hold on public consciousness – a hold comparable to that of
Dalí’s limp watches or Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending the
Staircase…[and] if Nude Descending the Staircase is widely accepted as a
valid symbol of the Armory Show of 1913, why should not the fur-lined
teacup be accepted as a valid symbol of the Surrealist exhibition of 1936?
…She [Genauer] accepts the Armory Show of 1913 as the ‘most powerful
single jolt’ which broke down ‘American art smugness.’ But when
confronted with the Surrealist show of 1936, she denies the revolutionary
impact of the movement….
214

213
Ibid. Soby was not the only arts administrator who came to Barr’s and the Modern’s defense. Museum
professionals nationwide wrote letters to Harper’s expressing the inaccuracy of the article and their
displeasure. Harper’s later published small portions of the letters from administrators at the Baltimore
Museum of Art, Chicago Art Institute, and the San Francisco Museum of Art.

214
James Thrall Soby, “Statement in Reference to ‘The Fur-Lined Museum,’ by Emily Genauer, Harper’s
Magazine, July 1944,” August 18, 1944, Dorothy Miller Papers III.10 Museum Matters; Genauer, Emily,
Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

109

Soby described “an instinctive moral revulsion [that] sets in against much pre-war
activity in the arts which was perfectly valid in peace but is out of tune with wartime
psychology” to account for Genauer’s nationalistic predilection to define art soley as
American painting and sculpture. But what Soby found to be the crux of Genauer’s
critical prejudices was her regard for what was “modern.” Soby writes, “She believes –
and her opinion is shared by many of the Museum’s critics (and friends) – that modern art
is that which disregards factual or romantic representation and follows the Expressionist
or abstract lines established thirty to fifty years ago. …Precisely because the Museum has
refused to accept so narrow and final a definition of modern art, it has been attacked time
and again….”
215
The sobriety of the war years, the isolation from European art and the
split between abstraction and figuration, with Surrealism representing elements of both,
seemed to be at the heart of debates of where modern art in America was heading.
In 1943, philosopher Charles E. Gauss noted that “Surrealism has now led an
uninhibited and boisterous adolescence among us for twenty years,” and yet “as the
exploration of a particular point of view which is in revolt against the accepted traditional
standards of art and criticism, surrealist art has faced the general snobbism of aesthetician
and critic.”
216
The snobbism alluded to by Gauss was quite readily embodied by
Greenberg, who published his own article on Surrealist painting in August 1944 in which

215
James Thrall Soby, “Statement in Reference to ‘The Fur-Lined Museum,’ by Emily Genauer, Harper’s
Magazine, July 1944,” August 18, 1944, Dorothy Miller Papers III.10 Museum Matters; Genauer, Emily,
Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

216
Charles E. Gauss, “The Theoretical Backgrounds of Surrealism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, v. 2, n. 8 (Fall 1943), 37. Gauss himself explored the theoretical backgrounds of Surrealism, thus
also evading the issue of artistic output.

110
his dismissal of the movement was explicit. Sawin convincingly proposes that Greenberg
positioned Surrealism as a “target [so] he could discredit the last existing avant-garde and
install a legitimate heir to the modern tradition.”
217
Greenberg admitted that “the desire
to change life on the spot, without waiting for the revolution, and to make art the affair of
everybody is Surrealism’s most laudable motive, yet it has led inevitably to a certain
vulgarization of modern art.”
218
According to Greenberg, Surrealism’s popularity
effectively undermines modern art. Greenberg concludes that Surrealist art (excepting
that of Picasso and Miró) is ultimately unnecessary since it fails to provide painting with
a new subject matter. Instead, “the Surrealist image provides painting with new anecdotes
to illustrate, just as current events supply new topics to the political cartoonist, but of
itself it does not charge painting with a new subject matter. On the contrary, it has
promoted the rehabilitation of academic art under a new literary disguise.”
219
Surrealist
art for Greenberg is a trivial exponent of a “literal past” which, though it leads to “best-
selling art,” adds nothing to avant-garde art. In 1951, he declared that once Surrealism,
Neo-Romanticism and Magic are “consigned to the outer darkness of Academicism in
general, where they really belong—the [Modern Art] scene becomes more orderly.”
220

217
Sawin, Surrealism in Exile, 355.

218
Clement Greenberg, “Surrealist Painting,” originally in The Nation (August 12 and 19, 1944),
republished in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, v. 1, edited by John O’Brian
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 225.

219
Ibid., 230.

220
Clement Greenberg, “Cézanne and the Unity of Modern Art,” Partisan Review (May-June 1951),
reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3 Affirmations and Refusals
1950-1956, edited by John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 82. When Greenberg
attacks Surrealism it is on terms similar to those laid out in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.”

111
To Greenberg, Surrealism’s self-fulfilling claims of being “anti-institutional, anti-
formal, anti-aesthetic” cause it to be treated as such by the critics, though this brand of
nihilism “has in the end proved a blessing to the restless rich, the expatriates, the
aesthete-flaneurs in general who were repelled by the asceticisms of modern life.”
221

Greenberg portrays Surrealism as appealing to the nouveau riche, foreigners, and dandies,
who enthusiastically respond because Surrealist art flamboyantly feeds their need for a
chic antidote to more arduous issues. According to art historian Thomas Crow, “the
object of this criticism was just such a person as Peggy Guggenheim, but it also
reproduced exactly the terms of her rejection of the decadently luxurious associations
which Surrealism had come to carry in New York.”
222
Indeed, with Barr as an artistic
advisor,
223
Guggenheim played a large role in providing the exiled Surrealists a place to
congregate in New York as well as show works at Art of this Century (1942-1947), her
self-described non-commercial gallery.
224
Guggenheim’s gallery also presented an
opportunity for the American artists to mingle with the Surrealists, as members and
works of both groups were in constant circulation there.
225
Art of this Century also gave

221
Ibid., 225-226.

222
Thomas Crow, “Fashioning the New York School,” Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1996), 45.

223
Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” Pollock and After, 153.

224
Peggy Guggenheim, Out of this Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (New York: Universe Books,
1979), 314.

225
As Alfred Barr recalls, as soon as it opened, “Art of this Century immediately became the centre of the
vanguard. Under the influence of Duchamp, Ernst and Breton, the surrealist tradition was strong but never
exclusive” (Alfred Barr, “Introduction,” in Peggy Guggenheim, Confessions of an Art Addict (London:
Andre Deutsch, 1960), 13.

112
Jackson Pollock his first solo show in 1943, and it is well known that the New York
School borrowed the “biomorphic shapes, mythic symbols and automatist techniques of
the Surrealists.”
226
On the night of the gallery’s opening, October 20, 1942, Guggenheim
writes that she “wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder, in order to
show my impartiality between Surrealist and abstract art.”
227
Though Guggenheim
declined to favor one type of art over the other, she had commissioned Frederick Kiesler
to design a Surrealist gallery space for Art of this Century where Surrealist works were
exhibited separately from other works of art. In their own room, unframed Surrealist
paintings were thrust into the viewer’s space by struts that projected from the curved
gum-wood walls at different angles, which could be altered according to the viewer’s
desires. The biomorphic chairs in the gallery doubled as sculpture stands in both the
Surrealist and the Abstract galleries. However, while photographs of the Abstract
Gallery display its evenly lit, well-illuminated viewing space, the lights in the Surrealist
gallery alternated at regular 3½-second-intervals to give the impression of blood coursing
through veins, which highlighted (and subsequently obscured) the works of art, but also
consequently reinforced the theatricality already associated with Surrealism.
228

These two types of painting – abstract and representational – were becoming
contentious categories and though they coincided and were often cited together, the

226
Jane de Hart Mathews, “Art and Politics in Cold War America,” Pollock and After, 170; Peggy
Guggenheim, Out of this Century, 276.

227
This accessorized impartiality was also noted in the popular press at the time, such as Newsweek.

228
Or, as Clement Greenberg put it when assessing the gallery, the lighting “is exactly right, because it
emphasizes that traditional discontinuity between the spectator and the space within the picture to which
most of the surrealists have returned” (Clement Greenberg, “Art,” The Nation (January 30, 1943).

113
distinction between them continued to grow. In 1940, critic Henry McBride had written
of contemporary American artists at the Whitney, “Some of them actually are being
abstract. I don’t know why I mention that first, for a lot of people have been saying that it
isn’t right for nice American boys and girls to paint the abstract. Perhaps this is the
reason why I mention it, first for really no one should tell an Artist what he should or
shouldn’t do.”
229
Abstraction had come slowly to American artists (the group American
Abstract Artists had been established in January 1937, but had never been a dominant
school), but by 1944, it was becoming more and more prevalent. In late 1944, timed to
coincide with the publication of his book of the same name, collector Sidney Janis (who
opened his gallery in 1948 and quickly became a prominent dealer) curated a show called
Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, which also presented the two categories of
painting side by side. In 1972, Janis recalled that, as a member of MoMA’s advisory
committee (which he had joined in 1934), he proposed that the museum’s 1936 shows
Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism to occur as one large show,
but that because of space the idea was eventually rejected.
230
Abstract and Surrealist Art
in America was shown in San Francisco, Cincinnati, Denver, Seattle, Santa Barbara and
New York, where Janis recalled that it was a big success. The catalogue’s foreword
noted that the necessity of the show was weighed against its impingement on the war

229
Henry McBride, “At the Whitney Museum,” New York Sun (January 31, 1940).

230
Sidney Janis, interview with Paul Cummings, Tape 1, Side 2, March 29, 1972, Archives of American
Art, Smithsonian Institution. The show and book had developed from Janis’s 1941 article “School of Paris
comes to the U.S.” (Sidney Janis, “School of Paris comes to the U.S.,” Decision, v. 2 (November-
December 1941). Janis had also helped to sponsor the Surrealist exhibition First Papers of Surrealism
(1942), for which he wrote the foreword to the show’s catalogue.

114
effort, assuring visitors that Pacific Coast museums “never contemplate any type of
exhibition these days without weighing conscientiously the artistic benefits to their
visitors – now so often in uniform – against the express space needed, for which they
must compete with war and war industry. This exhibition offers new and stimulating
material to their publics without too great interference with war’s necessities.”
231
Janis
had wanted to write the book because “Well, nothing had been done at all in America on
the Surrealist aspect of American art which was under the influence of the artists-in-
exile.”
232
Janis recognized that “yesterday’s vanguard art is traditional today.”
233
But he
took a different tack in his promotion of Surrealist art. Instead of maintaining
Surrealism’s integral position in the art world, he writes in 1944:
Mass production…is the fabulous progenitor of other equally astonishing
phenomena; mass travel, mass spectator participation, mass entertainment,
mass play. The patent medicine myth of modern advertising articulated
through loudspeakers on the radio and in the movies, selling coming
attractions, leisure and pleasure, spreads the dreams of insomnia over
everyday life. These and a hundred other aspects of daily experience
accepted in the natural course of things by masses who are swayed by the
spell of contemporary trends, are surrealist in essence.
234

231
Abstract and Surrealist Art in the United States (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1944),
10.

232
Sidney Janis, interview with Paul Cummings, Tape 3, Side 1 (April 18, 1972), Archives of American
Art, Smithsonian Institution. It is unclear if Janis had, by 1972, forgotten MoMA’s 1943 exhibition of
Magic Realism, or if he simply did not consider that show to have demonstrated Surrealist tendencies.

233
Sidney Janis, “Abstract and Surrealist Art in America,” excerpted in Art & Architecture, v. 61
(November 1944), 16. The artists in exile at this time included not only Dalí, but Breton, Duchamp,
Chagall, Ernst, Leger, Masson, Matta, Mondrian, Ozenfant, Seligmann, and Tanguy.

234
Ibid., 37.

115
Janis positions Surrealism not as a difficult art for an elite, but rather as infusing every
facet of contemporary urban life. Surrealism is art for the modern masses: “In contrast
with the severe intellectuality and almost puritanical restraint of much abstraction which
many temperaments find too constricting, it has a wide and instantaneous appeal.”
235

Though as a collector (and later, dealer) Janis had a vested interest in the wide appeal of
Surrealism, his comments nonetheless point to a certain insecurity about the status of
Surrealism – if its visual traces are everywhere in the everyday world, what is the value
of the work of art apart from this world? While Janis emphasizes the normativity of
Surrealism, he concludes that the Surrealists in exile were “nurturing in Americans—
painters and public alike—a reassuring sense of the permanency of our common
culture.”
236
Greenberg’s review was short and scathing: “There is no use quibbling: art
writing has a bad name at present, and rightly. In no other field – except politics and
perhaps music – can one get away with such hokum in print. The reason is obvious.
There has not yet matured a body of good taste within the art world that could call to
account statements made in public about art.”
237

Exemplifying this difficulty was the contingency of the categories Abstract and
Surrealist themselves. As reported in Art Digest, “Identities are becoming lost…I would
be surprised if many an artist in the show wasn’t bewildered to find himself catalogued as

235
Ibid.

236
Ibid.

237
Clement Greenberg, “Pictures and Prattle: Review of Abstract and Surrealist Art in America by Sidney
Janis,” The Nation (October 15, 1945), reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
Criticism, v. 2, edited by John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 36.

116
he is.”
238
Though it is perhaps not surprising that Jackson Pollock’s work She-Wolf
(1943), which had been bought by the Museum of Modern Art, was illustrated by Janis in
the Surrealist category, many of the other “American Surrealists” were represented with
similarly abstracted works. Other artists, such as O. Louis Gugliemli, represented by
Terror in Brooklyn (1941), the same painting seen in the American Realists and Magic
Realists show, Janis placed in the Surrealist section despite Barr’s effort to categorize the
painter as a Magic Realist. Moreover, that Gugliemli’s work was grouped in the same
section as Pollock’s points to the range of styles that the principles of Surrealism were
able to encompass. Janis admitted that artists themselves recognized the instability of the
categories. Hans Hofmann, whom Janis had placed in the abstract section, was, at the
time, painting “still lifes and interiors and landscapes” and told Janis “you know I’m
really not an abstract painter”; it was not until later that his art turned toward
abstraction.
239
DeKooning, included on the abstract side, and Rothko, included on the
Surrealist side, were also in the exhibition, represented by early works. Janis resolved the
fluidity between his categories thus: “though abstraction and surrealism are considered
countermovements in twentieth-century painting, there is in certain painters a fusion of

238
M.R., “Whither Goes Abstract and Surrealist Art?” Art Digest (December 1, 1944), 8. Janis timed the
show to coincide with the publication of his book of the same name and was accused of “bestowing honors
when he makes a painter a surrealist” but “the forty-year-old terms, abstract and surrealist, are Cinderella
slippers and there’s no use pretending they fit all of the new generation” (Ibid., 31).

239
Sidney Janis, interview with Paul Cummings, Tape 3, Side 1 (April 18, 1972), Archives of American
Art, Smithsonian Institution. William Rubin quotes another account, in which Janis remembers that after an
unfruitful visit to Hofmann’s studio, Janis told him he was including the work of Hofmann’s neighbor,
Jackson Pollock, whom Hofmann was not familiar with. “Some months later, Hofmann advised me he had
just completed an abstract work…” (Sidney Janis, quoted in William Rubin, “Introduction,” Three
Generations of Twentieth-Century Art: The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection of the Museum of Modern
Art (Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1972), xiv.

117
elements from each. …Apparently the schism between the factions is not as
insurmountable as their members believe.”
240
Janis was, I believe, one of the first to credit
Surrealism’s influence on the emerging New York School.
By 1945, with Hollywood films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, for which
Dalí had designed the dream sequence, portraying Freudian imagery to the mainstream,
Surrealism’s prominence both in the galleries and in mass culture led the New York Times
critic to remark that, “Dalí has at length humanized the Unconscious, and the
Unconscious, in gratitude (it could not be in spite), has made Dalí’s art seem as
comfortable as a pair of scuffed old-fashioned slippers.”
241
In 1947, Life magazine
outlined the overwhelming boom of psychoanalysis, noting “Indeed, it is rare to find a
Hollywood musical these days without some sort of pseudo-Freudian ‘dream
sequence’….”
242
Dalí’s autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, issued in 1942,
had, just three years later, already been published in four editions, and he had also
published a novel, Hidden Faces, in 1944. Surrealism was an acknowledged aspect of
everyday commercial culture: “The world and its inhabitants have helped advertise
Gunther’s furs, Ford cars, Wrigley’s chewing gum, Schiaparelli perfume, Gruen watches,
the products of the Abbott Laboratories and of the Container Corporation of America.”
243

But World War II had also shown the irrationality that the world was capable of. As a

240
Sidney Janis, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, 89.

241
Edward Alden Jewell, “Cozy Surrealism,” New York Times (November 23, 1945).

242
Francis Sill Wickware, “Psychoanalysis,” Life, v. 22, n. 5 (February 3, 1947), 98.

243
Winthrop Sargeant, “Close-up: Dalí,” Life v. 19, n. 13 (September 24, 1945), 63.

118
reviewer in 1946 put it, “Having once seen an authentic photograph of a gutted soldier
being eaten by vermin, can you be shocked any more by Mr. Dalí’s ants running willy-
nilly over a rotten apple? After Belsen and Buchenwald can you gag at Mr. Tchelitchev’s
monsters?”
244
Another reviewer felt the same, “After the gas chambers, those heaps of
bones and teeth and shoes and eyeglasses, what is there left for the poor Surrealists to
shock us with?”
245
In the 1930s, Surrealism unleashed the unconscious on the American
public; now the unconscionable had tamed it. In May 1947, Peggy Guggenheim closed
her gallery and returned to Europe, and in April 1949, Julien Levy, after 18 years selling
Surrealist art, also closed his doors. With the return of most of the Surrealists in exile to
Europe, Surrealist activity ebbed, though it was not until the 1960s that the movement
would be treated historically by critics and art historians in the United States. As the
perception of Surrealism in America shifted from avant-garde to commercial, from the
bizarre to the banal, Surrealism faded from the art world’s eye. It was not until the artists
of the 1960s turned toward common culture for their art that Surrealism’s utter
infiltration into daily life became revolutionary once again.

244
B.S. Thompson, “The Panic is Over,” Go (June 6, 1946), 26. Images of World War II atrocities began to
circulate widely in 1945.

245
“Art,” Time v. 50, n. 3 (July 21, 1947), 63.

119
Chapter Two: The Disputed Legacy of Surrealism in the 1960s

Surrealism had been a presence through much of the 1940s when André Breton
and other Surrealist émigrés had mingled (somewhat tentatively) with New York painters
and critics. Nonetheless, modernism emerges by the mid twentieth century, through such
formalist proponents as Greenberg, as necessitating the characteristics that art historian
Thomas Crow summarizes in the following terms: “inwardness, self-reflexivity, ‘truth to
media.’”
1
The concerns for the autonomous status of art eventually laid the critical
groundwork for Abstract Expressionism, but, as art historian T.J. Clark has suggested,
there is an unresolved transition in the dominant formalist account “that what Pollock and
Miró took from the Surrealists, by some miracle of probity, was a set of techniques which
they quickly cleansed and turned to higher purpose.”
2
Miró is often singled out in
formalist accounts such as the one Clark critiques because his paintings exhibit
automatism, and thus there is no need in approaching his work to reconcile elements of
representation, academicism, or populism found in other manifestations of Surrealism.
Coming at a moment when the proliferation of mass culture was seen as a threat to the
sanctity of art and high culture, the general public’s fluency in Surrealism became a
detraction from the movement’s aesthetic validity. Greenberg achieved critical
dominance in the art world with a formalist art history that left no place for common

1
Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” Modern Art in the Common Culture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) 9.

2
T.J. Clark, “Arguments about Modernism,” Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, 2
nd
edition (New
York: Routledge, 2000), 104. Originally published in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), The Politics of Interpretation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 239-248.

120
culture. Only abstract Surrealism – that strand of Surrealism which Barr had designated
space for in his 1936 chart – had been able to sustain the interest of the next generation of
American artists such as Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists who explored abstract
Surrealism as a process to convey the synthesis of the internal and the eternal (that
unconscious impulse manifested in the material, physical trace upon the canvas).
Figurative Surrealism – the work of Dalí, Magritte and others – which mixed fluidly with
everyday life, was almost completely eclipsed by a definition of the avant-garde that
could not accommodate it as significant art.
However, this situation had shifted by the mid-1960s. The popularity of Pop art
marked a return to figuration that distinctly departed from Greenberg’s formalism. As
artists of the late 1950s and early 1960s, such as Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, asserted
the importance of common culture through the iconography of their works, figurative
Surrealism slowly returned to vogue so that, when MoMA mounted its 1965 René
Magritte exhibition, with a catalogue by James Thrall Soby, nearly every review
mentioned Magritte’s work as an integral antecedent for Pop art. Meanwhile Dalí surely
offered a precedent for the crafting of the artist into a celebrity – he was a constant figure
in gossip columns and society pages of the 1960s.
3
As Dada and Surrealism proved to
have a vibrant legacy in American art, a young art historian named William Rubin began
research on a scholarly account of the movements, and he was eventually asked to curate

3
Dalí also appeared on numerous television shows, including What’s My Line in 1951 and The Ed Sullivan
Show in 1961. See also “Dalí Has a ‘Happening’ in a Sewer,” Times Herald Tribune (February 28, 1966);
“Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, v. 39, n. 52 (February 15, 1964), 23-24; “Dalí in Wax,” St. Louis
Post Dispatch (Deceber 2, 1968); Thomas Thompson, “Mia: An Impish Actress Who’d Rather Play
Somebody Else,” Life Magazine (May 5, 1967). He starred in several television commercials as well – for
Baniff Airways in 1969, Lanvin Chocolates in 1970 and Alka-Selzer in 1974.

121
a Dada and Surrealism show at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition, which
became Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (1968), largely worked to establish
abstract Surrealism’s place institutionally in a formalist narrative of recent art but it also
included work by Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and such Pop artists as Claes
Oldenburg. The focus of this chapter is therefore twofold, as I analyze the critical
vicissitudes of Magritte’s art as an example of the critical and market effects that Pop art
had on figurative Surrealism and then move to show how the Museum of Modern Art’s
1968 exhibition, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, worked to shape the recent
history of American art through Surrealism, especially establishing the relationship
between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, a debt that was largely made evident by
Rubin’s exhibition,
4
even as some critics, for example Irving Sandler and Sidney Tillim,
largely refused to give credit for the New York School to the Surrealists.
5

Simultaneously, many artists and critics who disagreed with the narrow terms of
formalism cited the show to foreground the significance of Dada and Surrealism for Pop

4
A reviewer for Time credited Rubin’s exhibition for bringing the relationship between Surrealism and
Abstract Expressionism to light: “Considerably less well known than pop art’s debt to Dada is the seminal
influence exercised by the surrealists on U.S. abstract expressionism. The relationship has been obscured
until now, partly by the abstract expressionists themselves, who kept their early surrealistic canvases out of
sight” (“The Hobbyhorse Rides Again,” Time, v. 91, n. 14 (April 2, 1968), 84.

5
In his 1968 article on the Surrealists in the 1940s, Sandler wrote that “it was…particularly from the
Cubists, that the New Yorkers derived their conception of a modern picture” (Irving Sandler, “Dada,
Surrealism, and Their Heritage: The Surrealist Émigrés in New York,” Artforum, v. 6, n. 9 (May 1968),
29). In a 1966 article, Tillim wrote, “The only Surrealist whose paintings had any impact was Miró, and he
affected Gorky principally, and through him de Kooning. Pollock and Motherwell were doubtlessly
affected by Breton’s theory of automatism. But in every case the ultimate benefit of Surrealism was not
ideological; rather it made possible, in a wholly unexpected way, certain liberties in the handling of paint.
Pollock could drip, Motherwell could splash and Gorky could stain, the idea in every instance being the
‘opening’ of their own hand-me-down versions of Cubism. …Consequently, I believe the greater part of
Surrealism’s impact on Abstract Expressionism to have been more indirect than hitherto thought” (Sidney
Tillim, “Surrealism as Art,” Artforum, v. 5, n. 1 (September 1966), 71).

122
art, not based on the aesthetic values laid out in the exhibition, but on social and political
terms, further articulating a shift in the way American art and criticism was formulated.

Retrospectively Yours: Magritte and Pop

In 1965, René Magritte is reported to have asked with mock surprise, “‘Do the
Pop artists claim me? Excuse me, but I think Pop is window dressing, advertising art.”
6

One is tempted to think the dismissal ironic, in light of Magritte’s own close
collaboration with advertising and commercial display. Magritte’s ambivalence about
Pop was well-known; art historian Sarah Whitfield describes Magritte’s attitude as “a
total rejection” of Pop art. But despite the artist’s disavowals of the quality or necessity
of Pop art, critics cited Magritte’s oeuvre in concert with the characteristics and strategies
of the new movement. For example, at the conclusion of “Pop Culture, Metaphysical
Disgust and the New Vulgarians,” (1962) one of the first articles published in an art
magazine to focus on Pop art, Max Kozloff wrote “When Rosenquist paints a metallic
scoop of ice cream, or Dine a flesh-colored tie, for instance, they are pulling down
magical curtains over identity which Magritte had been ‘photographing’ all during the
fifties.”
7
Magritte did acknowledge a connection between Pop and the earlier generation
of the avant-garde. In 1965, Magritte said, “Yes, I know I’m called the father of Pop

6
Magritte quoted in Grace Glueck, “A Bottle is a Bottle,” New York Times (December 19, 1965).

7
Max Kozloff, “Pop Culture, Metaphysical Disgust and the New Vulgarians,” in Pop Art: The Critical
Dialogue (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1989), 21.

123
art…but Pop art is nothing but [a sugar-coated] version…of good old Dadaism…”
8
The
problem for Magritte was not a lack of formal connection, but that this seemingly
uncomplicated repackaging of Dada resulted in the sublimation of the avant-garde’s
original values.
In part, we can use Magritte to explore the consequences of being “claimed.” In
what ways did Magritte in particular and Surrealism in general offer an alternative
genealogy to the dominant narrative of art history as it had been presented up to the
1960s? In some ways, Magritte’s work can be brought into greater relief when divorced
from the context of Parisian Surrealism (in which he had not closely participated since
the mid-1930s). Although the connection between Magritte and contemporary art has
been readily acknowledged in recent years though exhibitions such as Magritte and
Contemporary Art, which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in
November 2006, art historians still tend to focus on Magritte’s forms and the ways in
which he juxtaposes his painted objects as a means of collage or on the more superficial
similarities between Magritte’s paintings and those of younger artists who borrow his

8
Magritte, remarks reported by Claude Vial, 1965, quoted in Henry Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images
(New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers: 1977), 68. In another interview, Magritte stated, “Are we
permitted to expect from pop art anything more than sugar-coated Dadaism?” (Magritte, quoted in Gablik,
Magritte (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1992, orig. 1970), 73). He continued, “…Provided we forget
Dadaism, and, since they claim a kinship with me, that we forget about me as well, the pop art people will
one day show us, perhaps, unexpected images of the unknown, and thus they will satisfy our desire for
efficacious poetry” (Ibid.) Grace Glueck also relates an anecdote in which Magritte, asked at the height of
Pop art’s popularity which American artists he admired, answered Caspar David Friedrich, a nineteenth-
century German painter. In another interview he singled out Jasper Johns’s work: “The humour of Pop Art
is rather ‘orthodox,’ it is within the reach of any successful window-dresser: to paint large American flags
with one star more or less does not require any particular freedom of mind and does not present any
technical difficulty” (Magritte, interview for Belgian television program “Dieu est-il pop?” aired on
January 20, 1965, quoted in Sarah Whitfield, Magritte (London: South Bank Centre, 1992), 17).

124
motifs.
9
As new artists took up not only his iconography, but also many of his Surrealist
strategies, Magritte provides a case study three years prior to William Rubin’s
groundbreaking Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage show of 1968, which will be a
large focus of this chapter, that demonstrates the responses and critical negotiations that
took place between the Surrealists and what was going to be considered their heritage.
Thanks to Pop art, Magritte’s paintings, which had before the 1960s been couched
in a sense of the bizarre and the Freudian, began to be discussed for their attention to the
everyday. “Everything interests me,” Magritte was quoted as saying in Newsweek, “the
banal if you wish, and that’s why I find a union between the sky, a room, a casket, a bed
and a tuba.”
10
The banal had not only come into fashion in the early 1960s, but the new
saturated reality as depicted in Pop paintings and collages even began to seem a bit like
the surrealist dream. Though Magritte’s style remained constant from 1948 (which was
indeed a return to his style from the mid-1920s through 1946) until the end of his life in
1967, the tone of the criticism on Magritte shifted during the 1950s and the 1960s, as Pop
emerged. In the 1950s, Magritte had been accused of being a literary painter “who gives
us little pictorial quality.”
11
Magritte’s paintings, though praised for their technical

9
Indeed, Magritte’s forms do maintain a certain collage-like autonomy within the picture plane, but it is not
with the same intention (or result) as the Minimalist sculpture or modernist collages with which Magritte’s
works have been linked since his death. Michael Fried draws the comparison with Minimalist sculptors in
“Art and Objecthood,” which I quote below; William Rubin (as well as subsequent scholars such as Sarah
Whitfield) makes a connection between Magritte and collage (Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, 93).

10
“The Square Surrealist,” Newsweek (January 3, 1966), 57.

11
Cyril Connolly, 1956, quoted in Shattuck, “This Is Not René Magritte,” Artforum (September 1966), 32.

125
facility,
12
were considered “froth,”
13
or in the words of another reviewer, “droll but
peripheral.”
14
By 1961, Magritte was “a master of twentieth-century fantasy,” according
to The New York Times; five years later, in 1966, fantasy had been replaced by the
everyday and what distinguished Magritte for the Times critic was “the insistent and
deliberate banality of the pictorial elements he chooses to juggle.”
15
Critic Max Kozloff
also recanted his earlier opinion of Magritte, writing in 1965, “…now, after Johns and
Pop art…there seems something not only more cagey and owlish in Magritte but more
profound and liberating as well.”
16
Even James Thrall Soby, who, as I discussed in the
previous chapter, had been a persistent supporter of Surrealism, admitted, “Of all modern
artists whom I misjudged badly in my youth, the one about whom I feel most repentant
is…René Magritte. I wrote in my first book on art, After Picasso, that his paintings ‘wear
thin, like puns too often repeated.’ I don’t understand how I could have been so
wrong…”
17
However, as MoMA archivist Rona Roob has pointed out, Soby was

12
An emphasis on technical facility carried a rather retrograde stigma at this time, for it was associated with
the academic tradition rejected by the avant-garde. “M. Magritte never achieved the popular success of that
sage showman, Salvador Dalí, although his craftsmanship is just as masterly” (“About Art,” Cue (March
17, 1951), 13); “…Magritte proves that he has all the technical facility of the best surrealists” (“Surrealism
with a Smile,” Time, v. 65, n. 13 (March 16, 1953), 77.

13
“Bored Funnyman,” Time, v. 61, n. 5 (February 2, 1953), 53.

14
Thomas B. Hess, “Rene Magritte [ Janis],” Art News, v. 53, n. 2 (April 1954), 43.

15
John Canaday, “Magritte-Courbet,” New York Times (October 22, 1961) and John Canaday, “Art:
Retrospective for René Magritte,” New York Times (December 15, 1965) 42.

16
Max Kozloff, “Epiphanies of Artifice,” The Nation (January 10, 1966), 55.

17
James Thrall Soby, “The Changing Stream,” (originally c. 1971) The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-
Century: Continuity and Change (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 220.

126
mistaken and had entirely failed to mention Magritte in his 1935 book.
18
This quote
instead comes from Soby’s 1941 study The Early Chirico.
19
Nonetheless, Soby’s opinion
of Magritte had clearly changed over time, and, as an influential member of the
exhibition committee at the Museum of Modern Art, it was likely that he had a role in
suggesting Magritte for a one-man show at the museum.
20

When in December 1965, a major retrospective of Magritte’s work opened at the
Museum of Modern Art with Soby as co-director of the exhibition, nearly every review
discussed Magritte’s significance for Pop art. Magritte came to the United States for the
first time in 1965 on the occasion of his exhibition at MoMA where he attended the
opening, posing in front of his paintings for publicity photographs while dressed, as was
so often the case, in his trademark suit and bowler hat (Figure 2.1).
21
The exhibition,

18
Rona Roob, notes to “The Changing Stream,” The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: Continuity
and Change (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 227. Though Soby did not discuss Magritte’s
work in 1935, he was familiar enough with Magritte’s oeuvre in 1936 to pose for a portrait wearing a
bowler hat and suit jacket standing within a picture frame and looking very much like a figure in a Magritte
painting.

19
Soby writes, “His [Magritte’s] paintings are full of transformation which could not have been invented by
a lesser poet. The difficulty with them is that once the transformations have been accepted and their shock
absorbed, the paintings themselves sometimes wear thin, like puns too often repeated” (James Thrall Soby,
The Early Chirico (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1941), 95-96).

20
In a 1970 interview, Soby explained, “the way that thing worked was that here was an exhibition
committee. And that committee, which I was on, would decide which artists were to be given a one-man
show. Now directing the show meant assembling the pictures, writing the catalogue, installing the show,
doing everything; in other words, you were in charge of the whole project. So when the Tchelitchew show
came along it was approved by the committee and they asked me to do it. And I did it. And that’s what
happened with all the other shows up to Magritte, which was the last show I did for the Museum” (James
Thrall Soby, interview with Paul Cummings, July 7, 1970, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution).

21
Magritte often wore the bowler hat for publicity purposes but was not in the habit of wearing it on a daily
basis (Sotheby’s, The Remaining Contents of the Studio of Rene Magritte (London: Sotheby’s, July 2,
1987), n.p.). The Menil Foundation has in its archives a series of photographs of Rene Magritte attending a
rodeo in Simonton, Texas, where the Menils took the painter as part of his visit. A cowboy hat has
replaced the more familiar bowler, but beyond that, Magritte makes little attempt to blend into the
127
entitled René Magritte, was co-directed by William Seitz and James Thrall Soby.
22
By
September 1965, the show had become twice as large as originally planned
23
and the
directors had to turn away museums that wanted to co-sponsor the exhibition. Though
American museums held exhibitions of Magritte’s work in 1961, 1962 and 1964 – the
earliest at the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Art and the Houston Museum of Fine
Arts, followed by a retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and an
exhibition presented at the University of St. Thomas, Houston and the Arkansas Art
Center in Little Rock – none of these shows traveled outside of the Midwest. Dickran
Tashjian credits MoMA’s ability to create cultural buzz for the active solicitation of its
1965 Magritte show.
24

southwestern environment. Magritte is dressed, as always, in a suit, and at his polished shoes is the
Magritte’s beloved Pomeranian Lulu, who stands alert. Magritte’s expression is bemused, and he remains
bourgeois through and through.

22
MoMA initially contacted James Thrall Soby, who had authored several books on the Surrealists,
including Dalí’s 1941 MoMA exhibition catalogue, to curate the show but he declined, citing medical
difficulties, and instead wrote the catalogue text. The responsibility for selecting and hanging the works
was given to William Seitz, who was, at the time, the curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture
Exhibitions. Seitz left the museum before the show opened to become a director of the Rose Art Museum
and Professor of Fine Arts at Brandeis. The Belgian Government also gave its official sponsorship to the
exhibition.

23
See letter from James Thrall Soby to René Magritte, September 24, 1965, René Magritte exhibition files,
Museum of Modern Art archives.

24
Dickran Tashjian, “Magritte’s Last Laugh: A Surrealist’s Reception in America,” Magritte and
Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images (Los Angeles: LACMA, 2006), 57. It was also in 1965, that
Patrick Waldberg, who associated with the Surrealists, published his study of Magritte, which, in addition
to James Thrall Soby’s catalogue, became the large-scale English-language publication on the artist. (See
Patrick Waldberg, René Magritte (Brussels: André de Rache, 1965).

128
Figure 2.1
Throughout its run, the MoMA exhibition was extremely popular and by 1966,
when it toured the country, presented at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the
Art Institute of Chicago, the Pasadena Art Museum and the University Art Museum at
Berkeley, Surrealism was being actively rediscovered and newly reinterpreted by both the
public and art historians. Lecturing at several venues of the exhibition, historian and
literature critic Roger Shattuck offered new theoretical interpretations of Magritte to
American audiences.
25
When Magritte became aware of the lecture through his lawyer

25
At the newly inaugurated University Art Museum at Berkeley, the small temporary gallery received over
1000 visitors a day during the run of the show and more than 800 were in attendance at Professor Roger
Shattuck’s lecture on Magritte held on Berkeley’s campus in conjunction with the exhibition. Director
Peter Selz reported to the Chancellor Roger Heyns, “Professor Roger Shattuck, of the University of Texas,
spoke on ‘Rene Magritte Framed’ and the response was most gratifying. Not only did we fill rooms 155
Dwinelle (capacity 453) and 145 Dwinelle Hall (capacity 285), but we had an overflow crowd. After the
lecture we opened the Gallery to the public and over 300 people went to visit the show. This is just one
more indication of the response we have been able to stimulate on campus” (Peter Selz, letter to Robert W.
Heyns, October 14, 1966, Berkeley Art Museum archives). The exact number of visitors was 32,330 for
the run of the exhibition or about 1,198 per day (Berkeley Art Museum archives). Tom L. Freundenheim,
Assistant Director of the University Art Museum, wrote that the show was a “huge success…with record
crowds every day…” (Tom L. Freundenheim, letter to Henry Torczyner, October 14, 1966, Berkeley Art
Museum archives). Dickran Tashjian briefly mentioned that the buzz generated by the Magritte exhibition
at Berkeley “spilled into a campus still in the throes of the Free Speech movement” (Dickran Tashjian,
“Magritte’s Last Laugh,” 60). It is interesting to speculate if Magritte’s paintings, which demonstrate the
way words can be used to question and even negate a bourgeois reality, might have encapsulated the
129
Henry Torczyner, he deeply objected to Shattuck’s theories about his paintings being
puns based on arbitrary pages from a Larousse dictionary.
26
Indeed, Magritte had a
history of trying to control the commentary on his work, though he himself always
presented a nonchalant attitude when discussing it. His lawyer complained to the curator
of the exhibition, “We have just drafted and passed legislation in New York to protect the
public from fakes in art and perhaps the time has come to establish a consumer’s union to
protect artists, art lovers, and above all art students, from being fed false theories about
artists. When something perfectly nonsensical is being written about a dead painter we
say, well what a shame, the man cannot talk back, but really what is the living artist to do
when during his life time fables are concocted about his views and work?”
27

Shattuck’s lecture appeared as an article in Artforum’s special issue on
Surrealism, published in September 1966 (Figure 2.2). The increased interest in Magritte
was part of a larger trend that found in Surrealism a precedent for the art that emerged in
the late 1950s and 1960s. The magazine’s cover was designed by contemporary artist Ed
Ruscha. In the mixed media collage, Surrealism Soaped and Scrubbed, the word

frustration of the students who demonstrated for their right to free speech and political organization on the
Berkeley campus in Fall 1964.

26
Shattuck proposes that Magritte, looking at pages of Larousse’s dictionary, makes references to the
nearby entries in his works, particularly for the painting The Soul of Bandits (1960) (Roger Shattuck, “This
is Not René Magritte,” Artforum (September 1966), 32-35). Magritte may have been particularly peeved
because a new version of Larousse published in 1958 denied Magritte an entry, while including the name
of a rival Belgian Surrealist painter, Paul Delvaux (Sarah Whitfield, Magritte, London: The South Bank
Centre, 1992), 13).

27
Henry Torczyner, letter to William Seitz, September 22, 1966, Berkeley Art Museum archives.
Torczyner continued, “When something perfectly nonsensical is being written about a dead painter we say,
well what a shame, the man cannot talk back, but really what is the living artist to do when during his life
time fables are concocted about his views and work? Is he supposed to have a clipping service retain
advisers and counsel to prevent such stuff from being injected into the blood stream of the so-called
academic world?” (Ibid.)

130
“surrealism” seems dynamic, rising up diagonally off the page in straightforward
typeface. The letters rest rather than recede into space – they contrast with the whimsy
associated with bubbles and their elusive nature. Light catches the bubbles, in some
places underscoring their physical, if momentary, materiality, but in other places the
bubbles are flattened to soapy abstractions that, pressed against the blue-green
background, look almost reptilian. There is a play here not only with transparency and
opacity but also with temporality and transformation. In the 1960s, Surrealism –
represented in Ruscha’s cover by a dense, paradoxically rational, font – stands up to the
previous decade’s notions of art in its own autonomous bubble. But the concept of
Surrealism was nonetheless porous, open to appropriation and interpretation.
Figure 2.2
Despite their choice to dedicate a special issue to the movement, even the editors
of Artforum demonstrated the ambivalence toward Surrealism characteristic of art
criticism of the 1960s. As Amy Newman notes in the introduction to her oral history of
Artforum, while there were many approaches represented by the writers in the journal,
131
“there is no question that formalism was its [Artforum’s] sanctioned method and its most
potent legacy, leaving scars on many artists and critics and inspiring severe reactions by
many others.”
28
It was curious then, that a formalist-oriented magazine – many of whose
editors were influenced by Clement Greenberg’s notions of modernist painting – would
chose to do an issue on Surrealism. Philip Leider recalls that “the reason I decided to
devote a whole issue to Surrealism wasn’t deep. I think it was just that I had to come out
with an issue at the beginning of the season when there was no copy.”
29
Though it was his
idea, Leider was disappointed with the issue: “I regarded the Surrealist issue as terrible. I
didn’t see anything new in it. …The idea was mine, and everybody I respected laughed at
it. Michael [Fried] didn’t want any part of it…Frank [Stella] hated it. Because nobody
had any use for Surrealism.”
30
Leider fails to acknowledge that it was in this September
1966 issue of Artforum that William Rubin presented his ideas of Dada and Surrealism
for the first time in print that would later shape his highly influential exhibition, Dada,
Surrealism and Their Heritage at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. Editor Robert
Pincus-Witten recalls that the issue:

28
Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2000), 7. As Hilton
Kramer recalls, “For many of us Artforum really acquired an existence or an importance because of the
mainly formalist criticism that Artforum published under Phil Leider. At that time it was mainly associated
with Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Barbara Rose somewhat less so – critics we thought of as ‘School of
Greenberg’” (Ibid.).

29
Philip Leider, quoted in Amy Newman, Challenging Art, 153. Leider makes a point of saying that he did
not do the issue for William Rubin (though three of the articles were Rubin’s, and later appeared as parts of
his forthcoming book). “It [the decision to do the issue] wasn’t because of William Rubin. … He liked
Surrealism but he also liked Noland, where as nobody else did: If you liked Noland you couldn’t like
Surrealism. So we thought of him as a kind of father figure, balanced, mature” (Ibid.).

30
Ibid., 191.

132
pointed to Surrealism as a significant alternative tradition. You musn’t
minimize that Artforum’s writers all bore the heavy imprint of Clement
Greenberg. And Surrealism had no existence for Clem except as
something to be overcome, to be shed. The issue was an extraordinary
thing, a ratification or a codification of this alternative tradition. …A bit
later, there was Bill Rubin’s Surrealism show at the Museum of Modern
Art. So Surrealism became very important again.
31

Surrealism was a divisive issue for art criticism. Particularly in the pages of Artforum, it
became an issue around which to debate another tradition for modern art, oftentimes
discussed using the methodology of the critical tendency through which it had been
marginalized.
32

By the mid-1960s, Magritte was subject to the same re-examination being devoted
to Dada and Surrealism as a whole. But while his work was being appreciated by a new
audience,
33
Magritte fastidiously continued to maintain the persona of a quiet member of
the Belgian bourgeoisie. As Dickran Tashjian has recently pointed out though, “by the
1960s, a bourgeois artist seemed as mysterious as one of Magritte’s own paintings.”
34
As
one reviewer wrote in 1965, “One would never suspect that Monsieur Magritte in his neat

31
Robert Pincus-Witten, quoted in Amy Newman, Challenging Art, 192.

32
Robert Rosenblum also notes that Artforum had been late coming to Pop Art: “One of the ways Artforum
was deficient in the ‘60s was in not coming to grips with Pop Art. There was always a sense in the
Artforum world that art had to be much more unpolluted than Andy Warhol’s, that its flavor had to be
minimal and cerebral” (Robert Rosenblum, quoted in Amy Newman, Challenging Art, 194).

33
Commenting on the show’s popularity, one reviewer wrote, “His work has pulled in the housewife and
the teen-ager with a casual interest in art as well as the more sophisticated college crowd and the denizens
of our art culture” (Walter Barker, “Magritte’s Dislocations of Reality,” Sunday Post Dispatch (St. Louis),
(January 9, 1966).

34
Dickran Tashjian, “Magritte’s Last Laugh: A Surrealist’s Reception in America,” Magritte and
Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, edited by Stephanie Barron and Michel Draguet (Los
Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2006), 61.

133
dark suit and bowler hat is an artist.”
35
This may be why it is not surprising that
Magritte’s reputation as a kind of impostor was then frequently reported in the press. As
one critic wrote, “Magritte is a clever con man, and the quiet attire and the air of
propriety of his subjects are part of the act.”
36
Or, in BBC filmmaker George Melly’s
words, “He is a secret agent, his object to bring into disrepute the whole apparatus of
bourgeois reality. Like all saboteurs, he avoids detection by dressing and behaving just
like everybody else.”
37
So widespread was this notion that these words were repeated on
the first page of MoMA’s Magritte catalogue
38
and alluded to by the Museum’s Director
of Publication, Elizabeth Shaw.
39
The reviewer for Apollo wrote, “Like a secret agent
who captures an enemy radio station in order to transmit false messages, he is most
damaging when he seems to be on our wave-length. He works stealthily and primly in the

35
Florence Berkman, “Magritte Aims to Evoke Mystery of Life in Art,” Hartford Times (December 15,
1965).

36
Hennig Cohen, “The Art of Possibility,” Reporter, February 10, 1966, 51.

37
George Melly, Magritte, BBC Films, working script, 1965. This quote is repeated in Henry J. Seldis, Los
Angeles Times, August 14, 1966 and in Executive, September 1966.

38
See James Thrall Soby, René Magritte (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965), 7. Harry Torcznyer,
Magritte’s lawyer and a collector of his paintings who acted as an intermediary between Magritte and Soby
during the exhibition’s planning stages, commented directly on the line: “With respect to Melly’s pertinent
remark about Magritte as a secret agent, one is reminded of Magritte’s love for detective stories, his
admiration for his fellow compatriot, Georges Simenon’s (of Liege) Maigret [a protagonist in a series of
detective novels] and the fact that he painted Fantômas in the early twenties. Magritte is a revolutionary
artist in every sense of the word, and your Indian label is most fortunate” (Harry Torczyner, letter to James
Thrall Soby, MoMA archives, Magritte exhibition, (September 7, 1965).

39
In a letter to George Hellman of the New Yorker, Shaw writes, “[Except for three years], Magritte has
spent all his adult life in Brussels, where he lives, so they say, in the disguise of an ordinary businessman”
(Elizabeth Shaw, letter to George Hellman, MoMA archives, Magritte exhibition, Records of the
Department of Public Information II.B.459 (December 15, 1965).

134
effort to overthrow reason by profoundly dislocating reality.”
40
By the time of the
painter’s death in 1967, the comment had been attributed to Magritte himself: “‘He used
to call himself a secret agent,’ one of the artist’s friends recalled yesterday. ‘By that I
suppose he meant to allude to the contrast between his appearance and his reality. He
looked like a small-town banker, but under the banker’s innocent allures Magritte was a
very revolutionary personality.’”
41

But Magritte as a secret agent did not fit in particularly well, sticking out from the
narrative of modernism, where he operated at the fringe of French Surrealism – which
itself, as I have been discussing, betrays a fraught relationship with the history of modern
art. Even when he moved from Brussels to Paris in 1927, Magritte settled in a suburb of
the city and returned to Brussels three years later, where he resided until his death. As a
Surrealist in Belgium, Magritte was particularly close with the writer Paul Nougé, who
was a prominent organizer of both the Surrealist movement in Belgium, as well as the
Belgian Communist Party (which he helped to founded in 1919) and believed, “the
subversive act must be discreet.”
42
Magritte himself declared that:
It must be realized that the revolutionary artist is heir to a complex of habits and
troubled feelings. … This is why he tries to realize certain objects (books,
paintings, etc.) which he hopes will ruin the prestige of bourgeois myths. The

40
Stuart Preston, “Solemn Canonization of the Irrational,” Apollo, v. 83 (February 1966), 155.

41
Quoted in John Canaday, “René Magritte, Surrealist Painter, Dies in Brussels,” New York Times (August
16, 1967).

42
Paul Nougé, quoted in Sarah Whitfield, Magritte (London: The South Bank Centre, 1992), 26. Nougé’s
review Correspondance, first published in November 1924, “seized the attention of the Paris Surrealists
and from then on Surrealism in Belgium was dominated by Nougé” who became a close friend and mentor
to Magritte soon after they met in 1925 (David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield, René Magritte: Catalogue
Raisonné, v. I (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 48).

135
real value of art is a function of its power of liberating revelation. And nothing
confers on the artist any superiority whatsoever in the order of human labor.
The artist does not practice the priesthood that bourgeois duplicity tries to
attribute to him. Let him not, however, lose sight of the fact that his effort, like
that of every worker, is necessary to the dialectic development of the world.
43

When Magritte wrote these words, with Louis Scutenaire in 1939, he did not yet
officially belong to the Communist party, which he joined as paid-up member in 1945,
though he had been a Marxist thinker long before that. It is ironic however that Magritte
here righteously assumes the role of the hard-working laborer, whereas elsewhere he
seemingly embraces the role of bourgeois burgher, a characterization that would almost
propose itself on photographic evidence alone, even if reviewers had not commented so
consistently on his middle-class appearance. Thus Magritte was never quite assimilated
by American audiences, despite, or perhaps because of, critics’ insistence upon his
bourgeois demeanor – often presented paradoxically as if it were an artistic quirk to take
comfort in if one were too troubled by the artist’s bewildering images.
In the United States, Magritte had fairly frequent gallery shows in his standard
style throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps his most important show, prior to the
1960s, was Sidney Janis’s Word vs. Image, held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1954,
where, almost a quarter-century after it was made, Magritte’s Treachery of Images was
first exhibited, and reproduced, in the U.S.
44
The catalogue for the show included a
translation of Magritte’s now famous essay, “Words and Images.” In a 1972 interview,

43
René Magritte and Louis Scutenaire, “Bourgeois Art,” 157.

44
The reproduction was published in Arts Digest to accompany Robert Rosenblum’s review of Janis’s
exhibition. This is also one of the first reviews to describe Magritte’s paintings as detached and matter-of-
fact, as opposed to the previous characterization of his paintings as personal dream fantasies. See Robert
Rosenblum, “Magritte’s Surrealist Grammar,” Art Digest (March 15, 1954), 16.

136
Janis recalled that the show was a commercial failure, but, “…If we repeated today what
we did then, the show…would be a smashing success. It was a case of timing. The timing
was wrong.”
45
Nonetheless, the show was important – it was the first American
exhibition that grouped Magritte’s works thematically, and it was at this show that Jasper
Johns first encountered Magritte’s work.
46
In the early 1960s, Johns acquired The
Interpretation of Dreams (1935) (Figure 2.3). In his word paintings, Magritte juxtaposes
objects with discordant signifiers in neat compartments. Juxtaposed with instantly
recognizable images such as a clock, or a jug, Magritte’s regularized handwriting appears
to label and thereby rename these items “the wind,” and “the bird,” respectively. When
Lawrence Alloway wrote about Pop art, he did so in terms that could easily be applied to
Magritte’s work. Like Magritte’s images, Pop art was “an art about signs and sign-
systems…Pop art is an iconographical art…; there is an interplay of likeness and
unlikeness.”
47
The naming of these things is meant to appear largely arbitrary, until of
course we come to a confluence of registers—the doubly referenced valise. In such a
context though, the association of word and image seems almost accidental, confirmation
that total arbitrariness will yield some correspondence, here reframed as complete

45
Sidney Janis, interviewed by Paul Cummings, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, (May 9, 1972). In
an interview in 1967, Sidney Janis described the show: “Well, the exhibition that we did on “Word vs.
Image” was a dismal failure; I think we sold one picture, and that picture was bought by Saul Steinberg”
(Sidney Janis, Interview, conducted by Helen M. Franc, MoMA archives (June 15, 1967)).

46
See Roberta Bernstein, “René Magritte and Jasper Johns: Making Thoughts Visible,” in Magritte and
Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, edited by Stephanie Barron and Michel Draguet (Los
Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2006), 109-123.

47
Lawrence Alloway, American Pop Art (New York: Collier Books, 1974), 7.

137
coincidence.
48
Foucault describes such activity as “an art more committed than any other
to the careful and cruel separation of graphic and plastic elements,”
49
but it is as much a
combination as it is a separation. Magritte’s disjunctive sets unite objects and words in a
way that undercuts discourse, not allowing them to amount to anything more substantive
than their painted qualities.
Figure 2.3

48
As Magritte offered by way of explanation in his lecture “La Ligne de Vie,” delivered on November 20,
1938 at the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp: “An object meets with its image. An
object meets with its name. It sometimes happens that the image and the name coincide” (René Magritte,
“La Ligne de Vie,” reprinted in Magritte: 1898-1967. Edited by Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque and Frederik Leen
(Ludion Press: Ghent. 1998, 47).

49
Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 35.

138
Jasper Johns’s 1956 Canvas seems to represent the same values (Figure 2.4). The
painting is covered in a splotchy blanket of blue, grey and white brushstrokes that is
framed by a frame that is painted. This frame, in turn, is framed by a canvas that it both
surrounds and is surrounded by. The elements of the work become locked in a
relationship in which they are interchangeable, conflated – both are painted, both frame –
and in doing so, lose their specificity. But the painting functions nonetheless. It lays bare
both the infinite possibility of the image, and also its potential for irrelevance. As
Roberta Bernstein has pointed out, art historian Leo Steinberg early on called attention to
the way Johns’s choice to paint flat objects enabled his works thoroughly to confuse the
object-image relationship, pushing Magritte’s conceptual illusionism even further.
50

Johns collapses the space between image and object. As Steinberg wrote, “You can’t
smoke Magritte’s painted pipe, but you could throw a dart at a Johns target…”
51
Looking
at Johns’ Target with Four Faces (1955), one is struck by its similarity to Magritte’s
painting of thirty years earlier, The Shooting Gallery (1925) (Figures 2.5 and 2.6). Both
paintings display a target as the central focus of the image. Above the target, in Johns’s
work, are parts of four plaster faces in small boxes, which can be closed. The stretcher
itself is thick – pushing the canvas forward at least two inches from the wall and into the

50
Roberta Bernstein, “René Magritte and Jasper Johns: Making Thoughts Visible,” Magritte and
Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, edited by Stephanie Barron and Michel Draguet (Los
Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2006), 111. In The Shooting Gallery, Magritte paints a
target in deep recession with a head upsidedown in the space before it. Johns, in his Target with Four
Faces, presents a three-dimensional target that actually hangs in space. Because of Johns’s use of encaustic,
the target’s painted surface announces its materiality, as the shadows cast by the wooden framework
enhance the recession of the faces.

51
Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” Other Criteria: Confrontations with
Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 42.

139
viewer’s space. In Magritte’s The Shooting Gallery, a painted upside down face – also
seemingly of plaster – hangs above a painted target which is placed in a room that is
meant to convey a sense of three-dimensional recession. Yet it is unlikely that Johns ever
saw Magritte’s painting or a reproduction.
52
Nonetheless, Johns thoroughly has absorbed
the principles that drive Magritte’s picture, and, as Kozloff noted, brought them into the
world of objects.
Figure 2.4

52
According to Magritte’s catalogue raisonné, the painting was first exhibited in Tokyo in 1971 and first
illustrated in that exhibition’s catalogue (David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield, René Magritte Catalogue
Raisonné, v. I (New York: Rizzoli Publications, 1992), 164).

140
Figure 2.5
Figure 2.6
When Johns’s works were shown together for the first time at the Leo Castelli
Gallery in 1958, his art was immediately compared to Dada, and he was called by
141
Steinberg, “the Surrealist of naming things.”
53
Johns, along with Robert Rauschenberg,
was thereafter increasingly recognized for insisting on the common object in art, and, as
Pop developed as a movement in the 1960s, its ties to, and manipulation of, the real were
coded in the various names critics gave to the new art: commonism, new realism, and,
perhaps most significantly, neo-Dada. The anxiety over the distinction between art and
life initiated by Dada and Surrealism more than a generation earlier was taken up in many
ways by the Pop artists. Some critics went so far as to call Pop art irrational itself: “The
overt irrationality as found in the scale and repetition of everyday banalities that marks
the best of pop, can be seen… as a further extension of the somnambulant irrationality
found in many of Magritte’s scenes.”
54
In the 1930s when Surrealism had first been
introduced to the U.S., the American art-going public (who knew little of Surrealism’s
political ideals or literary affinities) embraced the irrationality that they saw before them
as a symptom of the modern age. Twenty-five years later, Pop too was immediately seen
as an expression of contemporary sensibilities – the exponential proliferation of the mass
media, mass products, and mass culture.

However, Dada and Surrealism, while engaging
with mass culture, were both firmly committed to deposing – or at least disrupting - the
status quo and Surrealism had been blatantly revolutionary in its ideological aims. The
parallel between Pop and the earlier movements was questioned by those, like Stanley
Kunitz, who recognized Dada’s passionate revolt against society and found Pop instead

53
Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” Other Criteria: Confrontations with
Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).

54
Henry J. Seldis, Los Angeles Times, August 14, 1966.

142
to be dispassionately announcing its embrace of bourgeois culture.
55
In citing Dada and
Surrealism, Pop was criticized by some for making “itself dependent upon the myths of
art history for its aesthetic integrity.”
56
Pop did not provoke in the same way that Dada
did, but merely “tease[d] and titillate[d],” as John Canaday wrote in The New York
Times.
57
For Canaday, Pop was trivial; critic Hilton Kramer’s take was far more serious.
According to Kramer, “[Pop’s] social effect is simply to reconcile us to a world of
commodities, banalities, and vulgarities – which is to say, an effect indistinguishable
from advertising. This is a reconciliation that must – now more than ever – be refused, if
art – and life itself- is to be defended against the dishonesties of…pretentious
commerce.”
58

Some critics early on recognized that Pop was not necessarily an embrace of
capitalist values, but could be understood as a send-up and therefore a critique of them.
At the same symposium where Kramer voiced his apprehensions, art historian Leo
Steinberg asserted that Pop was not about conformity at all: “the idea seemed to be to
out-bourgeois the bourgeois, to move in on him, unset him, play his role with a
vengeance.”
59
This of course could be said of Magritte in his bowler hat too.
60
Pop’s

55
Stanley Kunitz, “Discussion: Symposium on Pop Art,” Arts Magazine (April 1963), 44.

56
Hilton Kramer, “A Symposium on Pop Art,” Arts Magazine (April 1963), 38.

57
John Canaday, New York Times Magazine (June 5, 1960).

58
Hilton Kramer, “A Symposium on Pop Art,” Arts Magazine (April 1963), 39. Such rhetoric echoes that
of Clement Greenberg’s in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939).

59
Leo Steinberg, “A Symposium on Pop Art,” Arts Magazine (April 1963), 40.

60
Though I disagree with many of his points regarding Magritte, in Fred Miller Robinson’s study of the
iconography of the bowler hat in modernism, the author writes, “The bowler-hatted mad is clearly a ‘ready-
143
hyper-allegiance to society’s consumerism exposes capitalism’s version of reality, a
sometimes grotesque reduction to the level of object relations. But it also takes as its
premise that the subject for art can be those relations. As Lawrence Alloway wrote, “as
an alternative to an aesthetic that isolated visual art from life and from the other arts,
there emerged a new willingness to treat our whole culture as if it were art.”
61
Critic
Harold Rosenberg also acknowledged this aspect of Pop’s agenda, writing in The New
Yorker, “…Pop Art is hospitable to radical content. …In the United States, certain Pop
artists …have understood that an indispensable ingredient of avant-garde art, if it is not to
degenerate into parody, camp or school-room art history demonstrations, is social
dissent.”
62
Pop at its most powerful subverted not only social structures, but artistic ones
as well. As one art historian put it in 1968, “there are those who explain in ponderous
words the subtle differences between the dada movement of 30 to 50 years ago and the
pop art of the last decade, but they are essentially the same kind of revolt against
aesthetics and society itself.”
63
Overtly, Pop refused to conform to the revolutionary
history of art, acting as a sly commentary on both the originality of artistic revolution and
the limits of the avant-garde. And by pushing the products of society to the forefront, Pop

made’ figure, all of a piece, so composed as to be frozen: a bourgeois mannequin from the pages of
bourgeois couture advertisements” (Fred Miller Robinson, The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and
Iconography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1993). 134).

61
Lawrence Alloway, quoted in Max Kozloff, “American Painting during the Cold War,” Artforum, v. 11,
n. 9 (May 1973), originally “Popular Culture and Pop Art,” Studies in Popular Communication, Panthe
Record 7 (1969), 52.

62
Harold Rosenberg, “The Concept of Action in Painting,” The New Yorker, v. 44, n. 14 (May 25, 1968),
125.

63
D.K. Winebrenner, “Dada Another Word for Pop,” Buffalo Courier Express (April 14, 1968).

144
art also confronted the lingering formalist conservativism of the art world by offering a
promising testing ground for the power of the object, all the while reinforcing art’s own
status as commodity.
Sometimes, as in the case of Andy Warhol’s work, the object of focus included
those whose subjectivity had been objectified in the public eye. Celebrities were as much
the objects of consumption by society as commodities, and Warhol makes this idea
explicit in certain canvases that put on display the tragedy of society’s icons. In his 1966
work Two Jackies, Warhol uses silkscreen to repeat the image of Jacqueline Kennedy,
from a photograph taken of her at the funeral of her husband (Figure 2.7). The
expression on Jackie’s face is one of sad reconciliation, her gaze distant, fixed on some
unknown point. In the second depiction, Jackie is repeated, but her image becomes
grainier, softer, as if her evident grief, rather than rendering the viewer access to her
internal condition, instead causes her to fade away. The second image of Jackie is also
smaller, occupying less of the picture plane. The pixilated shadows and contours reveal
Warhol’s mechanistic reproduction of Jackie’s image through silkscreening, but also
underscores the photograph’s public status, its repeated appearance in newspapers or
perhaps, television and film reels.
145
Figure 2.7
Warhol plays with the tension between our desire to identify with Jackie and our
irreducible distance from her. We cannot really access Jackie because she operates not
only as a person, but as a symbol. However, in choosing an image of Jackie in the
immediate aftermath of her husband’s death, Warhol alters Jackie, turning her into a
figure of mourning, rather than a pinnacle of American ideals. As Tom Crow has written
of the subtle political implications of Warhol’s work, “The spectacle of overwhelming
Western affluence was the ideological weapon in which the Kennedy administration had
made its greatest investment and it is striking to find Warhol seizing on that image and
negating its received political meaning (affluence equals freedom and individualism) in
an effort to explain his work.”
64

Warhol’s audience had seen him playing with the personal and the symbolic
before, in his images of Campbell’s soup cans. At times Warhol has asked us to believe

64
Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters,” Andy Warhol (edited by Annette Michelson), (Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press, 2001), 51. Crow continues, “The principal thesis of this essay is that Warhol, though he
grounded his art in the ubiquity of the packaged commodity, produced his most powerful work by
dramatizing the breakdown of commodity exchange.” Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters,” Andy Warhol
(edited by Annette Michelson), (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001), 51.

146
the soup is personal, as when he told an interviewer that he chose the Campbell’s image
because he had consumed it every day in his youth. “I used to drink it. I used to have the
same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing, over and over again.
Someone said my life has dominated me; I liked that idea.”
65
Ostensibly there are
individual decisions to be made here – in Warhol’s earlier Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962),
in which each can was depicted on its own canvas, the viewer is still free to choose
between minestrone and cream of mushroom. But there is also a certain loss of self that
occurs when confronted with the mass replication of processed product. There may be
some variety within such an array, but soup is still the only thing on the menu, a symbol
of relentless merchandising, as Warhol demonstrates in the silk-screened (and thus itself
a play on mass production) 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962), which saturates the
canvas with its repetitive imagery (Figure 2.8). As Crow argues, “though [Warhol]
grounded his art in the ubiquity of the packaged commodity, [he] produced his most
powerful work by dramatizing the breakdown of commodity exchange.”
66
For Warhol,
that breakdown could come in the form of car accidents or tainted tuna fish cans, but it
could also be more subtly found in the overwhelming desire to consume the icons of the
age.

65
Warhol, interview with Gene R. Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters,” Art News
v. 62 (November 1963). This quote can also be found on the official Campbell’s Soup Company website.
Two years after Warhol painted his famous soup cans, the company stock split 3-to-1.

66
Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters,” Andy Warhol (edited by Annette Michelson), (Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press, 2001), 51.

147
Figure 2.8
It is another breakdown of systems that drives one of Magritte’s most famous
paintings, The Treachery of Images (1929) (Figure 2.9). The work presents us with a
representational equation that, after the initial realization, requires (but does not demand)
further inspection. We know that this is not a pipe. It is an image of a pipe, or a
representation of a pipe, or a symbolic description of a pipe, but it is definitely not a pipe.
In Magritte’s now iconic painting, the pipe, which is certainly a consumer object, is also a
signal of a set of conceptions about the capitalist world to which it belongs.
67
It is also an
object that had been around for centuries, and, like Warhol’s soupcans, not a new or
particularly desirable commodity. We are not allowed to consume this object before us,
because of Magritte’s insistent reminder of the artifice of art. The glossy sheen on

67
David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield remark on Robert Hughes’ idea that the source for Magritte’s pipe
may have come from the image of a pipe reproduced at the conclusion of Le Corbusier’s treatise Towards a
New Architecture (David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield, Rene Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, v. I, edited
by David Sylvester (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 332). Hughes writes that Corbusier’s pipe was an object of
“plain functional design. Five years later, Magritte painted his riposte to Corbusier’s single-level
rationalism in The Treason of Images” (Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Alfred Knopf,
Inc, 1980), 244). For Corbusier, the pipe seems to stand in for the way that architecture will serve and
preserve society. Given the last two lines of the book are “Architecture or Revolution. Revolution can be
avoided,” it seems fitting that Magritte might take this legible symbol of infrastructure and rewrite it to
reject Corbusier’s declaration that revolution can be avoided (Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture,
translated by Frederick Etchells (New York: Payson & Clark, Ltd., 1928), 289).

148
polished wood that meagerly attempts to model the pipe into three-dimensionality falls
flat, as the streaks of whitish paint tapering at the mouthpiece cartoonishly resemble the
currents of smoke that can never be sucked from the body of this not-a-pipe. This
whiteness doubles as both a delineation of the solidity of the exterior and a distillation of
that solidity to reveal the hollowness of the interior. As both object and image, the pipe
is twice eviscerated, for such haziness operates also as a breaking through of the bland
background to infiltrate the painting’s foreground (if it could even be said to have either).
The image then pictures solid melting into air, background seeping through to foreground
and smoking apparatus being written out of existence. The pipe is both transparent and
opaque in its disturbance of the expected. As it is mimed by Magritte, the pipe –
ordinary, bourgeois – becomes the point from which to undermine not only the icons of
the everyday but the preconceptions upon which they depend.
Figure 2.9
Magritte sent a version of The Treachery of Images, with its words written in
English, to Julien Levy who mounted Magritte’s first one-man show in the United States
149
at his gallery in January 1936.
68
Magritte’s reception in 1936 was tepid at best. The Post
reported, “If Surrealism depended on a dullard like Magritte, it would die overnight.”
69

Concluding his review in the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell wrote, “Thus it
proves possible to unpack a surréaliste’s whole bag of tricks without batting an
eyelash.”
70
Four days later, Jewell wrote, “Magritte is almost wholly literary in his
meanderings and seldom produces anything worthy of discussion in terms, strictly
speaking, of art. Thematically, the stuff is quite what one would expect.”
71
Only an
unsigned review in the New York Sun, presumably by Henry McBride, had anything
positive to say: “He [Magritte] paints with great perspicacity and apparent innocence, but
fetches you up rather sharply, at times, when you are not suspecting.”
72
In retrospect,
McBride’s review was a prescient assessment of how Magritte’s works would come to be
seen in the 1960s.
Though Magritte’s first show in the United States was in 1936, a few years after
Surrealism was first introduced to America and 11 months before MoMA’s Fantastic Art,
Dada, Surrealism, Magritte did not receive his first one-man show in Paris until 1948,
more than 20 years after he had established himself as a painter.
73
The works done in

68
The show ran from January 3 – January 20, 1936.

69
“Magritte, Surrealist at Levy Gallery,” The New York Post (January 25, 1936).

70
Edward Alden Jewell, “Show Lists Works of Surrealist Art: Paintings of Rene Magritte Are Seen for
First Time Here at Julien Levy Gallery,” New York Times (January 8, 1936).

71
Edward Alden Jewell, New York Times (January 12, 1936).

72
Henry McBride, New York Sun, (January 11, 1936).

73
Magritte’s first one-man show was in Brussels in 1927 at the Galerie Le Centaure, and consisted of 49
paintings and 12 collages. According to Sylvester and Whitfield, “press reaction was mainly hostile” (See
150
anticipation of that show demonstrate the extent of Magritte’s irritation at this affront.
The paintings are departures from his earlier work: garish, sloppy and perhaps most
importantly, transparently subversive. Magritte mocks the viewer’s expectations of his
oeuvre, as well as of modern art in general. In The Cripple (1948), the single iconic pipe
is multiplied to eight, insisting so much on their use that they can be smoked from any
number of places, including the man’s bespectacled eye (Figure 2.10). The flames that
surround the misshapen figure, which in other paintings appear frozen and arbitrary, here
seem to have been conveniently employed to facilitate smoking. Meanwhile, Magritte’s
trademark bowler hat has been replaced by a red cap. Perhaps not unexpectedly, not a
single painting in the show sold. But Magritte’s blatant disdain for the market is a telling
instance of his willingness to sabotage himself (both in reputation and revenue) in order
to make a point.
74

David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield, René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, v. I (New York: Rizzoli, 1992),
68-69).

74
As Noëlle Roussel has pointed out, this was Magritte’s first and last one-man exhibition in Paris during
his lifetime and the reviews of the show were disdainful (Noëlle Roussel, “La Période Vache: A Latter Day
Epidemic,” Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, 2006) 177-187).

151
Figure 2.10
Indeed there might have been something to Magritte’s reputation as a secret
agent, masquerading as an innocent bourgeois burgher. Critics in the United States in the
1960s did not seem to want to believe that Magritte led a rather boring life, painting on a
schedule in the afternoons, living peacefully in a suburban section of Brussels.
75

Magritte’s persistent desire to identify himself with his paintings especially betrays such
a characterization. Photographs of Magritte demonstrate his proclivity for posing with his
paintings, and we know from several sources that he often pictured himself as a surrogate

75
Several reviews comment on Magritte’s bourgeois lifestyle. A 1961 review in Time comments: “At 63
(‘I’m getting older; I get toothaches and headaches, and there’s nothing I can do about it’), Magritte lives in
a comfortable unbohemian house near Brussels, quietly damning a good deal of what other artists are
doing” (“Mystery Maker,” Time, v. 78, n. 18 (November 3, 1961), 67). A 1966 spread in Esquire reiterated
the same observation: “His life is deliberately possessed of the same irradicable air of banality as his
painting. Magritte has lived for years in a Brussels suburb on a bourgeois street…” (“This Is Not Magritte,”
Esquire (February 1966). A 1966 feature in Life opens with a description of Magritte’s regular lifestyle: “In
his neat dark suit and bowler, René Magritte seems an ordinary man of the everyday world. He lives in an
ordinary house in Brussels, takes walks with his wife and dog, watches TV, plays chess, reads detective
stories” (“The Enigmatic Visions of René Magritte,” Life, v. 60, n. 16 (April 22, 1966), 113).

152
within them. Aside from declared self-portraits in which we frequently find him engaged
in the act of painting, Magritte seems eager to engender the role of the bowler-bedecked
man in works like The Great War (1964) by assuming a meta-existence in front of his
paintings or, at other times, playfully acting them out (Figures 2.11 and 2.12). In both his
paintings and his persona, Magritte is already asking us to be suspicious of the normalcy
of the bourgeois life – his staid demeanor was also, by the 1960s, as dated as it was
determined. His paintings offer us no trace of time, or expressivity, but his plain
description is enough to convey the disquieting worldview that capitalism produces. In
the New York Times, a critic wrote, “it has become fashionable to view Magritte as a
secret agent of sorts, living the conventional life of the bourgeois citizen, yet all the while
preparing to blow up the Establishment.”
76

Figure 2.11

76
James R. Mellow, “Surrealism Resurrected,” New York Times (December 15, 1968), D33.

153
Figure 2.12
While Magritte maintained his allegiance to Marxism, saying in 1935, “The
Communist point of view is my own. My art is valid only insofar as it opposed the
bourgeois ideal in whose name life is being extinguished,”
77
he nonetheless painted for a
commercial market as virtually all artists must do, frequently at the behest of particular
patrons.
78
There are certainly deep ambivalences brought to bear here, often expressed

77
Magritte, Les Beaux Arts, n. 164 (May 17, 1935), 15 quoted in Torczyner, Magritte: The True Art of
Painting (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), 55.

78
In 1962, Marcel Mariën, once a friend, distributed a leaflet at a large Magritte retrospective in Knokke-Le
Zoute, Belgium, headed ‘Grande Baisse,’ which satirized Magritte’s habit of creating repeats of his best-
selling works. The text also makes fun of Magritte’s rhetoric, perpetuated by some of his critics, that his
paintings are a mystery: “Art lovers are invited to place their orders immediately. The fact must be faced:
there will not be enough mystery for everyone” (Marcel Mariën, translated in David Sylvester and Sarah
Whitfield, Rene Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, v. III, edited by Sarah Whitfield and Michael Raeburn
(New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 120). Here Magritte seems to fall prey to Barthes’ characterization of
bourgeois revolts against bourgeois ideology: “These revolts are socially limited, they remain open to
salvage. First because they come from a small section of the bourgeoisie itself, from a minority group of
artists and intellectuals without public other than the class which they contest, and who remain dependent
on its money in order to express themselves” (Roland Barthes, Mythologies, New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2001 (originally published 1957), 139). Magritte was very upset by the spoof, which many
assumed to have been issued by Magritte, including André Breton, who, explaining his initial appreciation
to Magritte, found it to be a witty commentary on “the stock market rating of others and the very
widespread individual tendency to take oneself too seriously” (André Breton, letter to Magritte, July 12,
1962, quoted in Sarah Whitfield and David Sylvester, Rene Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, v. III, 123). The
editors attribute Magritte’s sensitivity to being teased about art and money with “his own increasing
prosperity” for which he had been criticized by some of his Surrealist friends (Ibid).

154
in Magritte’s very self-aware use of irony, which permeates the corpus of his work.
79
In a
letter to the Communist Party, Magritte explained, “The only way poets and painters have
of struggling against the bourgeois economic system is to give their work a content that
rejects the bourgeois ideological values that underlie the bourgeois economic system.”
80

The duality expressed in this statement is similar to the ambiguity within Pop art – its
depiction of objects is deployed in a world where the critique of commodities can also
reaffirm their intrigue. But there is a driving force behind Magritte’s work, a desire to
depict the world of capitalism from a Marxist perspective, and it explains the powerful
consistency of his style and subject matter.
We have seen that a bowler-bedecked member of the bourgeoisie often populates
Magritte’s works. Sometimes, he is the tip-toeing top-hatted masquerader Fantômas,
with whom Magritte was familiar through detective novels in which Fantômas, a world-
class criminal, perpetually evaded his would-be captors through “[his] ability to pass
unseen through matter.”
81
In The Return of the Flame (1943), Magritte appropriates the
cover of a 1912 book featuring Fantômas as a tell-tale member of the dominant

79
Magritte’s friend, Louis Scutenaire, reported a decade after Magritte’s death that Magritte was
“tormented by the fame which he had never sought which came to him late in life. …The more honours –
and money – he received, the more uneasy he felt” (Louis Scutenaire in Retrospective Magritte, 1978,
quoted in Sarah Whitfield, Magritte (London: South Bank Centre, 1992), 47.

80
Magritte, letter to the Communist Party of Belgium, 1946, quoted in Henry Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas
and Images (New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 1977).

81
Gablik, Magritte, 61. Magritte was very taken with the character of Fantômas, writing, “He is never
entirely invisible. …His movements are those of an automaton; he brushes aside any furniture or walls
which are in his way. …We do not guess, and we cannot doubt, his powers” (Magritte, quoted in Gablik,
Magritte, 61). See also Robin Walz’s discussion of the Surrealists’ fascination with Fantômas in Robin
Walz, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000).

155
bourgeoisie towering above Paris in the crimson-colored sky, “far surpass[ing] Roman
aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals”
82
which appear diminutive beneath Fantômas’ self-
assured step.
Fantômas is not a singular agent however - repetition rules Magritte’s world. In
Golconda (1953), we see members of the bourgeoisie weightlessness and oddly isolated.
It is not, as many have assumed anonymous (one figure is identified as Magritte’s friend,
Louis Scoutenaire), but at the same time Golconda projects a severe image of bourgeois
alienation. Unlike the worker, the bourgeoisie are not alienated from the results of their
labor, they are alienated from social systems—from each other—as the individual goal of
profit separates rather than unites them. There is an illusion of stability here—the
regularized rows in which the men hover are straight and orderly, but such precision only
highlights the fact that this formation defies the laws of nature.
For Karl Marx, this masquerading marauder is the protagonist responsible for
“resolv[ing] personal worth into exchange value” and “substitut[ing] naked, shameless,
direct, brutal exploitation.”
83
With his shocking The Rape (1934), which adorned
Breton’s 1934 “Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme?,” Magritte exchanges the facial features of
a woman for her most privately personal and irreducible elements, a move he repeated in
1947 when he submitted a near-identical variation to a show organized by Communist
intellectuals and sympathizers.
84
Naked to the world, her particular capacity for exchange

82
Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 5.

83
Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 5.

84
Torczyner, Magritte: The True Art of Painting, 56.

156
is made perfectly legible. In The Red Model, also in this exhibition, another reduction
takes place, in which a pair of dilapidated working boots have fused into the feet which
inhabit them. Again, utility and humanity have merged. As Magritte describes, “The
problem of the shoe demonstrates how the most frightening things can, through
inattention, become completely innocuous. Thanks to the Red Model, we realize that the
union of a human foot and a shoe is actually a monstrous custom.”
85
In the red rubble
beside the boot-feet, a few coins, the vestiges of “callous cash payment”
86
make the
transformation complete.
The Sorcerer (1951) might also be a pun on the concept of consumption, for
Magritte originally intended it to be a portrait of his dealer, Alexander Iolas, whom he
asked for three photographs from which to paint (Figure 2.13).
87
The photographs
however, never came, the dealer explaining, “Let’s say I wait for sunny weather, I’ll lose
a little weight and then I’ll …send you some beautiful photographs.”
88
Magritte instead
substituted his own likeness, but pictured himself with twice the usual number of arms,
which both facilitate his frenetic consumption of the meal, but also might implicate the
presence of a second person—the originally intended Iolas. Rather than the idealized

85
Magritte, “La Ligne de Vie,” quoted in Torczyner, Magritte: The True Art of Painting, 58.

86
Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 5.

87
The title, The Sorcerer (1951), is perhaps also a play on the magic status of the bourgeoisie: Modern
bourgeois society…is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world
whom he has called up by his spells” (Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 5).

88
Sarah Whitfield, Magritte (London: South Bank Centre, 1992), pl. 107.

157
representation that Iolas seems to have wanted, Magritte has merged their bodies in an
endless cycle of artistic production and marketable consumption.
89

Figure 2.13
In 1963, Leo Steinberg told the audience at the Pop art symposium: “We
remember that twentieth-century art came in with the self-conscious slogan…to outrage
or needle the bourgeois, keep him as uncomfortable as possible. This program lasted
roughly through the 1930s, when it was pursued chiefly by the Surrealists.”
90
Steinberg’s
statement reminded the audience for Pop art that Surrealism’s program was not only
avant-garde, but very much concerned with unsettling capitalist culture. The following
year, writing the introduction for Magritte’s exhibition at the Arkansas Art Center,

89
Iolas’ hesitation to supply his photographed portrait for Magritte might perhaps stem from a bout of
“quarrelsome correspondence” concerning delayed exhibitions that passed between the two in 1950. In late
1956, Magritte was to sign a contract with Iolas that gave the dealer “exclusive rights to almost all of
Magritte’s production for the following year, with a provision for indefinite renewal” (Jan Ceuleers, René
Magritte, 135 rue Esseghem, Jette-Brussels (Antwerp: Pandora, 1999), 115 and 116). Interestingly, Iolas
originally agreed to buy The Sorcerer but once it arrived in New York, “he arranged for it to be sent back”
(Sarah Whitfield, Magritte (London: The South Bank Centre, 1992), pl. 107).

90
Leo Steinberg, “A Symposium on Pop Art,” Arts Magazine (April 1963), 40.

158
Magritte’s second museum exhibition in the United States,
91
André Breton borrowed a
statement made by Dore Ashton from the same Pop Art symposium, quoting:
The artist who believes that he can maintain the ‘original status’ of an
object deludes himself. The character of the human imagination is
expansive and allegorical. You cannot ‘think’ an object for more than an
instant without the mind’s shifting. Objects have always been no more
than cues to the vagabond imagination. Not an overcoat, not a bottle dryer,
not a Coca-Cola bottle can resist the onslaught of the imagination.
Metaphor is as natural to the imagination as saliva to the tongue.
92

As Breton observes through Ashton’s words on Pop, in depicting the object, Magritte’s
work actively invites metaphors, allegories, associations, to which the object though
seemingly infallible is deeply susceptible. There is a latent similarity between Magritte
and the Pop artists in their representation of the capitalist world and the way that the
image of the object takes on a charged and more thorny status through such a
transformation.

91
Magritte’s first solo exhibition in an American museum, René Magritte in America, was held at the
Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts from December 8, 1960 to January 8, 1961. In February 1961, it
was shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which had co-sponsored the exhibition. According to the
show’s organizers, “this retrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings by René Magritte is the first to
be offered by a museum in the United States and perhaps the largest so far assembled anywhere.
Composed solely of works already present in the United States, it includes a major proportion of paintings
by the artist which are estimated to exist in North American collections” (René Magritte in America
(Dallas: The Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1960), n.p.). The exhibition displayed 85 works, not
including the ink drawing Magritte did especially for his Texan debut, This is not a derrick, which depicted
an oil derrick, and was reproduced in the show’s catalogue. Magritte also contributed a two-page artist’s
statement, which was reproduced in both French and English. The biographical outline in the catalogue
mysteriously stops in 1953. The next museum exhibition of Magritte’s work was organized in 1964 by the
Art department at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas under the direction Dominique de Menil.
It was shown at the Arkansas Art Center from May 15 – June 30, 1964. As with his previous exhibition,
Magritte provided a new drawing for the catalogue and both a statement by Magritte and an essay by
Breton were printed in French and English.

92
Dore Ashton, quoted in André Breton, “The Breadth of René Magritte,” Magritte, (Houston, Texas;
University of St. Thomas, 1964), n.p.

159
The stylistic and iconographical similarities between Magritte and Pop art are
wholly evident, but the ties between Pop and Surrealism were not merely superficial, but
deeply ideological. While the Pop artists used the flattening and repetition of reality to
critique the fantasy of capitalism, Magritte used surreality to allude to a world in which
things were also not as straightforward as they seemed, pushing the viewer to question
the social order. Though not habitually referencing popular culture, Magritte’s steadfast,
even defiant, figuration and his foregrounding of the icon in an age of artistic iconoclasm
would be enough to warrant his significance for contemporary artists. His working
method too resembled that of the Pop artists. When Sarah Whitfield writes of Magritte’s
practice, she says, “in an age that prizes originality, Magritte’s resolve to pursue a
technique which courted anonymity, which set out to be workmanlike rather than
experimental, has been widely interpreted as a refusal to be a part of the modernist
tradition.”
93
Both the Surrealists and the Pop artists were reacting against the notion that
modern art had to be non-representational. In addition to a mutual reliance on
conceptualism, repetition, and changes in scale and context, Magritte shared an
ideological affinity with the Pop artists that I have been concerned to elucidate here.
Magritte, like the Pop artists, fixates on a world in which objects do not operate through
their expected networks, wherein they are invested with an interior life remarked upon

93
Sarah Whitfield, Magritte (London: The South Bank Centre, 1992), 13. Whitfield’s reference to the
workman is particularly apt, for Magritte himself declares, “The real value of art is a function of its power
of liberating revelation. And nothing confers on the artist any superiority whatsoever in the order of human
labor. The artist does not practice the priesthood that bourgeois duplicity tries to attribute to him. Let him
not, however, lose sight of the fact that his effort, like that of every worker, is necessary to the dialectic
development of the world” (René Magritte, quoted in Elaine de Wilde, “Foreword” Magritte: 1898-1967,
ed. Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque and Frederik Leen (Ludion Press: Ghent, 1998) 11).

160
through deadpan and irony that shows Magritte to be displaying, and simultaneously
displacing, the culture of the bourgeois accessories that populate his paintings. If, as
Magritte believed, “capitalist hypocrisy always refus[es] to take a thing for what it is”
94

the prosaic absurdity of the games that Magritte plays in his paintings – wherein objects
become weightless, shapeless, negated, depleted, freely exchanged and interchanged –
suggests a world of values turned upside down, a system in which everyone is a
consumer, and the bowler-bedecked bourgeoisie must be instructed that a painting is not
a pipe.
Despite Magritte’s distrust of capitalism, monetarily at least, he benefited
immensely from the newfound connection between his paintings and Pop, as its
rediscovery by critics, artists, and the public alike led to a dramatic increase in the value
of his paintings during the 1960s. In 1965-66, his prices were three times what they had
been just three years prior and eight times what they had been in 1959.
95
By the end of the
decade, his prices had more than doubled again. Contemporary artists were among the
collectors of Magritte’s art –Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and
Andy Warhol owned paintings by him. And it was the work of these artists in particular
that encouraged Kozloff to reassess his earlier opinion of Magritte, writing in 1965,
“Magritte raises the most fruitful doubts about the conventions of painting – doubts that

94
Magritte, “Bourgeois Art,” quoted in Lucy Lippard, Surrealists on Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall, 1970) 156.

95
Whitfield and Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, 1949-1967, vol. III. Edited by David
Sylvester (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993), 137.

161
are now seen to have pointed toward the future.”
96
It was this future that drove the interest
in Magritte’s work and Surrealism in general, for the contemporary art scene of the
1960s, on the cusp of redefining theories of modernism, found direction in the objects of
art with which art history itself had never seemed comfortable.
With Magritte’s works featured on the covers of magazines and the artist the
subject of a feature in Life magazine, as Dalí had once been, MoMA’s 1965 Magritte
exhibition succeeded in driving both popular and critical attention toward figurative
Surrealism. Noted William Berkson in Arts Magazine, “The Modern has a canny way of
picking the right times for such exhibitions. Magritte, although his alliance with the
fantastic firmly separates him from Pop, criticizes the contemporary scene with his
extreme calm.”
97
Many reviewers writing in the mid 1960s predicted the importance
Surrealism would soon be accorded in the history of art: “When the history of content in
modern art comes to be written – a document to be set beside the form-oriented
discussions that now prevail – both Dalí and Magritte (and the Surrealists in general)
should form a consequential chapter in that picaresque account.”
98
Emily Genauer
presciently advocated the necessity of a Surrealism show that would demonstrate how
integral the movement was to recent art:
What some museum ought to do now is stage a large, really
comprehensive survey of surrealism showing how protean was this non-
esthetic movement, and, paradoxically, what an enormous influence it had

96
Max Kozloff, “Epiphanies of Artifice,” The Nation (January 10, 1966), 56.

97
William Berkson, “René Magritte,” Arts Magazine, v. 40, n. 4 (February 1966), 52.

98
James R. Mellow, “Birds of a Feather,” The New Leader (February 14, 1966), 29.

162
on esthetics thereafter. It would underscore, for instance, what is too often
overlooked, that action painting and abstract expressionism were direct
outgrowths of the surrealists’ cult of the unconscious. …Pop is also a non-
esthetic, sociological expression. It, too, is a catch-all movement for many
diverse talents united principally by their opposition to current cultural
values....
99

Two decades earlier, Genauer had fiercely criticized the Modern under Barr’s leadership,
in part for supporting the work of the Surrealists. But, as Barr arranged for his retirement
from MoMA in 1967, he found a young art historian named William Rubin, who had
been working on Dada and Surrealism for the past six years,
100
to be his successor.

Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage
From the night of its opening on March 25, 1968, when protesters threw stink
bombs outside of the Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and Their
Heritage, organized by Rubin, became a literal and figurative site of opposition. The
protesters’ malodorous objections were numerous: their signs, “All you rich ladies go
back to Schrafft’s,” “This is a Money Circus. Down with Art, Up with Revolution,” and
“Surrealism means revolution, not spectator sports,” argued that Dada and Surrealism
were movements of the streets, not to be co-opted by, and encased in, the Museum of
Modern Art. But they also disputed the Surrealists’ commitment to overthrowing the
bourgeoisie, calling into question the irony of Surrealism’s absorption by the

99
Emily Genauer, “Dalí and Magritte: Pop’s Papas,” New York World Telegram and Sun (December 18,
1965).

100
In an interview that seems to have taken place during the run of the exhibition, Rubin told Ruth Bowman
that he had “been working on this subject for almost 7 years. Most of that had almost nothing to do with the
museum show, it was for a very extensive book on the subject which will be coming out next fall and is
being published by Harry N. Abrams” (William Rubin, interview with Ruth Bowman, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution).

163
establishment by decreeing the entire event a “Bourgeois Zoo.”
101
Organized by the art
critic Gene Swenson,
102
who summoned the protesters in part with an ad in The Village
Voice declaring that Dada and MoMA were dead, the 100 or more demonstrators’
presence
103
was the only indication that Dada and Surrealism were movements borne of
and dedicated to revolution.
104
Despite the charged cultural atmosphere of the 1960s that

101
Perhaps it seemed hypocritical to the demonstrators that opening night attendees were not the least
concerned with challenging the dominant social order. Several reports mention that the affair was black-tie
and guests dined on chicken à la Ritz and “crispy fried canapés” (“The Hobbyhorse Rides Again,” Time, v.
91, n. 14 (April 5, 1968), 84; Grace Glueck, “300 Hippies Protest at Opening of Modern Museum Dada
Show,” New York Times (March 26, 1968)). Class differences were very much in evidence in the reporting
of the demonstration. The protesters were indiscriminately labeled as hippies who objected to the leisure
activities of the upper class.

102
Gene Swenson was an editorial associate at ArtNews from 1961 to 1965 where he was an early
proponent of Pop Art. He had been picketing MoMA since February 1968. In 1966, he curated The Other
Tradition at the Philadelphia Institute for Contemporary Art, which I will discuss further in Chapter Three.
“This groundbreaking show proposed nothing less than an alternative, ‘non-formal’ history of twentieth-
century art, tracing a lineage that went not from Cubism's flattened picture plane to Color Field painting but
from Dada and Surrealism to Pop. … Swenson instead proposed a sophisticated reappraisal of Surrealism
through the cool lens of Pop…emphasizing their fascination with the rich emotional and psychological
responses triggered by everyday objects…. Rather than applaud his beloved Surrealism's ascent into the
ivory tower, Swenson railed against the museum alongside other critics, such as Nicolas Calas, who
lamented the art's symbolic castration at the hands of a formalist curator [William Rubin] more concerned
with his subject's stylistic taxonomy than its seditious sex appeal” (Scott Rothkopf, “Banned and
Determined: Scott Rothkopf on Gene Swenson,” Artforum, v. 40, n. 10 (Summer 2002), 194).

103
There are discrepancies concerning the actual number of protesters at MoMA. The New York Times
reported the number of protesters to be around 300, while the New York Post put the number at 100, with
the number of policemen on the scene at 300 and Newsweek reported that “close to 200 hippies
demonstrated” (Grace Glueck, “Hippies Protest at Dada Preview,” New York Times (March 26, 1968), 21;
Joseph Feurey and Jay Levin, “Hippies Put On A Museum Show,” New York Post (March 26, 1968);
“Dada at MOMA,” Newsweek v. LXXI, n. 15 (April 8, 1968). Time describes the group as “several hundred
Greenwich Village vigilantes” (“The Hobbyhorse Rides Again,” Time v. 91, n. 14 (April 5, 1968), 84).

104
Perhaps ironically, the group led by Gene Swenson, which called itself “The Transformation,” had
applied for a permit to demonstrate at the Museum and sent a letter to Glen Lowry, then MoMA’s director,
informing him “We wish to emphasize that this celebration will be peaceful and is in no way hostile or
antagonistic to the interest of the Museum” (“The Transformation,” letter to Glen Lowry, March 19, 1968,
Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition files, Museum of Modern Art archives). The following
day, the museum received a phone call from the Police Inspector in the 18
th
precinct to whom “The
Transformation” had applied for the permit to demonstrate. According to J.M. Chapman, who wrote an
internal Museum memo regarding the phone call, “Mr. Kelly [the Inspector] asked our opinion of this
group and stated that he would deny the permit if we opposed its issuance. I advised him we had no
opposition to declare” (J.M. Chapman, memo to Rene d’Harnoncourt, Richard Koch, William Rubin, Bates
164
made historical consciousness-raising art newly relevant,
105
William Rubin, then recently
appointed as curator at MoMA, through his written and visual presentation of the work,
had evacuated the radical agendas so central to Dada and Surrealism’s production in the
1920s and 30s.
This was not the only absence in the exhibition. In a sense, Dada and Surrealism
had themselves been largely ignored in the dominant narrative of modern art within
which they had not – perhaps could not – be readily placed. In 1968, Emily Genauer
complained that the exhibition did not answer the question of Dada and Surrealism’s
irrepressibility – “why Dada was revitalized in the ‘60s, and how it came about that
artists in a movement which was conceived as anti-Establishment have now become the
Establishment’s darlings.”
106
If the Dadaists and Surrealists had recently become the pets
of the established art world, that status did not necessarily ensure long-term critical
respect. Even more current scholarship on Surrealism has left (relatively) unexplained
Surrealism’s impact on the art world of the 1960s. In 1993 Hal Foster wrote:
For neo-avant-garde artists who challenged this hegemonic model [of
Anglo-American formalism] three decades ago, its very deviance might
have made surrealism an attractive object: as an impensé of cubocentric art
history, it might have exposed the ideological limitations of this narrative.
But such was not the case. … Again surrealism was lost in the shuffle.
To the neo-avant-gardists who challenged the formalist account in the

Lowry, Elizabeth Shaw, Security, March 20, 1968, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition files,
Museum of Modern Art archives).

105
As I will discuss further, the Vietnam war and “the general mood of uncertainty, dissatisfaction, violence
and tension in the United States today may explain why the exhibition is attracting such attention” (Barbara
Gold, “The Exquisite Corpse Drinking Young Wine,” The Sunday Sun (April 28 1968).

106
Emily Genauer, “Dada Revisited,” Houston Texas Post (April 21, 1968).

165
1950s and 1960s, it too appeared corrupt: technically kitschy,
philosophically subjectivist, hypocritically elitist.
107

Given the amount of attention that the Dada and Surrealism show received, which was
especially tied to its presentation at MoMA – immense crowds at the show, newspaper
reports printed across the country throughout the run of the exhibition, radio commentary,
Rubin’s promotional radio and television appearances, as well as national television
coverage – it seems impossible to agree unequivocally with Foster’s statement that
Surrealism was overlooked. Indeed, what Foster characterizes as Surrealism’s faults (if
this is what we take them to be) actually exposed many of the issues that Pop art forced
critics to grapple with, and, in some cases, come to terms with. Surrealism was not lost
in the shuffle; as this chapter demonstrates, its critical reception in the 1960s participated
in legitimizing the multiplicity of forms that comprised contemporary art. Surrealism
showed that unless the modern art narrative could take into account such variegated
production, then that narrative risked obsolescence. Surrealism’s challenge, which had
begun as more of a commitment to transgression, by 1968 had provoked a vigorous
debate between proponents and opponents of formalism that drew deeply on the cultural
issues of the day, questioning the efficacy of an art history seemingly structured
according to the ideals of form alone.

107
Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993), xii. Foster briefly
suggests that Surrealism has been ignored and that “one reason for this art-historical failure is a neglect of
the other principal precondition for the return of surrealism as an object of study: the dual demands of
contemporary art and theory,” a point he does not follow up on and that my dissertation addresses directly.
Foster goes on to allude to Surrealist influences on the art of the 1960s and 1970s in the realms of
phenomenological approaches and institutional critiques, but does not elaborate extensively (xiii).

166
It had been more than thirty years since MoMA’s previous Surrealism show of
1936, but in that time Surrealism’s place within modern art had not been significantly
reinterpreted. Indeed from 1951 until 1960 there appear to have been no scholarly studies
of the movement published in English.
108
Now, as Surrealism was actively re-positioned
as a seminal antecedent for artistic production in the 1960s, Dada, Surrealism, and Their
Heritage provided a forum in which Surrealism also could be taken up by such critics as
Gene Swenson, Harold Rosenberg, and Lucy Lippard as a tool to spotlight the fractures
in an already cracked high modernist monolith. Modern art was itself being reinterpreted
by younger critics and artists as new platforms for art – magazines such as Artforum
(founded in 1962), and government institutions, such as the National Endowment for the
Arts (founded in 1965) – rendered art more central to cultural life in America. In this
context, Clement Greenberg’s theories found a new audience, as his essays were re-
issued (with revisions that made his statements on modern art seem particularly prescient)
in the compilation Art and Culture (1961), which was widely read by young artists and
critics.
109
As Harold Rosenberg wrote in 1965, “the art establishment is in the process of

108
Rubin’s secondary sources overwhelmingly date from either the 1930s and 1940s (the majority of which
I discussed in Chapter One) or the 1960s, when major publications of Surrealism –its philosophies, literary
origins, and history were published and translated.

109
See Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). The book was
re-issued in 1965. Among other essays, the volume included “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” and “American-
type Painting.” In 1962, Hilton Kramer wrote in his review, “Art and Culture contains thirty-seven essays,
many of them generously revised, and is less a history of its author’s opinions than a catalogue of his
present views” (Hilton Kramer, “A Critic on the Side of History: Notes on Clement Greenberg,” Arts
Magazine (October 1962), 60). Rosalind Krauss recalled that she first became aware of Greenberg as a
critic through the publication of Art and Culture, “which had an enormous effect on what happened later in
the sixties and even into the seventies in the field of contemporary art, it wasn’t unitl this book floated into
the art library that I discovered Clement Greenberg” (Elizabeth Bakewell, William O. Beeman, and
Marilyn Schmitt, Interview with Rosalind Krauss (May 30, 1986), Getty Art History Information Program
(Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1990), 11). As Daniel Siedell has noted, Greenberg’s “Art and Culture
167
construction. … in its present form it dates no farther back than the five or six years since
money began streaming into American art and art education….”
110
Indeed, the growing
market for art had changed the way the public interacted with the avant-garde. Art
historian Meyer Schapiro decried the new exorbitant prices modern art began to
command: “Much of the interest in art buying today lies in the gambling aspect…what is
disturbing is not that people profit by the rise in prices of art, but the effect this
knowledge has on the attitude to art everywhere. Art becomes even more of a
commodity than ever before; the relation to art is infected with all the diseases of
business enterprise.”
111
As both Sears and Woolworth’s began displaying and selling art
in traveling exhibitions, the public encountered art in more settings.
112
Though as I
discussed in Chapter One, Dalí had been involved in retail window display in the 1930s,
those stores had been upscale and therefore less populist than the 1960s phenomenon.
An article in Vogue declared that the public for art had changed as well: “… the educated
public had not only assimilated the avant-garde past but had also caught up with the

amounted to a direct attack on the influence of his rival Harold Rosenberg, whose poetic and
expressionistic art criticism had marginalized Greenberg’s by the late fifties, particularly after Rosenberg
published his collection of essays, The Tradition of the New (1959), which included his profound and
influential essay, ‘The American Action Painters’ (1952)” (Daniel Siedell, “Review: Rosalind Krauss,
David Carrier, and Philosophical Art Criticism,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, v. 38, n. 2 (Summer
2004), 102).

110
Harold Rosenberg, “The Art Establishment,” Esquire (January 1965), 43.

111
Meyer Schapiro, “On the Art Market,” c. 1960, reprinted in Meyer Schapiro, Worldview in Painting: Art
and Society (New York: George Braziller, 1999). 203-204.

112
In 1965, dime stores such as Woolworth’s started carrying original art, including works by Dalí (John
Canaday, “Art: Quality and Trash,” New York Times (May 7, 1965), 32). Meanwhile Sears was exhibiting
artworks that then traveled to Sears stores throughout the country (Milton Esterow, “Buyers, Sellers, and
Forgers: The Strange New Art Market,” Harper’s Magazine (June 1967). Although department stores,
such as Wannamaker’s, Gimbel’s and Macy’s, had carried works of art in the early twentieth century, this
may have been the first time avant-garde works were sold in this particular way.

168
avant-garde present. It would look, too, as though the avant-garde in the present had
become what it never was before…: a body of people and an area of activity that society
at large accepted in an almost institutional way.”
113
Pop’s figuration especially enabled
acceptance and cultural reference that helped to encourage a new art audience, while
Rosenberg argued that even “A square within a square can exist as art today…because of
the public’s training in acknowledging its ignorance in the face of the artist’s will.”
114
As
it was packaged and sold in new ways, the newest avant-garde was being instantaneously
institutionalized. The idea of an American art world became a vibrant entity in the
1960s, and with it came newly charged debates over how this world would be
constructed. Because influential formalist critics such as Greenberg and Michael Fried
demonstrated that the formalist approach was unable (or unwilling) to account for many
of the new forms of art of the 1960s, the presentation of Surrealist artworks succeeded in
igniting a debate regarding the practices of the avant-garde, a debate in which Surrealism
was to play a pivotal role.
The debate sparked by Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage remained vivid
even thirty years later, as critic Max Kozloff recalled in 2000:
One had to ask what stakes were being protected in the recuperation of
this [the avant-garde’s] legacy, and for what reasons. A similar question
arose in the controversy ignited by the Museum of Modern Art’s Dada and
Surrealism show. That ‘turf war’ had much to tell us about the state of art
ideologies in 1968. Depending on what side one took, the prestige of art

113
“Where is the Avant-Garde?” Vogue (June 1, 1967).

114
Harold Rosenberg, “MoMA Dada,” The New Yorker, v. XLIV, n. 13 (May 18, 1968), 140.

169
works being done at the moment might go very considerably up or
down.
115

Describing the rift that had ignited the partisan reaction to the show, Kozloff had written
at the time in the left-leaning journal The Nation:
Formulated once again in terms of history, the debate pivots on whether
you take seriously the idea that art issues primarily from art, or accept
literally the Surrealist assumption that art can transcend itself (i.e., its
historical moment and hermetic instincts) and permanently affect life in
the same way as could an “action.”
116

Kozloff goes on in his article of 1968 to react with thick sarcasm to the position of such
formalists as Michael Fried, who believed that “the extent to which a painting is
contaminated by the Surrealist sensibility is the extent of its failure.”
117
If lines were
being drawn, however, Rubin hardly seemed a likely figure to promote Dada and
Surrealism. Rubin, in addition to being a collector of such Greenberg-endorsed abstract
artists as Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella, also demonstrated formalist sympathies in the
exhibition catalogue: “…art cannot be made from life alone, even less from particular
psychological methodologies; more than anything else it is made from art.”
118
Indeed,
Philip Leider and Irving Sandler mention that Rubin’s allegiances to Noland and Stella
clashed with his interest in Surrealism. As Sandler recalls: “Bill Rubin was always

115
Max Kozloff, “Introduction,” Cultivated Impasses: Essays on the Waning of the Avant-Garde 1964-1975
(New York: Marsilio Publishers, 2000), 11.

116
Max Kozloff, “The Sixties Look at Dada and Surrealism,” originally published in The Nation (1968),
reprinted in Cultivated Impasses: Essays on the Waning of the Avant-Garde 1964-1975 (New York:
Marsilio Publishers, 2000), 343.

117
Fried, quoted in Kozloff, “The Sixties Look at Dada and Surrealism,” 343, original emphasis. Fried’s
comment is also repeated in Philip Leider’s article on the exhibition (Philip Leider, “Dada, Surrealism, and
Their Heritage: A Beautiful Exhibition,” Artforum, v. 6, n. 9 (May 1968), 22).

118
William Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 15.

170
interested in Surrealism. By 1967, his writing seemed a little schizophrenic: His art
history led him to Surrealism, his art criticism to formalism—and Stella. He seems to
hold the two apart.”
119
As Nicolas Calas posed the question, “What is the reason for
organizing today in a Museum of Modern Art a show of Dada and Surrealism, that from
the Greenberg-Rubin point of view are to be considered regressive?”
120

In the press, Rubin was often associated with formalism and Greenberg – who
certainly influenced him – and not without reason. But unlike Greenberg, he embraced
Pop and, more significantly, was able to see the merit of works of art that were the
product of what he once called “life movements,”
121
as opposed to aesthetic movements.
Rubin had received his Ph.D. in 1959 from Columbia University under the advisement of
Meyer Schapiro, whose legacy in art history was very different from Greenberg’s.
122

119
Irving Sandler, quoted in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New York: Soho Press,
2000), 193. In fact, Rubin’s varied art collection played a role in the exhibition, making Rubin both a
lender as well as curator. From his personal collection, he lent Claes Oldenburg’s Fag Ends, Medium Scale
as well as four paintings by André Masson (Sarah Weiner, letter to Claes Oldenburg, December 20, 1967,
Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition files, Museum of Modern Art Archives). These works are
credited as “private collection” in the exhibition’s catalogue.

120
Nicolas Calas, “Surrealism Hits Back,” Arts, v. 42, n. 7 (May 1968), 23. Rosalind Krauss put it more
bluntly in her reminiscences of Rubin: “…his first ambitious MOMA exhibition, in 1968, was ‘Dada,
Surrealism, and Their Heritage,’ which focused on aesthetic phenomena despised by Greenberg” (Rosalind
Krauss, “The Discursive Legacy,” Artforum (May 2006), 253.

121
William Rubin, interview with Ruth Bowman, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. For
Rubin, the words “Dada and Surrealism” described “life movements, or philosophical movements,
movements that were really more interested in poetry, psychology, politics, action on various levels, than
specifically in works of art. … the Dadaist and Surrealists were incidentally art-makers, and they had great
anxiety lest they be too much confused with the notion of art. The irony is that what remains of these
movements and what best characterizes for us this historical [import] of these two movements, is the work
of art itself” (Ibid.).

122
Of Schapiro’s approach to art history, Thomas Crow has written, “Schapiro was pursuing nothing less
than a diagnosis of art’s fundamental signifying capacities, a dissolution of conventional dichotomy of form
and content” (Thomas Crow, The Intelligence of Art (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1999), 22-23). Writing Schapiro’s obituary in 1996, Rubin recalled his mentor’s absolute communion with
works of art, and stressed that he believed “criticism was at the core of his definition of modern art which,
171
Despite writing criticism for Art International, and publishing extensively in Artforum,
where he first outlined his theories of Dada and Surrealism in 1966 and his understanding
of Pollock in 1967,
123
Rubin later stated that “all this critical wordplay is utterly
insignificant next to one good picture. … Fifty years from now, the paintings are going to
be here, but nobody’s going to give a damn what you wrote about them.”
124
Before
coming to MoMA he had been a professor of art history at Sarah Lawrence College,
where he had been teaching art history for 15 years, and, in this capacity, met Alfred
Barr, whom he invited to lecture in his classes.
125
But it seems likely that Rubin’s
sensibilities as a collector may have led Barr to think of him for a position at MoMA. In
March 1967, Rubin’s downtown Manhattan loft at Thirteenth Street and Broadway was

in contradistinction to art of the past, he considered an implicit critique of its own culture” (William Rubin,
“Meyer Schapiro: ‘An Eye That Glowed,’” ArtNews, v. 95, n. 5 (May 1996), 54). That is, Rubin recognized
that Schapiro’s work was built on a social-political commitment. Rubin’s dissertation entitled, “Modern
Sacred Art and the Church of Assy,” was published in 1961. See William Rubin, Modern Sacred Art and
the Church of Assy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).

123
Rubin had written a polemical article comparing Masson and Pollock in 1959, however he deals mainly
with these two artists, rather than the movements as a whole. However, he did underscore the importance
of Surrealism for the Abstract Expressionists, writing, “Such is the rigor of the New American Chauvinism
that the Surrealist background of our postwar painting is often disavowed. But the parthenogenesis of the
New York School is a dogma professed by the second generation of Tenth Street rather than by the
originators of the style, the men who were actually on the scene in the crucial early and middle forties when
the exiled European artists were here” (William Rubin, “Notes on Masson and Pollock,” Arts Magazine, v.
34, n. 2 (November 1959), 36.

124
William Rubin, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “Profiles: Sharpening the Eye,” The New Yorker, v. 61, n. 37
(November 4, 1985), 75. John Elderfield, who became Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the
Museum of Modern Art, recalled Rubin expressing a similar sentiment during a conversation in the early
1970s: “He [Rubin] stunned me by saying that if I stopped wasting my time with [writing] art criticism and
buckled down and finished my Ph.D., maybe I could become a museum curator” (John Elderfield, “The
Great Persuader,” ArtNews, v. 105, n. 3 (March 2006), 53.

125
Barr and Soby invited Rubin to curate a Roberto Matta retrospective, and Rubin also wrote the catalogue
essay for the small 35-piece exhibition, Matta, which was displayed at MoMA from September 10 to
October 20, 1957. The show later traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Boston.

172
the subject of an extensive photo spread that was commissioned by Vogue for the
magazine. It included interior shots of works by Masson, Pollock and Rothko, as well as
Newman, Reinhardt, and Stella, among many others.
126
Rubin’s MoMA appointment was
the result of a re-organization of the museum’s divisions, and was designed to combine
the duties that Barr had been assigned as director of collections with the curatorial
functions of the painting and sculpture department.
127
A large part of Rubin’s mandate
was the “care and feeding” of MoMA’s collection, which he described in 1967 as a “the
only perfectible collection of modern painting in the world today.”
128
Of the 1966
meeting at which Barr proposed that Rubin become curator at the Modern, Rubin recalled
that “He [Barr] said there were three things the job required. The first was ‘eye;’ the
second was art-historical scholarship; and the third was knowledge of the art market.
He’d thought it over, and felt that I was the man for the job.”
129
Rubin officially assumed

126
Among the artists represented in the Vogue spreads were: Agostini, Willem de Kooning, Herbert Ferber,
Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofman, Franz Klein, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, André
Masson, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Mark Rothko, Jackson
Pollock, Larry Poons, George Segal, David Smith, Richard Stankiewicz, Frank Stella, and Clyfford Still.
See Annette Michelson, “An Art Scholar’s Loft: The New York Apartment of William Rubin,” Vogue
(March 15, 1967), pp. 136-142, 154-155.

127
Grace Glueck, “Museum Chooses Head for Division,” New York Times (July 11, 1967), 34.

128
Ibid. Indeed, Rubin had already proven adept at procuring works for the Museum, having played a large
role in persuading Sidney Janis to donate his important collection to the museum in 1967, under terms
especially beneficial to the institution that were soon after generously amended so that MoMA could use
funds from selling certain of Janis’s works to buy Pollock’s One (Number 31, 1950) in 1968 when it
became available from the collection of Ben Heller.

129
William Rubin, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “Profiles: Sharpening the Eye,” The New Yorker, v. 61, n. 37
(November 4, 1985), 52. According to Pepe Karmel, “Alfred Barr asked him [Rubin] to organize a large
exhibition, ‘Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage.’ It soon became apparent that Barr was looking for a
curatorial successor who, like himself, would combine scholarship, connoisseurship and art-world savvy”
(Pepe Karmel, “William S. Rubin, 1927-2006,” Art in America, v. 94, n. 3 (March 2006), 37). Patricia
Failing also reports that it was Barr who asked Rubin to do the Surrealism show: “In 1967, the year of his
retirement, Barr asked Rubin to help prepare MOMA’s ‘Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage’ exhibition;
173
the position of curator of painting and sculpture on July 1, 1967, in the midst of his
preparation for Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, and it is largely through his
leadership that the Museum of Modern Art concretized an official narrative of modern
art, which would be extensively critiqued both by artists and art historians in the decades
that followed.
130

Recently, Yve-Alain Bois has suggested motives for Rubin’s decision to organize
the Dada and Surrealism exhibition: “what Rubin attempted to do – which was strange
coming from him – was to rescue Surrealism…And he always disagreed with Greenberg
on Pop; Rubin supported it. And so if he could justify his interest in this new work by
finding historical precedents in Surrealism, well, that was one strategy.”
131
Even if Rubin
was attempting to validate Pop, showcasing Surrealism might seem an odd tack to take,
considering that Greenberg’s condemnation of Surrealism was well known.
132
It would
be misleading to say that Rubin set out to rectify Surrealism’s displacement from the
reigning history of modern art, but he was keenly aware of the problem that Surrealism
posed to art history and alluded to Surrealism’s difficulty in the exhibition catalogue.

shortly thereafter Rubin was hired as curator of painting and sculpture…” (Patricia Failing, “Who Makes
MoMA Run? William Rubin,” ArtNews, v. 78, n. 8 (October 1979), 141).

130
William Rubin’s papers from the bulk of his tenure at the Museum are unprocessed and therefore
unviewable at the time of this writing, but future scholarship on Rubin will likely make use of this archive.

131
Yve-Alain Bois in “Roundtable,” in Art Since 1900, Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois,
Benjamin Buchloh, editors (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 327. In the same discussion, Rosalind
Krauss added: “We have to realize too that Rubin was in constant dialogue with Greenberg, trying to
convince him that he, Rubin, was not on the wrong track, and that within Surrealism and even Dada there
were worthy modernist practices. He was pleading with Greenberg” (Rosalind Krauss, “Roundtable,” Art
Since 1900 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 327).

132
See for example, Clement Greenberg, “Surrealist Painting,” The Nation (August 12 and 19, 1944).

174
There Rubin acknowledged, “Obviously a definition of style that, for Dada, must
comprehend the work of Duchamp and Arp and, for Surrealism, that of Miró and Dalí,
will be problematic. Yet the alternative is not simply to accept confusion.”
133
For Rubin,
the key difficulty was that Dada and Surrealism “fostered activities in the plastic arts so
variegated as almost to preclude the use of the terms as definitions of style.”
134
Since its
introduction to the U.S., Surrealism had thwarted definitions based on style or medium
and it was this inability of art history’s traditional categories to define the movement that
had allowed for the flexibility of Surrealism’s dissemination within American art and
culture. Rubin’s motivation for mounting this exhibition could have been to test the
theories of modernism as they existed in the late 1960s. Though Rubin’s exhibition was
not overtly argumentative, he did hope to find a secure place for Surrealism within
modern art, to resolve what must have seemed to be its unstable status in the narrative of
modern art. As Rubin later wrote in the preface to his extensive study Dada and
Surrealist Art, “I have tried to balance these iconographic interests with the needs of
stylistic analysis. In so doing, I have had to bring into play such judgments as that of
quality. … I have proceeded from the assumption, therefore, that the works can be
described in terms that make sense for art history in general and for the discussion of

133
William Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, 11-12. Nonetheless, Rubin was determined to
find the common denominators in Surrealist production, continuing, “We can distinguish in Dada and
Surrealist art some common properties of style and many common denominators of character, iconography
and intent” (Ibid.).

134
William Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 11.

175
modernist painting and sculpture in particular.”
135
So, unlike later feminist criticism,
which demanded a thoroughgoing critique and revision of art history itself, Rubin
accepted the limits of the discipline he inherited. Rubin does not shy from judging Dada
and Surrealist works, marking his study as both critical and art historically driven. For
Irving Sandler, “Rubin’s show, in the spring of 1968, was certainly important to art
critics, particularly because it focused on the issue of formalist criticism.”
136
But contrary
to what might have been predicted, the validity of Rubin’s project was challenged not by
those who subscribed to formalist accounts, but rather by Surrealism’s own supporters.
How did Rubin’s exhibition manage to flip the expected allegiances of the art world?
What were the stakes of Surrealism’s official incorporation into modernism, and what (or
whose) version of history was it going to be?
Surrealism’s aesthetic and historical value – acknowledged or not – was exactly
what Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage set out to understand. A large exhibition, it
displayed some 300 objects, many of which had never before been exhibited in the
United States (Figures 2.14 and 2.15). Attempting to be encyclopedic in nature, the
exhibition nevertheless paid particular attention to Surrealists who had already been
approved by the formalists. Artists such as Miró, Masson, Picasso and Arp had been
singled out in Greenberg’s “Surrealist Painting” essay as representing the only admirable
aspect of Surrealism. He wrote, “Surrealism, under this aspect, and only under this,

135
William Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 8. The year after Dada,
Surrealism, and Their Heritage, Rubin published his truly mammoth 525-page study Dada and Surrealist
Art, which included 851 illustrations with 60 hand-mounted colour plates.

136
Irving Sandler, quoted in Amy Newman, Challenging Art, 193.

176
culminates the process which in the last seventy years restored painting to itself and
enabled the modern artist to rival the achievements of the past.”
137
Rubin, under Alfred
Barr’s advisement, divided the early work of the Surrealists in the twenties on the basis of
whether they were abstract or illusionistic, keeping the categories that had been instituted
by Barr’s 1936 exhibition in place.
138
Indeed, as I briefly discussed above, Rubin was
Barr’s hand-picked successor. Though Barr had been forced to step down from his
position as director of MoMA in 1943, he remained hugely influential at the museum,
even if his subsequent positions did not entail much administrative power. Richard
Oldenberg, curator, director, and finally director emeritus of MoMA, recalled that in
Rubin, Barr, about to retire from the Museum as director of museum collections in 1967,
“presciently saw a promising heir: an art historian with a discerning eye, clarity and grace
as a writer, and familiarity with the art market as a venturesome collector.”
139
Rubin too
saw himself as carrying on Barr’s legacy – his unpublished memoir was dedicated to

137
Clement Greenberg, “Surrealist Painting,” The Nation (August 12 and 19, 1944), reprinted in Clement
Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, v. 1, edited by John O’Brian (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), 228. Earlier that year, Greenberg had written that “Miró belong among the living
masters” (Clement Greenberg, “Review of Exhibition of Joan Miró and André Masson,” The Nation (May
20, 1944), reprinted in Ibid., 207).

138
In July 1966, Barr and Rubin traded several lengthy memos regarding the organization of the exhibition.
Barr advised Rubin, “In the Surrealist section I’d be inclined to sacrifice chronology somewhat and start
out with abstract surrealism (Arp, Miró, Masson, Ernst, Picasso 1925+), follow that with illusionistic
surrealism (Ernst, Man Ray, Tanguy, Picasso 1927+, Magritte, Dalí, Celze, Dominguez, Seligmann,
Paalen, Delvaux, etc.) Then Surrealist sculpture – Giacometti, Ernst?” (Alfred Barr, memo to William
Rubin, July 12, 1966, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition files, Museum of Modern Art
Archives). Rubin responded six days later, “I am going to take up your excellent suggestion of dividing—
at the sacrifice of chronology – the work of the later twenties on the basis of Abstraction versus Illusionism
so that the early Tanguys and Magrittes will lead into the Dalís and other illusionistic pictures of the
Thirties” (William Rubin, memo to Alfred Barr, July 18, 1966, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage
exhibition files, Museum of Modern Art Archives).

139
Richard E. Oldenburg, “Acquiring Mind,” Artforum (May 2006), 252.

177
Barr.
140
Unlike Barr’s exhibition of 1936, however, in 1968 Rubin did not include any of
the objects from everyday life that Barr had displayed, such as drawings by the insane,
cartoons, or folk art, even as he compared the movement to Pop, an art in obvious
dialogue with popular culture.
Figure 2.14
Figure 2.15
In the historical area of the exhibition, the works of prominent artists, such as
Duchamp, were given their own rooms. Rubin’s pride and joy was the section devoted to
Miró, who, after Max Ernst, was the second-most represented artist in the exhibition with

140
See Jason Edward Kaufman, “The Memoir MoMA Declined to Publish,” Art Newspaper, v. 15 (March
2006), pp. 33-35.

178
24 works.
141
Rubin stated his allegiance to the Miró in an interview about Dada,
Surrealism, and Their Heritage for the television show Camera III in 1968:
I think that Miró is by far the best artist in that exhibition. And he is the
best artist of the generation between the two wars. In other words, between
the generation of Picasso, Matisse and Bonnard, and the generation of
Pollock let’s say, the greatest painter in the modern tradition is Miró. And
he is the only great painter, in my estimation, in this exhibition.
142

Rubin also expressed his utmost appreciation for Miró when he wrote to René Gaffe, an
important collector of Miró’s work attempting to secure the loan of Miró’s Birth of the
World (1924):
…Since this painting [La Naissance du Monde] has never been seen in this
country and since it is so important historically – I consider it as Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon for the Informel – I should just like you to know
that to be able to have this picture for the New York showing of the
exhibition would give me the greatest single satisfaction of any loan I will
be getting …As the great pioneer collector of Miró’s work when it was at
once at its most radical and its most unacceptable to the public, I will think
that you will especially appreciate the recognition of La Naissance du
Monde to help confirm Miró as the real foundation of post-Cubist
abstraction.
143

141
Miró was often identified by critics as surpassing his fellow Surrealists. For instance: “Miró, whom I
would exclude from most of the reservations I have voiced about Surrealism, is not readily thought of as a
Surrealist…since his work has always acknowledged a level of taste beyond that of his polemical
contemporaries, just as his raw talent exceeded theirs as well” (Sidney Tillim, “Surrealism as Art,”
Artforum, v. 5, n. 1 (September 1966), 69). Clement Greenberg also favored Miró’s work while dismissing
Surrealism.

142
William Rubin, “Camera III 68.12 sound recording,” 1968, Museum of Modern Art Archives.

143
William Rubin, letter to René Gaffe, October 10, 1967, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition
files, Museum of Modern Art Archives. In a letter written seven months later, while the picture was on
view at MoMA, Rubin attempted to secure it for MoMA’s collection: “You already know how much I feel
that work will help this great Collection, and I want to assure you that the Museum can competitively meet
the price that could be offered by any other museum or private collector.” (William Rubin, letter to René
Gaffe, May 16, 1968, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition files, Museum of Modern Art
Archives.) Rubin eventually was able to acquire the painting for the Modern in 1972. In 1973, Rubin
attributed the assessment that The Birth of the World was the Demoiselle d’Avignon of the informel to
Breton (William Rubin, Miró in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, 1973), 32). In a 1974 interview about the museum’s collection and installation, Rubin singled
out the painting as an example of what had previously been a lacuna in the Modern’s collection under
179

Rubin strongly affirmed that Miró’s abstraction, which, while not entirely automatic, was
the lynchpin between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. As Mary Anne
Staniszewski has noted in her book on MoMA’s installation practices, in singling out
certain artists by giving them their own rooms, this display “articulated the inscription of
Surrealism under the signatures of various masters…throughout the exhibition.”
144

However, while Miró’s numerous works were displayed in their own spacious white
room,
145
Dalí’s work was relegated to a small, dark room with black walls in which his
paintings were lit from single sources of artificial light enhancing their cinematic effect,
an arrangement that mimicked that of MoMA’s 1941 Dalí exhibition (discussed in
Chapter One), but, perhaps intentionally, also harked back to pre-modernist strategies of
aesthetic display. Indeed, Rubin described Dalí’s style as being “like that of the fussiest
Pre-Raphaelite.”
146

Other reviewers of the 1968 exhibition mention the squeeze of paintings in the
Dada and Surrealism galleries, in contrast to a great opening up of space in the Heritage
section. Among those artists included in the “Heritage” section were Jasper Johns,
Edward Kienholz, Yves Klein, Claes Oldenburg, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg,
and Mark Rothko. However, installation photographs reveal that works by these more

Alfred Barr (William Rubin, quoted in Lawrence Alloway and John Coplans, “Talking with William
Rubin: ‘Like Folding out a Hand of Cards,’” Artforum, v. 13, n. 3 (November 1974), 49).

144
Mary Ann Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of
Modern Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998), 139.

145
Lucy Lippard, “Notes on Dada and Surrealism at the Modern,” Art International (May 15, 1968).

146
William Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 208.

180
contemporary artists were also grouped somewhat closely together. This may have been
because the larger scale of works by the “Heritage” artists necessitated a grander viewing
space, but it is more likely a result of Rubin’s focus on the practices of the earlier avant-
garde. For him, the selection of which contemporary artists would be represented was
almost arbitrary given how pervasive he perceived the influence of Dada and Surrealism
to be. As he explained in a letter to Anne d’Harnoncourt in 1968, “…This section
[Heritage] is virtually an afterthought in an exhibition which focuses on the historical
movements of Dada and surrealism. …I might have chosen 30 other artists or included
any one of a thousand since there is very little going on outside of pure abstraction which
is not related, at least at some remove, from those phases of art history.”
147
Already then,
we can see that Rubin’s primary focus was not, as Bois recently proposed, to validate Pop
through Surrealism, but to contend with Surrealism as part of a system that produced Pop.
The threat Surrealism posed to the dominant narrative of modern art was two-, if
not three-fold. Its first problem might be called extra-aesthetic; as I have shown in the
previous chapter, since the 1930s, Surrealism had appeared nearly everywhere in
American popular culture – from advertisements, to fashion, to film, and in the case of
Dalí (who, as we saw in Chapter One, had become nearly synonymous with the
movement), to gossip columns and, eventually, game shows. Already in 1952, Art News
had proclaimed, “The mystery and fantasy of one of Paris’ most famous and recent avant-
gardes has become part of the man-on-the-street’s favorite experience. What was, only a

147
William Rubin, letter to Anne d’Harnoncourt (January 24, 1968), MoMA archives, Dada, Surrealism K-
R (Painting and Sculpture) file.

181
few decades ago, the private game of brilliant young poets and painters is now the main
feature of Broadway second-act ballets, Hollywood dream sequences, fashion magazine
designs, even Coney Island shooting galleries.”
148
By the 1960s, the public’s familiarity
with the movement was even more comprehensive, as Surrealism seemed once again to
invade consciousness itself. Critic Max Kozloff, conveying an idea that was becoming
widespread, wrote, “this is a skeptical, anti-mystical age, replete, moreover, with such
conditions as pot, and LSD, which can furnish a poor man’s Surrealism.”
149
Beyond the
resemblance of the new psychedelic imagery to certain Surrealist paintings, the visual
correlation between Surrealism and the burgeoning drug culture is worth elaborating. In
1966, a special issue of Life magazine devoted to LSD featured a spread that offered a
photographic illustration of a bad trip (Figure 2.16).
150
The series was composed of
close-up photographs of a teenage girl writhing on the floor, in some images covering her
eyes with her hands, chewing on her fingers, or covering her mouth. The similarity to the
photographic spread commemorating the 50
th
anniversary of Charcot’s discovery of

148
Art News Annual XXI, v. 50, n. 7 (1952), 130.

149
Max Kozloff, “Surrealist Painting Re-examined,” Artforum, v. 5, n. 1 (1966), 9. In 1966, LSD was
made illegal in the United States. John Lennon noted Surrealism’s influence on him in the 1960s (Imagine:
John Lennon, directed by Andrew Solt (1988). See also Nicolas Calas’s comments of 1968, “This
exhibition takes place at a time of drop-outs. The young wanderers of our day are orgiastic in mood,
nihilistic in attitude; felling the one-dimensional world of technocrazy, they only too often fall into the traps
of ready-made techniques of alienation. … The Surrealist precedent could be of value to them” (Nicolas
Calas, “Surrealist Heritage? Focus on Super-reality at the Museum of Modern Art,” Arts Magazine, v. 42,
n. 5 (March 1968), 28.

150
Photographs by Lawrence Schiller, “A teen-age LSD user meets terror on a bad trip,” Life, v. 60, n. 12
(March 25, 1966), pp. 30B-30C. Life had been covering the culture’s fascination with drugs with several
major articles – in 1965, the first of a two-part feature on drug addiction included “John and Karen, Two
Lives Lost to Heroin” and “New York’s Needle Park” (Life, v. 58, n. 8 (February 25, 1965), pp. 65b-81,
and pp. 82-92).

182
hysteria that appeared in La Révolution Surréaliste is striking (Figure 2.17). In the 1928
issue, an article on hysteria is accompanied by six photographs of a young female patient
experiencing various symptoms, holding up her hands, grabbing a pillow, and crossing
her arms.
151
She appears much more conscious of the camera than the girl in Life, but
both spreads aim to document states of mental contortion and their physical
manifestations played out across the female body. In calling hysteria the “greatest poetic
discovery of the end of the 19
th
century,”
152
the Surrealists sounded very much like those
proponents of LSD who described the drug as “the psychic revolution of man.”
153
Life
magazine credited Surrealism in a 1967 issue:
There is a procession of art movements reaching back 50 years that
invented every major Underground idea including the obsession with
visionary drugs: the Dadaists, the Surrealists and the Beat Generation said
it all. But none could have guessed at the size of the audience the
Underground presently commands, the strange new turnings of ‘in group’
taste. Some artists, like the ingenious Andy Warhol, have hurled
themselves headlong into the honeypot while hardly altering the aim of
their art, thus cleaning up deliciously on movies that last eight hours, on
masochist song-and-dance acts, whatever they’re buying uptown. …But
there remains the large and growing number of young people who are
simply hanging around the Underground’s permissive edges, using drugs
to calm whirlwind confusions, to make the sun keep coming up.
154

151
See Louis Aragon, André Breton, “Le cinquantenaire de l’hystérie,” La Révolution Surréaliste, n. 11
(March 15, 1928).

152
Louis Aragon, André Breton, quoted in Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (London: Arts
Council of Great Britain, 1978), 206.

153
Barry Farrell, “Swept Up in a Psychic Revolution,” Life, v. 60, n. 12 (March 25, 1966), 31.

154
Barry Farrell, “The Other Culture,” Life, v. 62, n. 7 (February 17, 1967), 96.

183
Again and again, Surrealism was depicted as being for the people, making it one of the
very few avant-gardes to be, if not understood, at least appreciated, by a cross section of
the mainstream.
Figure 2.16
Figure 2.17
Surrealism was able to shift between elite and popular in part because its
practitioners were, from the outset, fascinated by common culture, collecting odd objects
from Parisian flea markets and reading pulp detective novels.
155
Singled out by Thomas
Crow in his essay “Modernism and Mass Culture” as having both recognized and
reorganized elements of subculture to invest such objects and detritus with an

155
See Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).

184
unconscious inner life, the Surrealists, in attitude as well as activity, were deeply engaged
with the operations of mass culture.
156
But Surrealism’s infiltration into popular culture
was a result of more than just an inherent interest in the ephemera of modern life. In the
abundance of genres, styles and mediums that Surrealism encompassed, there was a
questioning of form that became particularly relevant as an increasingly media-saturated
world seemed to necessitate amongst the new generation of art historians a more strict
separation between high culture and low. As I discussed in Chapter One, this delineation
had been articulated especially forcefully to American readers in 1939 by Clement
Greenberg in his widely-read article “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”; its refrain (and formalist
implications) had been perpetuated even among more moderate art critics and
historians.
157
As abstraction gained more currency as a visual mode, the figurative
language that was the hallmark of several of the most famous Surrealist painters became
the point of its critical undoing. As early as 1944, a committee of the College Art
Association comprised of Alfred Barr Jr., Erwin Panofsky and Meyer Schapiro, among
others, wrote that the study of art history “assumes to-day a special poignancy. Without
the kind of experience which this study provides, the student is abandoned to the blind
deforming influence of the mass arts—advertising, popular magazines, movies and soon

156
Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” Modern Art in the Common Culture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 36.

157
According to Max Kozloff, “Greenberg formalism offered young critics a coherent (though lopsided)
thesis about the evolution of modern art…By the end of the 1960s, many critics, erstwhile true believers,
ostentatiously disclaimed any allegiance to this system. But, even when they assessed new artistic
phenomena, they remained fascinated by Clement Greenberg’s old-time repressive attitude” (Max Kozloff,
“Introduction,” Cultivated Impasses: Essays on the Waning of the Avant-Garde 1964-1975 (New York:
Marsilio Publishers, 2000), 14).

185
no doubt, television.”
158
Indeed, in the 1960s, Surrealism, easily adaptable due to its lack
of singular style, had been presented in all these mediums.
159
By 1966 it was recognized
by many critics, including drama critic Martin Esslin: “In a period in which criticism of
the fine arts concentrated on form, texture and color, it became only too easy to dismiss
all surrealist painters and sculptors as illustrators. This is probably the main reason why
Surrealism’s reputation… declined as much as it did in the late forties and fifties.”
160

Because Surrealism did not have a singular style (or at least, no one could agree
on what that might be), Surrealism threatened a major evaluative methodology of art
history. Without this measure of consistency, Surrealism as a movement defied existing
systems of categorization, such as style, that art historians had been using.
161
Style,
however, is by definition a formal quality and Surrealism was anything but formally
coherent. Because the artists of Dada and Surrealism operated in both abstract and
figurative modes, some using automatic processes, others trained in academic practices,

158
A Committee of the College Art Association, College Art Journal, vol. 3, no. 3 (March 1944), 83.
Knowledge of the fine arts was assumed here to invest America’s youth with the “critical attitude” that
would be the crucial tool necessary to oppose the commercial pressures of the increased ubiquity of the
mass arts. Television was debuted at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and went on sale to the public in
1946; by 1948, one million sets were in use in the United States and a decade later, 50 million sets were in
use (“Chronology,” Image World: Art and Media Culture (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art,
1989), 176-177).

159
Dalí in fact designed the June 8, 1968 cover of TV Guide, which also contained the article “Salvador
Dalí’s View of Television.”

160
Martin Esslin, “Now All Artists Are Surrealists,” New York Times Magazine (May 22, 1966). Esslin was
the author of Theater of the Absurd (1962).

161
In a 1977 talk (later published as an article), art historian Svetlana Alpers discusses the problem of style
as a category, quoting George Kubler, “‘The notion of style has long been the art historian’s principal mode
of classing works of art’” and asking, “How can one conduct a study of all art with tools and assumptions
developed in the service of one?” (Svetlana Alpers, “Style is What You Make It: The Visual Arts Once
Again,” The Concept of Style (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 106). Alpers was arguing against
applying categories developed with regard to Italian art to Northern Renaissance works.

186
they could not be readily categorized by using style as a measurement. As Rubin wrote in
1966, “we cannot formulate a definition of Surrealist painting comparable in clarity with
the meanings of Impressionism and Cubism.”
162
But this did not stop him from trying.
Later in the same article, Rubin proposes that perhaps Surrealism’s plastic development
can be understood as “above all other determinants, the saga of biomorphism.”
163

Besides bracketing out Surrealists such as Magritte by defining the movement’s practice
thus, Rubin’s melodramatic characterization of Surrealism’s aesthetic contribution – for
him it is a saga – conveniently posits Surrealism’s development in clear contrast to
Cubism and ending by influencing the early New York School painters. Rubin’s attempt
at comprehensiveness is glaringly incomplete. However, it might make more sense to
consider Rubin’s project as one centered on recovery – by firmly placing Dada and
Surrealism under the category of art, Rubin felt that he was rectifying a previous “lack of
concern with the forms of art that Breton and the other Surrealist writers never even
raised.”
164
As Dore Ashton noted in her review of the exhibition, “It is true that of many
histories the movements engendered the one that interests the museum is the history of

162
William Rubin, “Toward a Critical Framework, 3. A Post-Cubist Morphology: Preliminary Remarks,””
Artforum, v. 5, n. 1 (September 1966), 36.

163
William Rubin, “Toward a Critical Framework, 3. A Post-Cubist Morphology: Preliminary Remarks,”
Artforum, v. 5, n. 1 (September 1966), 46. Earlier in the same article, Rubin declares “if there is a
characteristic formal element that runs like a leit-motif through the stylistic innovations of 1914-1947, it is
surely this biomorphology” (Ibid.). Rubin repeats this thesis in his larger study Dada and Surrealism,
placing the style “against Cubism that preceded it and the new American painting – or, less accurately
named, Abstract Expressionism – …which succeeded it” (William Rubin, Dada and Surrealism (London:
Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1969), 18).

164
William Rubin, Dada and Surrealism (London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1969), 18.

187
inherent style, viewed more or less aesthetically.”
165
Surrealism’s multiplicity of styles
was a challenge that was difficult to meet with the usual techniques of art historical
practice - and one that would ultimately demand their re-assessment.
Surrealism’s third difficulty for the art world of the 1960s was a contradictory
one. While the protesters outside MoMA in 1968 could and did recognize a fraught
kinship with the movement in no small part because the cultural climate of the late
1960s—including the protests over the war in Vietnam, civil rights, workers’ rights, free
speech—was deeply politicized, Surrealism’s own political affiliations and involvements
were hardly mentioned in the exhibition. Indeed, the hippies’ protest on the street outside
of MoMA was more than tinged with political allegations, as the demonstrators staged a
mimed drama that satirized the U.S.’s involvement in Vietnam.
166
This aspect of the
demonstration had little to do with the art on display, but the anti-war spirit of Dada and
Surrealism was very much in evidence, as was the movements’ history of “hoopla and
hubris that has become characteristic of modern American society,” as Time reported.
167

Though Harold Rosenberg wrote that “Surrealist thinking is omnipresent in the thought
of the uprising” in Paris, and one critic wrote of Dada and Surrealism’s acute “similarity
[to] current doctrines expressed by Senators Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy,

165
Dore Ashton, “New York Commentary,” Studio International (June 1968), 321.

166
As reported in a New Zealand newspaper, the play “featured a white-fanged dragon – the war –
devouring a U.S. soldier and a player representing President Johnson counting endless piles of outsize
dollars” (“Irate Hippies Lecture New York Police,” The Dominion (March 27, 1968). The mime show was
also reported in the New York Post (Joseph Feurey and Jay Levin, “Hippies Put on a Museum Show,” New
York Post (March 26, 1968).

167
“The Hobbyhorse Rides Again,” Time v. 91, n. 41 (April 5, 1968), 84.

188
multitudes of college students, flower children, and increasingly larger segments of the
population,” Surrealism’s officially stated commitment to Marxism was not often
mentioned.
168
This may have been another residual effect of long-dominant formalist
principles – the mixing of politics and art would inherently undermine any claim to art’s
autonomy. Surrealism in the service of the revolution (to borrow the title of the official
Surrealist journal published in Paris from 1930 to 1933), or Surrealism in the service of
anything resembling an ideology, could not help but be incompatible with an art for art’s
sake dogma. The movement’s historical allegiance to Marxism could also be seen as
another facet of its commitment to the common culture, which would have to be buried in
a version of modern art that endeavored to exist independent of context.

MoMA as Exhibitionist: Positions of Display
Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage drew large audiences – it was “one of the
best attended in the museum’s history,” and nearly every review mentioned the
extraordinary crowdedness of the galleries.
169
According to one newspaper, more than

168
Rosenberg continues, “It is the Surrealist idea, detached from Surrealist art, that links the uprising to art
history, as it is Marxist thinking, detached from Marxist organization, that links the uprising to the history
of Socialism…In the Paris uprising, …Surrealism, laced with Dada, suddenly reappeared as an intellectual
force independent of its past creations” (Harold Rosenberg, “Surrealism in the Streets,” The New Yorker, v.
44, n. 45 (December 28, 1968), 54); Bob Harris, “4 Major Manhattan Museum Shows,” Long Island Daily
Review (April 4, 1968).

169
William Wilson, “Exhibition of Art Made to Shock Opens,” Los Angeles Times (July 16, 1968), A1.
Additionally, the initial print run of the show’s catalogue was likely around 80,000, demonstrating the
interest MoMA projected for the exhibition (William Rubin, letter to Mr. and Mrs. Erickson, December 29,
1967, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition files, Museum of Modern Art archives). The
catalogue eventually saw seven printings of two editions, according to Jenny Tobias, of MoMA’s library:
the first edition of 1968, the second edition, revised in 1977, the second edition, second printing in 1982,
the second edition, third printing in 1985, the second edition, fourth printing, (n.d.), the second edition, fifth
printing in 1989, and the second edition, sixth printing in 1992.

189
150,000 visitors saw the show during its first month, “a figure well above the museum’s
average.”
170
Many newspapers reported on the visitors themselves, who were so often
described as hippies, it seemed that this subculture was Surrealism’s target audience
(Figure 2.18). One reviewer wrote: “Gallery visitors in psychedelic miniskirts, hippie
unhaircuts, and what passes for an intellectual look are sometimes closer to Surrealism
than the art,”
171
underscoring Surrealism’s sartorial, rather than aesthetic, manifestations.
Rubin also found himself in the position of advertising the projected audience’s attitudes
as a way of reassuring dealers and artists abroad. Writing to Madame Louise Leiris,
Rubin assured her of the museum audience’s liberal viewpoint, “I know that Picasso has
an attitude full of reservation towards America, considering the politics governing our
country. Perhaps he would have a more favorable attitude if you could explain to him that
the direction of the exhibition is in the hands of a young person and that our audience is
an audience of young people and young artists, having an idea on the war in Vietnam
very much different than the official politics.”
172
In its popularity, particularly with this
younger generation, the exhibition almost became an event, a happening itself, as

170
Douglas M. Davis, “Dada Loses Its Shock Effect, And the Crowds Flock Around,” National Observer
(June 24, 1968). According to the journal America, “3,562 paying visitors…crowded into the museum for
opening day, March 27. The next day the throng seemed even larger and more diversified: young, old; beat
and otherwise, especially otherwise” (“Dada and Lively Church Music,” America (April 27, 1968). Official
attendance data for the show could not be located in the Museum of Modern Art records.

171
“Brushed with Dada,” News Advocate (Manistee, Michigan: October 2, 1968).

172
William Rubin, letter to Louise Leiris, June 1, 1967, author’s translation, Dada, Surrealism, and Their
Heritage exhibition files, Museum of Modern Art Archives. Rubin was 39 years old at the time. Rubin
wrote much the same thing to the Swiss art historian Jean Leymarie: “Perhaps you could make clear to
Picasso that the people who are organizing this exhibition, the artists for whom it will be very important,
and the public which could not have seen the 1937 exhibition are all younger people whose views on most
of these issues are probably much closer to Picasso’s than to that of the American Government” (William
Rubin, letter to Jean Leymarie, January 3, 1967, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition files,
Museum of Modern Art Archives).

190
Surrealism was here transformed into a fashionable accessory for contemporary
subculture, though this is not to deny the genuine interest of the hippies who visited the
show. As the reviewer for Time pointed out, “Dada’s pranks and surrealist spectacles
were revived in the 1960s as Happenings, which in turn have been commercialized by
department stores, and ultimately popularized by flower children as love-ins.”
173
The
exhibition became, despite the objections of the demonstrators on opening night, a
countercultural site to see and be seen in.
Figure 2.18
By reporting on the audience as well as the art, reviewers were partly responding
to the new and more dynamic art-viewing public of the 1960s. As Abstract
Expressionism led to a multitude of artistic forms and formats, the market could support a
more eclectic variety of works, all of which could lay some claim to being avant-garde.
In the age of “instant art history” as Henry Geldzahler termed the era at the Museum of
Modern Art symposium on Pop in 1963, art was appreciated (and appreciating) faster

173
“The Hobbyhorse Rides Again,” Time, v. 91, n. 14 (April 5, 1968).

191
than ever before.
174
Driven by the growing market and the increase of art writing, the
Surrealists’ work in particular benefited from its newfound relationship to more recent
art.
175
When William Rubin chose to display Magritte’s painting Personal Values (1952)
in Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, he also attempted to buy the picture for the
Museum from its then owner Ambassador Jean-Albert Goris (Figure 2.19). The deal
never went through because Rubin unknowingly made an offer lower than others Goris
had already received. Rubin’s underestimation might have been due to the dramatic
increase in prices that Magritte’s paintings underwent in the 1960s. Ten years later, in a
letter to the Magritte collector, Henry Torczyner, who had bought the painting, Rubin
wrote that his mistake in not acquiring the painting was “one of the worst I’ve made in
my tenure here…I am obsessed with the idea that somehow, some day, this picture
should be in the Museum collection. There are few paintings in private collections about
which I feel so strongly.”
176
I would propose that this painting in particular was so
important to Rubin in 1968 and thereafter because, in its use of what had been established
as Pop iconography, Personal Values makes explicit the link between Magritte (and the
aspects of Surrealism that he represents) and Pop Art.

174
Henry Geldzahler, “Symposium on Pop Art,” Arts Magazine (April 1963), 37.

175
Harold Rosenberg, commenting on the close relationship of art criticism to the market, wrote that art
criticism “has anyway become little more than a shopping guide” (Harold Rosenberg, “Adding Up: The
Reign of the Art Market,” Art on the Edge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 279).

176
Letter from William Rubin to Henry Torczyner, 1978, Museum Collection Files, Magritte general,
Museum of Modern Art. The painting now hangs in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
192
Figure 2.19
The painting shows a bedroom in which the accessories of daily life – comb, soap
(or, perhaps, pill), brush, glass and match – are enlarged to superhuman proportions.
With increased size, the objects are automatically granted increased importance, as they
overtake a bourgeois bedroom. Magritte recognized the re-ordering of value in the
painting as a negotiation between society, the individual consumer, and the products at
hand. Describing the painting to his dealer in New York, Magritte wrote, “…a comb is
for combing hair, it is manufactured, sold, etc….In my picture, the comb (and the other
objects as well) has specifically lost its ‘social character,’ it has become an object of
useless luxury….”
177
As the scale of the objects disagrees with their surroundings, the
ordinary aspects of grooming become tools of societal maintenance. The breakdown of
social character – the alienation of the objects from their use-value – is foregrounded by

177
In full, Magritte’s comments to Iolas (who refused to keep the picture and gave it to Goris perhaps as a
present) read: “the individual in society needs a set of ideas thanks to which a comb, for instance, becomes
a symbol allowing a certain combination of events, in which he, the individual, manages to act within
society by behaving in a manner comprehensible to society: a comb is for combing hair, it is manufactured,
sold, etc….In my picture, the comb (and the other objects as well) has specifically lost its ‘social character,’
it has become an object of useless luxury, which may, as you say, leave the spectator ‘feeling helpless’ or
even make him ill. Well, this is proof of the effectiveness of the picture” (Magritte, quoted in René
Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, v. III, 192).

193
their careful display in the bedroom, as if the interior of a home was now a department
store window.
178
The strategy was seen in contemporary art as well – Claes Oldenburg’s
floppy Giant Soft Fan (1966-1967) enlarges (and renders useless) another household
object, while Andy Warhol’s thirty-two individual Campbell soup can canvases were
originally displayed on individual shelves, much as one would have encountered the cans
in a supermarket – another example of a mundane commodity elevated to the status of
art.
The idea of retail display and oversized objects also begs particular comparison
with Claes Oldenburg’s 1961 Store. In an interview, Rubin compared Magritte’s work to
Oldenburg’s: “There’s a Magritte painting in this show in which there’s a comb which
reaches almost to the ceiling and a shaving brush which is about 6 feet wide. I think that
this idea which we see developed in a marvelous way by say Oldenburg, who has turned
it into three dimensions, and gives you giant cigarette butts which are 5 ft long and so
forth.”
179
Rubin’s description itself confers dimensions on the objects in Magritte’s work
that they do not, in painted form, possess, already performing the work of Oldenburg’s
transformation. But while comparing Magritte’s work to Oldenburg, Rubin also praised
Magritte’s “considerable standard of abstraction,” writing that “a good deal of Magritte’s
appeal lies, therefore, in the area of the purely esthetic: the compositional breadth, the

178
It also appears that Magritte makes a play on sight in his buildup of windows, glass and reflective
surfaces in the painting. Through the green tint of the wineglass, the mirrored boudoir reflects a window,
but the window’s panes are opaque in distinct contrast to the sky visible everywhere else in the room.

179
William Rubin, interview with Ruth Bowman (April 1971), Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

194
massive contrasts of solids and voids, the economy of means.”
180
Though, as I
demonstrated earlier in this chapter, Magritte’s work was largely appreciated for its
iconographical and symbolic content, Rubin’s deep understanding of form manifests
itself even in describing some of the most illusionistic works of art in the exhibition.
For movements such as Dada and Surrealism, the institutionalization marked by
Rubin’s exhibition was interpreted by many critics as anathema to the formative ideals of
the movements. Instead of recreating the disruptive display techniques of previous
Surrealist exhibitions, Rubin took a diligent, documentary approach to his subject. Each
work was displayed straightforwardly, arranged methodically, without reference to the
Surrealist exhibition practices of the 1930s and 1940s that were designed to challenge,
rather than enable, the audience’s capacity to view.
181
Instead, Rubin’s exhibition
privileged analysis, not experience. There was, perhaps, one exception. In the museum’s
sculpture garden was a reproduction of Dalí’s 1938 installation, Rainy Taxi.
182
It
involved two mannequins, an interior sprinkler system and several live snails (though
these later had to be replaced by replicas, as the snails had either escaped or died). While
Rubin had commissioned Dalí to recreate his 1938 environment, other of the groups’

180
William Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 208.

181
An example of Surrealist exhibition practice is Duchamp’s looping of twine across and between
paintings to the point of obscuring the works of art in “The First Papers of Surrealism” exhibition of 1942.
For more on Surrealist exhibitions, see Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp,
Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).

182
In this case, reproduction involved the procurement of a period Rolls-Royce (much to the credit of
Museum staff) to which Dalí made alterations.

195
remaining living artists had refused to participate in creating Dadaist or Surrealist settings
for their works in the exhibition.
183

The exhibition was organized more or less chronologically, with Dada leading to
Surrealism and then to the Heritage section. The first room of the Heritage section was
filled with American paintings from the 1940s, including works by Rothko, William
Baziotes, Theodoros Stamos and Pollock. Rothko’s Slow Swirl by the Edge of the Sea
(1944) was a particularly interesting inclusion because the artist had tried to suppress his
early Surrealist-oriented work, even in his 1961 MoMA retrospective (Figure 2.20).
184

Critic Hilton Kramer has since speculated that Rothko’s denial of Surrealism as an
influence was partially the result of Clement Greenberg’s attack on Surrealism, published
in consecutive issues of The Nation in August and September 1944.
185
The painting’s two
vertically-oriented loosely figurative linear motifs display a connection to works by
Matta, Miró and Tanguy shown in the exhibition. Rubin was focused on rehabilitating
the abstract surrealists – such artists who fit into his “saga of biomorphism” as Masson

183
Rubin had asked Marcel Duchamp if he would consider curating the room of his own works, as well as
design an exquisite corpse drawing for the catalogue cover with Miró and Claes Oldenburg, but Duchamp
declined. Meanwhile, Dalí offered to design the book jacket, but Rubin refused.

184
In 1976, Dorothy Miller recalled how, when she and Barr requested to see Rothko’s early work, the
artist had pretended not to have it anymore. “But you see, he did have them, but tired to disown them. I
happen to know they’re extant, because I’m now serving at the Rothko Foundation” (Dorothy Miller,
quoted in John Gruen, “Dorothy Miller in the Company of Modern Art,” ArtNews, v. 75, n. 9 (November
1976), 57.

185
The article “caused a great sensation in the New York art world, where Surrealism was then enjoying
immense prestige and patronage. This was not something that could easily have been ignored by an artist as
ambitious-but also as insecure in his goals-as Rothko then was” (Hilton Kramer, “Rothko’s Surreal Killer
May Have Been Greenberg,” New York Observer (June 15, 1998). As I have shown in the previous chapter,
Surrealism was already in decline by the time Greenberg published his articles condemning the movement
in 1944.

196
and Miró – and the inclusion of early New York School paintings made explicit the
importance of the formal connections that Rubin felt had been ignored by the figurative
branch of Surrealism. Rubin’s loyalties in the Heritage section become evident. He
explained to Ruth Bowman in a radio program, “That branch of surrealism [abstract
surrealism], which is Miró and Masson, is really much more interesting from the point of
view of quality, ultimately much more creative for the history of art, because it is what
leads to Pollock and other painters rather than Dalí.”
186
Later in the interview he says, “I
think Magritte is a superb painter but Magritte has not led anywhere in the way that Miró
has led somewhere.”
187
In light of Rubin’s comparison between Magritte and Oldenburg
made only moments earlier in the radio program, it seems that Rubin clearly privileges
stylistic influence over iconographic similarities. Moreover, his assessment that Miró has
led “somewhere” implies that to Rubin the connections between abstract Surrealism and
the New York School were much more important for art history than those between
figurative Surrealism and Pop.

186
William Rubin, interview with Ruth Bowman (April 1971), Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
This may have still been a contested notion at the time. In a 1970 interview, Harold Rosenberg insists that
“Now, what happened to Surrealism is very important because the artists were not influenced by them. …It
[Surrealism] was great for Gorky. I mean he really began to go to town. But nobody else was interested in
Surrealism” (Harold Rosenberg, Interviewed by Paul Cummings, Tape 1, Side A (December 17, 1970),
Smithsonian Archives of American Art).

187
William Rubin, interview with Ruth Bowman (April 1971), Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

197
Figure 2.20
Rubin’s sober presentation prompted fierce partisan reaction. Several reviewers,
especially Nicolas Calas, a former Surrealist, and John Perreault, of the Village Voice,
accused Rubin of draining the critical Surrealist spirit from the works and denying them
the capacity to be anything but historical. (Perhaps they would not have come to this
conclusion had Christo’s proposal to wrap the Museum on the occasion of the exhibition
come to fruition.) Rubin’s attempt at a scholarly, rather than experiential, show
distinguished the exhibition from a Surrealist encounter. On the one hand, then, Rubin
paid serious attention to Surrealism’s art. Hilton Kramer praised Rubin for “attempt[ing]
to penetrate the rhetoric, the politics, and the legends of dada and surrealism—all the
extra-esthetic baggage that contribute to their beguiling mystique – in order to disclose
their durable esthetic substance.”
188
But on the other hand, these were the very aspects
that made Surrealism’s artistic concerns so widely relevant.

188
Hilton Kramer, “The Mark of the Infidel,” New York Times (April 7, 1968). For Kramer, it was not
Rubin who evacuated the revolutionary history of Dada and Surrealism, rather “history itself has disclosed
198
In part, Dada and Surrealism’s extra-aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) aspirations meant
that their exhibition in a museum would inherently contradict their artistic and social
ideals. While belittling the legitimacy of such a concern, Kramer acknowledged as much,
“No doubt for the partisans of the Surrealist movement, who continue to speak of
‘revolution’ as if it were a dinner party that still might take place, such artistic
accomplishments do little to assuage the bitterness they feel at the perfidy of history –
history, which promised so much and which has ended up as an exhibition in a
museum.”
189
This was indeed another objection raised by the protesters on opening night.
Even Philip Leider, though praising the exhibition, admitted, “The Surrealist ‘objects,’
for example are embalmed in a manner corroborating the worst fears of the protesting
Hippies – as befits what is deadest in Surrealism. The worst of them are hardest to get to,
awkwardly stuck in the far corner of a narrow mausoleum of a room.”
190
When
movements pertain to life and culture the way that Dada and Surrealism do, “there is an
ironic significance in the fact that the boisterous, anti-esthetic, prodigal sons have now
come home to rest on the great mothering breast of the Museum of Modern Art”
191
as one
reviewer put it. Rubin recognized this irony, but for him, “there’s a further irony…and
that is that not only is there a great deal of Dada and Surrealist art that really stacks up as

Dada and Surrealism to be, despite all the hopes and protestations to the contrary, primarily movements of
esthetic thought and artistic accomplishment” (Ibid.)

189
Hilton Kramer, “The Mark of the Infidel,” New York Times (April 7, 1968).

190
Philip Leider, “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage: A Beautiful Exhibition,” Artforum, v. 6, n. 9
(May 1968), 23.

191
James R. Mellow, “The Exquisite Corpses,” New Leader (April 8, 1968).

199
art, despite the fact that the intention was essentially elsewhere, but that it even looks
arty! … [A]rty is not the same thing as art. It means self-consciously art-like.”
192
And so,
even before connections could be made visually between this unruly strand of the avant-
garde and the recent art of the 1960s, the act of positioning – some called it confining –
Surrealism in a museum, a site arguably removed from actual experience, was itself a
practice to be contested.
The Museum of Modern Art had, since its inception, set about framing significant
art movements to American museum-goers, and it had simultaneously increasingly
established its own role in the modern art landscape, through both its exhibition and its
collecting policies. Initially, the Modern was conceived as a dynamic institution that
would work in concert with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to maintain an impermanent
permanent collection, selling off works as they came to be considered classic in order to
focus on the contemporary.
193
But according to MoMA curator Kirk Varnedoe, the Cold

192
William Rubin, Camera III, Recording Number 68.12, Part 1, Museum of Modern Art archives.

193
In 1947, Stephan Clark, James Thrall Soby and Barr proposed that “…the Museum of Modern Art will
retain possession of these works of art until they become ‘classic art.’ The term ‘classic art’ as defined in
this agreement shall be deemed to include ‘any painting, drawing, print or sculpture which has ceased to be
significant in the contemporary movement of art and has become part of the cultural history of humanity’”
(Clark, Barr and Soby, quoted in Kirk Varnedoe, “The Evolving Torpedo: Changing Ideas of the Collection
of Painting and Sculpture of the Museum of Modern Art,” The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century:
Continuity and Change (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995), 32). Chief MoMA Curator John
Elderfield points out that in 1940 only 14 percent of the Modern’s collection of 610 works dated from the
nineteenth century, “however, they represented almost half the entire financial value of the collection” and
thus were “a very attractive target” due to MoMA’s lack of acquisition funds (John Elderfield, “The Front
Door to Understanding,” Modern Painting and Sculpture: 1880 to the Present at the Museum of Modern
Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 21). While Barr had been fired in 1943, he became
Director of Museum Collections in 1947. Elderfield convincingly proposes that by 1947, Barr had realized
that the Museum’s earlier works were important to establish the continuity between modern and
contemporary art and should be retained, but did not then have the power or support to stop the signing of
the agreement with the Metropolitan. Thus, the Museum did not officially have a permanent collection
until 1953, when its agreement with the Metropolitan Museum was terminated.

200
War was instrumental in affecting a culture of competitive, rather than complimentary,
collecting practices of both the Modern and the Met, and also led to MoMA’s
collaboration with the United States Information Agency (USIA) to export political ideals
abroad through the new American avant-garde.
194
Museums, at once places to preserve
history while seemingly standing apart from it, were becoming more and more prominent
in writing the history of the recent past through their exhibition practices and
publications. Rubin offered a different opinion of the pace MoMA kept with relation to
art: “the Museum should move at a reasonable distance behind the artists, not
transcending the scene, not trying to make too rapid assumptions, not taste-making, not
worrying about one-upsmanship, but rather putting things together as their contours begin
to clarify.”
195
Nonetheless, few would disagree with National Gallery director J. Carter
Brown’s assessment that the Museum of Modern Art as “the most significant tastemaking
factor in twentieth-century America.”
196
This became especially obvious to critics when
Rubin took the helm of MoMA’s painting and sculpture department in 1967, during the
preparation of Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage. In a memo to MoMA’s director

194
According to Varnedoe, “Before World War II, the kind of art The Museum of Modern Art supported
was still commonly dismissed by many as a fringe avant-garde movement of interest largely to
oversophisticated Europeans or trendy bohemians. … the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, however, …gave
such art new stature as the embodiment of principles of individual freedom. This larger humanistic appeal,
which could be slanted to more specifically political purposes, would become more and more touted as the
Cold War intensified” (Varnedoe, “The Evolving Torpedo,” 38).

195
William Rubin, quoted in Lawrence Alloway and John Coplans, “Talking with William Rubin: ‘The
Museum Concept is not Infinitely Expandable,’” Artforum, v. 13, n. 2 (October 1974), 51.

196
J. Carter Brown, quoted in Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of
Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 432.

201
Bates Lowry in the midst of the Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage show, Rubin
asserted his support for the Modern’s commitment to its art and its audience:
At a time when museums are increasingly becoming community centers,
foci of ‘special events’ (often of a strictly public relations character), I
personally feel that the Museum of Modern Art ought to affirm the notion
of the Museum as a repository of great works of art. Many of the museums
to which I refer – particularly the newer ones – must indulge in these
programs because they do not have those great works of art; since we have
them – and our collection of modern art is many times greater and more
complete than its nearest rivals – I believe that we are under a moral
obligation to make them visible in the best possible way.
197

Rubin strongly believed that the Museum of Modern Art was first among New York
museums in its ability to undertake such major historical retrospectives of modern art as
Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, which he thought should be the primary purpose
of the museum after building the collection.
198
In May 1968, Harold Rosenberg wrote in
The New Yorker, that the sole purpose of Rubin’s show could only be “to knock out the
philosophical underpinnings of modern art. The show is a remarkable, if not epoch-
making, instance of a museum’s openly intruding into current art history as an active
partisan force by posing its own conception of value and its own will regarding the future
against the will and ideas of the artists it is displaying.”
199
The museum, with Rubin as its

197
William Rubin, memo to Bates Lowry, April 11, 1968, Dorothy Miller Papers, Addendum A.II.12,
Museum of Modern Art Archives. Rubin’s memo was written to Lowry to protest the space allocation plans
in the Museum’s new building. Rubin argued for greater space in order to display a larger percentage of the
Modern’s post-war American painting, much of which was not on view.

198
Ibid.

199
Harold Rosenberg, “MOMA Dada,” The New Yorker, v. XLIV, n. 13 (May 18, 1968), 151. Nicholas
Calas also accused the museum of “harm[ing] more than it helps when it thrusts its weight around” but
concludes that “the programs of museums have become as meaningless as those of the big political parties;
they are but advertising slogans” (Calas, “Surrealist Heritage? Focus on Super-reality at the Museum of
Modern Art,” Arts Magazine, v. 42, n. 5 (March 1968), 26).

202
agent, was seen as trying to fix a place for Surrealism, but Surrealism’s unsettled
relevance to current critical debates demonstrates not only the instability of its place
within art historical discourse but also the instability of that discourse itself.
Brickbats and Bouquets

The reviews of Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage varied widely but perhaps
none is more immediately arresting than the anonymous illustration that accompanied
Gregory Battcock’s article in The New York Free Press (Figure 2.21).
200
It shows a
photograph of Rubin’s head and hand, taken from the formal portrait that had
accompanied the New York Times article announcing his appointment at MoMA,
201

combined with a drawing of his body as a be-suited mermaid. He sits on a seashell,
which rests on what seems to be a hardwood floor, while the exterior of MoMA’s
building recedes in the background.

Rubin, though his gaze is unfixed, stares in the
direction of the Museum, his sights set upon this prototypic cube, but the capability
implied by the photographic transcription of reality is disowned by the simplicity of the
linear drawing and his own trans-corporeality (from photograph to drawing and from man
to fish). Rubin occupies a strange no-man’s land; neither in the museum, nor necessarily
outside of it, he is truly a fish out of water. The collage is itself surreal, turning the
curator into an exquisite corpse.

200
Gregory Battcock, “Review: “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage,” and “Exhibition of Destructive
Art,” New York Free Press (April 4, 1968), 8.

201
Grace Glueck, “Museum Chooses Head for Division,” New York Times (July 11, 1967).

203
Figure 2.21
How did Rubin come to occupy such a bifurcated position? In some ways, the
collage illustrates exactly the repression of the romantic, the fantastic and the
psychological that remain submerged under the museum’s strict modernist façade of
seemingly objective values. Rubin’s show generated such a heated critical response that
Phillip Leider, then editor of Artforum, recognizing the significance of this moment of
mutual inflection, and especially stirred by Harold Rosenberg’s piece in the New Yorker,
invited Rubin to write an article for Artforum on the critical response to the show.
202

Though Rubin declined Leider’s offer, citing psychic and physical exhaustion,
203
he did

202
Philip Leider, letter to William Rubin, May 16, 1968, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage file “855.
Dada, Surrealism Publicity (Painting and Sculpture),” Museum of Modern Art Archives.

203
William Rubin, letter to Philip Leider, May 22, 1968, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage file “855.
Dada, Surrealism Publicity (Painting and Sculpture),” Museum of Modern Art Archives.

204
promise to respond to certain individual reviewers once “the shouting [was] over and the
brickbats and bouquets have passed into memory.”
204

In some ways, Rubin’s was a voice in the void; at best, Surrealism had become an
art historical tangent, at worst – a lacuna. In Leider’s assessment, “By the time of Mr.
Rubin’s exhibition, neither the best painting nor the best criticism seemed to
acknowledge that Surrealism ever existed.”
205
The criticism to which Leider refers is
formalist (and his assessment is unsurprising given Artforum’s employment of Michael
Fried and Rosalind Krauss) and to a large extent this might have been true, but
Surrealism simply would not go away.
206
Indeed, it had no place to go, since, by the
1960s, it had been thoroughly absorbed into so many elements of visual culture. John
Ashbery noted the connections between Surrealism and other art movements, “Surrealism
is, however, the connecting link among any number of current styles thought to be
mutually exclusive, such as Abstract Expressionism, Minimal Art and ‘color-field’
painting. The art world is so divided into factions that the irrational, oneiric basis shared
by these arts is, though obvious, scarcely perceived.”
207
One such critic was certainly
Michael Fried. In his widely-read “Art and Objecthood,” published in Artforum one year
prior to Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, the author, arguing against theatricality in

204
William Rubin, letter to Mr. Shirey, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage archival file “855. Dada,
Surrealism Publicity (Painting and Sculpture),” May 27, 1968.

205
Philip Leider, “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage: A Beautiful Exhibition,” Artforum, v. 6, n. 9 (May
1968), 22.

206
In Chapter Three, I will discuss Artforum’s significance at length.

207
John Ashbery, “Dada & Surrealism,” The New Republic, v. 158, n. 22 (June 1, 1968), 36.

205
contemporary art, felt it necessary to connect Surrealism explicitly to his definition of
what was not art. Fried drew an extended comparison between the Minimalist art he was
critiquing and figurative Surrealism, specifically mentioning the work of Dalí and
Magritte, writing:
there is, in fact, a deep affinity between literalist and Surrealist
sensibility…which ought to be noted. Both employ imagery which is at
once holistic and, in a sense, fragmentary, incomplete; both resort to a
similar anthropomorphizing of objects or conglomerations of objects (in
Surrealism the use of dolls and manikins makes this explicit); both are
capable of achieving remarkable effects of ‘presence’; and both tend to
deploy, and isolate, objects and persons in situations – the closed room
and the abandoned artificial landscape are as important to Surrealism as to
literalism.
208

For such critics, Surrealism was not so much forgotten as it was actively defeated and
denied.
Rubin mounted his exhibition in dialogue with this view, and he set out to make a
case for Surrealist painting on formal terms, thus fitting Surrealism into the then
dominant framework of modern art. In Artforum, Ellen Mandelbaum wrote, “It seems
essential that for Surrealism to be brought into line with the present and our present form-
oriented values, that we understand the extent to which Surrealism participated in the

208
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum, v. 5, n. 10 (Summer 1967), 23. In the article, Fried
worked to characterize Minimalism, in order to set out the terms on which he would condemn it. Fried
takes from Greenberg the critique of presence (as opposed to presentness), which occurs with objecthood,
or as Fried calls it “the condition of non-art.” Fried argues that objecthood is antithetical to art because of
its theatricality, theatre being the opposite of art. The characteristics that make literalist art theatrical are its
concern with the circumstances in which the viewer encounters it, it is “an object in a situation—one
that…includes the beholder.” Fried also condemns the anthropomorphism of Minimalist art, which he sees
as contributing to its theatricality. Fried argues that defeating objecthood and defeating theatre are
imperative for art, and painting can achive this through its pictorial essence. For sculpture, objecthood can
be combated through syntax (as in Caro) or surface and color (as in Olitski). Fried declares that theatre lies
between the arts and that only within the individual arts can there be meaning. With Fried’s favorite artists
(Caro, Olitski, Noland, Smith), “at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest” and, he concludes
famously, “presentness is grace” (See Ibid., pp. 12-23).

206
crucial inventions of modern form.”
209
Mandelbaum wanted to take for granted the
uniformity of the artistic community’s “form-oriented values” perhaps because the desire
to bring this type of painting into line was a direct result of the multiplicity of values that
were evident by the 1960s, as Pop became thoroughly insinuated into the art world. In
the exhibition catalogue, Rubin declared, “it appeared by 1955 as if the entire Dada-
Surrealist adventure was a kind of anti-modernist reaction situated parenthetically
between the great abstract movements prior to World War I and after World War II.”
210

But by the mid-1960s, the persistence of Surrealism’s unruliness demonstrated that it was
not a parenthetical place-holder, but a pervasive influence. As Hilton Kramer, art news
editor for the New York Times wrote, “Dada and surrealism may be secure and even
fashionable fixtures in our general cultural consciousness, but they have proved to be
paradoxically resistant to art history.”
211
Kramer posits Dada and Surrealism as bandit
movements; art history – through Rubin’s exhibition – will now take “critical possession
of them as art, rather than as moral or political or literary events….”
212
Dada and
Surrealism may have joined art and life, but for Rubin to position Surrealism, the picture
plane would be primary.

209
Ellen Mandelbaum, “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage: Surrealist Composition: Surprise Syntax,”
Artforum, v. 6, n. 9 (May 1968), 33.

210
William Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, 182.

211
Hilton Kramer, “The Secret History of Dada and Surrealism,” Art in America, v. 56, n. 2 (March 1968),
108.

212
Ibid., 109. Kramer predicted the exhibition’s importance, for “in bringing us the secret history of dada
and surrealism, by forcing the esthetic issue of these movements into the critical daylight, Mr. Rubin is
involved in clarifying the present as well as the past” (Ibid., 112).

207
Rubin’s goal then must have been to account for, and thus finally absorb, modern
art’s Surrealist shadow. As Rosenberg wrote, “The exhibition was designed to salvage
the art residues of Dada and Surrealism while laying once and for all the radical ghost
introduced by these movements in the art of our time.”
213
Critic Lucy Lippard noted the
same thing, albeit more demurely (perhaps because of her close relationship with the
museum at the time
214
), “Above all, Dada and Surrealist art is finally fitted into the main
currents of art history…related to a broader continuity of modern art, from Cubism
through post-painterly abstraction.”
215
But “fitted into” was not a classification for which
proponents of Surrealism were necessarily eager. Lippard’s comment both echoes and
departs from her earlier assessment of Surrealism as revealed in her review of Gene
Swenson’s exhibition The Other Tradition, held at the Philadelphia Institute for
Contemporary Art in 1966. In her review, “An Impure Situation,” Lippard had
encouraged the complications the exhibition introduced: “To say that the Other Tradition
codified here is just the Dada-Surrealist-Pop stream would be gross
oversimplification.”
216
Instead, Swenson’s exhibition combined works from both

213
Harold Rosenberg, “MoMA Dada,” The New Yorker, v. XLIV, n. 13 (May 18, 1968), 142.

214
Lippard had acted as an editor and advisor on several exhibitions, including The School of Paris (1965)
and René Magritte (1965). At the time of Rubin’s appointment as Curator of Painting and Sculpture,
Lippard had written him, “congratulations tendered with heart-felt relief at the prospect of a rejuvenated
Museum. I couldn’t be more pleased” (Lucy Lippard, letter to William Rubin, July 25, 1967, folder “855.
Dada, Surrealism K-R (Painting and Sculpture)”, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition files,
Museum of Modern Art archives.

215
Lucy Lippard, “Notes on Dada and Surrealism at the Modern,” Art International (May 15, 1968). In
1970, Lippard published Surrealists on Art, which translated many key Surrealist texts for the first time.
See Surrealists on Art, edited by Lucy Lippard (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970).

216
Lucy Lippard, “An Impure Situation (New York and Philadelphia Letter),” Art International, v. 10, n. 5
(May 20, 1966), 61.
208
“‘formal’ and ‘non-formal’ natures” the latter being “one branch of the intellectual
tradition, since its non-formal nature necessarily focuses on the metaphysical.”
217
Thus
Lippard’s review becomes a referendum on formalist criticism as she examines the ways
Swenson’s exhibition opens up notions of artistic lineage. It is not incidental that it is
through such a framework that she first introduces the term “eccentric abstraction,”
which she would later codify in a show she curated at the Fischbach Gallery in New York
later that year. Indeed, in her later article, published in November 1966, she characterizes
eccentric abstraction in close relationship to Surrealism and thus posits Surrealism in
another lineage that marked a turning away from strictly ascetic Minimalism , or, as
Briony Fer has put it, “revealing all that Minimal art itself had sought to repress.”
218
Thus,
Surrealism enters into a variety of discursive legacies nearly simultaneously – Rubin
called for Surrealism’s insertion into a modernist framework, while Swenson (and others
such as Rosenberg) argued for Surrealism’s importance for non-formal traditions, and
Lippard uses Surrealism to launch what would become a feminist perspective of modern
and post-modern art.
But a reversal of positions is at once apparent in analyzing the immense amount
of criticism that the exhibition generated; critics who subscribed to formalism – for

217
Ibid.

218
Lucy Lippard writes, “Yet in the last three years, an extensive group of artists on both East and West
Coasts, largely unknown to each other, have evolved a nonsculptural style that has a good deal in common
with the primary structure as well as, surprisingly, with aspects of surrealism. The makers of what I am
calling, for semantic convenience, eccentric abstraction, refuse to eschew imagination and the extension of
sensuous experience while they also refuse to sacrifice the solid formal basis demanded of the best in
current non-objective art” (Lucy Lippard, “Eccentric Abstraction,” Art International, v. 10, n. 9 (November
1966); Briony Fer, “Objects beyond Objecthood,” Oxford Art Journal, v. 22, n. 2 (1999), 27.

209
whom Surrealism had long been regarded as a contaminant to modern art – celebrated the
show, while those who rejected formalism – who would seemingly be eager to use
Surrealism as a critique of the dominant modernist narrative – denounced it. Though a
critical examination of Surrealism was long overdue, its proponents refused to have it co-
opted into a progressive march of styles. It is worth quoting John Perreault’s review in
The Village Voice at length:
…perhaps the easiest way to kill them [Dada and Surrealism] off and erase
the threat is to mount a huge howl of undeniable quality – in terms of
individual works – but which in its cumulative effect is ultra-conservative
and seems to imply (1) that it’s all been done before, kids, so don’t waste
your time with the same old song and dance; (2) Dada and Surrealism are
only important because individual artists, often without knowing it,
produced individual works of lasting importance and ‘value’; and (3) it all
leads up to Abstract Expressionism anyway….
219

Perreault accuses Rubin of using Dada and Surrealism as a tool to drain the originality
out of Pop. Paradoxically, Rubin’s establishment of value through individual works
erases the dialogue the paintings establish – erases, according to Perreault, the dynamics
and interests of the Surrealists as a group. Moreover, the denial of the paintings’
communal generation echoes the principles of individuality so integral to Abstract
Expressionism, which is then set up to supersede Surrealism. Finally, several critics
point out that, “if Rubin wanted to honor the contemporary Pop artists, who are
undeniable descendents of Dada, he foundered, for the bland examples he chose seem

219
John Perreault, “More Dada than Dada?” The Village Voice (April 11, 1968). Rubin was compelled to
respond Perreault in a lengthy to and sent a copy of the letter to Philip Leider when the latter asked him to
write a commentary on the critical reaction to the show. Rubin wrote, “I thought it might interest you to
see a letter which I sent to Perreault who wrote a far more serious review than Harold [Rosenberg]’s…”
(Rubin, letter to Philip Leider, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage archival file “855. Dada, Surrealism
Publicity (Painting and Sculpture),”May 22, 1968).

210
empty, passive, even slick when compared to their prototypes of a half-century ago.”
220

Perreault does not consider Rubin’s exhibition to be finding a way to legitimize Pop (as
Bois has more recently proposed), but in fact, undermining Pop’s artistic innovations.
Issues of influence and originality were central to the critique of Dada,
Surrealism, and Their Heritage by those on the left. For Kozloff, “Mr. Rubin’s art
historical penchant for viewing any work simultaneously as an object and an influence
mars the perception of its real significance.”
221
That is, if Surrealism was being presented
as a tool – either to validate or interrogate the new Pop art – it was not being regarded on
its own terms. Such a methodology would (and indeed, did) establish Surrealism as a
sort of heuristic bridge between European and American art, to facilitate American art
critics’ need to tackle subsequent new art movements. Using Surrealism as a scaffold for
the contemporary scene was also dangerous for some critics because the connection
between the two movements – at least as it was forged in Rubin’s exhibition – was based
largely on form. The archeology that Rubin was attempting was, as far as some critics
were concerned, one of surface rather than substance. For Katherine Kuh, “… unless
genesis and heritage are seen as more than superficial entanglements, art and, in this case,
anti-art are apt to wilt in an orthodox sea of sources, influences, derivations and
terminology.”
222

220
Katherine Kuh, “The Fine Arts,” Saturday Review (April 27, 1968).

221
Max Kozloff, “Art,” The Nation (May 27, 1968).

222
Katherine Kuh, “The Fine Arts,” Saturday Review (April 27, 1968).

211
If Surrealism persists like some preferably forgotten relative who long ago
managed to germinate the genealogy and whose traces are still found pollinating so many
subsequent nodes of production, then why couldn’t art history adequately account for
Surrealism? Barr’s and Rubin’s efforts attest to a desire firmly to position Surrealism in
an account of the history of modern art. But it seems the problem persisted as Rosenberg
characterized it in response to Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage: “this pacification of
the two most unruly areas in the entire history of art [Dada and Surrealism] carries the
implicit promise—and this is the basic message of the exhibition’s catalogue—that
modern art has at last been restored to order and will confine itself to its own affairs and
leave ‘life’ to politicians and philosophers.”
223
Rubin wanted to understand Surrealist
pictures on aesthetic terms, however in Surrealism’s case, aesthetics is only half the
picture.
In truth, aesthetics became less and less a part of art. And the art world of the
sixties evidenced this in its multiplicity of styles – as Calvin Tomkins noted, “Clearly the
sixties were not going to be dominated by any singular style, as the fifties had been. … [it
was] the proliferation of new directions – Pop, Op, Minimal, Process, Earth Art,
Conceptual Art – that made the sixties such a visual tower of Babel.”
224
An art history
based on influence and lineage could no longer be sustained in such an environment, and

223
Harold Rosenberg, “MOMA Dada,” The New Yorker, v. XLIV, n. 13 (May 18, 1968), 143-144.

224
Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of our Time (New York:
Penguin Books, 1981), 169.

212
so Rubin’s attempt to re-make Dada and Surrealism as part of a modernist progression
brought to light the impossibility of practicing art history in this way.
213
Chapter Three: A Postmodern Surrealism

In Chapter Two, I briefly discussed Magritte’s penchant for photography though
this habit was hardly widely recognized in the 1960s. However, in the 1980s, the critical
interpretation of Surrealism was drastically reconfigured around its photography. The
shift in attention to a different medium came gradually, but also aided in deliberately
unseeding basic tenets of modernism. This chapter charts the rhetorical moves made by
such scholars as Rosalind Krauss and the interdependence of new theories about
photography with the broadening art market; at the same time, Krauss’s increasingly self-
conscious resistance to art criticism’s role in the growing commerce of art in the 1980s
reconfigured (or deconstructed) those ideals of modernism that had pushed Surrealism to
the margins, opening up a discursive space where Surrealism’s theories could be treated
not as fantasy, but as philosophy.
In a 1937 photograph by René Magritte, the barrel of a canon points directly at a
man’s head (Figure 3.1). Though we cannot see his face – the man has turned his back
on the viewer – he is identified as Edward James, an English patron of the Surrealists.
The man takes no notice of the weapon and seems to stare (though perhaps his eyes are
closed) toward an opening through which are visible several cumulous clouds in a blue
sky. There is a strange sense of disquiet fostered by the tension between the metallic
canon, the soft clouds and the notion that the viewer’s position roughly mimics the
man’s. The opening could be the pane of a window, but it is actually a panel of a painting
by Magritte. The canon too is only a painted threat, though it nonetheless appears to
protrude from the canvas, seemingly casting a shadow across it. Magritte, in a move that
214
was typical of his photography, has twice authored this image, and twice deceived the
viewer; his painting employs a photographic illusionism, with which the real James (as
depicted in the photograph) merges. The photographic medium then covers over the
painting’s physicality and James’ displacement from it, as we read the scene as a record
of the real (though for a viewer familiar with Magritte’s paintings, the sleight works the
other way around – the entire photograph reads as a document of a painting, since James
is deliberately styled to look like a familiar character in Magritte’s oeuvre). The entire
effect only underscores the acute duality (and duplicity) of reality – the logical correlate
of which might be that Surrealism sets these perceptions in play for those who know how
to look.
Figure 3.1
It is a look – of unease, of furrowed disturbance – that is the focus of Cindy
Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #21 (1978), a photograph made fifty years after Magritte’s
Edward James in Front of Au Seuil de la Liberté (Figure 3.2). As in Magritte’s
photograph, the focal point is a single individual, seemingly threatened. Though we here
have access to the subject’s face, we know nothing of what has caused her disquiet.
Sherman too is a doubled presence – the photograph is a self-portrait, orchestrated by
215
Sherman and picturing her as well, and, as in Magritte’s image, this one also plays with
our perception of reality, or reality as a masquerade. Instead of Magritte’s fusion of
painting and photography, Sherman offers us a confusion of photograph and film. The
image is taken from below so that the buildings behind Sherman – a flattened and
abstracted landscape of skyscrapers – seem taller, looming. Even if we know that the
anxiety here is staged – Sherman’s face, lit dramatically, is contorted for the camera in a
suspended theatricality – the sharp frozenness of the moment fosters a heightened sense
of the real, a psychological confrontation poised between layers of familiar and
unfamiliar, seriousness and play, the authentic and the affected.
Figure 3.2
That these disparate photographs engage such similar ideas is testament to
Surrealism’s intersection, yet again, with contemporary art.
1
This chapter sets out to
explore how the discourses surrounding Surrealism were drastically altered in the 1980s,
as the understanding of Surrealism was once again radically shifted due to changes in the

1
Though Magritte is rarely thought of as a photographer, critic and photographer Mark Power suggested
that Magritte “has influenced more photographers than have any of the Surrealist photographers” (Mark
Power, “Surrealist Photography at the Corcoran: A Revisionist Revival,” New Art Examiner (February
1986), 36-37.

216
production and critical reception of contemporary art. A critical turning point came in
1985, when art historian Rosalind Krauss and curator Jane Livingston organized the
exhibition L’Amour Fou at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. The
exhibition explored, against a sophisticated theoretical backdrop, Surrealism’s
photographs, not as a set of documents or illustrations, even though some photographs
had first become known as such, but as aesthetic objects in their own right – though, as
the curators stressed, their intention was not to suggest that the photographs should be
treated with any aura of authenticity or originality. The exhibition was staged at
precisely the moment when photography was emerging as one of the most salient
mediums in the practice of postmodern aesthetics and, not incidentally, its market was
rapidly expanding. But even before the 1980s, as I demonstrated in the previous chapter,
changes had taken place in the ongoing debate between such formalist critics as Clement
Greenberg and Michael Fried, who saw Surrealism as an unruly diversion in the narrative
of modern art, and those who had broken with formalism (or had never subscribed to it in
the first place) and placed Surrealism at the center of an entirely other tradition of the
history of modern art. The art critic Gene Swenson, for example, who had organized the
protest at the 1968 Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage show, wrote:
The other tradition is non-formal. It is less easily appreciated with the
familiar critical tool known as formal analysis. Its major importance lies
outside or beyond ‘significant form,’ and its application is useful chiefly to
non-abstract art: that is, in general it deals more with the movements
known as Dada, Surrealism and Pop Art rather than those known as
Cubism, Early Abstraction (Mondrian and Kandinsky) and Abstract-
Expressionism.
2

2
Gene Swenson, The Other Tradition (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania, 1966), viii.

217

Swenson identifies formal analysis as a tool tailored to critique those art movements
established around the principles of abstraction. Dada, Surrealism and Pop meanwhile
are left without a distinctive critical framework and therefore relegated to the position of
“other” in the traditional narrative of modern art. The debate about Surrealism’s place in
art history was far from over after 1968. This chapter explores yet another complicated
confluence of Surrealism and contemporary debate, through which not only were
Surrealism’s aesthetics analyzed on a theoretical level, but also the question of the
significance of the movement was finally secured, opening the floodgates to a variety of
methodologies that fostered psychoanalytic, political, and visual cultural accounts of the
movement.
How this came to pass was set in play long before Krauss and Livingston’s 1985
exhibition. In the 1970s, art history’s practice began to be reconceptualized on many
college campuses, as a Marxist social-cultural model became increasingly convincing as
a way to investigate the ideological investments of various institutions – among these the
Museum of Modern Art. Critic Max Kozloff recalls that “among their lesser
consequences, the events of 1968 dislodged formalism from its place in criticism.”
3
For
Kozloff, the protests over the Vietnam War and the upheaval of American politics had
made a nonpolitical, nonhistorical approach to art untenable. In 1973, Kozloff’s article,
“American Painting during the Cold War,” was one of the first published on the
ideologies at play in the construction of mid-century American modernism, practicing an

3
Max Kozloff, “Introduction,” Cultivated Impasses: Essays on the Waning of the Avant-Garde 1964-1975
(New York: Marsilio Publishers, 2000), 15.

218
art history that had direct political implications. Kozloff argued that Abstract
Expressionism’s preeminence in the art world was not the result of an autonomous
process, but the result of such factors as American post-war cultural and artistic
hegemony and was among the first articles to articulate a critique of MoMA’s
collaboration with the United States Information Agency (USIA).
4
In particular, he
described the federal endorsement of formalism: “Clement Greenberg, critic emeritus of
formalism, was an intellectual Cold Warrior who traveled during the ‘60s under
government sponsorship to foreign countries with the good news of color-fields
ascendance.”
5
Kozloff described how during the Cold War, “artists had to contend with
professional standards—none outside of formalism were allowable—that were at once
more ambitious and yet more conservative than those in the business world.”
6
Art
historian Terry Smith also wrote an article published in Artforum in 1974 in which he
commented upon New York’s cultural imperialism: “Only the most myopic elitist can
regard the hierarchical rigidity, the inbuilt unfairness, of the New York art world with
equanimity.”
7
Such revisionist accounts as Kozloff’s were sparked by the idea that the
analysis of social and historical factors -- “the choke of McCarthyism,” the Bay of Pigs,

4
Max Kozloff, “American Painting during the Cold War,” Artforum, v. 11, n. 9 (May 1973), 49. Michael
Kimmelman offers something of a rebuttal in his essay “Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its
Critics, and the Cold War” The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad (New York:
MoMA, 1994), 38-55.

5
Max Kozloff, “American Painting during the Cold War,” Artforum, v. 11, n. 9 (May 1973), 54.

6
Max Kozloff, “American Painting during the Cold War,” Artforum, v. 11, n. 9 (May 1973), 54.

7
Terry Smith, “The Provincialism Problem,” Artforum, v. 13, n. 1 (September 1974), 58. For a summary of
the revisionist accounts of the 1970s and 1980s, see Francis Frascina, “Introduction to Part Two, History:
representation and misrepresentation – the case of Abstract Expressionism,” Pollock and After: The
Critical Debate (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 113-129.

219
Kennedy’s youth corps, the Vietnam War - so long excluded by the formalist analysis of
Clement Greenberg and others, could serve to broaden and deepen an understanding of
American art and its history. Art historian Serge Guilbaut, whose 1983 book How New
York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (researched and written between 1975 and 1978 as a
dissertation under the direction of art historian T.J. Clark)
8
opened up the discourse
immensely by rewriting existing triumphal accounts of the period, linked the increased
visibility (and viability) of institutional critique with the upheaval of the late 1960s: “I am
a child of ’68. …What was great about all this was that you learned to be suspicious
about everything and in particular about any discourse—which we always assumed was
pronounced in order to sell you some ideas, some ideology.”
9
What had become apparent

8
See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and
the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Guilbaut’s account directly challenged Irving
Sandler’s book on Abstract Expressionism, The Triumph of American Painting: The History of Abstract
Expressionism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970). The contentiousness of the debate is illustrated by
Sandler’s comments in 1987, “Writers like Guilbaut submerge the work of art in theory and ideology. His
enterprise is to make Abstract Expressionism the art of American imperialism. …I think the book is
meretricious, and wrong” (Irving Sandler, quoted in Grace Glueck, “Clashing Views Reshape Art History,”
New York Times (December 20, 1987), A1).

9
Serge Guilbaut, quoted in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New York: Soho Press,
2000), 401-402. Guilbaut’s dissertation was supervised by T.J. Clark while Clark was a professor at
UCLA. In 1980, Clark was appointed to the faculty of Harvard (filling Michael Fried’s former position),
where his Marxist model of art history challenged the formalist approach of a powerful senior member of
the faculty, Sydney Freedberg. The competing methodologies – Marxist (social-historical) and formalist
(connoisseurial) – divided the department. Rosalind Krauss, who served on the 1983 departmental visiting
committee that censured Clark for breaches of conduct related to these debates, recalled, “There emerged a
struggle between T.J. Clark on the one hand and Sydney Freedberg on the other. This was a struggle that
was playing itself out in every art history department…in the country” (Rosalind Krauss, quoted in Lynne
Munson, Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishers, 2000), 177). Like
Serge Guilbaut and Max Kozloff, conservative critic Hilton Kramer ascribed the changes going on within
art history methodology to historical factors: “the cultural insurgency of the Sixties had done its work at
Harvard, no less than elsewhere in the academic world” (Hilton Kramer, quoted in Janet Tassel,
“Reverence for the Object: Art Museums in a Changed World,” Harvard Magazine (September-October
2002), 53). Critic Lynne Munson wrote that Clark’s model of art history was compelling to the many
graduate students he influenced: “To have attended Harvard in the eighties and not studied with Clark
would have been considered a grave career mistake for any young art historian” (Lynne Munson,
Exhibitionism, 180). For more on the debate between Clark and Freedberg, see Lynne Munson,
220
to these critics and art historians was the growing pressure on (and evident impractability
of) the practice of art history based primarily on distinctions of style and formal
influence. Nonetheless, the Museum of Modern Art continued to display – and thus,
represent – a definitive narrative of modern art based primarily on the formal
characteristics of its objects. As art historian Carol Duncan writes, “eventually, the
history of modern art as told in the MoMA would come to stand for the definitive story of
‘mainstream modernism.’”
10
The critiques of MoMA in the mid to late 1970s by Duncan,
Alan Wallach and others show an increasingly wary view of the institution that had come
to represent modernism and a seemingly unilateral tradition of modern art.
In articles by these scholars, the Modern’s installation of the permanent collection
began to be questioned for its linear this-begat-that story.
11
As Duncan summarizes, at
MoMA, the narrative begins with Cézanne and makes a direct connection between that
artist’s work and Cubism, which marks the major taking-off point for the history of
twentieth-century art. Dada and Surrealism have been marshaled to “open the next major
chapter in this history of art (…relying on the MoMA’s program, but the same story is
told almost everywhere in the West)” in which “Miró is usually the most important
figure.”
12
As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, the preeminence of Miró within

Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishers, 2000) and Sara Day, “Art
History’s New Warrior Breed,” Art International (Spring 1984), pp. 84-85.

10
Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge Press, 1995), 103.

11
Carol Duncan’s “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual” (1978) is among the first to
question the way modern art was represented at MoMA.

12
Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 105.

221
Surrealism was established in large part by William Rubin on the basis of the connections
he argued for between Miró’s work and that of the Abstract Expressionists. Thomas Hess
had criticized MoMA’s Abstract Expressionist show in 1969 for demonstrating a
“deathly sort of inevitability from the 1940s to the ‘60s,…the ‘style’ purifying itself of
‘irrelevancies’ like a snake shucking its skin,”
13
an analysis similar to those made by
critics in relation to Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage in 1968.
14
In 1978, in a
sweeping critique of MoMA, Duncan and Alan Wallach argued that the Modern’s
installation presents Surrealism as having “unseated the last vestiges of reason and
history and…you end up in the Abstract Expressionist realm of myth…in which abstract
form signified the Absolute. This is the climax…”
15
Surrealism is marshaled at MoMA,
they argue, as a gateway to be passed through (or even, perhaps, overcome) between the
abstraction of Cubism and that of the New York school. MoMA’s installation of its

13
Thomas B. Hess, “Editorial: Plant You Now, Dig You Later,” ArtNews, v. 68, n. 7 (November 1969), 25.
Hess singles out MoMA and William Rubin in his editorial, though he spends much of the editorial
speaking of art historians in general. Hess’s observation is later echoed in T.J. Clark’s 1983 critique of
modernist critics that I quoted in the second chapter, which I include more extensively here. Clark wrote, “I
still find it striking that modernist writers so confidently outlaw the real impulse of Dada and early
Surrealism from their account of twentieth-century art, while giving such weight to artists – like Arp or
Miró or Pollock – who were profoundly affected by it. Nor is the problem solved, I think, by claiming that
what Pollock and Miró took from the Surrealists, by some miracle of probity, was a set of techniques which
they quickly cleansed and turned to higher purpose” (T.J. Clark, “Arguments about Modernism,” Pollock
and After: The Critical Debate, 2
nd
edition (New York: Routledge, 2000), 104. Originally published in
W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), The Politics of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 239-
248.

14
See, for example, my analysis of Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage in Chapter Two of this
dissertation, particularly the section entitled “Brickbats and Bouquets.”

15
Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “MoMA: Ordeal and Triumph on 53
rd
Street,” Studio International, v.
148, n. 988 (1978), 54. A longer version of the article was also published in the United States with the title
“The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis,” in Marxist
Perspectives, v. 1, n. 4 (Winter 1978). Reflecting on that article in a 1992 essay, Wallach states that the
Marxist Perspectives essay was “the first to attempt a critical analysis of MoMA and it intervened in what
had been up to that point pretty much a celebratory discourse” (Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern
Art: The Past’s Future,” Journal of Design History, v. 5, n. 3 (1992), 214).

222
permanent collection also displaced the connection between Dada, Surrealism and Pop
Art, which Rubin’s exhibition (and art practitioners and critics of the 1960s) had openly
acknowledged. Despite the link proposed by Rubin, Swenson, and many art critics
between Surrealism and art of the 1960s (one that I have argued was ideological and not
merely stylistic), artists such as Magritte did not garner nearly the same authority as Miró
within MoMA’s permanent collection; there are presently 22 paintings by Miró in the
Modern’s collection compared with 7 by Magritte. This preference was probably due to
the ways in which abstraction, from a formalist point of view, has come to represent
transcendence in art, and figurative art therefore appeared corrupted, less serious, and
obviously connected to the everyday world which was seen by some to be increasingly
encroaching on art’s domain.
16
But such discussions of influence and imminence still
exhibit overtones of the narrative that MoMA’s permanent installation attempted to
establish of modern art’s successive progress, a narrative that was ardently being
challenged as a model. It is interesting that by 1978, Duncan and Wallach identified
Surrealism as one of the three major movements “that frame and define the history of
modern art” according to MoMA’s installation.
17
Distinguishing Miró as a prototypical

16
Nonetheless, as Duncan argues, the very presence of the art object in a museum, especially one with the
cultural capital of MoMA, provides a way for “viewers [to] enact a drama of enlightenment in which
spiritual freedom is won by repeatedly overcoming and moving beyond the visible, material world”
(Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 110). As Guilbaut and others have argued, in the 1950s and 1960s Abstract
Expressionism was exported by the U.S. government, often directly through MoMA’s circulating
exhibitions, to represent the values of freedom, individualism and democracy and so it too failed to avoid
being politicized (See the essays by Eva Cockroft, Jane de Hart Mathews, David and Cecile Shapiro, Serge
Guilbaut and Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock collected in Francis Frascina, Pollock and After: The
Critical Debate, 2
nd
edition (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 147-226.

17
Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An
Iconographic Analysis,” 35.

223
Surrealist, Duncan and Wallach write that “up to this point the installation preserves the
art-historical program MoMA’s curators developed in the Museum’s early years and have
since extended to include American Abstract Expressionism.”
18
However, this
connection was very much a recent development, the result of Rubin’s persuasive writing
only 10 years earlier.
Indeed, Rubin himself was increasingly coming to represent the goals and
attitudes of the museum at which he was employed. The installation and collecting
practices at the Modern were also questioned in pieces that had appeared in Artforum in
November 1974.
19
Two of the magazine’s editors, Lawrence Alloway and John Coplans,
interviewed Rubin, who was by then Director of Painting and Sculpture, about MoMA’s
installation, probing him on why some artists “deserved” their own rooms, and why the
layout of the galleries privileged Cubism. Accompanying the interview were diagrams of
MoMA’s gallery layout and documentary-style photographs of MoMA’s interiors, eerily
unpopulated, imparting to the article something of an exposé quality.
20
Rubin, never one
to make excuses for his curatorial selections, announced his allegiance to Barr’s
conception of modern art: “I was brought up on Alfred [Barr]’s museum and on the
collection as he built it. …Modern art education during and just after World War II was,

18
Ibid., 36.

19
Citing the 1974 interview in their work, Duncan and Wallach describe the Artforum editors’ opinion as
“these critics clearly think the collection and its installation present a biased view of art history” (Duncan
and Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis,” 50.

20
It appears that these diagrams were then reproduced in Duncan and Wallach’s article, though the authors
added shading to certain galleries (Latin Americans and Primitives, Americans, Sculpture) to indicate the
route of secondary importance.

224
in the first instance, very much a question of this museum and its publications.”
21
The
admiration was mutual. According to Richard Oldenburg, who was hired as a curator at
the Modern shortly after Rubin, “With Alfred’s support, Bill was named curator of
painting and sculpture and, a year later, chief curator. In 1973 he was appointed director
of the department, a position he held until his retirement, in 1988.”
22
But even as
Artforum was publishing articles and interviews that engaged the terms of institutional
critique, for the most part it was ignoring (in print at least) its own growing role as a
presenter of dominant, rather than dissenting, opinions. That is, it was ignoring its own
institutionalization, a concern which came to the fore in the very issue of November 1974
that carried Rubin’s second interview by the editors, in what art historian and critic
Rosalind Krauss would later call “The Lynda Benglis incident.”
23

The incident referred to by Krauss was Artforum’s decision to publish an
advertisement, paid for by Benglis and the gallery that represented her work, of a
photograph of the artist, naked, greased, and wielding a dildo, that appeared in the
November 1974 issue (Figure 3.3). As critic Robert Pincus-Witten wrote of Benglis’s
photograph and the works of her contemporaries, “despite the inescapable sensationalism
inherent in such imagery, its real interest reflects a maintenance of the Duchampian

21
William Rubin, quoted in Lawrence Alloway and John Coplans, “Talking with William Rubin: ‘Like
Folding out a Hand of Cards,’” Artforum, v. 13, n. 3 (November 1974), 49. Though Barr’s position was, at
least temporarily, diminished after his demotion in 1943, he continued to play a lead role in the museum’s
publications.

22
Richard E. Oldenburg, “Acquiring Minds,” Artforum (May 2006), 252.

23
Rosalind Krauss, quoted in Janet Malcolm, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” The New Yorker 62 (October 10,
1986), 49.

225
tradition.”
24
That is, Benglis’s image, by thwarting notions of societal (and aesthetic)
expectations, bluntly updated the legacy of Dada and Surrealism for photographic
consumption. And in some ways, her provocation was similar to Dalí’s – how
commercial was an artist allowed to be? To Krauss, however, it appeared to be both anti-
feminist and anti-art critic: “we read it as saying that art writers are whores.”
25
It is
striking, in fact, that Krauss’s reaction to the image was directed more toward the implied
consumerism of art critics, rather than toward the ad’s overt sexual stance. She conflates
the two – “art writers are whores” – but this position still foregrounds the monetary
relationship that Krauss reads through the image. In a collective letter to the editor, five
of the editors of Artforum, including Krauss, Annette Michelson and Max Kozloff,
described Benglis’s ad as exploitative not only in Benglis’s relation to the general public,
but because, in Krauss’s view, Artforum became “a natural accomplice to that
exploitation, for the advertisement has pictured the journal’s role as devoted to the self-
promotion of artists in the most debased sense of that term.”
26
As Richard Meyer has
pointed out, “the ad was degrading not – or not only—because it presented the artist as a
sexual commodity, but because it implied that the art writer herself was for sale on the

24
Robert Pincus-Witten, “Scott Burton: Conceptual Performance as Sculpture,” Arts Magazine, v. 51, n. 1
(September 1976), 115.

25
Rosalind Krauss, quoted in Janet Malcolm, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” The New Yorker 62 (October 10,
1986), 50.

26
Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff, Rosalind Krauss, Joseph Masheck, Annette Michelson, “Letter to the
Editor,” Artforum, v. 13, n. 4 (December 1974), 9. Regarding the letter, feminist critic Lucy Lippard
recalled, “I was just amazed at that puritanical letter from the editors protesting this piece. I mean what in
the world was going on in their minds? They were just on the wrong side there” (Lucy Lippard, quoted in
Amy Newman, Challenging Art, original emphasis, 422).

226
open market.”
27
But Benglis’s ad, which was conceived specifically to appear in
Artforum, also acknowledges what is true – that art has a market, as does art criticism.
28

Benglis recalls, “I did it in Artforum because that was the magazine. It was the magazine.
I was very aware of the artists in relationship to the hype and to the work. It was about
the media, and Artforum was the medium, really.”
29
In the 1970s, Benglis’s ad could be
read as a form of institutional critique that, played out across the pages of a magazine,
implicated editors, writers and their audience in its gesture.
Figure 3.3

27
Richard Meyer, “Bone of Contention,” Artforum, v. 43, n. 3 (November 2004), 74. For more on the
Lynda Benglis photograph, see Anna Chave, “Minimalism and Biography,” The Art Bulletin v. 82, n. 1
(March 2000), pp. 149-163 and Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New York: Soho
Press, 2000), pp. 413-422.

28
The late 1970s also saw the auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christies, which had opened in New York in
1977, offering their shares publicly. According to Jane Addams Allen, “Going public was the final step in
clinching a massive shift of influence and power, over the past 30 years, from dealer to auction house, and
from critic and curator to collector” (Jane Addams Allen, “Pluralism and Postmodernism: Assessing a
Decade,” New Art Examiner, v. 17, n. 5 (January 1990), 21.

29
Lynda Benglis, original emphasis, quoted in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New
York: Soho Press, 2000). Benglis’s words also echo what Robert Pincus-Witten had written about her in his
1974 article, “In Benglis’ work, the new medium is now ‘the media’” (Robert Pincus-Witten, “Lynda
Benglis: The Frozen Gesture,” Artforum, v. 13, n. 3 (November 1974), 59.

227
But such a reading ignores, or at least sets aside, the issues of sexuality and
gender that Benglis’s ad embodies and the limits of which art of the 1970s (particularly
performance art) increasingly tested. What was actually pictured in the photograph was a
woman, her eyes shielded behind sunglasses, whose naked body confronts the viewer
with one arm akimbo and the other holding a giant latex dildo to her crotch. Because of
the photograph’s connection with reality, it is all the more bold for capturing an actual
body in an act of sexual appropriation that implicates the viewer in its transgression.
Benglis’s ad, while providing an ambivalent commentary on the role of the artist in the
market, also collapses, while it confronts, the distance between female and phallus.
Many critics of the day were struck by the currency of the gender issues the ad conveyed.
Pincus-Witten wrote in 1976 that “What we are dealing with, of course, is the much
higher visibility of erstwhile secret sexual life coincidental with the early seventies, an
awareness that owes much to the liberating forces generated by the women’s movement
and its attendant male consciousness including gay lib.”
30
Though some critics were able
to address the sexuality of the photograph – its most salient aspect – it was not until 2003,
in the introduction to Art since 1900, co-edited by Krauss, that Krauss acknowledges the
position of the ad as sexual commentary. Illustrated in the introduction, the photograph is
captioned: “Lynda Benglis mocked the macho posturing of some Minimalist and
Postminimalist artists, as well as the increased marketing of contemporary art; at the
same time she seized ‘the phallus’ in a way that both literalized its association with

30
Robert Pincus-Witten, “Scott Burton: Conceptual Performance as Sculpture,” Arts Magazine, v. 51, n. 1
(September 1976), 115.

228
plentitude and power and parodied it.”
31
In many ways, this caption foregrounds issues
of gender that had been eclipsed by Krauss’s reaction to the ad thirty years earlier. The
image is brazen, as the Artforum editors acknowledged; its vulgarity lies not only in its
connections with the market, but also in the questions it raises about power – from where
it is derived and how it is gendered.
The Benglis image had a companion photograph of sorts, one taken by Krauss of
the artist Robert Morris, in which he appears in bondage gear, tugging on the heavy
chain-link that is draped over his own seemingly naked body (visible from the waist up).
The image was used in an ad for Morris’s show at Castelli-Sonnabend that had appeared
in the September 1974 issue of Artforum (Figure 3.4). As Anna Chave has noted,
Morris’s “comparably outrageous image” went un-censured, a fact which might
demonstrate the way women’s sexuality was, in the 1970s, a much more charged issue
than men’s.
32
Indeed, in contrast to the responses elicited by Benglis’s image, Jeremy
Gilbert-Rolfe described the “poster showing Morris in s-m regalia” as “delightful,” and

31
Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois, Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism,
Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 19.

32
However, by the end of the 1980s, men’s (homo)sexuality in photography had also become a point of
controversy, of which Robert Mapplethorpe’s retrospective exhibition, scheduled to open July 1, 1989 at
the Corcoran Gallery, was the victim. See Janet Kardon, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment,
second edition (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania,
1989). The Corcoran’s director, Christina Orr-Cahall, under pressure from Republican politicians, canceled
the exhibition because the show (previously seen in two other U.S. museums) contained photographs
associated with gay subculture. The budget for the National Endowment for the Arts was subsequently
slashed. For more on this incident, see Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002), pp. 158-223 and Carol S. Vance, “The War on Culture,” Art Matters: How the
Culture Wars Changed America (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

229
later, “ironic,” because “it [the poster] wasn’t a gratuitous appendage to the show.”
33

Gilbert-Rolfe continued to read the image as further “concentrat[ing] attention on the
theme of the show, which is about individual willfulness in the face of extrapersonal
terminology.”
34
Morris’s image is thus re-fashioned as parody and an act of critical
awareness, and sex is not mentioned in direct conjunction with the image at all. However,
the issues provoked by, and bound up in, these images – the effects of photography,
fetishization, irrepressibility, institutional critique – are central to the ways that
Surrealism operated in the view of Krauss, and these would guide her influential writing
on the movement.
Figure 3.4

33
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, “Robert Morris: The Complication of Exhaustion,” Artforum, v. 13, n. 1
(September 1974), 44. One wonders if, in her photographic response, Benglis insinuated just what the
necessary appendage was.

34
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, “Robert Morris: The Complication of Exhaustion,” Artforum, v. 13, n. 1
(September 1974), 44.

230
Part of the story of Surrealism’s contemporaneity has to do with the emerging
attention to the study of photography. Julien Levy, who, as I have demonstrated in earlier
chapters, played an integral role in the way Surrealism was presented to the American
public throughout the thirties, had also early on collected photographs – those by such
Surrealists as Man Ray, whose 1932 exhibition at Levy’s gallery was his first solo show
of photography in New York, as well as others, including Walker Evans, to whom Levy
gave an important early show, also in 1932.
35
Indeed, when Levy opened his gallery in
November 1931, his original intention was to devote it to photography and film.
36

However in the 1930s there was nothing like a vigorous market for photography, and
Levy had to reorient his exhibitions in order to stay financially afloat.
37
The Museum of
Modern Art did not begin to collect photography in earnest until late 1940, when MoMA
announced the formation of its Department of Photography.
38
While MoMA had

35
In an interview, Walker Evans recalls “a sort of well-to-do young Harvard esthete who had a little gallery
that he was paying for. He gave me an exhibition very early, the first exhibition I had of photographs.
Imagine that!” (Walker Evans, interview with Paul Cummings, Tape 1, Side 2 (October 17, 1971) Archives
of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). Paul Cummings then asks if people collected photographs at
that time, to which Evans replies, “No. Never thought of that. Well, yes, Julien Levy tried to start a gallery
for photographs. It didn’t work” (Ibid.)

36
Ingrid Schaffner, Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998)
128. Levy’s inaugural exhibition was a retrospective of American photography, followed a month later by
a show of Atget and Nadar (December 12, 1931 to January 9, 1932).

37
As time went on and Levy came to understand the market, he gradually cut down on the number of his
exhibitions devoted to photography. “During the second season, one-half of the exhibitions were of
photographs and during the third season about one-third.” Eventually photography was replaced in primacy
by painting (David Travis, Photographs from the Julien Levy Collection Starting with Atget (Chicago: Art
Institute of Chicago, 1976), 19.

38
Douglas Crimp notes that MoMA proudly pointed out in its 1980 Annual Report, that the Department of
Photography was “the first such department in any art museum” (Douglas Crimp, “The Museum’s Old, the
Library’s New Subject,” On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993), 68. By
contrast, the Modern’s Film department was established in 1935. According to curator James Alinder,
Beaumont Newhall’s friendship with the photographer Ansel Adams was a “prime instigator in the creation
231
exhibited photographs prior to 1940, the museum had not accorded the medium specific
attention as far as collecting was concerned.
39
Now, Barr announced in 1941, “under the
auspices of the Library, a collection of photographs has been founded and a reference
library of photographic material established.”
40
Perhaps most significant with respect to
the status of the medium at that time was the relationship between the library and the
photograph; the department of photography, headed by the Modern’s librarian, Beaumont
Newhall, would be related to the book – the photographs’ flat reproducibility easily
making them objects of reference, document and illustration.
41
In conjunction with the
Modern’s first large-scale photography exhibition in 1937, Newhall had published a
history of photography, which was revised and republished numerous times, in 1938,
1949, 1964, 1982 and 1988. Attempting to establish both the photograph’s technical
history and its status as an art, Newhall thoroughly catalogued the different types and
modes of photography in part it seems because for him “photographic esthetics are so
closely combined with technique that it is almost impossible to separate the two.”
42

of a department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art” (James Alinder, “Ansel Adams, American
Artist,” Ansel Adams: Classic Images (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985), 20).

39
Photographs had played a small role in Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936); however, they were
absent – except as documentation – from Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage (1968).

40
Alfred Barr, “The New Department of Photography,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, v. 7, n.
2 (December-January 1940-41), 3.

41
For more on the changing relationship between photography and the book, see Douglas Crimp’s “The
Museum’s Old, the Library’s New Subject,” Parachute, n. 22 (Spring 1981).

42
Beaumont Newhall, Photography 1839-1937 (New York: Museum of Modern Art), 75. Earlier in the
book, Newhall had posed the question “Is Photography art?” and only elliptically answered it by comparing
the painter’s and the photographer’s shared desire to make a picture (Ibid., 44). By the time of the printing
of the 1964 edition, Newhall addressed photography’s status directly: “Everywhere progress is being made
in the acceptance of photography as a valid, vital and needful art form” (Beaumont Newhall, The History of
Photography from 1839 to the present day (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 201).
232
Newhall recalled that because MoMA at the time “had no reputation in the field of
photography, and was not known to the photographic community” he suggested that the
museum form an international advisory committee to act as a sponsor.
43
Newhall
approached Alfred Stieglitz, largely considered to be the father of modern photography,
but Stieglitz flatly refused involvement with the exhibition. According to Newhall,
Stieglitz “intensely disliked the museum: it was becoming too popular; and also, it was
riding on exhibitions of modern art by artists whom he had been the first in this country
to show.”
44
In 1943, while Newhall was serving in the air force, the museum’s Center for
Photography was opened, with Willard D. Morgan as its director. According to Newhall,
Morgan was an expert in the technical aspects of photography, but “he had no real
understanding of the art of photography.”
45
The Center for Photography was housed in a
building adjacent to the Modern, and its purpose “was to provide archive and exhibition
space for the 2,000 prints in the collection, and to serve as a research and information
center for those interested in the art of photography.”
46
However, the space was closed

43
Beaumont Newhall, Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1993), 46.

44
Beaumont Newhall, Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1993), 47. According to National Gallery photography curator Sarah Greenough, who had been a student
of Newhall in the 1960s, Stieglitz was also horrified that such a young person was in charge of the
photography show (Sarah Greenough, “Beaumont Newhall: Teaching a History, Inspiring a Vision,” Getty
Center, June 12, 2008). Stieglitz refused to show any of his recent work in MoMA’s 1937 exhibition.

45
Beaumont Newhall, Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1993), 101. Newhall also recalls how Morgan’s first exhibition as director, The American Snapshot (1944),
“was not a success and injured the department’s reputation for maintaining the highest standards” (Ibid.,
105).

46
Whitney Gaylord, cataloguer of the Department of Photography, MoMA, email to the author, May 16,
2008.

233
the following year when the building it was in was sold, and the department was returned
to the main building, now housed adjacent to the library, its staff cut to Nancy Newhall
alone, who had taken the position of interim curator while her husband served in the war
effort.
47
In 1947, Edward Steichen was appointed officially director of the Photography
Department, where he curated large-scale exhibitions that promoted photography as a
universal form of communication, often in the service of American ideals, but not
necessarily as art. In 1951, Steichen curated the exhibition Memorable Life
Photographs, which displayed photographs that had appeared in the magazine,
celebrating photojournalism as a “visual record of the time we live in.” Steichen wrote in
the foreword to the catalogue, “On occasion they create images that reach into the
nebulous and controversial realm of the fine arts.”
48
Steichen’s most famous exhibition
was The Family of Man, which opened at MoMA on January 24, 1955.
49
Following Carl
Sandburg’s prologue, Steichen introduced a later version of the immensely popular
catalogue by describing the exhibition as “conceived as a mirror of the universal elements

47
The budget for the photography department for the year 1943-44 shows the department to have had a
multi-faceted approach to its mission. The first three projects listed were “I. develop a comprehensive
lantern slide collection…II. commission some special photographic projects and assignments by selected
photographers…III. Allowance for special photographic lectures…” (“Budget for Photography
Department, Museum of Modern Art, 1943-44,” Alfred H. Barr papers roll 2170, Archives of the Museum
of Modern Art).

48
Edward Steichen, Memorable Life Photographs (New York: Time, Inc., 1951), n.p.

49
See Edward Steichen, The Family of Man: The Greatest photographic Exhibition of All Time (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1955). The slightly shorter paperback version of the catalogue was subtitled: “The
greatest photographic exhibition of all time – 503 pictures from 68 countries.” Writing in October 1979,
photography critic A.D. Coleman echoed the paperback’s subtitle, calling Family of Man “the most popular
and influential photography exhibition and book of all time” (A.D. Coleman, “The Impact on Photography:
‘No Other Institution Even Comes Close,” ArtNews, v. 78, n. 8 (October 1979), 103). The paperback
catalogue contains 192 pages compared with the hardback edition’s 206 pages.

234
and emotions in the everydayness of life—as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind
throughout the world.”
50
While Steichen’s tenure was later described as “flamboyant,” he
was able to acquire vast amounts of photographs for the Museum at minimal cost, simply
“by asking photographers to donate them to MOMA free of charge. …Most
photographers considered themselves lucky to be asked by Steichen to give their work
away” because original photographic prints were still not widely considered works of
art,
51
an attitude perpetuated by Steichen’s (correct) assumption that photographers would
forgo payment for their works for the prestige of being collected by a major museum. By
1958, the photography collection had grown to 5,800 prints.
52

It was with the arrival of John Szarkowski in 1962 that MoMA’s attitude toward
photography began to shift toward exhibiting the medium as a fine art.
53
As Christopher
Philips has pointed out, “Szarkowski created something of a stir in museum circles by
insisting that photographs be shown matted, framed, and behind glass, at a time when the
framing process cost more than most of the photographs were worth.”
54
In his 1964
exhibition The Photographer’s Eye, Szarkowski, who was a photographer himself,
argued that the medium demanded a different set of standards than those applied to

50
Edward Steichen, The Family of Man: The Photoraphic Exhibition created by Edward Steichen for the
Museum of Modern Art (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 5).

51
A.D. Coleman, “The Impact on Photography: ‘No Other Institution Even Comes Close,” ArtNews, v. 78,
n. 8 (October 1979), 104.

52
A.D. Coleman, “The Impact on Photography: ‘No Other Institution Even Comes Close,” ArtNews, v. 78,
n. 8 (October 1979), 103.

53
Christopher Philips, “Letters,” October, v. 19 (Winter 1981), 121.

54
Christopher Philips, “Letters,” October, v. 19 (Winter 1981), 121.

235
paintings, which he outlined as the “thing itself,” its details, frame, vantage point, and
duration.
55
Photography critic Andy Grunberg called Szarkowski’s essay in The
Photographer’s Eye as a “position paper” describing Szarkowski’s attitude as “In spirit
not far removed from the formalist esthetic applied to painting by critic Clement
Greenberg.”
56
By emphasizing the medium’s formal characteristics, Szarkowski
announced a different attitude toward the medium from that of Edward Steichen.
In 1975, Levy donated his photography collection to the Art Institute of Chicago,
which displayed 136 of the photographs in an exhibition, The Julien Levy Collection
Starting with Atget, from December 11, 1976 to February 20, 1977.
57
As one of the first
exhibitions to include Surrealist photography in the 1970s, the show of Levy’s
photographs used Atget’s status as a hook; presumably because of the then virtually
unrecognized importance of the collection, the exhibition’s organizers attached a “name”
to the show, and thus Atget is put forth, lending legitimacy to the fledgling field of the
history of photography.
58
The exhibition catalogue is also oriented around names – both

55
John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), n.p.

56
Andy Grundberg, “John Szarkowski 1925-2007” Art in America, v. 95, n. 8 (September 2007), 37). In
later years, Szarkowski’s position was viewed as increasingly conservative: “MOMA belatedly acquired
Cindy Sherman's '70s "Untitled Film Stills" only in 1995, after he had retired” (Ibid.). In an exhibition also
of 1964, Szarkowski presented the work of André Kertész. Of the 51 plates illustrated in the exhibition
catalogue only three demonstrate the photographer’s distorted images; the vast majority depict straight
photographs.

57
The exhibition was later shown at the International Center for Photography in New York. In 1977, Levy
also published a personal record of his experience as a dealer and collector, Memoir of an Art Gallery (New
York: C.G. Putnam’s Sons, 1977). On the book’s cover, Levy is identified as “‘The Man Who Organized
The First Surrealist Exhibition in America.’”

58
In a discussion with photography collector and dealer Stephen White, who owned and operated his
photography gallery in Los Angeles between 1975 and 1991, White explained that the market for
photography early on was formulated around the idea of the author (Stephen White, conversation with the
author, February 29, 2008). In addition, the work of Atget had been heavily promoted by the Museum of
236
widely recognized and largely unknown – where in its alphabetical (rather than
chronological) order Atget is preceded by Abbott. Included are not only such
photographers associated with Surrealism as Brassaï, Kertesz, Lee Miller, Man Ray, and
Raul Ubac, but others whose names within photography were becoming commonplace in
broader modern art discourse in general – Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, George
Platt Lynes, and Charles Sheeler. As the curator of the exhibition, David Travis,
concluded his essay, “since the time of the Levy Gallery much has happened and much
has changed in photography. …Photography has become something with a history,
something with masterpieces, something to study and collect, something to sell, and
something in which to have pride of ownership. It has become like other art.”
59

At the same time, photography was very much not like other art. On February 2,
1968, on the front page of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington
Post, and the New York Daily News, readers were confronted with a large photograph of a
man being executed at close range – the man’s face contorting at the moment the bullet
entered his skull.
60
The photograph, General Loan Executing a Vietcong Suspect, had

Modern Art throughout the 1970s, following Julien Levy and Berenice Abbott’s sale of their jointly-owned
Atget collection (Levy had bought a stake in the collection in 1930), which included “several thousand
original prints and approximately 1,000 glass negatives” (Museum of Modern Art Biennial Report 1966-
1969 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1969), 19).

59
David Travis, The Julien Levy Collection Starting with Atget (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1976),
22.

60
Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed our Lives (New York:
Abbeville Press, 1991), 228. The Chicago Tribune printed the photograph as a series on page 3. Footage of
the execution was also shown on the NBC nightly news and the ABC nightly news, which had film that did
not include the shooting. “ABC ran the sequence as far as it went, then cut to Adams’s black-and-white
photograph, then returned to moving pictures of the corpse. The photograph kept reappearing. Time and
Newsweek both printed it again later that month” (Ibid.).

237
been taken by Eddie Adams only the day before, and immediately became a powerful
icon of the injustices of war, while it contradicted the messages that the U.S. government
wished to propagate about progress in Vietnam (Figure 3.5). Such images foregrounded
the medium’s increasing currency in contemporary life. The rise of the photograph in the
1970s should be correlated with the medium’s dominance as the most resonant document
of the Vietnam War – the photograph offered an immediacy that neither print, nor more
traditional visual mediums such as painting, could match. In an age of instantaneity and
spectacle, only the photograph and television, through which many Americans first
became aware of Vietnam,
61
could bring home the absurd truth of reality.
Figure 3.5

61
Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, second revised edition (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990), 358. The author writes that Americans “first became aware of Vietnam
through the 1964 presidential campaign as seen on the home screen” (Ibid.). On television, he argues, the
Vietnam War’s escalation was depicted “as a continuation of the older struggles against tyranny,”
especially World War II, inspiring several television series about war, though none of the dramas were
actually set in Vietnam (Ibid., 374). While debates about the war occurred throughout American society,
television was slow to portray them, especially in prime time, until the late 1960s. At a conference on
television held at the Museum of Modern Art in January 1974, one speaker argued that television could be
a liberating force because “in contrast to older ‘linear’ media it is not, by its very nature, self-limiting and
elitist. Everybody can use it, since everybody knows how to speak and to act and to play” (Hans Magnus
Enzensberger, “Television and the Politics of Liberation,” The New Television: A Public/Private Art, edited
by Douglas Davis and Allison Simmons (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1977), 253). I would
argue that photography shared this democratic potential and appeal.

238
These were not the images that would attain art-level status in the 1970s;
contemporary art photography moved in the opposite direction. As John Szarkowski
wrote in his 1978 exhibition Mirrors and Windows, “For most Americans the meaning of
the Vietnam War was not political, or military, or even ethical, but psychological. It
brought to us a sudden, unambiguous knowledge of moral frailty and failure. The
photographs that best memorialize the shock of that new knowledge were perhaps made
halfway around the world, by Diane Arbus.”
62
Szarkowski argued for the importance of
photography not based on its photojournalistic abilities – indeed, he announced
photojournalism’s failure, even as he credited the achievement of Steichen’s Family of
Man, an exhibition that had been a great popular success.
63
For Szarkowski, the aesthetic
ambitions of photographers – their psychological sensibilities to their subjects – could
only be expressed when photography was not “subservient to a larger, overriding
concept.”
64
Nonetheless, the broadening visibility of particularly salient images that were
able to blend the photojournalistic with the psychological – correlates with the increased
market for photography and, eventually, its art-level status. Hilton Kramer also noted
this shift in 1978, writing:
one of the most striking developments in the recent history of the visual
arts in this country has been the elevation of photography to an exalted

62
John Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1978), 13. The exhibition was seen at MoMA from July 28 to October 2, 1978, before
traveling to the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center; the J.B. Speed Art Museum in
Louisville, Kentucky; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the University of Illinois, Krannert Art
Museum; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and the Milwaukee Art Center, where it closed on March 2,
1980.

63
Ibid., 16-17.

64
Ibid., 17.

239
status. …[F]requently reduced to an ancillary role in the
arts...photography has now been welcomed to the esthetic sanctum of our
culture on a scale that even its most devoted champions of an earlier day
might have hesitated to predict.
65

Indeed, photography previously had been so de-valued that Levy admitted, “you should
have seen how my photographs were stored for many years. In the barn, amid manure –
though not on them of course.”
66
Levy was not the only one to collect Surrealist
photographs – Abbott’s preservation of Atget’s work in 1927 comes to mind – but he was
an early proponent of the widest array of Surrealist production.
Though the majority of images in the exhibition of Levy’s collection were
“straight” photographs, there were a few obviously manipulated ones – images that had
been superimposed or solarized – trademarks of the surrealizing of photography’s
connection to the real. This connection between artifice and reality, while constantly at
play in Surrealism, was problematic for the medium of photography. Critic and activist
Douglas Crimp writes that photography “was excluded from the museum and art history,
because, virtually of necessity, it points to a world outside itself….The ‘world outside’ is
allowed in and art’s autonomy is revealed as a fiction, a construction of the museum.”
67

For Crimp, it is this “discursive incoherence” that marks postmodern theory as well as its

65
Hilton Kramer, “The New American Photography,” New York Times Magazine (July 23, 1978), 9, 11.
Kramer’s article was published as a review of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Mirrors and
Windows,” curated by John Szarkowski (though it appeared before the show’s opening). The exhibition
was meant to characterize the photographic trend from 1960 to the present, and concentrated almost
entirely on the documentary approach.

66
Julien Levy, quoted in Nancy Hall-Duncan, “Surrealist Photography at The New Gallery: A
Conversation with Julien Levy,” Dialogue, v. 2 (September-October 1979), 23.

67
Douglas Crimp, “Photographs at the End of Modernism,” On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993), 14.

240
practice – an acknowledgement of the mismatch between an autonomous existence for art
(in the modernist view) and the everyday world.
68
Of course, this same blending – of art
and life – was at the heart of Surrealism’s ideological underpinnings, and moreover, had
been grounds for its rejection by influential modernist critics such as Clement Greenberg.
Thus, it might not be a surprise that in the mid-1970s, such critics as Susan Sontag argued
that so-called “straight” photography was itself surreal at its core: “The mainstream of
photographic activity has shown that a Surrealist manipulation or theatricalization of the
real is unnecessary, if not actually redundant. Surrealism lies at the heart of the
photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the
second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.”
69

The photographs of Atget, admired immensely by the Surrealists, fit precisely such a
characterization – at once straightforward, his images of shop windows present their own
enclosed and uncanny reality.
In his Avenue des Gobelins (n.d.) which appeared in the exhibition of Levy’s
collection, Atget photographs four feminine mannequins through a store window (Figure
3.6). The mannequins’ faces and bodies are identical, but posed at different angles and
dressed in different outfits, at a glance they give the impression of being almost real –
almost. The mannequins’ artificiality is covered over by the photograph’s mediation
between artifice and reality. Their frozenness is disguised by the arrested photographic
moment, though at the same time, it seems also to offer a stop-motion view of time

68
Ibid.

69
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar: Straus and Giroux, 1977 (originally 1973)), 49.

241
distended – one body pictured at four distinct times. And then there is the problem of
space – the photograph pictures three spaces collapsed into a single frame: there is the
sidewalk, which is only gestured to by the exterior window casing, the enclosed interior
of the store display, and the world beyond the shop, which is reflected in the glass as it
bisects the bodies of the mannequins. It is this layering of reality – cropped from the
everyday but somehow amplified, elevated beyond it while infused within it – that marks
photography as a medium not only available to the Surrealists, but surrealist in and of
itself. In 1930, Walter Benjamin reflected on just this aspect of Atget’s work, writing
that in Atget’s photographs, “the city in these pictures is swept clean like a house which
has not yet found its new tenant. These are the sort of effects with which Surrealist
photography established a healthy alienation between environment and man…in the face
of which all intimacies fall in favor of the illumination of details.”
70
The tension between
accumulated information and emotional evacuation fosters a new, perhaps disorienting,
awareness of the potential interchangeability between the familiar and the unfamiliar.
Reviewing the exhibition of contemporary photographs, entitled “Photo Media” at the
Museum of Contemporary Crafts in 1971, Denise Hare came to a related conclusion,
writing of the contemporary photographs on view by such artists as John Pfal, William
Larson, and Charles Swedlund, “intended or not, this show has a rather surrealist air
about it. This might be just one of the properties of the medium itself; that is, if an image
is transferred onto an unexpected object such as a stone…the ‘conceptual image’ will be

70
Walter Benjamin, “Short History of Photography,” orig. 1930, Artforum, v. 15 (February 1977), 50;
quoted in Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, 9.

242
colored ‘surreal.’”
71
In Charles Swedlund’s “Six Sided Puzzle,” included in the
exhibition, a “straight” photograph is printed on the sides of 49 cubes, which then can be
placed together to form a cohesive larger picture – a sort of splayed out Rubik’s cube –
composed of the individual surfaces. In the process, the body depicted in the broken
photograph can be both dissected and resurrected. The effect is disjointed, but offers up
the possibility for cohesion – it also returns space to its three-dimensional physicality,
though bound by its photographic transcription, this new-found materiality remains
planar. For Crimp, photography challenges the modernist project through its insistence
on the everyday; for Hare, photographic reality invites disjunctive Surrealist moments
and for Sontag, the photographic image is itself inherently surrealistic.
Figure 3.6

71
David Hare, “Photography as Media,” Craft Horizons, v. 31, n. 6 (December 1971), 70.

243
At approximately the same moment that the medium of photography was being
re-conceptualized around its associations with Surrealism, Atget began to be heavily
promoted by the Museum of Modern Art, which had purchased Berenice Abbott and
Julien Levy’s Atget collection in 1969.
72
Szarkowski later described the transaction as “a
pretty daring venture at the time. It wasn’t a gift. We bought it.”
73
Prior to the purchase,
Atget had received only two exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, but between 1969
and 1985 Atget was the subject of six one-man exhibitions at the Modern. Moreover, a
pledge to MoMA by the Spring Mills Corporation in 1980 to promote the work of Atget
was to result in “a series of four exhibitions and books planned to appear over the next
four years…that will be the culmination of thirteen years of work on the Museum’s
Abbott-Levy Collection of over 5,000 prints and 1,000 negatives by the French
photographer Eugène Atget.”
74
By 1979, MoMA’s photography collection consisted of
about 20,000 prints, meaning that Atget’s prints represented a quarter of the collection.
In the first catalogue of this series of exhibitions, held at MoMA in 1981, John
Szarkowski’s essay made every effort to position Atget (and thus, photography) as
ambitious, authentic, beautiful, original and, above all, artistic. A quotation from
Szarkowski’s text demonstrates the extent to which Atget was being made to stand for a

72
Levy had bought a partial interest in the Atget archive in 1930 and helped Abbott to secure finances for
the maintenance of the archive. However, after Levy was unsuccessful in his efforts to promote Atget in
the early 1930s, Abbott largely took over in lecturing and publishing on the photographer. When the deal
with the Museum of Modern Art went through in 1969, “she resented having to share the proceeds with
Levy” (Ingrid Schaffner, “Alchemy of the Gallery,” Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998), 27).

73
John Szarkowski, quoted in Terry Trucco, “Who Makes MoMA Run: John Szarkowski,” ArtNews, v. 78,
n. 8 (October 1979), 150. Trucco reports that the purchase price of the archive was $80,000.

74
Museum of Modern Art Annual Report 1980-1981 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 21.

244
modernist photography: “To many photographers today his work stands not only as a
heroic and original achievement, but as an exemplary pedagogical lesson…it is rather as
though the world itself were a finished work of art….”
75
This was a very different model
than the one Atget himself had applied to his work, which he had never claimed to be art,
but documentation. Art historian Molly Nesbit, in her study Atget’s Seven Albums,
foregrounds Atget’s attitude toward his photography. Nesbit writes, “More than once
Atget explained to Man Ray that these photographs were only documents, documents for
artists”
76
and that Atget had also told Julien Levy, in Levy’s words, “he [Atget] was
simply preserving carefully the vanishing world that he loved, and keeping an archive of
important classified documents.”
77
Though Atget clearly described his work as
documentation, Szarkowski’s aestheticizing language pushed to locate the photographs
unequivocally in the realm of art, a relationship that was just beginning to be established.
Art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau critiqued the aestheticizing impulse of
historians with regard to Atget. In her review of Szarkowski’s four-volume series on the
photographer, she critiqued the persistent desire by historians and critics for Atget to
function as a creative author:
That the operations of cultural legitimation possess economic as well as
ideological interests (an Atget photograph is worth more than an
anonymous one in both senses of the term) is but another indication of the
force and power implied in the word investment. Eugène Atget, currently
positioned as the exemplar, progenitor, and patriarch of modern

75
John Szarkowski, “Atget and the Art of Photography,” The Work of Atget, volume 1: Old France (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 12.

76
Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 9.

77
Julien Levy, quoted in Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, 215.

245
photography and celebrated unanimously by the photographic community
with an enthusiasm bordering on delirium, proves an apt case – or case
history – for examining some of the terms of this investment.
78

Solomon-Godeau argued that Atget’s authority was historically constructed to suit
current needs.
79
In 1982, Solomon-Godeau had published an article on art photography’s
relation to modernism – “having been for most of its historical life always the bridesmaid
and never the bride…art photography may be seen to have won the game at
approximately the point when the rules were changed.”
80
Though Solomon-Godeau
never defines art photography specifically, she suggests that:
the expression of the photographer’s interior…has been almost from the
medium’s inception the doxa of art photography…Implicit in the notion of
the photographer’s expressive mediation of the world through the use of
his or her instrument is a related constellation of assumptions: the
subjectivity of vision and the camera as medium of that subjectivity; the
sovereignty of authorship; the belief that the meaning of a photograph
exists autonomously within the boundaries of its frame. That these
assumptions are coeval with modernism…have to a considerable extent
determined the ethos as well as the fortunes of art photography.
81

With this characterization of art photography in place, Solomon-Godeau then contrasts
postmodern photography, which, she writes, possesses the “potential for institutional

78
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Cannon Fodder: Authoring Eugene Atget,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter,
v. 16, n. 6 (January-February 1989), 222.

79
For a critique of Solomon-Godeau’s argument and an analysis of Krauss’s use of Foucault, see Andrew
E. Herschberger, “Krauss’s Foucault and the Foundations of Postmodern History of Photography,” History
of Photography, v. 30, n. 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 55-67.

80
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Playing in the Fields of the Image,” Photography at the Dock: Essays on
Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 87.
Originally published in Afterimage v. 10 n. 1 and 2 (Summer 1982).

81
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Playing in the Fields of the Image,” Photography at the Dock: Essays on
Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 87.
Originally published in Afterimage v. 10 n. 1 and 2 (Summer 1982).

246
and/or representational critique, analysis or address.”
82
Though Solomon-Godeau seeks
to distance “art photography” from postmodern photography, the manipulated
photographs produced in the 1930s by such Surrealists as Man Ray and André Kertesz
seem to fit between these poles – it is at once highly and self-consciously subjective,
keenly aware of the camera as a malleable tool, but it also disregards representational
maxims and for that matter, societal ones as well. Whether “straight” and everyday or
disjunctive and manipulated, at the moment of its re-theorization, photography being
produced in the late 1970s by artists such as Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman or Duane
Michaels seemed to exhibit the lessons of Surrealism; and Surrealism, having already
flouted the conventions of modernism, presented a vantage point from which aesthetic
production could be re-examined.
It may have been coincidence that the recognition of photography as a viable
means of production corresponded with the recognition of its surrealist aspects.
However, it was not a coincidence for art historians like Krauss, who were deconstructing
the myths that modernist art criticism and history had erected for itself. According to
Krauss:
within standard art-historical accounts of twentieth-century production
Surrealism is totally marginalized, as is photography. And therefore
photography’s undeniably major role within Surrealism – in books,
journals, etc. – has simply been ignored in the histories of the movement
that have been produced over the past forty years. I thought it was

82
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Photography after Art Photography,” Art after Modernism: Rethinking
Representation, edited by Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 77.

247
important to ask about this marginalization, because it has the quality of
repression.
83

Because of the twin subsidiary roles that photography and Surrealism had played as
outsiders to traditional constructions of modern art’s history, Surrealism and its
photography offered a way to understand modernism better, by examining what it had left
out, overlooked and repressed.
Where, or perhaps a better question, how did Krauss gain the authority to overturn
these so-called conventional art historical accounts?
84
As a graduate student in 1966,
Krauss began writing for Artforum, receiving her Ph.D. in 1969 from Harvard, where she
had been a classmate of Michael Fried and in the circle of Clement Greenberg. After her
break with Artforum in 1975, Krauss was intent on recasting the terrain of modern art,
approaching it more than before by its theoretical underpinnings, not influenced by
Greenberg, nor subject to the editorial decisions of Philip Leider or Max Kozloff. Krauss
had disagreed with Greenberg over the handling of David Smith’s estate, his opinions of
Richard Serra and Robert Smithson, and his “hawkish position about Viet Nam.”
85
And,

83
Rosalind Krauss, quoted in Gregory Gilbert and Richard Paley, “An Interview with Rosalind Krauss,”
Rutgers Art Review, v. 11 (1990), 65-66.

84
As art historian Anna Chave has recently written, “something akin to the sway that Clement Greenberg
held over the United States art critical discourse in Hesse’s day has of late, arguably, come to be held by his
former disciple Rosalind Krauss” (Anna Chave, “Minimalism and Biography,” Art Bulletin v. 82, n. 1
(March 2000), 153). Philip Leider also ascribes to Krauss an enormous role in the art world: “The Rosalind
I knew is not the Rosalind that now is this dominatrix of the cultural world” (Philip Leider, quoted in Amy
Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2000), 187.

85
Krauss, quoted in Judy K. Collisenan Van Wagner, Women Shaping Art: Profiles of Power (New York:
Praeger Publishers, 1984), 155. Krauss recalls that “A group of artists were emerging that I found to be
extraordinary, but that were taboo for Greenberg. They included Richard Serra and Robert Smithson, but
mainly Serra. …On the tenth anniversary of Artforum, I wrote ‘A View of Modernism’ and at that point
officially severed by ties with Greenberg, Fried and their hard-nosed position” (Ibid., 156). See Rosalind
Krauss, “A View of Modernism,” Artforum, v. 11, n. 1 (September 1972), pp. 48-51.
248
according to Krauss, soon after Kozloff became executive editor of Artforum in 1975, he
refused to publish an article that Krauss had written. Krauss describes Kozloff as
“determined to rid the magazine of its earlier ‘formalism.’ … He was claiming realism as
the only vehicle for politically committed art and condemning everything else as
formalism.”
86
While Krauss rejected Greenberg in part for his political views, she had
conflicts with Kozloff because he did not find her politically engaged enough. In 1976,
Kozloff, who had published several pieces in the magazine on photography, turned
toward photography himself, and began taking pictures of street scenes, much in the
manner of Atget, whom he cited as an influence.
87
Moreover, Krauss recalls that “Max
[Kozloff] had staked out his claim to knowing all about photography and its history; he
was Mr. Photography. …but I had a view of the photographic that was different from
Max’s and it was that view that was elaborated in the piece [“Impressionism: The
Narcissism of Light,” which Kozloff rejected].”
88
In her piece, Krauss cited
photography’s ability to transcribe nature as having incited the Impressionists to find an

86
Rosalind Krauss, quoted in Gregory Gilbert and Richard Paley, “An Interview with Rosalind Krauss,”
Rutgers Art Review, v. 11 (1990), 58, 63.

87
Kozloff recalls, “I first noticed it when I started photographing store windows, around 1976. These
windows are particularly compromised surfaces, since they simultaneously let us see into their contents
while interrupting them with reflections, at some illusory remove, of the world around us. The model was
Atget. There was something innately pictorial about this experience, which evaporated in the round, and
left only my flat transcription of it. The spectacle provided by store windows was, in pictorial terms, of
double exposure, of disintegration, of seeing and not seeing. Confusing and frustrating as this situation was,
it taught me about the larger equivocations of the visible world. The photograph became a kind of dream”
(Vicki Goldberg, “An Interview with Joyce and Max Kozloff,” Art Journal, v. 59, n. 3 (Autumn 2000),
103.

88
Krauss, quoted in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2000),
423. Krauss’s piece, “Impressionism,” was eventually published in The Partisan Review in Spring 1976.
Krauss states that her reaction to Kozloff’s rejection of her piece was the resolve “never to write another
thing for Artforum; it was over” (Rosalind Krauss, quoted in Amy Newman, Challenging Art, 423).

249
alternative mode in which “their art becomes the first chapter of that compulsion to make
art from the didactic organization of perception that is the text of modernism.”
89
Krauss
describes photography as a formal exercise and one that offers a teleological explanation
for modernism; instead, for Kozloff, photography was a medium that was socially
relevant and perhaps aesthetically democratizing: “No one will make much headway in
understanding photographs who is not open and liberal in this fashion [to allow random
visual possibilities].”
90
In addition to her methodological differences with Kozloff, it was
Artforum’s decision to publish the photograph of the artist Lynda Benglis, discussed
earlier, that was the catalyst for Krauss’s resignation from the staff of the magazine.
91

Leaving Artforum to found the journal October in 1976 with fellow former
Artforum contributor Annette Michelson, coincided, for Krauss, with “a transitional
period in which the modernist canon, the forms and categories that had defined and
elucidated it, were everywhere in question. This situation, which we have subsequently
come to call postmodernist, required in our estimation an intensive effort of reassessment
and analysis.”
92
What the founding of October signaled in 1976 was a break with
traditional art history, and with the widespread understanding of formalism as narrow and
apolitical. The journal’s title was a reference to Sergei Eisenstein’s film October,

89
Rosalind Krauss, “Impressionism: The Narcissism of Light,” Partisan Review (May 1976), 111.

90
Max Kozloff, “The Territory of Photographs,” Artforum, v. 13, n. 3 (November 1974), 67.

91
Krauss recalls, “for some of us I guess the Benglis thing was the last straw” (Rosalind Krauss, quoted in
Amy Newman, Challenging Art, 414).

92
“Introduction,” October: The First Decade, 1976-1986 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987),
ix. The first article in the inaugural issue of October in Spring 1976 was Michel Foucault’s “Ceci n’est pas
une pipe.”

250
because, according to Krauss, “the repressive nature of Stalinist aesthetics employed in
the name of politics paralleled what was going on at Artforum.”
93
According to Judy K.
Collisenan Van Wagner, October became a self-sustaining journal within six years of its
founding, and in 1982, had a circulation of 3,500.
94
While the first four issues of October
were funded privately by the editors, by mid-1979, October finalized its negotiations
with MIT Press.
95
As Thomas Crow, writing on the thirtieth anniversary of Artforum
observed, October’s “implicit diagnosis of the impasse that had defeated the old Artforum
was that serious art writing could only go on as before if it could call in sufficient
reinforcements. Paris, for some time secondary in the practices of art, came to the rescue
on the plane of theory, providing an amalgam of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and
deconstructive skepticism that went under the name of poststructuralism.”
96
The reference
to Paris also brings up the legacies of 1968 one of which was surely the opening of the
Pompidou Center for Arts and Culture in 1977, “the first major art museum to attempt to

93
Krauss, quoted in Judy K. Collisenan Van Wagner, Women Shaping Art: Profiles of Power (New York:
Praeger Publishers, 1984), 160). In Art since 1900, the editors write that “October [was] named for the
Sergei Eisenstein film that suffered from the Soviet assault against ‘formalism’” (Art since 1900, 472).

94
Judy K. Collisenan Van Wagner, Women Shaping Art: Profiles of Power (New York: Praeger Publishers,
1984), 159. In contrast, Artforum’s circulation was first cited at 5,483 in 1963 (the first year its circulation
records were reported) and grew to 10,918 five years later in 1968 (Amy Newman, Challenging Art, 88).

95
Douglas Crimp, letter to Jerry Rozenberg (May 12, 1979), Box 1, Folder 10, October records, Getty
Research Institute Archives.

96
Thomas Crow, “On the Graying of Art Criticism,” Artforum, v. 32, n. 1 (September 1993), 187. In 2004,
Hal Foster characterized “poststructuralist postmodernism” as a commitment to overcoming modernism
because modernism was no longer critical enough; poststructuralism and postmodernism were both “driven
by a critique of representation that questioned this truth, and it is this critique that aligned such
postmodernist art most closely with poststructuralist theory” (Hal Foster, Art Since 1900, edited by
Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004),
598).

251
address the May ’68 demands for access and inclusion.”
97
President Georges Pompidou
believed firmly in Paris’s need for a “cultural center that would be both a museum and a
center for creativity – a place where the plastic arts, music, cinema, literature, audio-
visual works, etc. would find a common ground.”
98
The $180 million effort to reclaim
Paris’s primacy in the visual arts,
99
the Pompidou Center was to have several of its levels,
such as its library – La Bibliothèque Public d’Information – and gallery spaces, open and
on offer to the general public, a mandate exemplified by its transparent architectural
“inside-out” edifice. The Pompidou offered a “system in which the fine arts, the applied
arts, the popular arts, and various forms of entertainment, journalism and kitsch are all
regarded as cultural activities of equal value and significance” the conservative critic
Hilton Kramer proclaimed in The New York Times, who suspected that “the fine arts may
indeed be the ultimate losers.”
100
Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson translated Jean
Baudrillard’s analysis of the Pompidou as a monument to the spectacle of culture for
October in 1982. Baudrillard writes, through Krauss and Michelson, “The whole of
social discourse is there, and on both this level and that of cultural manipulation,
Beaubourg is – in total contradiction to its stated objectives – a brilliant monument of

97
Rebecca DeRoo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in
France after 1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 17.

98
Georges Pompidou, quoted in “Museum News and Comments,” Art Journal, v. 37, n. 1 (Autumn 1977),
61.

99
Pompidou was quoted as having been “worried lest the extraordinary home for the arts which is Paris
wander abroad, across the seas,” clearly referencing the general acceptance that New York had displaced
Paris as the center of modern and contemporary art (Georges Pompidou, quoted in Flora Lewis, “Pompidou
Extolled as Giscard Opens $180 Million Art Complex,” New York Times (February 1, 1977), 21).

100
Hilton Kramer, “A New Arts Center in Paris to Open Amid Raging Controversy,” The New York Times
(January 30, 1977), D1.

252
modernity.”
101
Thus the institutionalization of the concerns of 1968 offered a particularly
interesting vantage point from which to view the return of European art and ideals.
Indeed, while the October editors made much of European theory, their focus seems to
have been on translating key texts for Anglophone audiences, as the majority of the
journal’s small budget was spent on expenses associated with translation. October’s
layout was strictly achromatic, the result of the editors’ decision to make “a measured
iconoclasm into policy” in order to favor “the primacy of the text and the writer’s
freedom of discourse.”
102
Whatever power the image had held as an icon – an icon for
sale, no less –- was purposefully diminished, and in its place the craft of art writing – and
the methodology of its author – was privileged.
103
Though the editors chose only to
advertise their magazine with a small notice in the New York Review, the first issue of
October sold out.
104

101
Jean Baudrillard, “The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence,” trans. Rosalind Krauss and
Annette Michelson, October, v. 20 (Spring 1982), 4.

102
Thomas Crow, “On the Graying of Art Criticism,” Artforum, v. 32, n. 1 (September 1993) and Krauss,
quoted in Thomas Crow, “On the Graying of Art Criticism,” Artforum, v. 32, n. 1 (September 1993).
Meyer points out that at the time the Benglis ad appeared in Artforum, the magazine was “gradually
expanding its use of color printing as well as the number and ambition of its advertising pages. Needless to
say, this expansion continues today” (Richard Meyer, “Bone of Contention,” Artforum, v. 43, n. 3
(November 2004), 250). Indeed, the layout of October could even be called anti-chromatic, as Krauss
recalls an instance where Leo Steinberg offered to pay for color images to accompany an article, but was
told that he could not compromise the journal’s stance.

103
For an analysis of how this type of art writing came about see Daniel A. Siedell, “Contemporary Art
Criticism and the Legacy of Clement Greenberg: Or, How Artwriting Earned its Good Name,” Journal of
Aesthetic Education, v. 36, n. 4 (Winter 2002), pp. 15-31.

104
The first three issues of October had a print run of 3,000 copies. Of these, 2,500 were sold of the first
issue, 500 having been withheld by the editors. (Rosalind Krauss, memo to Peter Eisenman (August 1977),
Box 1, Folder 10, October records, Getty Research Institute Archives.

253
A much different approach was taken at Artforum. With the departure in 1975 of
Krauss and the “Artforum mafia,” which had included editor Philip Leider and his
editorial board Krauss, Michelson, Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff, Barbara Rose, Peter
Plagens, Robert Pincus-Wittten and Joseph Masheck, the magazine’s owners hired a
young, new editor, Ingrid Sischy, whose inaugural issue signaled a sea change in the
magazine’s former commitments to Greenbergian formalism, and, however briefly under
Kozloff, realism.
105
Sischy’s first issue as the magazine’s editor, published in February
1980, featured on its cover the first cover of another magazine – VVV, the short-lived
Surrealist journal of the 1940s published in the United States.
106
Reproducing its now-
faded and stained green number, Sischy insisted that Artforum be, indeed, a forum for art
and “not a didactic organ.”
107
The VVV cover, designed by Max Ernst, featured a swirling
set of sinusoidal diagrams and accompanying calculations, a sort of Surrealist
mathematics that seemed to question the supposedly rational systems of managing the
world. Embedded between the columns of Sischy’s one-page letter from the editor, was
the table of contents page of VVV, reproduced legibly with the names of its editor, David
Hare, a Surrealist photographer, and its editorial advisors, André Breton and Max Ernst.
The publication of VVV had marked a transition for the Surrealists of the 1940s too – it

105
For more on the editorship of Ingrid Sischy, see Janet Malcolm, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” The New
Yorker, v. 62 (October 20, 1986), pp. 49-89. For a detailed conversation on the inner workings of Artforum,
see Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2000).

106
VVV had been published sporadically throughout the war years in the United States. The first issue dates
from June 1942 and the fourth, and final, issue dates from February 1944. In later issues, Marcel Duchamp
joins Breton and Ernst as editorial advisors (see Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, pp. 374-387).

107
Ingrid Sischy, “Letter from the Editor,” Artforum v. 18, n. 6 (February 1980), 26.

254
was the return of a central Surrealist review following a hiatus from 1939, as well as the
first concerted effort of the Surrealists in exile. Its publication also gave Breton a forum
in which to “assess the position of Surrealism and determine its current relevance.”
108
In
1980, Artforum – indeed the entire art world – was also undergoing a critical
reassessment. Looking to redefine the magazine – and in presenting this redefinition
visually – Sischy turned to Surrealism and to an exploration of the idea of “multiplicity—
multiples, prints, photographs, videos and artists’ books”
109
as a way to reaffirm the role
of print (and therefore, the public domain of publication) in the aesthetic arena.
The primacy of the journal for artistic culture was also argued for in an exhibition
that occurred two years after October was founded and two years before Sischy’s tenure
at Artforum. In 1978 the exhibition Dada and Surrealism Reviewed was held from
January 11 to March 27 at the Hayward Gallery in London, which catalogued the
numerous incarnations of Dada and Surrealist journals and magazines.
110
In the
exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, art historian Dawn Ades argued that the
journals had been the primary vehicle of Surrealist expression. Organizing the exhibition
around texts, Ades gave individual sections over to the Surrealist journals published in
Paris, La Revolution Surréaliste, Documents (started by the Surrealist dissident Georges

108
Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), 377.

109
Ingrid Sischy, “Letter from the Editor,” Artforum, v. 18, n. 6 (February 1980), 26.

110
Because this dissertation focuses on American responses to Surrealism, I have for the most part
consciously excluded European exhibitions of Surrealism; however I am including a discussion of Dada
and Surrealism Reviewed because it had a direct influence on Krauss and Livingston’s L’Amour Fou
exhibition. Dawn Ades, who organized Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, then acted as a contributor to the
L’Amour Fou catalogue.

255
Bataille), Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution and Minotaure, in addition to
documenting Surrealist publications based in Belgium, London, and New York. The
exhibition and catalogue marked the first time serious attention was paid to the journals
as works themselves (Figure 3.7).
Figure 3.7
In many ways, to focus on the Surrealist journals brings the movement closer to
its origins as a literary movement, though the Bureau for Surrealist Research, featured on
the cover of the inaugural issue of La Revolution Surréaliste, announced the Surrealists’
intentions to move beyond words.
111
The cover, with its nondescript serif font,
underscores Surrealism’s principled (though ironically, often irrational) methodologies,

111
The Bureau for Surrealist Research opened on October 11, 1924, about two months before the
publication of the first issue of La Revolution Surréaliste on December 1, 1924 and served as a
headquarters for the Surrealists.

256
demonstrating the layout’s visual debt to the scientific journal La Nature.
112
Man Ray’s
photographs appear beneath the journal’s title. Picturing (mostly) men in dark suits and
ties, the triad of documentary photographs highlights the seriousness of the inquiry. The
only whimsy alluded to by the journal’s cover is the pinwheel configuration of the
photographs, which overlap at their edges to pose the visual question – is the Bureau’s
desk or an indecipherable bright blur the collage’s central focus? Would material
empiricism or immaterial introspection be the group’s concern? The visible and the
invisible world would clash again in a photograph by Atget that the Surrealists selected
for the cover of the June 1926 issue, which Nesbit discusses in her study of Atget. The
photograph is called “L’Eclipse—Avril 1912,” but it depicts not the celestial
phenomenon, but the crowd of people gathered to watch it (Figure 3.8). The crowd’s
collective eye is trained to the sky, setting only Atget and a young boy thumbing his nose
directly at the camera apart from the group by their shared focus on the moment’s
representation rather than experience. It is impossible to say if Atget’s tone was intended
to be slightly mocking, but Atget’s (and the smiling child’s) choice to refrain from
looking up conveys a disconnect with the group’s concentration with what befell them.
The Surrealists retitled the photograph “Les Dernières Conversions,” as if alluding to the
apocalyptic posture of the group in confrontation with the unknown. Such interactions
between journal and photograph (or painting, or object) would be lost without knowledge

112
According to Dawn Ades, Pierre Naville suggested taking La Nature as a model because of its
“positivist inspiration” and the Surrealists copied La Nature’s clean and simple layout. It seems likely that
the editors chose to integrate the images and the text closely, so “that they look like documents, like
evidence – none of the ‘halo’ of a beaux arts review” (Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, 189).

257
of the original context. And, by placing those journals in the context of an art gallery,
Ades argued that the journals should be considered as objects among many other Dada
and Surrealist works – indeed the exhibition was full of paintings, Surrealist objects, and
photographs, most of which had been originally illustrated in the journals.
Figure 3.8
A reviewer of the exhibition, while acknowledging the organizers’ argument for
the primacy of journals, wrote that “the most immediately striking general point to
emerge from the whole exhibition is that Dada and Surrealism embraced or anticipated
every major manifestation of modern art, not excluding non-objective art, from cubism to
conceptualism.”
113
In his review, George Melly echoed this observation, writing that
Dada and Surrealism’s strategies are “no longer the exclusive armoury of a small and
committed group. The Surrealist methods are everywhere applied, sometimes with

113
Simon Wilson, “‘Dada and Surrealism reviewed’ at the Hayward Gallery,” Burlington Magazine, v. 120,
n. 900 (March 1978), 181.

258
intelligence but usually indiscriminately.”
114
The exhibition may have emphasized the
eclecticism of Dada and Surrealist practice by packing the Hayward Gallery with works.
As another reviewer reported, “the clutter was positively Victorian. There was a feast of
images, certainly, but so crowded together that they frequently became confused and their
particular impact blurred.”
115
As these critics point out, the bleeding of Surrealism into
both contemporary art and life was emphatically apparent in the face of the sheer scope
of Surrealist production, which, audiences were meant to understand, also included the
journals and their photographs. However, some reviewers may have missed this aspect
of the exhibition. Malcolm Quantrill, writing in Art International, wrote that, in addition
to the belated publication of the catalogue, “the other organizational blunder stems from
the uneasy relationship of the works themselves to the seminal texts. My personal
impression was that the texts would have been better presented as ‘side shows,’ in little
booths to which one might have withdrawn from the battle of styles and poses.”
116
Ades’
exhibition was the first to integrate the Surrealist works with their texts in a way
increasingly relevant to the artistic production of the 1970s, however its importance in
pointing art historians toward a direction of Surrealist production that had been
overlooked was not initially appreciated.
Though Krauss’s exhibition of Surrealism’s photography was the most influential
on later critics and art historians, it was not the first exhibition to focus on the

114
George Melly, “Dada and Surrealism: George Melly reviews ‘Dada and Surrealism Reviewed,’”
Architecture and Design, v. 48, n. 2-3 (1978).

115
Malcolm Quantrill, “London,” Art International, v. 22, n. 3 (March 1978), 43.

116
Ibid.

259
photographic element of Surrealism. From October 3, 1979 to November 24, 1979,
Nancy Hall-Duncan’s exhibition Photographic Surrealism was on display at the New
Gallery for Contemporary Art in Cleveland, Ohio.
117
At the time of her exhibition, Hall-
Duncan was a graduate student in Art History working under the advisement of Kirk
Varnedoe at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. In her exhibition, Hall-Duncan
charged that “photographic surrealism forms one of the most critically important but
largely disregarded undercurrents of photographic history today.”
118
Hall-Duncan makes
frequent use of the phrase “photographic surrealism” (as distinct from Surrealist
photography) within the eponymous exhibition catalogue essay, positing the movement’s
photography as one visual outlet among many. Introducing her topic, she writes,
“Photography became one of many languages used to express surrealist imagery and
meaning.”
119

In addition to the work of the Surrealists, Hall-Duncan’s exhibition also included
images by contemporary photographers, so that the period represented by the exhibition
ranged from 1923 (beginning with photographs by Man Ray) to 1978 (photographs by
Duane Michaels, Jerry N. Uelsmann and Deborah Turbeville) and 1979 (Les Krims).
Hall-Duncan thus supported her claim that “First- and second-generation permutations
(what many would consider aberrations) of surrealism continue to exist today in

117
This exhibition then traveled to the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton Ohio from February 29 to April 13,
1980, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York from May 17 to July 13, 1980.

118
Nancy Hall-Duncan, Photographic Surrealism (Cleveland, Ohio: New Gallery of Contemporary Art,
1979), 5.

119
Nancy Hall-Duncan, Photographic Surrealism (Cleveland, Ohio: New Gallery of Contemporary Art,
1979), 5.

260
contemporary ‘art’ photography and the mass-media vehicles of fashion and advertising
photography.”
120
In both areas, it is contemporary photography’s slide toward
subjectivity – as opposed to the long-dominant documentary approach – that marks
current trends as “surrealistic,” in Hall-Duncan’s view.
121
In the catalogue, photographs
are arranged more or less chronologically (with works by the same photographer grouped
together) in order to present a visual genealogy of the surrealist tendency. And to
demonstrate the affinity between Surrealism and contemporary “art” photographers, Hall-
Duncan devotes a quarter of the exhibition to them.
122
In doing this, she replicates, in
some ways, the manner in which Rubin’s earlier exhibition in 1968, Dada, Surrealism
and their Heritage, had identified Surrealism as an antecedent of later work, thus
positioning Surrealism as something between a historical movement and a contemporary
trend.
In conjunction with her exhibition, Hall-Duncan interviewed Julien Levy, whose
collection of Surrealist photographs the Art Institute of Chicago had recently acquired.
Though the photography collection was a major acquisition for the institution, in the

120
Nancy Hall-Duncan, Photographic Surrealism (Cleveland, Ohio: New Gallery of Contemporary Art,
1979), 5. The 1981 exhibition, Surrealist Photographic Portraits 1920-1980, held at the Marlborough
Gallery in New York makes a similar claim. In showing Surrealist photographs alongside contemporary
photographers such as Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe. In the catalogue, Dennis Longwell
describes their formal portraits as displaying “a revivified and ennobling form of Surrealism” through the
juxtaposition of colliding forces; Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait contrasts femininity with masculinity, or
Avedon’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe which isolates the youth and beauty of the actress from the
impending tragedy of her life (Dennis Longwell, Surrealist Photographic Portraits 1920-1980 (New York:
Marlborough Gallery, 1981), n.p.).

121
Ibid., 12.

122
Of the 119 photographs in the exhibition, 31 photographs date from 1952 to 1979 and of these, 29 date
from 1961 to 1979.

261
interview, Levy expressed his view that “There was always a remaining prejudice against
surrealism, because it’s not serious even about politics, or it’s decadent, or it’s European
or purportedly dead, or I don’t know just what.”
123
Hall-Duncan also uses the word
prejudice in the opening page of her essay: “The most potent prejudice against
photographic surrealism has been that the surrealists’ emphasis on creativity and
subjective states of feeling runs counter to the objectivity of the camera image.”
124
That
bias is described by Susan Sontag in her study of photography, published as a collection
of essays in 1977:
those photographers (many of them ex-painters) consciously influenced by
Surrealism count almost as little today as the nineteenth-century ‘pictorial’
photographers… Even the loveliest trouvailles of the 1920s – the solarized
photographs and Rayographs by Man Ray…the multiple-exposure
studies… – are regarded as marginal exploits in the history of
photography. …The Surrealist legacy for photography came to seem
trivial as the surrealist repertoire of fantasies and props was rapidly
absorbed into high fashion in the 1930s….
125

It was just such an opinion that Hall-Duncan’s exhibition sought to change. Sontag’s
characterization is representative of the notion that Surrealism’s commercial endeavors
undermined its viability as high art. Both Sontag and Hall-Duncan would agree that
Surrealist photography did not fit into the dominant history of photography that –
mimicking the history of modernist painting – overlooked Surrealism because of its anti-

123
Julien Levy, quoted in “Surrealist Photography at the New Gallery: A Conversation with Julien Levy,”
Dialogue, v. 2 (September-October 1979), 25.

124
Nancy Hall-Duncan, Photographic Surrealism, 5. She continues, The coincidence of the Surrealists’
manipulation of the “truth” of the photograph came in direct opposition to the popularity of
photojournalism “with its directive of factual presentation…” (Ibid.)

125
Susan Sontag, “On Photography,” 48.

262
formalist, anti-rational position toward representation. But in her exhibition, Hall-
Duncan seeks to re-affirm Surrealism’s importance for the history of photography. A
major difference then between Hall-Duncan’s Photographic Surrealism exhibition and
Krauss’s later L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism would be Hall-Duncan’s
emphasis on securing a place for surrealist photography within the history of
photography, and Krauss’s focus on destabilizing the history of modernism by reorienting
modern art’s most hybrid movement, Surrealism, around its photography.
In 2003, in a roundtable discussion published in Art since 1900, the book’s
authors – Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss
126
–
responded to the question, “how did Surrealism come back then?”
127
This is, of course, a
central inquiry undertaken by this dissertation, in addition to the question of why
Surrealism has continued to come back, and to what ends has Surrealism’s cyclical re-
emergence contributed? The question is posed by Buchloh, and in response, Krauss
suggested that “in Rubin’s hands Surrealism came back as painting and sculpture, not in
terms of photography and texts. Twenty years later, when I did my show of Surrealist
photography with Jane Livingston, L’Amour Fou: Surrealism and Photography, it was a
historical and theoretical project, and it developed in resistance to the repression of that
part of Surrealist history.”
128
In this abbreviated explanation, Krauss focuses on the

126
Both Buchloh and Foster were Krauss’s students; All are editors at October, the journal Krauss co-
founded in 1976 with Annette Michelson.

127
Benjamin Buchloh, “Art at mid-century Roundtable,” Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism,
Postmodernism, edited by Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss (London:
Thames and Hudson, 2004), 327.

128
Rosalind Krauss, “Art at mid-century Roundtable,” Art Since 1900, 327.
263
forms she selected to represent Surrealism – its photographs and texts – as well as the
theories of semiology, psychoanalysis and those of the dissident Surrealist Bataille that
she applied to the movement. Again, because the Surrealist movement entailed such a
broad and varied body of work, what Rubin had attempted (and in Krauss’s view failed)
to characterize – Surrealism’s painting and sculpture – could be set aside and, beginning
in the 1980s, an entirely new body of work (which of course was not new at all) could
come to stand for Surrealism.
Like Rubin before her, Krauss took up the debate about Surrealism by mounting,
with Jane Livingston, an ambitious exhibition of Surrealism, though the forum this time
was not MoMA, but the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibition ran
from September 14 until November 17, 1985, before traveling to the San Francisco
Museum of Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Hayward Gallery in
London. The Corcoran Gallery was an appropriate venue in which photography could be
pushed to the fore of Surrealism. The Corcoran had demonstrated a commitment to
contemporary art through its sponsorship of a series of biennales of contemporary
American painting, the 39
th
of which was held in 1985. In 1976 Jane Livingston, as
Associate Director of the museum, had inaugurated a series of exhibitions called
“Photography at the Corcoran.” According to Livingston and Krauss’s NEH grant
application for L’Amour Fou, “these shows have set a national standard for the exhibition
of contemporary photography.”
129
There is an implicit conflation here between Surrealist

129
Application to the National Endowment of the Humanities (March 23, 1983), L’Amour Fou exhibition
files, Corcoran Gallery of Art. Krauss and Livingston applied to both the National Endowment of the
264
photography and contemporary photography. In many senses, Surrealist photography was
capable of being contemporary because it so rarely was shown in public and therefore
most likely appeared new. Additionally, with Krauss and Livingston’s reproduction and
manipulation of original images and contexts, many of the photographs were actually
products of the contemporary moment. It is probably also worth noting that the
exhibition took place at a museum that did not have a central stake in the display of
modern art. Founded in 1869, historically, the Corcoran gallery was oriented toward the
promotion of American art and while W.W. Corcoran’s ambition had been to
demonstrate national cultural hegemony, this proved impossible in the early aftermath of
the Civil War. When, just before the turn of the twentieth century, the Corcoran moved
to its present location, not on the national mall, “it relinquished in symbol as well as in
fact any lingering claim to national gallery status.”
130
Though farther afield
geographically (both from the museums on the Mall, as well as the museums and
galleries of New York), it seems likely that the museum’s location also allowed a certain
degree of experimentation that might have been impossible at an institution such as
MoMA. Concluding his (rather unfavorable) review of the exhibition, New York Times
critic Gene Thornton pointedly wrote, the exhibition “will travel to San Francisco, Paris

Humanities and the National Endowment of the Arts, and eventually received some funding from both
institutions. However, funding was difficult to come by, as Livingston reported in 1982, “I cannot
understand why we have had as much difficulty as we have had with fundraising, given all the interest and
even excitement we have elicited in many quarters. I can only think that it is a question of the times we are
in. In any event, we are still working very hard to get major support for this exhibition…” (Jane Livingston,
letter to Van ___ (October 13, 1982), L’Amour Fou exhibition files, Corcoran Gallery of Art).

130
Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 37.

265
and London, but not to New York.”
131
That the exhibition did not travel to New York is
perhaps indicative of its distance – theoretically and aesthetically – from previous
photography shows.
A reviewer of L’Amour Fou contrasted the differences between the audience’s
reactions at the Corcoran Gallery from those at the National Gallery, which was then
showing an exhibition of Ansel Adams. Ansel Adams: Classic Images moved to frame
Adams’ work biographically and his photography as a heroic view of the American
landscape. The grand sweep of his photographs harks back to a pristine vision of the
American outdoors, a traditional beauty that – though it is straight photography – reflects
an idealized America. Conflating Adams with his work and referring to him by his first
name, curator James Alinder wrote of the artist who had died the previous year, “Ansel
had become a symbol of the best of America.”
132
For the curator, Adams’ photography
represented the perfect collapse of art and nature. The distinction is significant, as
reviewer Richard Howard noted, “There were audible crowds in the Adams galleries,
admiring all that crisp, melodramatic scenery with the readily shared enthusiasm you can
hear…,” while in L’Amour Fou, “the reactions of the visitors…seem to have been as
startled, even stunned, as I was…Indeed, this was the only exhibition…where I have been
aware that the public was intimidated, caught off guard, and that I was one of their

131
Gene Thornton, “When Poets with Cameras Sought a Surreal Vision of Life,” New York Times (October
27, 1985), H29.

132
James Alinder, “Ansel Adams, American Artist,” Ansel Adams: Classic Images (Boston: Little, Brown
and Company, 1985), 21.

266
number.”
133
One wonders if such a challenging exhibition would have been possible at a
more risk-averse institution.
The exhibition had been conceived four years prior, in 1981, when Krauss had
been in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington
D.C., writing the essays “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism” and “The
Originality of the Avant-Garde.”
134
During this period, Krauss traveled to Chicago to
examine the Julien Levy photography collection at the Art Institute. Having already
decided to mount the exhibition, she wrote to Livingston about the collection, encouraged
that it would be a good source from which to borrow material – “It has a few things I had
not known about and that are really wonderful. But mostly the good stuff I already knew
through the catalogue of the collection that the Art Institute put out a few years ago.”
135

In Krauss’s first article about Surrealist photography, which appeared in Art
Journal in Spring 1981, she set out to explore the relationship of Surrealism to the real,
which she was convinced lies in the movement’s use of the photographic medium.
136

Krauss outlines the applications of semiotics to Surrealist photography, that is, the ways
in which the visual can be read as a system of signs and referents. She also discusses the

133
Richard Howard, “Moving Violations,” The New Republic (February 3, 1986), 34.

134
Rosalind Krauss, “Acknowledgments,” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985), n.p. When “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism”
was originally published, it included an asterisk by the title, which announced the planned collaboration
between Krauss and Livingston on an exhibition of surrealist photography to come to fruition in 1983.

135
Rosalind Krauss, letter to Jane Livingston, (n.d., but probably 1980-1981), L’Amour Fou exhibition
files, Corcoran Gallery of Art Archives. See David Travis, Photographs from the Julien Levy Collection
Starting with Atget (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1976), which I discussed above.

136
See Rosalind Krauss, “Nightwalkers,” Art Journal, v. 41, n. 1 (Spring 1981), pp. 33-38.

267
Surrealists’ use of photography in relation to space – the liminal spaces of Paris’s streets
and arcades as depicted in Breton’s novels, as well as the space depicted within
photographs, which often operate as a mise en abyme, a representation within (and of)
another representation, pointing toward photographs by Brassaï that include mirrors as
examples.
137
In L’Amour Fou, Krauss expanded the en abyme reading, exhibiting a very
different set of Brassaï’s photographs: “If we are to generalize the aesthetic of surrealism,
the concept of convulsive beauty is at the core of this aesthetic, a concept that reduces to
an experience of reality transformed into representation. … The manipulations then
available to photography—what we have been calling doubling and spacing as well as a
technique of representational reduplication, or structure en abyme—appear to document
these convulsions.”
138
In 1981, Krauss had yet to introduce Bataille’s theories and the
photographs that she examines are documentary in effect. However, reflecting on the
relationship of Surrealism and photography in 1999, Krauss recalled that it was around
1984, armed with the concepts of formlessness, decategorizing and alteration, which she
introduced in an essay on Giacometti’s sculpture (later revised for Rubin’s MoMA

137
Craig Owens had previously noted the same effect in Brassaï’s photographs in an essay published in
October three years earlier. See Craig Owens, “Photography en abyme,” October, n. 5 (1978). An example
is Brassaï’s closely cropped image of a Bal-Musette, entitled A Happy Group at the Quatre Saisons (1932),
in which a man sits in a booth betwixt two women; the trio is visually paired with a reflection in the mirror.
However, the reflection is not of the central figures but of their imbibing companions who sit opposite them
in positions that mimic the figures of the foreground, down to each pimp's possessive hand resting self-
assuredly on both girls’ shoulders. The reflections of the group in the mirror are "severed from any
physical connection with an object, [and so] attach themselves to the first group" (Owens, "Photography en
abyme," 16). It is an uncanny image in which the viewer's expectations must incorporate the apparitional
reflection that hovers almost specter-like above the image, in a way recalling the ephemerality of the
photographic moment.

138
Rosalind Krauss, “Photography in the Service of Surrealism,” L’Amour Fou, 35.

268
exhibition Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art), that she turned to Surrealism’s
photography:
For if surrealism had been struck with the accusation that it had added
nothing to the repertory of formal innovation in painting and sculpture,
photography – marginalized as minor relative to the major art practices –
was, in its surrealist guise, derided even within the parameters of its own
medium, since photographic values had been declared, from Watkins to
Weston, from Atget to Arbus, to be documentary…The result was that all
those trick effects with which surrealist practice was identified in the
popular imagination – double exposure, sandwich printing, montage,
brûlage, solarization—were seen by straight photography as an act of
impurity….
139

As Krauss explains, the Surrealists’ use of photography blurred the perceived inherent
veracity of the medium, collapsed the distances between “photograph and painting, or
photograph and film” and this blurring was a feminization of modernism’s masculine
straightness.
140
Ultimately, including both types of photographs – overtly manipulated, as
well as straight – in L’Amour Fou, Krauss intended the exhibition to push at the formalist
impositions on photography as well as modern painting and sculpture.
It was also in 1984 that October obtained the rights to publish key Bataille texts in
translation in the U.S.
141
Krauss and Michelson were planning a special issue on Bataille,
to include numerous translations of his work, to be published in 1985, thus coinciding
with L’Amour Fou. The issue was initially conceived as a special October book, but this

139
Rosalind Krauss, “Claude Cahun and Dora Maar: By Way of Introduction,” Bachelors (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999), 8.

140
Ibid. It is interesting to position Surrealism as feminizing masculine modernism, when, in his initial
definition of the movement, Breton declared the word surréalisme itself to be masculine.

141
Joan Copjec, letter to Wendy Schacher, May 14, 1985, Box 5, Folder 3, October archives, Getty
Research Institute. On January 27, 1984, Joan Copjec, managing editor of October had sent a check for
$500 to obtain the rights, but discussions with the rights-holders had begun in early 1983.

269
plan was changed in 1983, when discussions were first undertaken to obtain the rights,
when Michelson learned that the University of Minnesota Press was planning its own
translations of many of Bataille’s texts. As Michelson summarized October’s continued
commitment to the project:
It is our view that the work of George Bataille has a breadth and richness
which fully justify another, differently oriented selection. We believe,
moreover, that the understanding of his work in this country and in
England will be strengthened by the resonance that a second collection,
benefiting from our wide and already well-established network of
distribution, can provide.
142

The Bataille issue was published in 1986, delayed because of the need to obtain a grant to
pay for the extensive translations,
143
but as Michelson’s letter makes clear, the October
editors were very much committed to brining European texts to English-speaking
audiences.
In another interview, conducted in 1986, Krauss again describes the conception of
L’Amour Fou as beginning with the essay on Giacometti, which was commissioned by
Rubin for his 1984 exhibition Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art. Krauss recalls that
her essay on Giacometti “was very much played out in relationship to Bill [Rubin]. And
what I knew Bill wanted, and what I didn’t want to give him. [laughter] And I knew
somehow there was gong to have to be some compromise because in order to play at all,

142
Annette Michelson, letter to Ania Chevallier, October 20, 1983, Box 5, Folder 3, October archives,
Getty Research Institute.

143
The editors estimated the costs of translation to be between $7,500 and $10,000 (Douglas Crimp, letter
to Laura Ayr, October 24, 1984, Box 5, Folder 3, October archives, Getty Research Institute.

270
one had to play at least partly by the rules of the other person’s game.”
144
Indeed, Krauss
knew her ideas on Giacometti, which led her to Bataille’s journal Documents and the
ideas that would be integral to L’Amour Fou, were “taking me further and further away
from what I assumed to be Bill Rubin’s request, which was that I fill in all the details
about when Giacometti saw this, or what specific collections he knew.”
145
Krauss openly
declares her antipathy for traditional art history as practiced by American leaders in the
field, such as Rubin.
146
The experience working on Giacometti was “enormously fruitful
and it opened up directly into part of the work I was then doing on surrealist
photography.”
147
Though Krauss was very much engaged with applying Bataille’s
theories to modern art, at the same time she was also aware of the ways in which this
would allow her to open up artistic discourse in the U.S., particularly in response to
Rubin’s conception of modern art.
Rubin also plays a major role in Krauss’s “The Photographic Conditions of
Surrealism,” first published in October in Winter 1981. Krauss states that a major
impetus for writing on Surrealism is to address (or redress) the 1968 MoMA exhibition
and curator William Rubin’s need to determine a cohesive style of Surrealism, or, as

144
Rosalind Krauss, “Interview with Rosalind Krauss,” (May 30, 1986) Elizabeth Bakewell, William O.
Beeman, and Marilyn Schmitt (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1990), 93.

145
Ibid., 103.

146
Though Krauss anticipated Rubin’s disapproval, she later states that she was “infinitely grateful to him
for having made this whole primitivism project available to me, from which I benefited enormously. And in
fact, as I said, he was very receptive to what I did. Even though I had this paranoid idea that he wouldn’t
be, he was in fact very happy with it” (Rosalind Krauss, “Interview with Rosalind Krauss,” (May 30, 1986)
Elizabeth Bakewell, William O. Beeman, and Marilyn Schmitt (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1990),
204).

147
Ibid., 105.

271
Rubin put it, “an intrinsic definition of Surrealist painting.”
148
For Krauss, Rubin’s
proposed dual poles of Surrealist practice – automatist/abstract and academic/illusionist –
look so dissimilar that their cohesion is both too forced and too easy, for it relies on
Breton’s own 1925 contrivance to cohere the group’s output in the same terms.
149

Wresting Surrealism from Breton (and from Rubin), Krauss re-oriented the discussion of
Surrealist practice by focusing attention on Georges Bataille’s dissident theories, which
were an alluring alternative for those poets and painters who chose not to follow Breton.
Bataille’s concept of informe is central, according to Krauss, “for this term was meant to
allow one to think the removal of all those boundaries by which concepts organize
reality, dividing it up into little packages of sense, limiting it by giving it what Bataille
calls ‘mathematical frock coats’….”
150
The idea of getting beyond boundaries is a
guiding principle, Krauss explains, especially for the Surrealists’ photographic
procedures. Thus, another critique Krauss makes is that Rubin had been looking toward
the medium of painting alone, when the privilege in Surrealist practice, according to
Krauss, Livingston and Ades, is given to publication of their literary materials, the visual
accompaniment to these journals being in most cases the photographs published
alongside the text. One of the salient aspects of Krauss and Livingston’s exhibition was

148
Rosalind Krauss, “Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” The Originality of the Avant-garde and
other Modernist Myths,” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985), 91.

149
Rosalind Krauss, “Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” The Originality of the Avant-garde and
other Modernist Myths,” 91-92. These rubrics also of course recall Barr’s categories of Surrealist painting
as well.

150
Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,” L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville
Press, 1985), 64.

272
its attempt to redress the value of Surrealism as an aesthetic category, remodeling the
prevailing understanding of the movement to resolve the diversity of Surrealist practice
through the “semiological functions of photography.”
151
In an interview published in
Amy Newman’s oral history of Artforum, Robert Pincus-Witten, an editor at Artforum,
recalls that before Krauss, important young critics, particularly coming out of Harvard,
had:
as an article of faith, this resistance to Surrealism. Now clearly the worm
has turned. Ros is all Georges Bataille, and it’s all this visceral, underbelly
kind of side to Surrealism which she’s largely valorized as the cynosure of
graduate studies, displacing Breton. Now we’re all grown up so that we
don’t have the same feeling. But then Surrealism was absolutely to be
handled with tongs. And back then, no one studied Bataille.
152

Not only had Krauss taken up a new set of objects – Surrealism’s photography – but
Pincus-Witten credits Krauss with having re-theorized the movement, transforming it
from a movement that had previously been kept at arm’s length from the narrative of
modernist art. However, though she is critical of Rubin for attempting to characterize an
intrinsic style for Surrealism, Krauss’s project is after all analogous, for she too wants to
cohere an incoherent movement: “my effort is to uncover and present a conceptual core
for this material – a unifying idea,” she wrote to Livingston.
153
In the early 1980s, Krauss
finds the same difficulty with Surrealism that Rubin had had in the 1960s –

151
Krauss, “Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” The Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 101.

152
Robert Pincus-Witten, quoted in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New York:
Soho Press, 2000), 193. The interviews conducted for Newman’s book took place between 1993 and 1999.

153
Rosalind Krauss, letter to Jane Livingston, October 20 no year, L’Amour Fou exhibition files, Corcoran
Gallery of Art Archives. Krauss further explained, “In relation to this [unifying idea] I am really interested
in demonstrating the nature of the center, which I believe to be represented by the work of a few
photographers, rather than a whole host of them. The important ones are: Parry, Boiffard, Man Ray,
273
it must be said that the field of production in painting and sculpture around
surrealism is equally disunified. If you think about the range from Miró to
Dalí, or from Magritte to Masson, it’s incredibly heterogenous. …Could
an analysis of the role of photography within surrealism also help solve
what was a current art-historical question about what constitutes
surrealism as a stylistic phenomenon, since it seems so disunified as a
stylistic phenomenon?
154

Krauss points out that the Surrealists used photography intact (as distinct from
their Dada predecessors, who favored montage
155
) because this allows the photographs to
be read “in direct contact with reality;” they then acted within the frame of the
photograph to alter its record of reality by picturing both the simulacrum but then also
destroying its singularity and its instantaneity. This alludes to double-exposures, so-called
sandwich printing, and other distortions of the darkroom.
156
Through its aesthetic
manipulations, “Surrealist photography exploits the special connection to reality with
which all photography is endowed,” effectively destroying its iconicity and deferring to
its indexicality.
157
That is, the photograph is not, and can never be, a self-contained
(iconic) enterprise – it is forced, by the nature of the medium’s technological

Bellmer, Tabard, Ubac, Brassaï, Kertesz, Dora Maar and a few others plus some of the people who made
photomontages” (Ibid.)

154
Rosalind Krauss, “Interview with Rosalind Krauss” (May 30, 1986), conducted by Elizabeth Bakewell,
William O. Beeman, and Marilyn Schmitt (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1990), 146.

155
The spliced and re-oriented nature of montage is closely related to the Cubist practice of collage and
assemblage as a formal exercise in representation. It therefore harks back to a very different tradition than
Surrealist photography which favored manipulating intact photographs.

156
Ibid., 109. As Nancy Hall-Duncan pointed out, it is not entirely true that the Surrealists did not use
photomontage, as many of the prominent members of the group, including Breton and Dalí, did engage in
the production of photomontage (Nancy Hall-Duncan, “Out of Context,” Afterimage, v. 13, n. 9 (April
1986)).

157
Ibid., 110.

274
manifestation, to refer to the outside world, and thus acts as an imprint or impression of
that world upon a paper. Concentrating primarily on Hans Bellmer, Jacques-André
Boiffard, and Raoul Ubac, Krauss produces elegant formal readings of Surrealist
photography. Man Ray is represented most prominently in the exhibition, with 40
photographs (and is the subject of Jane Livingston’s catalogue essay); Bellmer and
Boiffard each have 21 works in the show.
158
In her review of L’Amour Fou, Hall-Duncan
asserts that these photographers, though represented to a minor extent in Surrealist
journals, are disproportionately present in the exhibition to prove Krauss’s theories on
Bataille’s formlessness and Freud’s doubling (in which images are often literally doubled
and represent “the genital symbol”).
159
Moreover, though Krauss insists that the
photograph’s original presentation in Surrealist journals attests to their centrality to the
movement, she fails to disclose to the reader the original contextual circumstances for the
photographs – that is, in which journals or novels they appeared and when.
160
And
though she revises the interpretive thrust of Surrealism toward the theories of Georges
Bataille, a relatively small number of photographs were reproduced in his journal,
Documents, as compared with the much larger number that appeared in official, that is
Breton-run, Surrealist magazines – including such important images as Man Ray’s
Monument à D.A.F. de Sade (1933), which appeared in Surrealism au Service de la

158
One hundred twelve, or roughly half of the photographs in the exhibition, are from foreign collections.

159
Nancy Hall-Duncan, Out of Context, Afterimage, v. 13, n. 9 (April 1986); Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus
Delecti,” L’Amour Fou, 86.

160
Ibid. Exceptions are the photographs within Dawn Ades’ essay, in which original sources are noted in
captions. See Dawn Ades, “Photography and the Surrealist Text,” L’Amour Fou: Surrealism and
Photography, pp. 153-189.

275
Revolution and Brassaï’s Untitled (1933) which originally appeared with the article
“Variétés du corps humain,” in Minotaure.
Krauss’s strategy of examining Surrealism through its photographs coincided with
the development of a burgeoning market for photographs. Though the photography
market was flooded at the end of 1979 as sellers auctioned off increased numbers of
photographs due to increased prices, resulting in a plateau in 1980, the photography
market continued to grow. From the spring of 1980 to the spring of 1981, the “auction
market reache[d] its second major plateau period similar to that of 1977-79, with one
major difference: the advent of a two-tiered market. As collectors become more
sophisticated and the supply of rare high quality prints decline[d], the two-tiered market
further imposes itself.”
161
That is, with the flood of so many high-quality prints on the
market, collectors could afford to be more picky, and thus, two echelons of prices emerge
– “the finest works offered did indeed bring in record prices but prints of secondary or
tertiary importance…either brought disappointingly low prices or failed to sell at all.”
162

In fact, though photography’s share of the total art and antique sales at the major auction
houses reached only about $5 million (of a $434 million dollar total market), the
photographic market had doubled by 1980, as compared to the year before.
163
These
figures are based on statistics from Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Philips, Swann and other
smaller dealers, compiled by Peter Falk. According to Falk in 1981, “in forthcoming

161
Peter Falk, The Photographic Art Market (New York: Falk-Leads International, Inc., 1981), 28.

162
Ibid., 7.

163
Ibid., 7.

276
seasons photography’s share of the total art and antique auction market should continue
to increase gradually before leveling off at about 3 per cent by the end of the current
decade. In other words it is expected that photographs will appreciate at a rate higher than
that of the other fine arts and will continue to demand a higher relative share within both
the auction market and the general exchange.”
164

To acknowledge photography as an emerging field of aesthetic inquiry was also to
admit to scholarship’s participation in the process of the medium’s commodification. In
dedicating the Summer 1978 issue of October to photography, the editors write that the
issue is “open to the charge of complicity with the scholarship and speculation which are
reconstituting—more surely than anything else—a status for photography as a
commodity within the framework of a sector of our market economy, the sector of artistic
commerce.”
165
Three and a half years earlier, Krauss had perceived Lynda Benglis’s
photograph in Artforum as suggesting that art writers were whores to the market
economy. Now, for the October editors, scholarship was able to influence the market; for
American studies scholar Alan Trachtenberg writing in Art Journal’s special issue on
photography in Spring 1981 where Krauss too appeared, it was as much the market that
pushed the study of photography forward. Accepting photography’s “full rights as a
‘legitimate’ art,” Trachtenberg wrote in the opening essay of the issue, “it is not exactly
comforting that the status of ‘legitimate’ originates as much in the art market (the ‘traffic’

164
Ibid., 8.

165
The Editors, “Photography: A Special Issue,” October v. 5 (Summer 1978), 3.

277
as Allan Sekula puts it) as in the processes of exhibition and connoisseurship…”
166
That
photography’s emergence as a field of study was simultaneously correlated to its
prominence in the art market demonstrates a relationship between art history and
commerce, the acknowledgment of which would previously have been largely taboo.
A major factor in the increased value in photography was the 1984 announcement
of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s decision to make photography a major component of its
collecting interests. As Andy Grundberg wrote in the New York Times, “Already gallery
owners, private dealers and photographers are anticipating an upswing in public attention
and collectors’ interest as a result of the museum’s commitment. … The significance of
the establishment of a major photography collection by the Getty Museum can hardly be
overestimated.”
167
The Getty’s newly formed photography department, headed by curator
Weston Naef, who had previously directed the prints and photographs department at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, began with the purchase of 18,000
photographs, including the major collections of Arnold Crane and Sam Wagstaff.
Crane’s collection in particular included a significant number of photographs by Man
Ray, which had been catalogued in an exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Center in 1973.
168

166
Alan Trachtenberg, “Photography and the Scholar/Critic,” Art Journal v. 41, n. 1 (Spring 1981), 13. In
his history of photography, Beaumont Newhall had identified the relationship between the medium and the
market, crediting the bourgeoisie’s demand for pictures with pushing forward increasingly technological
ways of making images: “To answer this demand, new and cheaper ways of making portraits were devised
where the artist’s skill was replaced by an ingenious mechanism” (Beaumont Newhall, Photography: A
Short Critical History (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1937), 13). Later he writes, “the industrial
revolution had penetrated the artist’s studio” (Ibid., 41).

167
Andy Grundberg, “The Getty Shifts the Focus Westward,” New York Times (June 17, 1984), H1.

168
See Man Ray photo graphics, from the collection of Arnold H. Crane (Milwaukee, Michigan:
Milwaukee Art Center, 1973).

278
With the Getty’s commitment to photography “reported to be in the neighborhood of $20
million,” collectors, dealers and photographers projected a great deal of growth in the
market.
169

An examination of the records of Man Ray’s photographic sales at auction from
the 1970s reveals that nearly all the works offered were sold for less than $1,000.
However, by 1989, several Man Ray images (especially those similar to the ones featured
in Krauss and Livingston’s catalogue) were consistently exceeding their estimated prices.
In a sale at Christie’s New York in April 1989, both Man Ray’s Lila and Nusch Eluard
and Ady doubled their anticipated prices, selling for $33,000 and $39,600 respectively.
170

In October 1989, Man Ray’s The Primacy of Matter over Thought – the image that had
adorned the dust jacket of the Amour Fou catalogue – sold for $121,000. That the
increased value of these photographs corresponds to Surrealism’s status and to Krauss’s
argument about Surrealism again suggests the conjunction of the art market and art
criticism – a conjunction that has not been fully integrated into the art historical narrative.
This acknowledgement of the relationship of the work of art to the world of commerce
destabilizes those familiar binaries that are central to this study – that of avant-garde and
mass culture, but also the issues of originality and reproduction, which cannot help but
play into a discussion of photography.

169
Andy Grundberg, “The Getty Shifts the Focus Westward,” New York Times (June 17, 1984), H1.

170
Hans Bellmer’s Doll Assemblage, also similar to photographs featured in the L’Amour Fou catalogue,
doubled its estimate as well, selling for $5,500 (150 Years of Photography (New York: Christie, Manson &
Wood, International, 1989).

279
The exhibition was a mix of both original prints and blown-up reproductions.
Because the photographs had themselves often “been placed originally in contexts of
reproduction—in books and magazines—and variability of scale—in posters,” Krauss
and Livingston argued that it was unnecessary to maintain a reverence for the original,
and therefore took liberties with the format and scale of the works in order to drive home
their contention of photography’s centrality to Surrealism.
171
Livingston wrote to the
director of the Corcoran, Peter Marzio, about her and Krauss’s conception for the
exhibition:
the two of us are formulating an idea which makes it even more exciting
than the original conception. We want to do installations of the show in
each museum that will involve front and rear projection, etc. in order to
play with images, scale and juxtapositions in a way that is really truer to
surrealism than showing merely precious objects in previous frames. Ros
and I agree anyway that the object-mystique in art photography is getting
out of hand.
172

By displaying photographs out of context and recently reproduced, Krauss and
Livingston intentionally discarded the cult of originality that the avant-garde was said to
represent. They also emphasized the centrality of reproducibility to photography – a
frequent characteristic of postmodern art. However, one reviewer commented on the
“transformation of a number of seminal Surrealist images into motif posters—modern
mural prints—which seem a token obeisance to conventional exhibit design,” which

171
Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, “Preface,” L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New
York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 9.

172
Jane Livingston, memo to Peter Marzio, (April 5, 1982), L’Amour Fou exhibition files, Corcoran
Gallery of Art.

280
perhaps undermines the curators’ intended subversion of the original.
173
Krauss and
Livingston justified their choices to reformat the photographs by maintaining that
“surrealism’s attitude toward photography tended always to break with what we had
come to feel was a rather overzealous museological reverence toward the medium.”
174

But perhaps most interestingly, in light of the confluence of the market, was that such
reproduction also sought to undermine a central aspect of the art market.
Krauss was also very much aware that in ordering certain negatives to be
reprinted for display in the exhibition, she was challenging the precepts of the
photographic market. Krauss recalls that “When I did that [ordered modern prints from a
vintage negative] I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to get in trouble, the photography biz is going
to say, ‘She didn’t get all vintage prints.’”
175
Krauss’s reproductions change the status of
the prints as objects on the market, but as objects of historical study they were integral in
constructing the visual argument Krauss was proposing, about Surrealism, but perhaps
also about modernism’s fetishization of the original as well. Krauss was especially
interested in dethroning preconceptions associated with the avant-garde, such as
originality, rarity, and beauty, particularly as they influenced the art’s value in the market
at a time when the relationship between art and commerce was once again a major issue

173
Mark Power, “Surrealist Photography at the Corcoran: A Revisionist Revival,” New Art Examiner
(February 1986), 35.

174
Krauss and Livingston, “Preface,” L’Amour Fou, 9.

175
Rosalind Krauss, “Interview with Rosalind Krauss,” (May 30, 1986) Elizabeth Bakewell, William O.
Beeman, and Marilyn Schmitt (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1990), 150.

281
due to the economic boom of the mid-1980s, which produced a growing market for art
and catapulted many young artists to celebrity.
176

As the concept of postmodernism developed in relation to the art that was being
produced in the 1970s and 1980s, photography’s importance continued to increase.
According to Douglas Crimp, who was an editor at October from 1977 to 1990 and
whose 1977 exhibition Pictures participated in ushering in the critical discourse of new
aesthetic, it was because of the “abandonment of the artistic medium as such that we had
witnessed a break with modernism, or more precisely with what was espoused as
modernism by Michael Fried. Fried’s is, however, a very particular and partisan kind of
modernism, one that does not, for example allow for the inclusion of cinema...or for the
preeminently theatrical painting of surrealism.”
177
For Crimp, Fried’s 1967 essay “Art
and Objecthood,” which denounced theatricality in minimalist sculpture, also had the
(unintended) effect of characterizing the concerns of a new generation of artists. As
Crimp has pointed out, “the still photograph is generally thought to announce itself as a
direct transcription of the real precisely in its being a spatiotemporal fragment; or, on the
contrary, it may attempt to transcend both space and time by contravening that very
fragmentary quality.”
178
Crimp’s comment was made in relation to Cindy Sherman’s

176
See Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985). For more on the rhetoric and reception of art in the 1980s, see Alison
Pearlman, Unpackaging Art of the 1980s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

177
Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis
(New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 186. Crimp also did his doctoral work under
Krauss, though he was already an established critic at this point.

178
Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis
(New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 181.

282
Untitled Film Stills, one of which I discussed above, a series of photographs in which
Sherman plays with the truth of photography in images that mimic cinematic scenes that
convey a sense of impending action, a narrative frozen for only a moment.
179
It is
precisely theatricality that Sherman exploits in her photographic series – its look is
intentionally staged, and the audience is aware of her role-playing as Sherman performs
different female stereotypes for a presumably male viewer. Though speaking of
contemporary art, Crimp’s characterization holds just as true for Surrealist photography.
The Surrealist photograph also works on both levels; as a wayward glimpse of reality, it
plays upon photography’s implicit truth claims, but at the same time, it argues for a
psychological questioning of reality as a fixed entity. Take for example, Maurice
Tabard’s 1929 Untitled series, in which a young woman stands by a window. In one
image, light shines on her face, offering the viewer the most visual data possible, though
the woman stares vacantly at something unseen. She is almost beheaded by a dark
shadow that occludes her neck, separating her face from a body that has been printed over
– the double exposure serving to confuse both her relationship with reality, as well as the
photograph’s. Though Surrealist paintings’ theatricality might have made them
candidates for re-evaluation, Krauss writes that Surrealism’s photography has far greater
power than “what was done in the remorselessly labored paintings and drawings that
came increasingly to establish the identity of Breton’s concept of ‘surrealism and
paintings.’”
180
For some, Surrealist painting could not be rescued from its theatrical

179
The Film Stills form a series, but the 69 images that comprise the series do not picture related events.

180
Rosalind Krauss, “Photography in the Service of Surrealism,” L’Amour Fou, 19.
283
associations, but Surrealist photography, for the most part uncharted territory, was a place
where Surrealism could be re-examined apart from the taint of the movement’s figurative
painting. The photographs were, of course, figurative too – many of them depict women’s
bodies, often in various states of contortion, or in the case of Hans Bellmer,
dismemberment. In depicting bodily fragments and exploring the terrain of torsos, backs,
legs and faces, the photographs themselves become abstract. In Man Ray’s Return to
Reason (1923) in the Julien Levy Collection at the Chicago Art Institute, shadows cast
undulating strips of light and dark down the length of a female torso, seen only from
chest to navel (Figure 3.9). Without arms, legs, or a face, the body is only recognized as
such because of two breasts – the right breast is highlighted on one side, eclipsed by
darkness on the other, while the left breast is pictured either emerging from, or
disappearing into, shadows. The space of the photograph is murky in places, grainy in
others – the body is visible, available, but somehow its materiality is denied. Krauss
describes this operation as the “subject defined as a projection, a being-seen.”
181
There is
much to be seen, but there is just as much if not more that is not seen, cannot be seen, and
Krauss cites moments such as these as representing “the informe, the crumbling of
boundaries, the invasion of space.”
182

181
Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delecti,” L’Amour Fou, 78.

182
Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delecti,” L’Amour Fou, 78.

284
Figure 3.9
Building on the groundwork laid by Dawn Ades in her 1978 exhibition Dada and
Surrealism Reviewed, Krauss argued for the fundamental importance of writing (with
which she often seemed to equate photography
183
) in Surrealism and observed that
“witnessing the parade of surrealist magazines [she names them], one becomes convinced
that they more than anything else are the true objects produced by surrealism.”
184
In an
undated letter to Livingston, Krauss wrote:

183
Comments Jed Perl in his review of the catalogue, “I’m not sure if she writes about pictures as if they
were texts in order to convince herself pictures are more susceptible to line-by-line readings than they
really are, or if she writes this way in order to convince us she has a firmer grasp on the material than she
really does. Whatever the reason, Krauss wants to uncover within Surrealist photography an order which
parallels the structure of human language” (Perl, “Academic Surrealism,” The New Criterion, v. 4, n. 3
(November 1985), 39.

184
Ibid., 101.

285
photography was literally at the heart of writing during the 1920s and 30s,
serving as the pictorial equivalent of the values and ideologies expressed
in Surrealist texts. This theme of the strong nexus between Surrealist
photography and writing is a major focus of the exhibition. …Third, both
the technical possibilities of photography and its “automatic” quality were
perfectly suited to the Surrealists’ ideas—far more adaptable to their
purposes than was painting, which in comparison is a static medium.
185

Though Krauss wants to make the photographs central by assessing them on their own
merits, she must acknowledge their context within the Surrealist movement, “as a major
visual resource of the surrealist periodicals.”
186
This confluence—of language, and
printed page, and photograph—while offering up a much different framework for
examining a new aspect of Surrealist production, ultimately gives us yet another source to
be mined, or rather, as art historian Steve Edwards wrote, “Surrealist photography
becomes, in Krauss’s hands, the gizmo of desire, antecedent of ‘Post-Modern’
practice.”
187
It is postmodernism that seems to be Krauss’s central focus and, as early as
1979, she had argued for postmodernism as a situation in which “practice is not defined
in relation to a given medium…but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of
cultural terms, for which any medium – photography, books, lines on walls, or sculpture
itself – might be used.”
188
As an avant-garde movement, Surrealism seems to fit quite

185
Rosalind Krauss, letter to Jane Livingston, October 20 no year (probably 1982), L’Amour Fou exhibition
files, Corcoran Gallery of Art.

186
Rosalind Krauss, “Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” The Originality of the Avant-garde and
other Modernist Myths,” 98.

187
Steve Edwards, “Gizmo Surrealism,” Art History, v. 10, n. 4 (December 1987), 512. Indeed, Edwards’
assessment of gender alludes to the confluence of postmodernism with gender and sexuality. The 2001
exhibition Surrealism: Desire Unbound clearly manifests this convergence (Jennifer Mundy, ed.,
Surrealism: Desire Unbound (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).

188
Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October v. 8 (Spring 1979), 42.

286
readily with such a characterization, for its hybridization (another postmodern condition
identified by Douglas Crimp) was inherent in its very beginnings. The diversity of
Surrealism’s visual culture allows Krauss to choose the mediums of Surrealist production
that support her reading.
As Hal Foster points out in his review of L’Amour Fou, the vast majority of
photographs in the exhibition depict women.
189
In Krauss’s hands, the Surrealists’
subjection of women through the lens of the camera is recast as fetishization, but the
exhibition was also critiqued as a willful overlooking on Krauss’s part of the group’s
misogyny. While Krauss discusses the Surrealists’ manipulation of photographs as an
example of deconstructed gender categories offering another way of accessing the
informe, Rudolf Kuenzli argues that the Surrealists’ willful transgressions on both an
aesthetic and a social level betray a sadistic and deep-seated violence toward the female
figures.
190
Bellmer’s dolls, dismembered, splayed, and silenced are an obvious instance
of the disfigurement of women’s bodies, though Krauss chooses to read this as an
instance of defamiliarization. For Krauss, however, this destabilization of gender reveals
an “element within Surrealism that challenged all types of essentialism (including
sexuality and gender). It was this challenge that, I suggested, could be aligned with that
aspect of the feminist project that is also hostile to essentialism.”
191
As Kuenzli points out,

189
Hal Foster, “L’Amour faux,” Art in America, v. 74, n. 1 (January 1986), 118.

190
Rudolf E. Kuenzli, “Surrealism and Misogyny,” Dada/Surrealism, n. 18 (1990), 22-23.

191
Rosalind Krauss, quoted in Gregory Gilbert and Richard Paley, “An Interview with Rosalind Krauss,”
Rutgers Art Review 11 (1990), 66. Krauss acknowledges that there is a split within feminist thinking and
states “I think feminists who have attacked Surrealism have come from this essentializing camp” (Ibid.).

287
Kertesz’s distortions also render the female form grotesque and Brassaï’s famous
Untitled (1933) presents a headless and legless woman whose torso and buttocks appear
to have been transformed into a phallus, which Krauss reads as “the female body and the
male organ have become the sign for each other.”
192
Ubac’s The Battle of the Amazons
(1939) scorches and slices the female body through the photographer’s use of solarization
and photomontage, but Krauss focuses only on his “attack” on the photographic process;
the form of the photograph – and its consequent formlessness – become the subject,
rather than the partial bodies on display. Kuenzli concludes that “By consistently refusing
to see these mangled bodies as female bodies, Krauss is unable to see the aggressive
sexual-visual politics acted out in these photographs.”
193

The 1985 publication of art historian Whitney Chadwick’s Women Artists and the
Surrealist Movement presents a much different view, that “almost without exception,
women artists interviewed in the course of the research for this book spoke positively of
the support and encouragement they received from Breton and other Surrealists.”
194

Nonetheless, Chadwick writes that art historical attention toward the female artists
associated with Surrealism had been minimal, and she sets out to record the contributions
of women artists to Surrealism, assessing “the ways that Surrealism failed to meet the

192
Ten years after the Benglis ad, in L’Amour Fou, Krauss finds the breaking down of gender boundaries as
represented in Surrealist photographs of female bodies as phalluses to be liberating and non-essentializing.

193
Rudolf E. Kuenzli, “Surrealism and Misogyny,” Dada/Surrealism, n. 18 (1990), 24.

194
Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (Great Britain: Thames and Hudson,
1985), 11.

288
needs of women artists… [and] to celebrate its, and their, considerable achievements.”
195

This type of feminist project – wherein the female practitioners of the movement were
separated out – was objectionable to some artists (as well as art historians), and Meret
Oppenheim in particular refused to have her work reproduced in the book.
196
Chadwick
revisited her work in 1998 in the context of the exhibition Mirror Images: Women,
Surrealism and Self-Representation, which explicitly focused on the roles that the female
body and identity played in Surrealism. In the years intervening between Chadwick’s
studies, the body, identity, and theories of gender performance had become a prominent
part of art historical discourse.
197
Several articles appeared that took up the implications
of Surrealism from a feminist perspective.
198
In 1999, Krauss wrote again on the subject
of Surrealism, this time explicitly addressing some of its female practitioners. She also
related the previously held misconceptions that “at the level of style there was, as I said,
the unshakable ‘truth’ that surrealism had contributed nothing to the twentieth century’s
history of form; while at the level of content its contribution was seen as limited to a

195
Chadwick’s book seems very much to answer the call put forth by art historian Linda Nochlin in her
extremely influential article, “Why have there been no great women artists?” Art News (January 1971).

196
Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (Great Britain: Thames and Hudson,
1985), 12.

197
See Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation, edited by Whitney Chadwick
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). Since this exhibition, which debuted at the MIT List Center in Cambridge,
Massachusetts before traveling to the Miami Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
several more studies of gender and Surrealism have been published, including Surrealism: Desire
Unbound, edited by Jennifer Mundy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001).

198
See Mary Ann Caws, “Ladies Shot and Painted: Female Embodiment in Surrealist Art,” The Female
Body in Western Culture, edited by Susan R. Suleiman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1985), pp. 262-287. Chadwick also cites several studies of Surrealism and women, including
Surrealism and Women, ed. Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991) and The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art
(Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1995).

289
thematics of misogyny. …both these positions now seemed wholly inaccurate…”
199
But
as Hal Foster points out, the tension remains – fruitfully – between Surrealism seen as
anti-feminist and Surrealism as proto-feminist.
200

In his review of the exhibition L’Amour Fou, art historian and student of Krauss,
Hal Foster declares that “Surrealist photography is a scandal several times over”
201
– a
scandal because it violates photography’s ties to reality, a scandal because it does not
abide by the values of objective or documentary photography, a psychosexual scandal
because of its blatant fetishization of the female body, and finally, an ideological scandal
“at least to a formalist reading of modernism which dismisses Surrealism as too
literary.”
202
While Foster’s first two assessments of the scandalousness of Surrealist
photography are debatable in light of postmodern practices that encourage subjectivity,
fragmentation, and investigations of gender, he rightly points out the long-repressed
literary-ness of Surrealist art. It was precisely on these grounds that Greenberg dismissed
figurative Surrealism in 1944 and it is precisely on these grounds that Krauss seeks to
recover Surrealism’s photography for art history with recourse to literary theory.

199
Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999), 4. Reviewing Bachelors,
Carol Zemel wrote that Krauss’s “enthusiasm for an artistic movement [Surrealism] dominated—and one
might say, patrolled—by men, and for a body of work rife with images of objectified and violated women,
has provoked some feminist scholars to accuse her of ignoring the achievements of women artists,
celebrating misogyny and colluding with the culture’s oppressive male gaze. In part, this book is Krauss’
answer to those concerns” (Carol Zemel, “Dada’s Girl,” The Women’s Review of Books, v. 17, n. 1
(October 1999), 24).

200
Hal Foster, “L’Amour Faux,” Art in America, v. 74, n. 1 (January 1986), 127.

201
Hal Foster, “L’Amour Faux,” Art in America, v. 74, n. 1 (January 1986), 117.

202
Ibid.

290
Perhaps most of this was lost on the audience that saw the L’Amour Fou exhibition.
203

For my purposes, the exhibition mounted in 1985 should be considered in
conjunction with Krauss’s book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
Myths, also of 1985. The essays published therein, covering a vast range of modern art,
work to change the role of the art critic by applying a structural and post-structural
model. In particular, Krauss wrestles with the precedent set by formalism and its
assumptions of value. For Craig Owens, it is precisely on the point of aesthetic value that
she challenges the Greenbergian model, insisting instead on the centrality of
methodology.
204
What she hopes to accomplish with her methodology is a description of
postmodernism in theoretical terms, as she works to demythologize “all the conceptual
unities upon which modernism was based: originality, oeuvre, stylistic coherence, etc.
(conceptual unities that are, by the way, also those of art history, a discipline that was
born at the same time as modernism and undoubtedly borrowed its concepts from its

203
I have not been able to ascertain exact museum attendance during the show, but in Krauss and
Livingston’s application to the National Endowment of the Arts, they estimated that the number of persons
“expected to benefit from this project” was around 500,000 (L’Amour Fou exhibition files, Corcoran
Gallery of Art archives). This number is probably generous, and may also include those who would have
access to the exhibition catalogue as well as the general art historical community. A Corcoran Gallery
press release from 1985 reports that the gallery receives “nearly 400,000 visitors each year” (Roberta Faul,
Corcoran Gallery Press Release (September 20, 1985), Corcoran Gallery of Art Archives, Washington
D.C.).

204
Owens writes, “Krauss distances her present ‘demythologizing’ criticism from formalism precisely
according to the issue of value: referring to the normative criticism of Clement Greenberg…, she writes,
‘[Greenberg] would argue that the point of criticism has everything to do with value and almost nothing to
do with method’” (Craig Owens, “Review: The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” Art in America, v. 73, n. 5
(May 1985), 25). Owens asserts though that “Krauss’s initial break with Greenberg was motivated less by
methodological differences than by her disagreement with his (and Michael Fried’s) assessment of the
value of Minimal (and, somewhat belatedly, Pop) art” (Ibid.).

291
system of evaluation).”
205
However, as Paul Wood points out, at times, “Krauss appeared
to want to preserve some modernist positions about modern art viz. its ‘autonomy’ and
‘visuality’” despite her desire to dismantle these criteria.
206
Polemical in nature, Krauss
places importance on method above aesthetic value, above what art history had valued in
art; instead, criticism unmasks the conventions of production, for the artwork is an index
rather than an icon. This is why “issues of Surrealist heterogeneity will be resolved
around the semiological functions of photography rather than the formal properties
operating the traditional art-historical classifications of style.”
207
But, cautions Michael
Peglau in his review of Krauss’s book, while this is “criticism to be respected, it is also
profoundly limited—I almost want to say blinded—by the ruling conceit of these post-
modern times: that everything can be read. The work of art is not a text.”
208
As a text,
moreover, Krauss’s account speaks most impressively of and to itself. Hermetic and
theoretical, this version of modern art criticism, in its efforts to avoid “the reductive form
of explanation which sees artworks essentially as illustrations leads to the severing of

205
Yve-Alain Bois, “Review: The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” Art Journal, v. 45, n. 4 (Winter 1985),
373.

206
Paul Wood, “Howl of Minerva: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths,” Art
History, v. 9, n. 1 (March 1986), 123.

207
Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, 101. In his review of the book, Yve-Alain Bois
concurs, writing of the Surrealist essays, “more useful for students of the field, considering the quantity of
failed attempts at a stylistic analysis of this phenomenon, is the redefinition of Surrealist art that is offered
by Krauss in this book” (Yve-Alain Bois, “Review: Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde,”
Art Journal, v. 45, n. 4 (1985), 371).

208
Michael Peglau, “Review: The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” Art Criticism, v. 2, n. 2 (1986), 101.

292
their connections with a world of wars, politics, assassinations and strikes.”
209
By
dissolving the specifics of its historical context (which American criticism on Surrealism
had rarely acknowledged), Krauss isolates the movement from factors — “wars, politics,
assassinations and strikes”— that cannot help but inform the perception of these works.
Krauss’s preoccupations with Surrealism also isolated Surrealism, in effect, from
its own historiography – a historiography through which, as this dissertation argues, the
investments of American art historical discourses can be better understood. When Krauss
and Livingston had the opportunity to invite William Rubin to participate in the
symposium or the lecture series that the Corcoran Gallery hosted in conjunction with
L’Amour Fou, they declined to do so, “because of the amount of money he might require
to participate and what response Roz Krauss might have to say about his speaking.”
210

Originally Nancy Hall-Duncan, curator of the earlier exhibition of Surrealist photographs,
was to have contributed an essay; as the exhibition took shape, she was eventually cut
from the project and her previous work on Surrealism’s photographs went virtually
unacknowledged.
211
One of the scholars who was invited to participate in both the

209
Wood, “Howl of Minerva,” 129. For Wood, this leads to the “neutering of this work. Surrealism, ‘all
Surrealist production’ (p. 115) is centrally seen as being about the ‘experience of nature as representation’
(p. 115); the ‘very heart of Surrealist thinking’ (p. 112) concerns the revelation of ‘reality as representation’
(p. 112). So it does. But ‘which reality’, ‘whose reality’ are the questions crying out to be asked” (Wood,
“Howl of Minerva,” 127-128).

210
Nancy Eickel, memo to Barbara Moore Re: Notes on Surrealism Exhibition/Interpretation (June 24,
1985), L’Amour Fou files, Corcoran Gallery of Art.

211
In a letter from Nancy Hall-Duncan to Michael Botwinick, director of the Corcoran Gallery, Hall-
Duncan outlines her belabored, but ultimately unsuccessful involvement with the L’Amour Fou exhibition
and its catalogue. In the letter, Hall-Duncan both documents that her work on Surrealist photography
preceded Krauss’s “earliest work on the subject” by two years and that she did not understand why she had
been cut from the project, having been given the reason that her proposed essay topic was both too close
and too far afield of the curators’ focus (Nancy Hall-Duncan, letter to Michael Botwinick, November 7,
293
symposium and in a lecture series held in conjunction with the exhibition was Donald
Preziosi, an art historian not known for his scholarship on Surrealism, but whose talk,
with the provocative title, “Surrealism: Anti-Modernism or Post-Modernism?” addressed
Surrealism in light of contemporary critical theory, thereby fitting better Krauss’s criteria
for current readings of Surrealism. Indeed, Preziosi was trained in linguistics (he had
received his Master’s degree in the field), and his future work in art history was very
much concerned with critiquing the discipline and the museum.
212

Reviewing the exhibition and catalogue for L’Amour Fou, Hal Foster articulated a
characterization of the motility of Surrealism within art history:
All of which, finally, goes to suggest two things: 1) that any new theory of
a past art, or any revision of a historical period, derives from insights
earned from the present, a moment of which is then privileged (or
disavowed) as the prism of that theory or history; and 2) an intuition I can
only let hang here—that much contemporary criticism and art, much
theory and practice of our postmodernist present is partly, genealogically,
a theory and practice of “Surrealism.”
213

This brings up an interesting circularity: If Surrealism is influencing present criticism and
art, and the present is the source of insights of new theories on past art, then is the

1984, L’Amour Fou files, Corcoran Gallery of Art). In print, Krauss’s only acknowledgment of Hall-
Duncan’s earlier work was in an asterisk at the bottom of the first page of “The Photographic Conditions of
Surrealism,” where she writes that Nancy Hall-Duncan’s Photographic Surrealism was a particularly useful
scholarly source (Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October, v. 19 (Winter
1981), 3).

212
See Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven, Connecticut:
Yale University Press, 1989) and Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Preziosi was also a classmate of Krauss’s at Harvard (he received
his Ph.D. in 1968, the year before Krauss), and was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in
the Visual Arts in 1981-1982, the year when Krauss was also a fellow there.

213
Hal Foster, “L’Amour faux,” Art in America, v. 74, n. 1 (January 1986), 128. The coincidence of
Foster’s and Krauss’s views is unsurprising, given that he was her student.

294
narrative of art criticism circulating around Surrealism in circles?
214
Or, as another
reviewer of L’Amour Fou put it, “Where does revisionism end? …what’s to prevent some
future art historian from redesigning semiological Surrealism so that it fits comfortably
with the theoretical furniture of that time?”
215

The answer, one supposes, is nothing. In 1981, Donald Kuspit, editor of the
journal Art Criticism, wrote, “On the whole, for an art to endure it must first be popularly
received, then critically rejected, and finally ideologically acclaimed.”
216
Such a statement
accurately describes Surrealism’s critical fate in the United States. Surrealism, almost
instantly popular among the American public, was then rejected by critics invested in the
creation of an American avant-garde and was eventually taken up again by those (the
present author included) who seek to demonstrate Surrealism’s wide-ranging engagement
with theories that today look, with appropriately paradoxical Surrealist logic, more and
more like a postmodernism avant la lettre.

214
This question echoes a concern articulated by art historian Paul Wood in his review of Krauss’s The
Originality of the Avant-Garde, wherein he characterizes Krauss’s model as: “‘what is (e.g.) Surrealism
other than what it can be made to mean for us now?’; ‘how can X be incorporated, e.g. as a learning
strategy into our projectivity, here, now?’” (Paul Wood, “Howl of Minerva: The Originality of the Avant-
Garde and Other Modernist Myths,” Art History, v. 9, n. 1 (March 1986), 128).

215
Mark Power, “Surrealist Photography at the Corcoran: A Revisionist Revival,” New Art Examiner
(February 1986), 36.

216
Donald Kuspit, “Art, Criticism, and Ideology,” Art in America, v. 69, n. 6 (Summer 1981), 95.
295
Conclusion
When Salvador Dalí died, on January 23, 1989, he had been living in near
isolation in his native Spain for some time, depressed and neglected, if not forgotten. A
few years earlier, the revelation that thousands of blank pieces of paper had been signed
by Dalí (as many as 40,000 according to one report
1
) threatened to destroy the market for
his prints and it was revealed that the artist’s business affairs had been badly mishandled
by those close to him.
2
Dalí was buried beneath the museum he had founded in 1974, in
Figueres, Spain, the city of his birth. It was, at the time of his death, the second-most
visited museum in Spain, after the Prado.
3
Despite this, several obituaries chronicled the
artist’s downfall, one declaring that “the life of Salvador Dalí was haunted by curse. He
died alone, the victim of avarice and exploitation.”
4
In the obituary that appeared on the
front page of The New York Times, Dalí was cited as “a subject of controversy, though in
recent years the controversy had more to do with the activities of his associates than with
creative powers that had subsided long ago.”
5
In the twenty years that have passed since
Dalí’s death however, his legacy has been largely re-written to reflect better the

1
James M. Markham, “Dalí Trying to Repair Business Affairs,” The New York Times (March 26, 1981),
A8.

2
James M. Markham, “Dalí Aide Is Embroiled in a $300,000 Scandal,” The New York Times (February 3,
1981), C5.

3
Tim McGirk, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” Independent (January 24, 1989). In a 2005 article, Charles
Stuckey also states that among Spanish museums only the Prado gets more visitors than Dalí’s Museum in
Figueres. Stuckey also points out that the Dalí Museum in Figueres has largely been left out of discussions
of destination museums, which certainly holds its own in terms of visitors, even with the opening of the
Guggenheim Bilbao in 1997.

4
Tim McGirk, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” Independent (January 24, 1989).

5
John Russell, “Salvador Dalí, Pioneer Surrealist, Dies at 84,” The New York Times (January 24, 1989),
A1.

296
complexities of his long career, a career now appreciated for its scope and for traversing,
and at times collapsing, the distance between avant-garde and kitsch. The Dalí of today
looks very different from the Dalí of the 1980s, and from the Dalí of the late 1930s, when
the artist first began to be criticized for his constant commercial ventures.
Dalí has best embodied Surrealism’s reception in the United States from the
moment of the movement’s introduction, for nowhere are the issues of Surrealism’s
versatility more prevalent than in the consumption of his work. After critics hailed him
as the most talented painter of his generation in the early 1930s, they became skeptical of
his overextended participation in consumer culture in the 1940s, as Dalí focused more on
mainstream movies, advertising designs and society portraits. Currently at the center of
Surrealism yet again, he has recently been the subject of several large-scale exhibitions –
the encyclopedic Dalí (attended by 350,000 visitors at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
6
)
and Dalí Mass Culture, seen in the United States at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg,
Florida. Both exhibitions were issued to celebrate the centennial of the artist’s birth in
2004, and most recently, in 2008, the exhibition Dalí & Film became Dalí’s second one-
man show at MoMA. Prior to 2004, there had not been an ambitious Dalí retrospective in
the U.S. in almost 40 years and in 1980, William Rubin had asserted that no Dalí oil
dating past 1941 had ever been exhibited at MoMA.
7
Art historian Charles Stuckey

6
Lisa Fondo, “Galleries find museum shows to be a 'natural fit': synchronizing gallery events with museum
shows spurs business and a 'buzz,’” Art Business News (September 2005). Fondo also quotes Philadelphia
Museum of Art’s Press Officer Dominic M. Mercier that Dalí was the second-highest attended show in the
Philadelphia Museum of Art’s history.

7
William Rubin, letter to New York Times (January 2, 1980), Museum Collection Dalí files, Museum of
Modern Art archives.

297
wrote that “surely it is time to ask why Dalí has been effectively blackballed for
transgressions against conventional taste, when other artists’ disregard for similar rules
earned them special consideration.”
8

The massive retrospective Dalí, which featured almost 300 works by the artist and
included translations of his many key texts, as well as an extensive chronology covering
both aesthetic projects and commercial activity, made no secret of its organizers’ desire
to rehabilitate the reputation of Dalí’s post-1939 work, “long viewed as kitsch by artists,
critics and curators.”
9
Curator Michael Taylor stated that the exhibition gives Dalí “the
proper recognition he deserves” and director Anne d’Harnoncourt believed that after the
exhibition, “there’ll be a whole new Dalí.”
10
This point was not lost on critics. In a
review entitled “Dalí Goes to Rehab,” Richard Lacayo described Dalí’s recent
rehabilitation as a precursor for postmodern career tactics, but pointed out that the vast
majority of works in the show were still “from the agreed upon golden age before
1940.”
11
Peter Plagens’ review in Newsweek echoed a similar sentiment of the primacy of
the pre-1941 paintings, concluding “even in an exhibition whose marketing campaign has

8
Charles Stuckey, “The Persistence of Dalí,” Art in America (March 2005), 118. Stuckey continues:
“Given his astonishing capacity for vulgarity, it seems incredible, for example, that Dalí goes unmentioned
in the ambitious catalogue to the Museum of Modern Art’s controversial 1990 exhibition ‘High & Low:
Modern Art and Popular Culture.’ Should the omission be understood as an oversight, or was it intended to
imply that Dalí’s ‘low’ is beneath consideration?” (Ibid.).

9
Dawn Ades, “Introduction,” Dalí (New York: Rizzoli Publications, 2004), 17. Dalí was shown at the
Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Italy from September 12, 2004 until January 16, 2005 and at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art from February 16, 2005 until May 15, 2005.

10
Michael Taylor and Anne d’Harnoncourt, quoted in Carol Strickland, “The Surreal Life; Art Critics Are
Often Dismissive of Salvador Dalí, But a New Exhibition Suggests He was Ahead of His Time,” The
Christian Science Monitor (February 25, 2005), 11.

11
Richard Lacayo, “Dalí Goes to Rehab,” Time, v. 165, n. 8 (February 21, 2005), 60.

298
one of the museum’s restaurants adding a ‘Dill E Dalí’ dish to its menu, the surreal has its
limits.”
12
It was a similar pandering to the public that had contributed to damaged Dalí’s
reputation decades earlier, though here Dalí’s considerable marketing power was
marshaled in the service of the museum. As art critic Christopher Knight points out:
once upon a time artists were controversial because of popular loathing;
now, apparently, they’re controversial because the public adores them. …
‘Salvador Dalí’ is billed as revisionist art history, but actually..the show
exploits the tabloid theme the artist perfected… ‘Revisionist’ curators get
to play the clichéd role of rebellious artist, challenging counterfeit taboos,
while mirroring Dalí’s vacuous careerism.
13

Dalí’s popularity remains double-edged.
Dalí Mass Culture, curated by Felix Fanés, foregrounded the vast variety of
materials from nearly all of Dalí’s commercial enterprises – 405 objects that included
photographic documents, Vogue magazine covers, tie designs, endorsements and
advertisements, as well as Dalí’s ideas for Hollywood.
14
Reviews of these exhibitions
cited Dalí as a key figure for Pop art, and some made a connection between Dalí and
contemporary art as well. Art historian Robert Rosenblum predicted, “My sense is that
Dalí going to be completely reborn, and people are going to look at him in completely
new ways…” and artist Mike Kelley, in the same piece, stated, “Dalí is obviously the

12
Peter Plagens, “You’re Looking Swell, Dalí…Considering,” Newsweek, v. CXLV, n. 8 (February 21,
2005), 55.

13
Chistopher Knight, “Method to His Madness, Dalí Exhibit Marks the Enduring Pull of a Gifted but
Secondary Artist,” Los Angeles Times (March 19, 2005), E1.

14
See Felix Fanés, Dalí Mass Culture (Barcelona: Fundación “La Caixa,” 2004). Dalí Mass Culture
opened at CaixaForum in Barcelona in February 2004, and traveled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Art
Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, where it was seen from
October 2004 until January 2005, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, where it closed
in May 2005.

299
model for later artistic production, especially Warhol. …It’s impossible to look at
contemporary art now and not think of Dalí.”
15
Artists James Rosenquist and Jeff Koons
both gave lectures at the 2004 symposium sponsored by the Dalí Museum in St.
Petersburg Florida entitled “New Critical Perspectives on Dalí at the Centennial.”
16

Because Dalí and Dalí Mass Culture traveled at the same time, some reviewers noted that
they prevented each other from being as comprehensive as they otherwise could have
been. Indeed, especially with an artist such as Dalí, the line between his mass cultural
efforts and his artistic practice is purposely difficult to distinguish, particularly in works
in which Dalí manipulated found objects by painting on them.
17
Thus, the divisions that
the curators make in trying to characterize Dalí’s mass cultural production by grouping
the exhibition into the categories “Modern life. Art Anti-Art,” “The Angelus, a Tragic
Myth,” “Hollywood: a Place of Pilgrimage,” “Dream of Venus,” “Fiat modes, Pereat
ars,” “Photographic Documents,” and “Dalí News,” sometimes come across as rather
forced, or in other cases, rushed. Stuckey notes that several categories of the exhibition
could warrant their own exhibition, particularly Dalí’s work in film.
This cinematic influence on Dalí’s work was argued for in the very recent
exhibition Dalí & Film, which re-evaluates Dalí’s work yet again. In her essay for the

15
Robert Rosenblum and Mike Kelley, both quoted in George Stolz, “The Great Late Salvador Dalí,” Art
News (February 2005), 122.

16
See Persistence and Memory: New Critical Perspectives on Dalí at the Centennial, eds., Hank Hine,
William Jeffett, Kelly Reynolds (St. Petersburg, Fl.: Bompiani, 2004).

17
An example Stuckey discusses is Dalí’s work Baby Map of the World (1939), in which Dalí painted over
a lithograph of a baby’s face. The piece was included in Dalí Mass Culture, but Stuckey argues that Dalí
would have been better served had it been exhibited in the retrospective Dalí, where it could have shed light
on Dalí’s political stance during the war years (Charles Stuckey, “The Persistence of Dalí,” 120).

300
catalogue, Dawn Ades, acting as a special advisor to the exhibition, poses the question
“Why Film?” and the answer is that, like photography, film holds a position intermediary
between the facts of the world and the possibility for a play on these facts. But, as the
Surrealists were themselves well aware, the medium also balances between its potential
to be both popular and avant-garde. The film series held in conjunction with L’Amour
Fou in 1985, called “Surrealist Cinema: Popular Medium, Revolutionary Aims” and
hosted by film historian Herbert Reynolds had begun to emphasize Surrealism’s anti-
aesthetic stance within a theoretically-bounded museum context. In Reynolds’
introduction to the series, he called attention to the popularity of film as a medium, as
well as the Surrealists’ taste in commercial movies, such as those by Buster Keaton.
Reynolds points out that much of the Surrealists’ attraction to film was precisely because
of its status as an entertainment of the masses. The inclusion of films in the exhibition
was opposed by Krauss and the idea of a series in conjunction with the exhibition might
represent a compromise between her and Livingston. Krauss had written Livingston that
she felt that films would detract from the show, “because once again people would
associate surrealist photography with spookiness and manipulation and all the things that
our show is trying to cut through.”
18
Film – moving or static – offered a means for
experimentation that was exceptionally fluid, underscored in Dalí & Film by the archival
documents including letters, sketches and notes that display Dalí’s ideas which, in the

18
Rosalind Krauss, letter to Jane Livingston, October 20, no year, L’Amour Fou exhibition files, Corcoran
Gallery of Art.

301
words of one reviewer “were generally far more interesting than his finished products.”
19

Even to follow the trajectory of Dalí’s own experience with film – which led him from
the avant-garde Un Chien Andalou (1929) to the dream sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s
Spellbound (1945) and finally to the posthumously-realized (and Oscar nominated)
Disney-produced Destino (2003, begun in 1946) – parallels the transitions that the
reception of Surrealism as a whole has undergone in art history and mass culture.
While advance tickets for Dali & Film were sold out for the run of the exhibition
at LACMA, reviews of Dalí & Film were mixed. A critic in the Los Angeles Times
wrote, “The painter intermittently and inconsequentially piddled about with the movies,
and because he is considered to be a major artist, we are asked to take these piddlings
seriously – but there aren’t enough of them to mount a major show, so out comes ‘The
Persistence of Memory’ for the umpty-umpth time.”
20
It is difficult to agree that Dalí’s
interaction with film was so haphazard, especially considering all the iterations of
Surrealism found in Hollywood features from the 1930s through the 1950s. When the
exhibition was shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, part of its
programming included a discussion with artists Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw who showed
dozens of clips of Hollywood movies clearly influenced by Dalí and Surrealist concepts.
Nonetheless, some of Dali’s better-known paintings are used in the exhibition as a
legitimating backdrop for his work in cinema. New York Times critic Roberta Smith
recognized the easy transference between Dalí’s notions of the surrealistic and film: “Dalí

19
Holly Myers, “Dalí’s Picture Show,” Los Angeles Times (October 17, 2007), E1.

20
Richard Schickel, “Surreal cinema; The Medium was made for Salvador Dalí – or was it? His film
dabblings are explored in a new LACMA show,” Los Angeles Times (October 14, 2007), R10.

302
grasped that film’s capacities – for depicting irrationality in action; for dissolving,
continually mutating images; and for an intensely real unreality – were ready-made for
his sensibility and his desire to reach a mass audience.”
21
Nonetheless, other reviewers
were more resistant, eschewing Dalí’s relevance except as an influence on contemporary
art: “more necessary than this autopsy would be a show like last year’s brainy salute to
René Magritte at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art…Perhaps only with a roundup
of Dalí’s many artistic offspring will we be able to acknowledge how much he has meant
to us, whether we want to admit it or not.”
22

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 2006 exhibition Magritte and
Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images foregrounded the connections between
Magritte and contemporary art by displaying 68 Magritte paintings amidst an equal
number of contemporary works by 30 artists (Figure 4.1). The exhibition space was
designed by the artist John Baldessari who had Magritte’s trademark cumulous clouds
made into carpeting (specially milled in Georgia) while aerial photographs of Los
Angeles’s trademark freeways adorned the ceiling.
23
This simple reversal of
environments – not only sky versus ground, but universality (of Magritte’s painted
spaces) versus specificity (of Los Angeles’s twisted concrete interchanges) – was

21
Roberta Smith, “Reflections through a Surrealistic Eye: Dalí and the Camera,” New York Times (June 27,
2008), E28.

22
Richard B. Woodward, “Art: Dalí Gets a Makeover,” Wall Street Journal (July 26, 2008), W12.

23
It is somewhat fitting that even this installation is a recycled idea – Baldessari originally conceived “the
plan for clouds below and freeways above five years ago, as part of a joint proposal with the architect Rem
Koolhaas for the Los Angeles headquarters of Caltrans, the government agency in charge of freeways. The
architect Thom Mayne ultimately won the competition, but Mr. Baldessari walked away with his feet in the
clouds.” (Jori Finkel, “Ceci N’est Pas Magritte, but His Outlook Is Compatibly Surreal,” New York Times
(November 19, 2006).

303
presumably meant to ask the audience to think about the iconography of dislocation
(those clouds almost never appearing in Magritte’s paintings where one would expect)
but it also exemplifies the surface-level connections and quotations that the exhibition
encouraged between Magritte’s works and those of later artists. Exhibition co-curator
Stephanie Barron described the connections between Magritte and contemporary artists
as “either a direct visual link with or an homage to specific Magritte images…others
glean from Magritte the seeds that fuel or enhance their particular pictorial
interventions.”
24
Conceptually, Magritte’s works offer rich derivatives in contemporary
works, but too often homage and quotation shape Magritte’s legacy, thereby indirectly
repeating formalist assessments of the importance of works based on the influence and
advancement of certain formal qualities.
Figure 4.1
Borrowing from another of Magritte’s motifs, Baldessari dressed the guards in
black with bowler hats. In 1965, Magritte had attended his retrospective at MoMA in the
hat that he had so identified himself with, courting anonymity and structure; in 2006,

24
Stephanie Barron, “Enigma: The Problem(s) of René Magritte,” Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery
of Images, edited by Stephanie Barron and Michel Draguet (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
2006), 10.

304
exhibition attendees had to be satisfied with themed surrogates. The result is an
installation that looks rather gimmicky, or even Dalínian. Magritte, perhaps because of
his blasé demeanor and more conceptual style, has not suffered Dalí’s critical fate and
reviews of this installation were generally positive – Jacquelynn Bass, director emeritus
of the Berkeley Art Museum, reported that “my fellow visitors seemed to share this
mood, darting from one work to another, talking animatedly with each other and with the
guards… Visitors are not allowed to photograph the paintings, but they can photograph
the guards and their friends with the guards, favorite paintings hovering discreetly in the
background.”
25
Critic Christopher Knight proclaimed “the show is a gas, entertaining and
insightful, partly thanks to a savvy, subversive installation design by Conceptual artist
John Baldessari.”
26
It is true of course, that Magritte’s works work well with playful
installation, conceptual art, and the irony inherent in many postmodern works, but at the
same time a Magrittean environment cannot help but replicate, once again, the
intermediate position that Surrealism as an art movement has occupied. Certainly it
recalls Julien Levy’s original proposal for the 1939 New York World’s Fair – a Surrealist
fun house in the shape of an eye (another of Magritte’s enduring symbols). A New York
Times article quoted Baldessari as saying, “Magritte makes Surrealism digestible for a
broader audience, and he’s had such a great influence on advertising that we don’t even
see it anymore.”
27
Ironically, Baldessari seems to replace Magritte as a major publicity

25
Jacquelynn Bass, “Review: Magritte and Contemporary Art,” (April 12, 2007), caareview.org.

26
Christopher Knight, “Magritte Pipeline,” Los Angeles Times (November 18, 2006), E1.

27
John Baldessari, quoted in Jori Finkel, “Ceci N’est Pas Magritte, but His Outlook Is Compatibly
Surreal,” New York Times (November 19, 2006).
305
force as his installation became a key aspect of the advertising and reviews of the show.
Surrealism, as I have been discussing throughout this dissertation, has been digestible for
a broad audience long before Magritte gained critical attention for his work, but his work
– and that of Surrealism in general – is always ready to be re-packaged.
Surrealism offers a tempting challenge to today’s museum curators. Not only is
an exhibition of Surrealism, or its leading artists, almost sure to be a crowd-pleaser,
bringing in much-needed revenue for the museum, but such exhibitions also allow
curators to experiment with installation, offering avenues for multi-media engagement
with the works. Expanding notions of not just what to exhibit but how to exhibit
encourage curators to overcome the limits of the so-called white cube, in many ways
returning to earlier moments of exhibition practice as explored at MoMA in shows such
as Modern Art in Your Life, with which I introduced this project. In Modern Art in Your
Life, only the Surrealist section of the exhibition offered full-scale installations and
approached an experiential engagement with modern art’s daily influence. But recent
exhibitions do not need to re-create specific historical replicas in part because Surrealism
is itself a conceptual program where, if the Surrealist revolution conceived broadly is to
be successful, the audience will recognize that life itself is surreal. Thus it is not
necessarily antithetical to Surrealism to be displayed in unconventional environments that
threaten or challenge the significance of the art. As art historian Louis Kachur has argued,
these environments can become Surrealist works themselves. Again, Surrealism’s
inability to be aesthetically confined makes room for its many incarnations as an object of

306
display. At LACMA’s installation of Dali & Film an attendee could look at paintings on
the wall, projections on the wall (with ambient audio) of commercial films as well as
avant-garde cinema, read archival letters between Dali and Buñuel, or sit at individual
monitors to see Dali and his ocelot appearing on television variety shows (among other
programming). The scope of Surrealism’s objects has always offered such variability,
but it is in the expanding field of curatorial practice that the multiple mediums of
Surrealism thrive in conversation with one another.
While Dalí may have been an early example of a modern artist to achieve brand-
name recognition as much for his celebrity as for his art, he was certainly not the last.
Dalí Mass Culture and Dalí & Film both included a screen test that Dalí did for Andy
Warhol in 1965. The mixing of media, art and commerce that Dalí initiated, and in
which Warhol reveled, has today reached new proportions as the contemporary art
market continues to swell. In foregrounding the tension between art and commerce, the
criticism of Dalí’s oeuvre has helped to formulate a discursive space in which such
contemporary artists as Damien Hirst can capitalize on the previously taboo relationship
between art and money. Hirst’s For the Love of God, a skull encrusted with thousands of
diamonds, sold privately for a reported $100 million in 2007 (Figure 4.2). Hirst’s
dazzling defacement of the object that has stood as a memento mori throughout art
history turns its message of the vanity of luxury on its head. Indeed, the price of the
piece is an integral part of its effectiveness. Though Dalí Mass Culture strangely did not
exhibit any of the jewelry Dalí designed and supervised in the 1940s and 1950s, such an
omission would hardly be likely to occur today, given the notoriety of Hirst’s investment.
307
In many ways, Dalí initiated the open, though still fraught, integration of art, artist and
commodity that makes Hirst’s iconicity possible. The union of the fantastic and the base,
the precious and the banal, seems today to be one of Dalí’s most provocative legacies.
Figure 4.2
Obviously, it is not Dalí’s oeuvre that has changed so much as discursive and
market conditions have altered the way we think about both the artist and the movement
which he embodied. Throughout each of the historical moments I have examined,
Surrealism has managed to remain contemporary, despite efforts to historicize the
movement. When Surrealism was first exhibited in the United States in the 1930s, art
historians and critics hoped to account for tendencies in modern art, but Surrealism
demonstrated the difficulty of this endeavor. To look at how Surrealism was later
308
presented in the 1960s and the 1980s not only sheds light on the obvious fact that
Surrealism, and modern art history in general, have changed over time, but how
Surrealism has ultimately shaped these discourses as it was being shaped by them. The
fundamental insight that this dissertation reveals is that Surrealism as an object of study
has been in flux for the better part of the twentieth century, and that powerful forces in art
critical discourse in the United States have tackled the movement as a way to examine the
viability of the construction not only of Surrealism, but of art criticism and art history.
If I have not dwelled as much on Surrealism’s objects, it is because I have
analyzed Surrealism as an object itself, one which presents a broad conceptual program
that manifested itself in many different ways. I have looked closely at the history of the
institutions that gave a forum for Surrealism’s historicization and the diverse voices of
those who engaged with it on both aesthetic and popular terms. The Museum of Modern
Art, as I mentioned in my introduction, looms large over this project and, as I have shown
in Chapter One, its initial mandate to be contemporary, experimental, and forward-
thinking allowed Alfred Barr to present Surrealism not only in terms of its aesthetics but
in its vernacular forms. That the museum came under fire, both internally from President
A. Conger Goodyear and externally from members of the press, for its broad view of
Surrealism evokes an early, but by no means singular, instance of the stakes involved in
historicizing Surrealism. Moreover, the Museum of Modern Art was actively and self-
consciously engaged in formulating the American reception of modern art, which, it
argued, was played out in modern life as well. Dalí became a central example of
Surrealism’s interaction with mass culture and the limitations that interaction would be
309
subject to under formalism’s burgeoning critical dominance. In Chapter Two, I examined
artists’ and critics’ rediscovery of Magritte in the 1960s to show how Surrealism created
a lineage for what critic Gene Swenson termed “the other tradition” of modern art, that is
a non-formal history that could exceed the boundaries of the canvas as sometimes
discussed in the criticism of Greenberg’s rival, Harold Rosenberg. In 1968, when
William Rubin curated Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, his attempt to
reincorporate these dissident movements into the dominant narrative of art history
sparked an intense debate among critics over the interaction of art, popular culture, and
MoMA’s role in creating art history. In Chapter Three, I examined early institutional
critiques of MoMA, the culture of Artforum, and the rise of photography as an aesthetic
commodity in the late 1970s and through the 1980s to show the interaction between art
history, art criticism, and the market. These issues were manifested in Rosalind Krauss
and Jane Livingston’s re-orientation of Surrealism around its photographs and journals
which then foregrounded Surrealism in the development of postmodernist theories of art.
As this dissertation has demonstrated, it is within this larger context that it is most
valuable to explore Surrealism, for the mutual inflection of Surrealism and art criticism
creates a window into the development of modern art history in America.
Indeed, historiography itself allows these connections to be recognized and
reflected upon. As interpretive paradigms continue to change, it is necessary to
understand that the constructions we have mastered today may not be as convincing
tomorrow. Surrealism, because of its irrepressibility, forces this issue to the fore; it
matters that Surrealism could not be mastered by a particular reading at a particular point
310
in time, because it exposes the way ideas coalesce around different critical moments, and
the value of taking a longer view of these debates. The recent exhibition
Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976 (2008)
demonstrates the newfound viability of historiography within art history, even as a
framework for display. Indeed, the subject of the exhibition is frameworks themselves
and the sometimes resounding effect they have on the reception of art. The exhibition is
structured around the conflicting art critical theories of Clement Greenberg and Harold
Rosenberg, and even as it displays the familiar terrain of the New York School, by using
discourse as a structure, the exhibition restores the works to their original critical context.
Even if, as art critic Roberta Smith reminds us in her review of Action/Abstraction, “Art
is long, art criticism is often very, very brief…,”
28
it is often art criticism that determines
which art will be enduring. Historiography allows an examination of these moments
when history and discourse meet in order to analyze the relationship between the
contemporary and the historical, how the contemporary becomes history, and those times
when it does not. Historiography, is, of course, rooted in the present, and so this study is
inescapably written from the vantage point of current discourses.
In traditional narratives of American art history, Surrealism is often presented in
the 1940s as a meeting point, a way to get to here (the United States) from there
(Europe). But Surrealism’s influence in the development of art criticism in America
begins at least a decade earlier, and because of the popularity of its ideas, it certainly does
not end with the return of the Surrealists in exile to Europe. From Surrealism’s

28
Roberta Smith, “Rivalry Played Out on Canvas and Page,” New York Times (May 2, 2008).
311
introduction in the 1930s, the American public related readily to Surrealism’s agenda and
recognized its lessons as a powerful cultural force in the 1960s. Early on, American
critical and mass cultural reaction to Surrealism’s pluralist and hybrid nature acted as a
catalyst in opening up art critical debates on abstraction and realism, the aesthetics of
common culture, and later the role of institutions, politics, photography and visual
culture. Ultimately, the lens of Surrealism offers a framework for understanding major
ideological changes in American art history and criticism without losing sight of the
specificity of how critical writing on these subjects developed. In dissolving the division
between art and life, Surrealism’s critical and popular reception in the United States
sheds light on the problems of artistic definition in the age of mass media and the
continuing tension between modernism and commerce.

312
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