Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents “Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity“, a joint exhibition project between the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Museum Barberini.

“Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity” is very tied to The Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s history, since Peggy was married to Max Ernst and was on intimate terms with André Breton, founder of the Surrealism with his Manifesto of Surrealism. During her lifetime, she exhibited many of the artists represented in this show.

The exhibition investigates the relationship between Surrealism, magic and the occult, showing how the attraction towards these contents shaped Surrealist production. Occult symbolism often populate Surrealist works, and the figure of the artist was associated with that of a magician, seer or alchemist, looking to magic as a poetic and deeply philosophical discourse, related to individual self-empowerment.

The exhibition, curated by Grazina Subelyte, displays about 60 works from all over the world. Among the national and international lenders are the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, The Menil Collection in Houston, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rivoli-Torino.

The exhibition includes works by Victor Brauner, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Delvaux, Maya Deren, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, René Magritte, Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, Kay Sage, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo, among the others.