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Introduction
Surrealism was not entirely unknown to American audiences before 1936,1 but that year it was introduced once and for all to a great many people. Curator and director Alfred Barr, jr. (1902-1981) staged the grand show Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. The exhibition ran from December 1936 into early 1937 before packing up to travel to six other major museum locations in the US, and in 1938, in adapted form and under the title Fantastic Art, Past and Present, to a further five smaller locations. The exhibition must have been hard to miss; over 50,000 visitors graced it at the MoMA alone, the print press had a field day-or several of them, with Salvador Dalí also having arrived on the scene -and Universal and Paramount Pictures incorporated reports about it into their newsreels.2
Although eventually the show's impact would prove far-reaching, at the time the reception was rather lukewarm. Visitors and critics struggled to get the point of it. Barr hardly made it easy, including not only over 700 objects in his show but those also a rather heterogeneous bunch: dada and surrealist works of art, works by other modernists including such diverse artists as George Grosz and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as old masters from the fifteenth century through to Symbolism. The show further incorporated children's drawings, cartoons by Walt Disney, a machine-design by Rube Goldberg, 'folk' art or naive art, and art by mental patients or asylum art.3 'Drawings by Lunatic Asylum Inmates as Good as Most of the 700 Items in Museum's Fantastic Exhibit' was the subtitle of one review in the press.4 The exhibition was quite a succes scandale; critics and intelligentsia loved to hate on it as much as on surrealism in general.
For all that the show did have some failings, Barr succeeded rather well in putting surrealism on the map of American, and also international, audiences, and his vision of surrealism would reverberate internationally for decades to come. Two concepts in particular Barr proposed through the show would prove immensely successful, indicated by how quickly they came to be part of the general discourse around and about surrealism. The first is the historicity of surrealism. The second is its...