Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams
Surrealism is arguably the foremost art and literature movement of the twentieth century and carries with it considerable intellectual and cultural reach. Therefore, it repays on-going interrogation and research by scholars (be they art historians and/or artists, literary experts, psychoanalysts or political historians) when an exhibition of the magnitude of ‘Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams’ is mounted in Australia.
Still strong in memory is ‘Surrealism: Revolution by Night’, put on by the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) and toured from Canberra to the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1993. On that occasion, the exhibition was curated ‘in-house’ and comprised over three hundred loans from seventy-nine separate sources. It was cognizant of the influence of Surrealism on Australian artists and made their inclusion an important component of the survey. As the QAG was one of the galleries to host this mammoth curatorial exercise after its term at the NGA, a proportion of viewers were already primed for the recent exhibition ‘Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams’ at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA). It was mounted by the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou expressly for Brisbane and curated by Didier Ottinger, the Pompidou’s Deputy Director.
Having a single curatorial eye and knowledge base and one collection to deal with has considerable merit in these times of straightened financial resources. However, while Ottinger chose the one hundred and eighty-six exhibits in Paris and wrote the in-depth catalogue essays, it is obvious that he liaised closely with senior curators at QAG/GoMA on his selection of works. This latest Surrealism show, for instance, has a strong film component (over one hundred titles) that admirably fits the