Major Dada and Surrealist Exhibit Opens in Israel

At the Israel Museum, a new exhibit presents the museum's first comprehensive exhibition of the Vera, Silvia and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art, which the museum received as a gift in 1991. The exhibit, "Dreaming with Open Eyes," features more than 750 works by some 200 artists and will be on view through June. It then travels to the San Francisco Museums of Fine Arts from Feb. to April 2002, the Art Gallery of Ontario during the summer of 2002 and will conclude in Japan.

The gift of the Arturo Schwarz Collection, together with a library of more than 1,000 related books, pamphlets and artifacts, has transformed the Israel Museum into the largest repository in the world of Dada and Surrealist art. Paintings, drawings, sculpture, ready-mades, photographs and prints are complemented by unique items from the museum's Dada and Surrealist library of art periodicals, documents, letters and artists' books.

Seventy works are on display by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, both of whom Schwarz met during the 1950s. Schwarz demonstrated his appreciation for their work by arranging exhibitions, acquiring dozens of works and composing scholarship on the two men.

The Schwarz collection includes a sizable body of pre-Surrealist work, which, like the Surrealist movement that would follow, demonstrates a timeless interest in dreams, the supernatural and the irrational. This portion of the collection includes paintings, prints and drawings from the 16th to the 20th centuries by artists such as Albrecht Durer, Francisco de Goya, Gustave Moreau and Odilion Redon, along with tribal masks and artifacts from Africa, Oceania and North America.

The works of dozens of Surrealist artist from the 1920s to the 1980s are arranged in the exhibit according to visual and thematic criteria. Among the artists represented are Andre Breton, Joan Miro, Yves Tanguy, Andre Masson and Max Ernst. Women artists include Claude Cahun, Remedio Varo, Kay Sage and Dorothea Tanning.

The final component of the exhibit is drawn from the museum's extensive library of Dada and Surrealist materials, including a display of portraits depicting Surrealist artists and writers, as well as a selection of original Dada and Surrealist literary documents.