Monsters and Myths ― Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s

This revelatory survey of Surrealist masterworks of the 1930s and 1940s by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, and André Masson presents the movement through a new and timely lens--that of war, violence, and exile.

During the pivotal years between the world wars, Surrealist artists on both sides of the Atlantic responded through their works to the rise of Hitler and the spread of Fascism in Europe, resulting in a period of surprising brilliance and fertility. Monstrosities in the real world bred monsters in paintings and sculpture, on film, and in the pages of journals and artists' books.
Despite the political and personal turmoil brought on by the Spanish Civil War and World War II, avant-garde artists in Europe and those who sought refuge in the United States pushed themselves to create some of the most potent and striking images of the Surrealist movement. Trailblazing essays by four experts in the field trace the experimental and international extent of Surrealist art during these years--and, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, its irrepressible beauty.

Oliver Tostmann is Susan Morse Hilles Curator of European Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn. Previously he was a curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, where he curated the exhibitions Anders Zorn. A European Artist Seduces America (2013); Donatello, Michelangelo, Cellini. Sculptors' Drawings from Renaissance Italy (2014); and Ornament & Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice (2015).
Oliver Shell is Associate Curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, curated various shows at the BMA, among them Matisse Painter as Sculpture (2007); Rodin Expression and Influence (2007); A Circus Family: Picasso to Léger (2009); Advancing Abstraction in Modern Sculpture (2010/11); and German Expressionism: A Revolutionary Spirit (2014).
Robin Adèle Greeley is Associate Professor of Modern & Contemporary Latin American Art History at the University of Connecticut, and author of Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War (2006, Yale University Press).
Samantha Kavky is Associate Professor of Art History at Pennsylvania State University-Berks. She is co-editor of the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas and an expert on Max Ernst.