One of the key themes of Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective will be the artist’s profound engagement with the Surrealist movement throughout the 1940s. Gorky’s relationships with members of the Surrealist group in exile in the United States, including its leader, Andre Breton, as well as painters Yves Tanguy, Wifredo Lam, and Max Ernst, and his close friendship with the Chilean-born artist Roberto Matta all contributed to the development of his singular visual vocabulary, a highly original form of Surrealist automatism characterized by biomorphic forms rendered with thinned-out washes of paint. After his marriage in 1941 to Agnes Magruder, whose parents had a farm in Virginia, Gorky’s experience of the American landscape would enrich his artistic vision, and, beginning in 1943, emerges as a central theme in the lush, evocative paintings for which Gorky is best known. The rich farmland and bucolic atmosphere of rural Virginia (and later Sherman, Connecticut) reminded Gorky of his father’s farm near Lake Van, and inspired him to create freely improvised abstract works that combined memories of his Armenian childhood with direct observations from nature. The resulting paintings, such as "Scent of Apricots on the Fields" (1944) and "The Plow and the Song" series (1944-1947), are remarkable for their evocative strength, lyrical beauty, and fecundity of organic forms.

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Tate Modern, London, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The exhibition will run from October 21, 2009 to January 10, 2010

Joseph Cornell, Pink Chateau, 1944, mixed media

Museums in Miniature explores the use of collage, assemblage, and staged tableaux by Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell as plays on the notion of an exhibition space. Evocative juxtapositions, absurdities, and rebuses abound in Cornell’s work, demonstrating the enduring influence of Duchamp’s practice, and of Surrealism more broadly, during the second half of the 20th century. Duchamp will be represented by MCASD’s The Green Box (1934) and by a version of his Boîte-en-valise (1942-54), which contains miniature replicas of three of Duchamp’s works. Duchamp described the Boîte-en-valise as a “miniature museum,” or a portable retrospective of his oeuvre to that point.

The exhibition also showcases several box constructions by Joseph Cornell. The rounded arches of Untitled (Grand Hôtel des Alpes) (1957) function as architectural fragments that refer to a monumental structure, while the elaborate fenestration of Pink Chateau (1944) seems the perfect backdrop for an epic ballet. Duchamp’s “miniature museums” are ironic, polemic, and humorous; Cornell’s are richly textured and extraordinarily poetic. Together the works by Duchamp and Cornell serve as a prelude to the exhibition, Automatic Cities on view in the adjacent galleries. The exhibition is curated by MCASD Curator Robin Clark.

André Kertész. Eiffel Tower, 1929

Surrealism: seeing the ordinary as extraordinary was the theme of Dr. Therese Lichtenstein's photography and film exhibition, called 'Twilight Visions', which opened Thursday night at the Frist Center.

The exhibition featured more than 120 photographs by French artists from the 1920's and 1930's, such as Man Ray, Eugene Atget, Hans Bellmer and Brassai, and offered a unique insight to the social and political hardships during their culture's transition between world wars.

This mixture of documentary and experimental photography beautifully captured the celebration of electricity and encouraged observers to excite their vision and to be active participants as the walked through the disoriented structure of the exhibit.

"It is so important for our culture to appreciate surrealism, considering all the things going on within our nation today,"
Dr. Lichtensteing commented when asked about how the exhibit could be inspiration even to the American culture today.

Percieving the ordinary as extraordinary serves as inspiration to us during this time of economic crisis and emphasizes the concept of the Twilight Exhibit both literally and metaphorically. In the exhibit, twilight represents the undetermined time occuring between night and day, in a more literal sense, where everything is both hidden and exposed.

Metaphorically, the exhibit also represents a comparison; be it between the grotesque and the beautiful or reality and fantasy- and sometimes when things become difficult it helps to not be able to determine a clear divide between the two.

"I found it really fascinating. It’s abstract. I really enjoyed the photos by Man Ray and would like to revisit again soon, remarked Libby Robinson Lacocke, a former personal finance professor at MTSU.

The exhibition will be held at the Frist until January 3, 2010 then will travel to the International Center of Photography in New York from January 29 through May 9, 2010 and lastly, to the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia from June until September 30, 2010.

Listen free online to Duchamp's "Session on the Creative Act" recorded live at the Convention of the American Federation of Arts in Houston, Texas, April 1957. CD also includes interviews with George Hamilton and Richard Hamilton as well as musical introludes.

Duchamp, Hat Rack, 1964

Image Source

This upcoming exhibition to open Sept. 18 at Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art explores artists who incorporate chance as a decisive factor in the creation of an artwork. The work spans from the early 20th century and follows through to the 1970s.

The exhibition includes over 60 works by Jean (Hans) Arp, George Brecht, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Ellsworth Kelly, Alison Knowles, François Morellet, Robert Morris, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Dieter Roth, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Yves Tanguy, among many others.

"Chance Aesthetics explores these concepts in three thematic sections: "Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object," "Automatism," and "Games and Systems of Random Ordering." Each section addresses central avant-garde strategies employed to subvert or rework traditional forms of artistic expression. These categories also provide a basic framework through which individual movements--Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, and others--are traversed in order to compare and contrast chance-based strategies and objectives across diverse historical and cultural contexts. " - Excerpt from Press Release

Chance Aesthetics will be open from Sept. 18, 2009 - Jan. 4, 2010