Watch a video interview with Andrea Rosen, curator of Under the Surface: Surrealist Photography, produced by student assistant to the curator Kiyomi Mino ’16. My Favorite Objects in “Under the Surface: Surrealist Photography” from Bowdoin Art Museum on Vimeo. Related posts: Grete Stern, Dream 28, 1951 Frederick Sommer, Max Ernst, 1946 Frederick Sommer, Max Ernst, […]
Grete Stern, Dream 28, 1951
by Andrea Rosen, Curator of Under the Surface. Sigmund Freud’s revolutionary theories about the interpretation of dreams resonated with pop culture as well as avant-garde culture. Starting in 1948, Idilio, a weekly women’s magazine in Argentina, ran a column titled “Psychoanalysis Will Help You,” for which readers sent in their dreams to be analyzed. Each column […]
Erwin Blumenfeld, Nude Waving Behind Perforated Screen, ca. 1955-1957
by Andrea Rosen, Curator of Under the Surface. Erwin Blumenfeld sought in his experimental photographs to represent the idealized female beauty of his dreams and fantasies. Inspired by the way the old masters coyly rendered nudes “even more naked by their transparent veils,” Blumenfeld often employed props like grids, sheets, or glass barriers, as well as darkroom […]
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brussels, 1932
by Andrea Rosen, Curator of Under the Surface. Intrigue in a photograph can be created by alluding to a space or object that is hidden from the viewer. In Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Brussels, 1932, a rough-spun cloth blocks the sight of some unknown spectacle. One man has found a gap to peek through, but the other furtively […]
Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Two Pairs of Legs, ca. 1928-29
by Andrea Rosen, Curator of Under the Surface. In Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s Two Pairs of Legs, 1931, a peeling billboard shows only the legs of its fashion models, laying bare the façade beneath. The image appears flat, but the dark windows suggest an unknown private space lurking behind. Álvarez Bravo depicted with sensitive lyricism and rich […]
André Kertész, Meudon, 1928
by Andrea Rosen, Curator of Under the Surface. In Meudon, the dissimilarity between the viaduct, the construction at its base, and the dilapidated rowhouses is as unsettling as the man furtively walking towards the viewer with a large package under his arm. Visually tying it all together is the train steaming overhead into the scene. To […]
Eugène Atget, Cour, 28 Rue Bonaparte, Paris, 1910
by Andrea Rosen, Curator of Under the Surface. The ability of Eugène Atget’s images of streets, shop windows, and parks to seem at once straightforward and uncanny was admired by the surrealists. Atget spent his thirty-year career documenting Old Paris, taking thousands of photographs that he primarily sold to libraries and archives. In the 1920s Man Ray […]
George Platt Lynes, Portrait of Thomas Bacon, ca. 1938
by Andrea Rosen, Curator of Under the Surface. The Portrait of Thomas Bacon exemplifies striking compositional strategies that invite close, slow looking. Between the two poles of the composition—the subject of the portrait in the lower third and a tear in the backdrop at the top—are at first indecipherable marks, which turn out to be the […]
Man Ray, Space Writing (Self-Portrait), 1935
by Andrea Rosen, Curator of Under the Surface. Ever interested in light and movement, Man Ray created Space Writing (Self-Portrait) by opening the shutter of his camera for a prolonged exposure and drawing with a penlight in the air. Man Ray appears only as a dark, blurred figure in the background. His doodled outline, his scribbled […]
Frederick Sommer, Max Ernst, 1946
by Andrea Rosen, Curator of Under the Surface. In Frederick Sommer’s portrait of the surrealist painter Max Ernst, the subject both emerges from and is fused with the textured background, in ways that recall some of Ernst’s own techniques, such as collage and frottage (a rubbing over a textured surface). Sommer achieved this effect through the […]