Originally scheduled to close February 17, 2013, the exhibition Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico, on view at the Getty Research Institute, will continue through April 14, 2013.
The Marriage, 1944, Gordon Onslow Ford. Courtesy private collection.
© Lucid Art Foundation
In 1939, three artists, Wolfgang Paalen (Austrian, 1905–1959), Alice Rahon (French, 1904–1987), and Eva Sulzer (Swiss, 1902–1990), left Paris to explore the pre-Columbian ruins of the Pacific Northwest and Mexico. They remained in Mexico, becoming part of an international group of surrealist artists and writers who settled in Mexico City during the 1940s.
These artists—haunted by the Second World War, inspired by science, and seduced by archaeological discoveries—defined a new direction for their art. In dialogue with and in opposition to their surrealist colleagues in New York, they also created a journal called Dyn. From 1942 to 1944, six issues of Dyn were published and distributed in New York, London, Paris, and Mexico City. The journal included the work of avant-garde writers, painters, and photographers, as well as scholarly contributions by anthropologists and archaeologists.
Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico features paintings, photographs, drawings, letters, ephemera and other objects from more than a dozen artists and writers connected with Dyn, including Paalen, Rahon, Sulzer, as well as Manual Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902–2002), Miguel Covarrubius (Mexican, 1904–1957), Gordon Onslow Ford (English, 1912–2003), Doris Heyden (American, 1915–2005), Robert Motherwell (American, 1915–1991), César Moro (Peruvian, 1903–1956), Rosa Rolando (American, 1985–1970), and others. The exhibition is curated by Annette Leddy, senior cataloguer and a consulting curator at the Getty Research Institute, and Donna Conwell, associate curator at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California.
Additional information is available at www.getty.edu