Sun 10/19-Sun 1/11
As surrealism — the art movement that drew on the subconscious and dreamlike states to create strange reorderings of realistic scenes and objects — caught hold in the 20s, it was a logical area of exploration for photographers. Both deliberately and inadvertently they’d already been creating works in which reality was disrupted or rearranged.
The best-known photographer in the genre was the American Man Ray, who worked in Paris, the hub of surrealism, in the ’20s and ’30s. But the style had many other adherents around the world. Art collector/filmmaker David Raymond collected vintage prints from the ’20s through the ’40s, amassing a comprehensive collection that went far deeper than the familiar images.
The Cleveland Museum of Art acquired the collection in 2007 and now it’s putting 167 of the prints on display in Forbidden Games: Surrealism and Modernist Photography. It features the work of photographers from 14 countries, both those in the Parisian circle Man Ray was part of and the Soviet Union, the U.S. and other European countries.
Admission to this exhibition is free.
clevelandart.org/events/exhibitions/forbidden-games-surrealist-and-modernist-photography
Cleveland, OH 44106