Glens Falls, NY – The Hyde Collection is delighted to announce the opening of A Long Affair: Surrealism 1924 to Now. The exhibition will run from June 22 to September 15, 2024 and features a selection of works from the movement's inception to contemporary interpretations.
2024 marks the centenary of André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, which laid the foundation for one of the most enduring movements in the arts. Breton (1896–1966) was the poet and intellectual who directed Surrealism’s cultural course, organizing publications, exhibitions, and calls to action.
According to Breton’s manifesto, Surrealism induced "the marvelous"—a feeling of pleasurable disorientation brought about by creative devotion to dreams and the unconscious. With psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams as his guidebook, Breton defined Surrealism as: “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought.” Breton’s “automatism” is the creative equivalent of Freudian free association, in which patients say whatever is on their mind, without forethought or self-censorship, as a means to access the unconscious. Automatic writing—where the writer free associates by setting pen to paper with no planned narrative—was a Surrealist literary technique that preceded Surrealism in the visual arts. Disjointed, evocative, sometimes comical texts resulted from this practice, several examples of which are included in the exhibition.
The allure of this freeform, psychically guided experimentation was not lost on visual artists. Early participants in the Surrealist movement like André Masson and Joan Miró created automatist paintings—spontaneous, largely abstract works containing random figurative or biomorphic elements. Automatism and abstraction constitute a crucial strain in Surrealism’s birth and development. However, a second style is perhaps more familiar to those interested in the movement: the eerily realistic rendering of unreal things. Artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Kay Sage created disorienting, dream-like images wielding a polished illusionism that, from a technical standpoint, is automatism’s opposite. Yet in their psychological tension and complex juxtaposition of arbitrary elements, these works of art equally express Surrealism’s “actual functioning of thought.”
A Long Affair: Surrealism 1924 to Now includes examples of both stylistic categories, automatism and dream-like realism. On view will be artists from Breton’s inner circle, artists who were never his card-carrying devotees, and artists living today who absorbed the movement’s influence years after his death—demonstrating the durability and geographic reach of this long, creative affair with the unconscious.
A Long Affair: Surrealism 1924 to Now commemorates the hundred-year anniversary of André Breton’s famed Manifesto of Surrealism, the text that laid the foundation for one of the most enduring
movements in the arts. According to the manifesto, Surrealism induced “the marvelous”—a feeling of pleasurable disorientation brought about by creative devotion to dreams, the imagination, and the deeply psychological. The variety of themes and visual styles comprising the movement will be represented in the exhibition by works from The Hyde Collection’s strong holdings in Surrealism as well as loans from major institutions.
On view will be paintings, drawings, prints, and three-dimensional objects from every decade from the 1920s to the present. The checklist includes Alicia Adamerovich, Jean Arp, Pennie Brantley, Leonora Carrington, George Condo, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Peter Dechar, Julio de Diego, Dorothy Dehner, Max Ernst, Karl Fortess, Philip Guston, Wifredo Lam, René Magritte, Georges Malkine, Man Ray, André Masson, Joan Miró, Wangechi Mutu, Richard Pousette-Dart, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Kay Sage, Atillio Salemme, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, Val Telberg, and Remedios Varo.
A Long Affair: Surrealism 1924 to Now demonstrates the longevity and geographic reach of Surrealism’s defining characteristics, from the onset of the movement through contemporary makers today. It incorporates artists who may not have been card-carrying devotees of Breton but absorbed the movement’s influence—in some cases, like Philip Guston, for only a fleeting moment in their careers. Also on view will be a few lesser-known names such as Georges Malkine, who was at the forefront of the early movement in Paris but, by his own design, fell into obscurity.
