On view through Sunday, September 29, 2019 at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, “Monsters & Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s” is an exhibition that explores the powerful and unsettling images created in response to the threat of war and fascist rule. Works by Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Dorothea Tanning, and others are on display.

“In this exhibition, Surrealists’ portrayals of monsters, fragmented bodies, and other depictions of the grotesque are explored as metaphors for the threat of violence and fears and fantasies of unbridled power,” said Frist Art Museum chief curator Mark Scala.

The works in this show are drawn from the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The 79 paintings, drawings, film and sculptures highlights the brilliance and fertility of this period, which arose in response to Hitler’s rise to power, the Spanish Civil War and World War II events that profoundly challenged the revolutionary hopes that had guided most Surrealist artists in the 1920s.

Since 1924, artists and writers associated with the Surrealist movement had aimed to deconstruct the social order, particularly through targeting oppressive traditions by embracing the irrational and the marvelous in pursuit of psychic liberation. “Seeking access to hidden truths, the artists in this show used their darkest imaginings to confront trauma,” said Scala. “They employed the language of dreams, free association, and Freudian psychoanalytic theory to help transform both themselves and a society that seemed inescapably bound for fascism and war.”

     To discover more on this exhibition, see: https://fristartmuseum.org/calendar/detail/monsters-myths-surrealism-and-war-in-the-1930s-and-1940s