LONG BEACH, CA.- The Long Beach Museum of Art presents High Drama: Eugene Berman and the Legacy of the Melancholic Sublime, featuring the paintings of Surrealist artist Eugene Berman together with work by his contemporaries, and later artists exploring similar themes and subjects. The exhibition includes 92 paintings, photographs, sculptures and maquettes, and arises from a new view of these artworks and their relationships, suggesting new connections and a common tone of “melancholic sublime.” The Long Beach Museum of Art presents High Drama in its only west coast presentation, from September 9 through October 30, 2005. High Drama was organized by the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas.

A Russian Jewish painter and designer, Eugene Berman (1899 – 1972) emigrated to the United States on the brink of the Holocaust. He was one of the most celebrated artists of the 1930s and 1940s, designing imposing settings and sumptuous costumes for premier theatrical companies, including the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and the Metropolitan Opera. Berman’s Neo-Romantic paintings of decadent beauty and the ruined past were prized by discerning collectors. But in the 1950s and 1960s, as formalist abstraction came to dominate the American art world, his influence waned. With the return to figuration in the 1980s and 1990s, his work and that of his fellow Neo-Romantics became important to contemporary artists, critics and curators. Berman’s nostalgic response to the inexorable losses of history, termed the “melancholic sublime,” gained renewed meaning in response to the AIDS pandemic, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and other cataclysmic events.

High Drama underscores connections between Berman’s works and that of his contemporaries, notably Neo-Romantics Christian Bérard and Pavel Tchelitchev, as well as Surrealists Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dali, Frida Kahlo, Yves Tanguy and Dorothea Tanning. The exhibition also demonstrates Berman’s relevance to artists today, including Julio Galán, Julie Heffernan, Larry Pitman and Cindy Sherman, and links multiple generations of American artists who have expressed, with poetic intensity and heartbreaking beauty, what it means to be human.

High Drama is guest curated by Michael Duncan, in conjunction with Jody Blake, Curator of the Tobin Collection of Theatre Arts at the McNay Art Museum. Duncan is a Corresponding Editor for Art in America and a frequent contributor to Artforum. An art historian specializing in modernism with an emphasis on the relationship between the visual and the performing arts, Blake was an associate professor of Art History at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. A full-color exhibition catalogue is available.

Funding for this exhibition is generously provided by the Tobin Foundation for Theatre Arts, funded by the Tobin Endowment, and by the Ewing Halsell Foundation Endowment. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.

The Long Beach presentation of High Drama is generously sponsored by the Evalyn M. Bauer Foundation, the Bess J. Hodges Foundation, the Earl B. and Loraine H. Miller Foundation, Jim Morris, Bernard Jazzar and Harold B. Nelson, Ron Nelson and David Schnur, Yellowbook USA and Venice Magazine.