Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity

Oct 22, 2022 – Jan 29, 2023

The exhibition Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity (October 22, 2022 – January 29, 2023) was the first large-scale international loan exhibition to focus on the Surrealists’ interest in magic and myth.

With his Manifesto of Surrealism, published in October 1924, the French writer André Breton founded a literary and artistic movement that soon became the leading international avant-garde. At the center of the Surrealist enterprise lay a reorientation towards the world of the night-dream, the unconscious and the irrational. Numerous artists, who moved in the intellectual orbit of the movement, also immersed themselves in the imaginative world of magic. In their works, they frequently drew on occult symbolism and cultivated the traditional image of the artist’s persona as a magician, seer, and alchemist. The exhibition ranges from the “metaphysical painting” of Giorgio de Chirico around 1915, through Max Ernst’s iconic painting Attirement of the Bride (1940), to the occult imagery that underpinned the late works of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo.

#SurrealismusBarberini

VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022, Image: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York (Photo: David Heald)

Victor Brauner: The Surrealist, 1947, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

Magic was a stimulus to thinking. It freed man from fears, endowed him with a feeling of his power to control the world, sharpened his capacity to imagine, and kept awake his dreams of higher achievement.

Kurt Seligmann, „Das Weltreich der Magie“, 1948

Selected masterpieces by world-renowned artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and René Magritte were featured alongside key works by painters that remain to be discovered by the larger museum-going public, amongst them Victor Brauner, Enrico Donati, Jacques Hérold, Wolfgang Paalen, and Kurt Seligmann. In addition, the exhibition highlighted the central contribution of women, which comes to the fore in works by artists such as Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Jacqueline Lamba, Kay Sage, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo.

The Estate of Kay Sage / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022, Image: bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Kay Sage, Tomorrow Is Never, 1955, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

With works by artists from 15 countries and exhibits dating from 1914 to 1987, Surrealism presented itself as a global, transnational movement whose impact radiated far beyond France in the 1920s and 1930s. The loans came from over 50 museum and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Museo nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

The concept of the exhibition could be based on the outstanding holdings of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which has one of the most important collections of Surrealist painting in the world. Numerous works acquired by Peggy Guggenheim in the course of her patronage of the Surrealist movement vividly reflect its iconographic borrowings from occult symbolism.

Ortrud Westheider, Director, Museum Barberini

An exhibition of the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, curated by Daniel Zamani (Potsdam) and Grazina Subelyte (Venice). In Venice, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presented the exhibition from April 9 to September 26, 2022. The exhibition was accompanied by 240-page catalog (Prestel, 2022), featuring essays by Susan Aberth, Will Atkin, Victoria Ferentinou, Alyce Mahon, Kristoffer Noheden, Gavin Parkinson, Grazina Subelyte, and Daniel Zamani.

View of the exhibition

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Reviews

“One of those great exhibitions where you walk from one painting to the next in wonder and amazement”

Berliner Morgenpost

“Eight thematic chapters are opened by the exhibition curated by Daniel Zamani, giving a kind of frame to the magical whirlwind of images from the 20s to the 70s of the 20th century (...) In addition to iconic works, the show also brings into the light those that are less present in the art world.”

Berliner Zeitung

“The search for a reconciliation with nature, however, the appropriation of old genres, women who look back at witches - and not least the omnipresent preoccupation with the subject of war: these are indeed motifs that could hardly be closer to today’s world.”

Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten

“An impressive Surrealism exhibition”

Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung

“The exhibition shows us how much enchantment there really is in Surrealism (...) it’s incredible that this is the first major exhibition on the theme of Surrealism and magic.”

rbb radioeins

“The Potsdam exhibition is rich in tragic, ghostly, magical moments. Anyone who visits it senses them immediately and can hardly believe that this is to be the first show devoted to the occult in Surrealism, so evident does it appear here. (...) An institution can hardly be more devotedly engaged.“

Der Tagesspiegel

“An emotional exhibition”

Deutschlandfunk Kultur

“What is remarkable about the show is the range of styles. (...) What Surrealism was, we will once more have to think about.”

WELT am Sonntag

“The new exhibition at Potsdam’s Museum Barberini about the Surrealists and their interest in magic, myth, and esotericism is attracting numerous visitors.”

dpa

“It’s surprising discoveries that make up the enchantment of the new exhibition at the Museum Barberini. An exhibition that also includes Surrealist icons (...) and the women Surrealists, too, are a major presence in the Potsdam exhibition (...) well worth discovering.”

rbbkultur

“Surrealism is highly relevant. (...) Our world seems haunted by enigmatic, dangerous shadow worlds, and it’s often difficult to tell the difference between dream and reality. The supernatural, magic, and fantastical worlds—they’re with us again.”

tip Berlin

“Dreams, desire and total delirium at the Barberini“

Exberliner

"At the Museum Barberini, one can make surprising discoveries, establish unusual associations, engage in an imaginary dialogue between times and worlds, but also relive uncertainties, incongruities, liberations, and confusions in the lives and work of the Surrealists"

neues deutschland

"The Museum Barberini explores surrealism from a new perspective. Psychoanalysis and dream interpretation meet sorcery, tarot, and the occult ... One can wonderfully lose oneself in the surrealist imagery and symbol-laden phantasmagoria of these 89 works, drawn from fifty prestigious collections such as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Menil Collection in Houston."

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