{"id":232572,"date":"2026-01-14T10:53:24","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T10:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/232572\/"},"modified":"2026-01-14T10:53:24","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T10:53:24","slug":"the-nightmares-beneath-the-surface-of-dreamworld","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/232572\/","title":{"rendered":"The Nightmares Beneath the Surface of “Dreamworld”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: The following story contains material that may be triggering to some readers.<\/p>\n

PHILADELPHIA \u2014 When he was five years old, Salvador Dal\u00ed pushed his friend off a bridge<\/a>. At 29, he \u201ctrampled<\/a>\u201d a woman after she told him he had beautiful feet. At 30, he was temporarily ousted from the Surrealist art movement because of his infatuation with Hitler. And at 35, after sending the movement\u2019s co-founder, Andr\u00e9 Breton, letters<\/a> that described \u201cfeeling real pleasure and considerable sexual excitement in reading about\u201d the lynchings of Black Americans, his expulsion was made permanent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps we shouldn\u2019t expect Dreamworld, the wide-ranging commemoration of Surrealism\u2019s 100th anniversary currently on view at the Philadelphia Art Museum, to divulge every grisly detail of Dal\u00ed\u2019s inhumanity. But it is disappointing that it doesn\u2019t even attempt to scratch the surface. On its face, the exhibition is impressive, offering a rare glimpse at an enormous array of Surrealist masterworks, from the legendary to the overlooked. The timing could not be better: We have much to learn in this moment<\/a> from a movement that was both explicitly antifascist and radically hopeful \u2014 and from how the not-so-antifascist Dal\u00ed broke from it. But Dreamworld presents precious little of the historical and political context \u2014 for example, the birth of the movement out of the grotesque terrors of World War I \u2014 that would help viewers grasp the relevance of what\u2019s in front of them. <\/p>\n

\"\"Andr\u00e9 Masson, \u201cTauromachy\u201d (1937)<\/p>\n

Instead, it groups the art into vague categories and provides wall texts full of platitudes. Take a look at the difference between how the exhibition\u2019s didactics describe the Surrealists\u2019 interest in nature and that of cultural critic Naomi Klein, for instance. The wall text states: \u201cThe Surrealists believed that the rationalism associated with modern life had the pernicious effect of estranging people from themselves \u2026 Surrealist landscape painting presents natural scenery as a window into the imagination.\u201d In contrast, Klein writes: \u201cThey attempted to merge with the natural world \u2014 anything that could provide an escape from the machinery of death that disguised itself as progress.\u201d The result of Dreamworld’s surface-level approach is perhaps the most surreal of all: a show about one of the 20th century\u2019s most compelling art movements that is, somehow, kind of bland<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If you ignore the wall labels, a stroll through Dreamworld feels appropriately like floating across a mystical barrier into the collective unconscious. Amoeba-like blobs and severed limbs merge and collide. Umbrellas encrusted with coral descend from the heavens. Minotaurs painted by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Andr\u00e9 Masson, and Leonora Carrington roar in the distance. Monstrous chimeras and exquisite corpses<\/a> foreshadow the cathartic effects of 1980s creature features<\/a>. Particularly heartening is the unusually large number of works by lesser-known surrealists, including many women and artists from countries like Romania<\/a>, Mexico<\/a>, and Cuba<\/a>, who often used the cosmological and horrifying dream space of the movement to work through horrors of war and industrialized genocide.<\/p>\n

\"\"Rita Kernn-Larsen, \u201cThe Women\u2019s Uprising\u201d (1940)\"\"Suzanne Van Damme, \u201cSurrealist Composition\u201d (1943\u201347)<\/p>\n

But \u2014 what is their story? Too often, the didactics contain barely any information. Who is Rita Kernn-Larsen<\/a>, the rare woman in early European Surrealism, who grew up in a castle, and why did she title an unnerving 1940 painting of drowning, headless, humanoid trees grasping at the sky \u201cThe Women\u2019s Uprising\u201d? Why go to such lengths to include niche delights such as Suzanne Van Damme\u2019s \u201cSurrealist Composition<\/a>\u201d (1943\u201347), a floating coterie of alien creatures, if we learn nothing about who she was? How are we to thoroughly understand Surrealism\u2019s adventures into the unconscious without learning about its origins in Breton\u2019s work as a doctor treating traumatized World War I veterans? And how can one invoke these artists\u2019 opposition to the specter of fascism while glossing over the very different and far more disturbing politics of Dal\u00ed, who is so prominently featured in the show?\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is unsettling to see visitors taking selfies with Dal\u00ed\u2019s 1936 masterwork \u201cSoft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of War)\u201d knowing that he painted it a year after he wrote<\/a> to Breton praising Nazism as the pinnacle of surrealism and dreaming of the \u201cdomination or submission to slavery of all the colored races,\u201d which \u201ccould produce immense possibilities of immediate illusions for white men.\u201d Nowhere in the exhibition does the wall text note that Dal\u00ed was in fact rejected from the Surrealism group, let alone why. Perhaps fewer people would snap selfies next to his work, or buy the piles of Dal\u00ed merch on offer in the gift shop, if they knew that he lauded Spanish dictator Francisco Franco as \u201cthe greatest hero of Spain.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Salvador Dal\u00ed, \u201cInvisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion\u201d (1930)\"\"Visitor photographing Salvador Dal\u00ed, \u201cSoft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)\u201d (1936)<\/p>\n

Some have written off Dal\u00ed\u2019s predilection for fascism due to his later claim that he only wrote about it to the Surrealist Manifesto author \u201cprecisely because Breton did not want to hear about it.\u201d Ruffling feathers was indeed one of his favorite pastimes; he was, in today\u2019s terms, a perfect troll \u2014 though trolling does not negate the impact or violence of his sentiments. Combined with his notorious greed and misogyny, he comes across as surprisingly Trumpian.<\/p>\n

Should Dreamworld have excluded Dal\u00ed\u2019s work? Absolutely not. What\u2019s needed is proper historical context. In many ways, the show suffers from an embarrassment of riches: There are scores of masterworks are on display, but in an attempt to broadly outline a deeply complex, rich movement through overly large categories (for example, most sections’ themes boil down to \u201csex,\u201d \u201cnature,\u201d and \u201cwar\u201d) the true power of the work fades into the background. One beautiful section at the end discusses the friendship between Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, both based in Mexico, and their shared interest in witchcraft and the occult. On a nearby wall, however, Hebrew characters dance across a painting by Victor Brauner near Kurt Seligmann\u2019s \u201cFlight to the Sabbath\u201d (1956) without even a brief acknowledgement of both artists\u2019 Jewishness and their escapes from the Holocaust. This placement, lacking further information, unintentionally makes the more mystical aspects of their Jewishness appear as just another form of whimsical witchery. And Mexican-born artists \u2014 including Frida Kahlo \u2014 are folded into a section titled \u201cExile,\u201d which results in framing Central and South America as simply on the receiving end of Surrealist dreams, rather than a source itself of a distinctive creative force.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m glad I saw Dreamworld and basked in the beauty of its art. But I\u2019m also grateful that I learned more on my own time about some of these artists. Because without the whole story, we can lose sight of the difference between those who illustrate monsters \u2014 defining them, feeling them, and, critically, fighting them \u2014 and those who give in to their horror.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Dal\u00ed-themed merch on sale in the adjoining giftshop includes a children\u2019s book that makes it look like the artist was kicked out of the Surrealist movement simply because he was unapologetic about \u201cbeing himself.\u201d\u00a0\"\"Victor Brauner, \u201cHitler\u201d (1934). The Jewish artist was at one time a member of the Romanian Communist Party and fled the Nazis during the Holocaust.\u00a0\"\"Installation view of Max Ernst, \u201cChimera\u201d (1928) next to Rita Kernn-Larsen, \u201cThe Women\u2019s Uprising\u201d (1940)<\/p>\n

Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100<\/a> continues at the Philadelphia Art Museum (2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) through February 16. The exhibition was curated by Matthew Affron with Danielle Cooke, exhibition assistant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s Note: The following story contains material that may be triggering to some readers. PHILADELPHIA \u2014 When he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":232573,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-232572","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}