| At the recent inauguration of MoMA’s Education and Research Building (which marked the grand finale of architect Yoshio Taniguchi’s vision for the museum), I was struck by the power of symmetry and how the open glass bookends now framing the sculpture garden create an illusion of larger space. Designed to mirror the gallery building on the west side of the garden, the new eight-story building completes the reference to the museum’s twin activities of art and education while providing a new home for one of the world’s great research centers on modern and contemporary art. |  |
America Fantastica – Valery Oisteanu
At the recent inauguration of MoMA’s Education and Research Building (which marked the grand finale of architect Yoshio Taniguchi’s vision for the museum), I was struck by the power of symmetry and how the open glass bookends now framing the sculpture garden create an illusion of larger space. Designed to mirror the gallery building on the west side of the garden, the new eight-story building completes the reference to the museum’s twin activities of art and education while providing a new home for one of the world’s great research centers on modern and contemporary art.
The new center houses MoMA’s library and archives, state-of-the-art classrooms and workshop areas, a theater and two film and media screening rooms, along with curatorial study centers for architecture and design, painting and sculpture, film and media.
For its opening showcase, the facility offers a modest but interesting exhibit called “America Fantastica,” a multimedia display some in glass cases and at the same time projected images of magazines and publications that either complemented the international surrealist movement or started regional avant-garde movements across North and South America, in the process giving voice to a generation of artists bent on challenging the prevailing stagnant academic view of art.
Organized by Mary Castleberry, Editor, Contemporary Editions, Library Council of the MoMA, the show features a choice sampling of mid-20th century surrealist journals and books published in the Americas and inspired in part by a title used in an issue of Charles Henri Ford’s View magazine that was dedicated to native American art and largely designed by Joseph Cornell, called “Americana Fantastica.” The show also includes work created by self-exiled Euro-surrealists and by their local counterparts during the World War II era, as well as artist-run magazines from the 1950s and 1960s. Among them is a collector’s rare gem, Fata Morgana, by Andre Breton (Sur, Buenos Aires, 1942), a happenstance collaboration between Breton and the artist Wilfredo Lam, who met in Marseille while both were awaiting passage from occupied France to America.
Originally created to serve as “multiples” of artistic and literary expression, these publications became laboratories for art and typographic experiments, depicting the dreams, chimeras, psychological and ethnographic symbolism revered by the surrealists. Edited by André Breton, magazines such as La Révolution surréaliste (Paris, 1924–29) and Minotaure (Paris, 1933–39) commissioned original art made purposely for their covers, as well as illustrations for essays on architecture, mythology and psychoanalysis.
Many avant-garde magazines in Europe closed during the war (Minoutaure #13, reportedly themed around “diabolical powers”, was edited but never published), but the publishing scene became quite lively on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Many of the publications shown here represent surrealism’s “mature stage” and a result of the emigration of avant-garde artists from Europe to New York. While the European magazines were offshoots of dada and surrealism, the magazines published in Latin American by transplanted and homegrown artists became the nucleus around which the art revolved and avant-garde prosper.
Literary surrealism blossomed in cosmopolitan Latin American cities through magazines such as Mandrágora (Santiago, Chile, 1938-41) and Tropiques (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 1941-45), co-founded by the poet Aimé Césaire of the Négritude movement in Martinique.
The first publication to feature both literary and artistic surrealism was Sur, an international magazine (printed from 1931 till 1954 in Buenos Aires,) edited by Victoria Ocampo with contributions, among others, from Jorge Luis Borges (who had previously collaborated with Xul Solar on Martin Fierro magazine, 1924-27). In the early 1940s, Sur’s publishing house produced a series of exquisite books of works by Borges, Breton, Lam and Henri Michaux, mixing local art with the European avant-garde.
Charles Henri Ford, considered the mentor of surrealists in the United States, opened up the pages of View (New York, 1940-47) to the exotic likes of Andre Breton, Yves Tanguy, Andre Masson and Max Ernst, and to locals Joseph Cornell, Wilfredo Lam and Marcel Duchamp. Indeed, Ford’s historic efforts to unite exiled surrealists with American avant-gardists resulted in the best surrealist art and literature produced during World War II. A recent anthology of the magazine, “View — Parade of the Avant Garde” (Thunder’s Mouth Press), reads like the secret history of art in the America of the 1940s. He also published the first monograph on Duchamp and a book of Breton’s poems, “Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares,” in the 1946 edition of View (displayed here), translated by the late Edouard Roditi and with a cover design by Duchamp showing Breton’s face superimposed on the statue of Liberty and illustrated by Arshile Gorky.
VVV (New York, 1942–44), the “official” stateside organ of surrealism, was modeled on Minotaure and published by Breton, who did not speak or understand English (in a twist of irony, his wife seduced his translator). Declaring a preference for New York’s butterflies to its skyscrapers in an interview published in View, Breton begrudgingly acknowledged the city’s uber-dada status. Though settled in New York for the war years, Breton traveled to the Southwest, where he visited Hopi villages, adding to his collection a number of Hopi kachina dolls, one of which was photographed for publication in VVV by Berenice Abbott.
Dyn (Coyoacán, Mexico, 1942–44) was another brilliant one-man publication, this by Wolfgang Paalen, an Austrian born artist/writer and a former disciple of Breton’s who immigrated to Mexico in 1938 seeking Native American art and mystic rituals as a way to connect to the unconscious.
All of these books and magazines reveal the artistic reaction of the displaced to a diversity of cultures. The European surrealists had a vision of a mythic “ur-America” in images of primordial landscapes, native mystical art and exotic animals concludes May Castleberry. In 1938, Breton visited Mexico, declaring it a Surrealist land, and published his discoveries in “Souvenir du Mexique” a section of Minotaure magazine, accompanied by Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s photographs. Surrealism’s incorporation of Latin America’s ancient past, its folkloric traditions and its diverse myths, and cultures created a new generation of avant-garde publications.
The graphic and literary experimentation remained after the war, through the 1950s and 1960s in the sphere of the Beat generation. Surrealism’s elements of dreams and occult can be found also in a magazine such as Semina (Los Angeles and San Francisco, 1955-64). Wallace Berman is obviously an under-recognized genius of that generation. He was an enigmatic underground figure communicating a dark spirituality of the American culture through his collages and assemblages. His hand-printed and self-distributed journal, Semina, is an iconic document of its time, providing a space for some of the most innovative talents of the ‘50s and the ‘60s. At the Grey Art Gallery at NYU, a full-blown exhibition (Jan. 16-March 31, 2007) presents the history of this exceptional magazine and the group of artists that collaborated with publisher Wallace Berman. His oracular artwork featured Jewish hermetic symbols, images referring to jazz music and Kabbalah.
Back at MoMa, the lavishly produced pop/neo-Surrealist periodical S.M.S. (New York, 1968) and the Andy Warhol and David Dalton–designed issue of Aspen (New York, 1966) offered a campy mix of the vernacular and the marvelous; also noteworthy, a rare, special issue of Edgardo Antonio Vigo’s Diagonal cero (Buenos Aires, 1968), filled with surrealist imagery. A number of other Latin American magazines, like Las Moradas (Lima, 1947-49), tapped a variety of European modernist and surrealist work in their pages, blending studies of Latin America’s profound archaeological and anthropological heritage alongside new and experimental art and literature.
All of these magazines reveal an inner dichotomy between the New World esthetic and European avant-garde that sometimes clashed, but often inspired great works and created new regional neo-surrealist groups and movements. Consider this show a delicious appetizer: There is much more to be mined from the world of “America Fantastica.”
