This ambitious touring exhibition, conceived in close partnership with the Centre Pompidou (Paris), offers an immersion into all the main dimensions of the Surrealist movement gathering its greatest names: Dalí, De Chirico, Ernst, Fini, Graverol, Miró, Tanning, and Ray, among others.
If each partner museum houses the core of the travelling exhibition, it enriches it by emphasizing its own local heritage. In Brussels, the RMFAB explores Surrealism from a symbolist perspective, through a total of more than 130 works of art highlighting the connections and similarities, but also the fractures between Surrealism and Symbolism, one of its precursors. Symbolism, embodied in particular by Rops, Spilliaert, Khnopff, Delville and Minne, saw a rapid development in Brussels and largely anticipated the emergence of the Surrealist movement. A few decades later, Brussels became a center for Belgian Surrealism. Despite the cultural rupture caused by World War I, the older symbolists and the emerging young surrealists were never fundamentally alienated from each other.
After Brussels and Paris, the exhibition will travel to the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Fundación Mapfré Madrid, before closing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
