These collections illustrate my artistic adventures over the years. My work is created in the spriit of surrealism: exemplifying “Convulsive Beauty” to use a term André Breton coined. Breton was a poet, writer, and leader of the Surrealist movement. Many of the creations in the collections linked above have served as the basis for gallery shows.
For surrealist artists, photography occupies a particularly important place since double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization dramatize the unity of dreams with reality. (More below}
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Surrealism is an idea and a highly elastic one at that. Although organized surrealist groups exist on the fringes of the art world and no definite surrealist style really exists, surrealism’s influence on photography, painting, sculpture, film, literature, and poetry remains profound and nearly ubiquitous—from Hollywood to graphic design and to the finest galleries. In celebration of nearly a century of surrealism, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tate Modern teamed up to put together an exhibition of Surrealist work, “Surrealism Beyond the Borders.” Showing at the Tate in 1922 following its time at the Met, the exhibit demonstrates that Surrealism is not the Euro-Centric artform sometimes argued, but international.
Surrealism emerged in the early 1920s out of Dadaism, which involved Swiss, German, and French artists protesting what they viewed as the irrationality of the unbridled slaughter of World War I and the commercialism of Western capitalism. Dada began in 1916 in Paris with a meeting place across the street from the apartment of the obscure Russian revolutionary writer V. I. Lenin. Dada came to an end in May 1921 after organizing a spectacular street action that turned into something of a fiasco. Inspired by the scientific and technological revolution of the early Twentieth Century along with the revolutionary scientific ideas of Freud and Marx the Surrealists, led by Breton embraced a more nuanced approach to artistic expression portraying reality in dynamic, multi-dimensional ways through dreams, fantasy, and the unfettered subconscious. While the First Surrealist Manifesto was published in 1924, the movement really began in 1919 with Philippe Soupault’s initiation of the periodical Littérature together with Breton and Louis Aragon in Paris. Soupault and Breton discovered the poetry of Comte de Lautréamont who died during the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870 at age 24 embracing him as a prophet of the movement. Of his work, it was said that he forced his readers to stop taking their world for granted by shattering the complacent acceptance of the reality proposed by cultural tradition and forcing them to see that reality for what it is: an unreal nightmare all the more hair-raising because the sleeper believes himself or herself to be awake.
The movement promoted greater artistic and sexual freedom along with revolutionary ideas. Surrealists sharply rejected the official art promoted by both Stalinists, fascists, and dominant conservative trends in the democracies (who all labeled them as degenerate). Surrealists challenged racial and sexual oppression as well as Dollarism.
As the movement spread beyond Parisian Avant Gard circles to Africa, Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, and Asia, many surrealists involved themselves in struggles for independence from the colonial powers and defended the Algerian and Cuban revolutions. Small groups continue to function in Chicago, Sweden, England, and the Czech Republic. Franklin Rosemont’s collection of Andre Breton’s writings is kept permanently in print by the revolutionary New York publishing house Pathfinder Press. A collection of Surrealist Manifestos is available through the University of Michigan Press.
I’ve broken these collections into several themed groupings. Visit each one of the galleries listed below. To keep my menu structure simple (especially for mobile users), I’ve eliminated the links from the main menu. Keep coming back to this page for the links.
