The desert—in all of its arid, minimalist, color-block permutations—permeates this selection of Surrealist artworks from the University of Arizona’s collection.

A Century of Surrealism
August 24, 2024–February 1, 2025
University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson
Let’s talk about the “what” embedded in Jackson Arn’s article “The Bad Dream of Surrealism” in an August 2024 issue of The New Yorker. It’s not André Breton’s first Surrealist manifesto, published 100 years ago, which has inspired exhibitions of surrealist art around the world in 2024. Not the manifesto itself, or its repercussions. But rather it’s a setting, a landscape, in particular, the expansive one defining the Southwest: the desert, in all of its arid, minimalist, color-block permutations. “[T]he Surrealists sometimes appear to have dreamed about little else,” Arn writes. Tree-women, bird-women, always curving impossibly through space, an ever-popular motif in surrealist art, he continues, “are severely outnumbered by the deserts. Once you start to notice these, it is hard to stop.”
So true. Especially when viewing A Century of Surrealism, a small (sixteen paintings) yet potent exhibition at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson. In Eva Schwartz’s oil Untitled (Horns and Bow) (1941), the brown-textured appendages of bighorn sheep crisscross a green-and-black patterned dress bow, both positioned in a pebbly bed of sand out of which sea shells and a human face emerge. A lithe and limber bird-woman (yes, there’s one in this exhibition) with one bright eye darts across a mountainous desert-scape in Max Ernst’s Arizona Nightingale (1941-1953), painted while living with Dorothea Tanning in the red sandstone–saturated landscape of Sedona, Arizona. The couple enticed many artists, surrealist and otherwise, to visit them, introducing their friends to a landscape singular among deserts.
As for Tanning, she famously couldn’t contend with so much red, as Portefeuille (Pocketbook) (1946) clearly illustrates. In this oil on panel, a woman enters the pages of a larger-than-life book through an open door (one of Tanning’s ubiquitous motifs) as if escaping the blood-red desert around it. Clay Edgar Spohn’s lithograph Depression in a Desert (1939) renders figures, structure, ground, and sky in featureless shades of gray. In Federico Castellón’s pencil drawing, Untitled (Figure and Star on a Stick) (1935-1945) a woman with amoebic curves energizes a setting of leafless trees and stripped trunks dripping Dali-like with a shoe and fabric.
Arguably, Kay Sage’s oil on canvas, An Important Event (1938), is desert-like in its accumulation of starkly rendered forms cradling an egg, reminiscent of Escher, beneath a swath of turquoise sky. And Yves Tanguy’s oil Le Temps Égaux (Time Without Change) (1951) is desert-esque in the artist’s abstraction of form into outlined gray globs, flat sandy planes, and white needle-like shapes piercing a mutating sky.
All of the works in A Century of Surrealism are from the museum’s collection, and were selected by Violet Rose Arma, curatorial assistant. The show also includes pieces by Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí (whom Breton kicked out of the Surrealist gang in 1939), Joseph Marsh Sheridan, Leticia Tarrago, and Sargent Claude Johnson—all of whom eschewed the desert’s influence in the works presented. In fact, Gertrude Abercrombie’s reverse glass painting, Late Summer Landscape (1939), has a barren quality and yet is imbued with an evocative blue-green color in foreground, middle, and back: a rich, watery color in which a female figure bravely wades, holding a bouquet in the same tint. It’s dour, yet refreshing. A breath of menthol exhaled into the room.
As many art historians and critics continue to argue during Surrealism’s centennial, our existence has never been more surreal than it is now.
“The artworks included in this UAMA exhibition,” states the website, “showcase influences and participants in the movement from the mid 1920s to 1980, emphasizing the diffusion of Surrealist ideas and techniques in the American consciousness.” The canon is well-represented. And Surrealism continues to influence artists throughout the Southwest, as evidenced in Southwest Surrealism/Surreal Southwest at Yavapai College Prescott Art Gallery this summer, the lauded Surrealism and Us exhibition at the Fort Worth Modern, and the current WONDER: Social Surrealism in Contemporary Art through December 21, 2024, at Coconino Center for the Arts in Flagstaff, in which “artists expand on the ethos of Social Surrealism by using imagery rooted in absurdity and wonder to contemplate the pressing issues of our times,” according to the center’s website.
An art movement that began with poetry in the aftermath of World War I, Surrealism was about allowing the unconscious mind to express itself, to revel in the illogical and dream-world through words, ideas, paint, pencil, sculpture, paper, and whatever else could be part of the mix. As many art historians and critics continue to argue during Surrealism’s centennial, our existence has never been more surreal than it is now. “The world that the finest Surrealists succeeded in illustrating,” Arn writes, “is the one we’ve always lived in. We still have a hard time noticing.” Unless, of course, you live in the desert.





