CLEVELAND, OH.- The Cleveland Museum of Art presents Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography, a fascinatingly varied group of over 160 surrealist and modernist photographs from the 1920s through the 1940s. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue of the extraordinary vintage prints, acquired by the museum in 2007-2008 from the renowned collection of filmmaker David Raymond, represent the collection’s first appearance in print or at a museum. The exhibition also includes six short films and two books. Forbidden Games is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art from October 19, 2014, through January 11, 2015. Admission to this exhibition is free.
“We are proud to celebrate this important acquisition with the first in-depth examination of a segment of our increasingly important collection of photography,” said Dr. William M. Griswold, museum director. “David Raymond is a judicious and passionate collector who assembled his collection with astute judgment and connoisseurship, seeking out works that reflect l’oeil à l’état sauvage – the eye in its wild state, a tenet of surrealism supplied by André Breton, founder of the first surrealist group in Paris.”
Beginning in the 1990s, Raymond assembled works of both surrealism and modernism, two usually opposing movements that share a desire to bypass conventions about composition and content to experiment with new processes, materials and subject matter. His holdings were distinguished by their quality, breadth and rarity of subject matter.
Vertiginous camera angles, odd croppings and exaggerated tones and perspectives are hallmarks of both surrealism and modernism. As with surrealist efforts in other media, artists making photographs also aimed to explore the irrational and the chance encounter – magic and the mundane – filtered through the unconscious defined by Sigmund Freud. Eventually, photography became a pre-eminent tool of surrealist visual culture.
Photographs by 68 artists from 14 countries in the Americas and Europe, representing diverse artistic pathways and divergent attitudes toward photography, come together in the collection. It includes works by notable artists such as Hans Bellmer, Ilse Bing, Bill Brandt, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Brassaï, Marcel Duchamp, Germaine Krull, László Moholy-Nagy, René Magritte, Man Ray and Alexander Rodchenko as well as numerous rare examples of equally provocative but less well-known photographers. Special highlights are bodies of work by Georges Hugnet, Marcel G. Lefrancq and 23 photographs by Dora Maar, one of the largest holdings of her work in a public collection.
“The Cleveland Museum of Art made a major, transformative acquisition by procuring the David Raymond collection, one of the most important holdings of twentieth-century surrealist photography that remained in private hands,” said Barbara Tannenbaum, the museum’s curator of photography. “Forbidden Games offers the public its first chance to view Raymond’s collection and through it, to vicariously experience an exhilarating, sometimes harrowing period of revolutionary social and cultural change.”
Forbidden Games is accompanied by a 240-page catalogue by Tom Hinson, curator emeritus, who tells the story of how the collection came to the museum and discusses the philosophy and the psychology behind Raymond’s collecting style; photo historian Ian Walker of the University of South Wales, who sets the photographs into historical and historiographic contexts; and independent curator Lisa Kurzner, who delves into topics of special interest ranging from examinations of techniques such as photograms and photo collage to explications of the symbolism of the mannequin and biographical studies of Maar and Hugnet. The catalogue, distributed by Yale University Press, is available for purchase at the museum or online: store.cmastore.org/fogasuandmop.html (Hard cover/$39.95, soft cover/$29.95.)
