In 1939, three artists, Wolfgang Paalen (Austrian, 1905-1959), Alice Rahon (French, 1904-1987), and Eva Sulzer (Swiss, 1902-1990), left Paris to explore the pre-Columbian ruins of the Pacific Northwest and Mexico. They remained in Mexico, becoming part of an international group of surrealist artists and writers who settled in Mexico City during the 1940s.
These artists—haunted by the Second World War, inspired by science, and seduced by archaeological discoveries—defined a new direction for their art. In dialogue with and in opposition to their surrealist colleagues in New York, they also created a journal called Dyn. From 1942 to 1944, six issues of Dyn were published and distributed in New York, London, Paris, and Mexico City. The journal included the work of avant-garde writers, painters, and photographers, as well as scholarly contributions by anthropologists and archaeologists.
Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico features paintings, photographs, drawings, letters, ephemera and other objects from more than a dozen artists and writers connected with Dyn, including Paalen, Rahon, Sulzer, as well as Manual Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002), Miguel Covarrubius (Mexican, 1904-1957), Gordon Onslow Ford (English, 1912-2003), Doris Heyden (American, 1915-2005), Robert Motherwell (American, 1915-1991), César Moro (Peruvian, 1903-1956), Rosa Rolando (American, 1985-1970), and others. The exhibition is curated by Annette Leddy, senior cataloguer and a consulting curator at the Getty Research Institute, and Donna Conwell, associate curator at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an eighty-page, color illustrated publication, also called Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico published by Getty Publications and written by the exhibition’s curators Annette Leddy and Donna Conwell, with an introduction by Dawn Ades.
Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico
October 2, 2012–February 17, 2013
The Getty Research Institute
1200 Getty Center Drive – Suite 1100
Los Angeles, CA 90049–1688
Tel. (310) 440-7335
