‘Forbidden Games’ @ClevelandArt Explores Surrealist/Modern Photo Experiments

Forbiddengames

Through Sun 1/11

Recently I read that, of all the photos ever taken since photography was invented in the 1830s, half were taken in the last year. The ubiquity of photos since the beginning of the digital age requires placing oneself in a sort of mental time machine when viewing a show like Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography, on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art through January 11.

The show focuses on a photography collection assembled by art collector/ filmmaker David Raymond and acquired by the museum in 2007-2008. It’s on view for the first time in its entirety — 175 works in all.

When most of the photos were taken, in the 1920s and 1930s, the art world was in creative ferment, and the photography scene along with it. Like painters, photographers were exploring ways of getting beyond the simple reality of what you see. Some of the ways they did this — double exposures, odd angles, collage — appear hackneyed now. You might find yourself going “Who hasn’t thought of that?” But that’s now. It’s important to realize how striking and fresh they were nearly a century ago.

Surrealism, which still fascinates us today, was a movement that focused on the reality beyond surface reality, on tapping into the unconscious to get at a truer truth. And while surrealism gets the top billing here, in fact, though many of the photos are thought-provoking and disturbing, more seem matter-of-fact.

The great French-Hungarian photographer Brassaï may have done his most memorable photos at night, but there’s a straightforward, documentary quality to his work, even when he’s shooting offbeat nightlife denizens as he so frequently did. His from-the-rear photo of a pair of young men, expressing their pair-ness by wearing the same suit, one the jacket and the other the pants, is unblinking and observational.

Most of the artists in this show aren’t as well known as Brassaï but the quality of work is consistent and impressive, a tribute to Raymond’s collector’s eye. Most observers, if they know Dora Maar at all, know her as one of Picasso’s series of lover-muses. With an entire room devoted to her 23 photos in a collection, one gets a sense of the range of this woman who worked as a commercial photographer in the ’30s before her job became tending to Picasso’s whims. While a handful of her photos here are experimental, using collage and double exposure effects, her more usual “trick” is the unusual angle — years before such steep angles were found in zillions of band photos.

Some of the still lifes may seem familiar to modern eyes and their juxtapositions more formal (or labored) than strange and some of the experiments primitive. The photogram section is especially hard to see as groundbreaking after decades in which every beginning art class has played with them, and there is a station where you can do that in the exhibit.

But amidst the display of talented artists with gifted eyes working on something that may or may not express the surrealistic urge clearly to a view, a photo will jump out at you that does so as boldly as the best painting by Magritte or Tanguy: for instance, Hans Bellmer’s “La Poupee” (The Doll), a short of a spooky distorted mannequin. The section of doll-based photos seems to have the clearest connection to surrealism and is also the strongest segment of the show.

Another warning to the contemporary viewer. These days, many photographers favor the razzle-dazzle impact of huge size. The tinyness of some of these photos might make them easy to skim. Don’t. But their size invites intimate engagement the way a monster wall-sized photo rejects it. Man Ray’s photo of model Lee Miller (herself a photographer with a major reputation) in repose? playing dead? is only 2 ½ by 3/ ½ inches. At that size it’s a suggestive whisper of a work that’s about mystery rather than the photographer’s ego.

Don’t miss the chance to see this show. Like the museum itself, it’s free. Spend some time with the photos, imagining yourself back to the day when advances in camera size and film technology had just freed up artists to play some of the games with the medium you see here and digital photography had not freed up every “artist” with a cell phone to re-tread the ground these artists broke.

http://clevelandart.org

Photo: “Double Portrait With Hat” by Dora Maar 

Cleveland, OH 44106

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