Dennis Raverty

From the 1930s through the 1960s Ben Shahn's painting and illustration addressed such issues as unemployment, discrimination, the rise of authoritarianism abroad, and threats to freedom of expression in the United States. Starting his career during the Great Depression, his art witnessed totalitarian regimes in Europe and the anti-Communist hysteria of postwar America, as well as the Civil Rights movement. Shahn viewed nonconformity as the essence of avant-garde art as well as the agent of social change. His art was clearly modernist yet remained figurative and accessible to a wide, popular audience. A retrospective exhibition that spans the artist's long career is currently at the Jewish Museum in New York City through October.

Surrealism originally arose as a reaction to the First World War, which was seen as a nervous breakdown on a societal level. The solution was to make a deep dive into the unconscious mind to uncover the dynamic sources of human aggression. Using the new psychology of Sigmund Freud, they illuminated a strange world of dreams and forbidden desires. In the words of Salvador Dali, the Surrealists intended to make "hand-painted dream photographs." The Philadelphia Museum celebrates the anniversary of this important and influential movement with an exhibition that opens in November, 2025.

Excerpts from Surrealistic films from 1929 through 1972 by Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau and Alfred Hitchcock will be introduced, screened and placed within the context of surrealist theory and psychoanalytic thought from the period.

"We were like two mountain-climbers roped together." This is how Georges Braque described his collaboration with Pablo Picasso during the years before the First World War. The art they developed was called "Cubism" by a baffled critic (although it has nothing whatsoever to do with cubes). The movement they started had profound influences not only on subsequent painting, but also graphic art, industrial design, sculpture and modernist architecture of Corbusier, the Bauhaus and the International Style.