What’s Dada/Surrealism?
9:30 a.m., Thursday, Sept. 28, 2006
Webster Hall Auditorium
Admission: free

 

Following from the negative force of Dada, the positive force of Surrealism took hold. That is the usual way of looking at it; this presentation looked at paintings and photographs and texts from both movements, from Man Ray, Dora Maar, Picasso, Masson, and other artists, and from the writers Tzara, Eluard, Breton, Desnos, and others.

Dr. Mary Ann Caws is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Her many areas of interest in 20th century avant-garde literature and art include Surrealism, poets René Char and André Breton, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, and artists Robert Motherwell, Joseph Cornell, and Pablo Picasso. Conceptually, one of her primary themes has been the relationship between image and text. Dr. Caws’ books include Pablo Picasso (Critical Lives series), To the Boathouse: A Memoir, Marcel Proust (Illustrated Lives), Robert Motherwell with Pen and Brush, Virginia Woolf (Ilustrated Lives), Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind, and Picasso’s Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar.