The Surrealist Impulse:

New Acquisitions from the Tacoma Art Museum Collection

The Surrealist Impulse: New Acquisitions from the Tacoma Art Museum
Collection presents a select group of artworks that have an affinity to the ideas
and methods of the surrealists. These works demonstrate the museum’s
commitment to collecting artworks in a broad range of historical periods, stylistic
variations, and media. The Surrealist Impulse highlights the generosity of 13
families who recently have donated artworks to the museum’s collection. These
artworks represent a small percentage of the 476 works donated since 2004.
Tacoma Art Museum thanks all of its patrons for their donations and their trust in
the museum to keep and share these artworks for future generations.

The term surréalisme was used first by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in
1917 in response to the ballet Parade, created by composer Erik Satie and artists
Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. It referred to the free flow of ideas uniting the
world of dream and fantasy with that of the everyday rational world in an
“absolute reality, or surreality.” Surrealism emerged fully in the 1920s as a literary
movement responding to the expanding intellectual crises and social turmoil after
World War I. Surrealist writers, including Andre Breton, were influenced heavily
by Sigmund Freud’s work in defining the unconscious and sought direct access to
the deepest levels of the human mind, unfiltered by logic or reason. By the early
1920s, visual artists had incorporated the ideas and methods of the surrealist
writers and created works based on dream-like imagery, ideas mined directly from
the unconscious, and odd juxtapositions of objects. By 1929, Salvador Dalí, one
of the most influential and recognizable artists of the 20th century, had joined the
movement. Dalí’s portfolio of prints The Song of Songs of King Solomon, from
late in his career, is included in this exhibition.

With the significant exception of Salvador Dalí of Spain, the artists included in
The Surrealist Impulse created their works here in the Pacific Northwest or, as in
the case of Bertil Vallien, have played important roles in this region. Only Morris
Graves worked during the formative years of European surrealism—he began
incorporating the overt symbolism of surrealism into his works in the mid-1930s.
Like Graves, many other contemporary Northwest artists have absorbed the
conceptual foundations of surrealism and created art based in part on surrealism’s
ideas, visual strategies, and psychological impact. The common thread that links
the works in this exhibition draws attention to how surrealism remains a persistent
and powerful influence in contemporary art.

This symbol indicates that the work was created by a Northwest

artist.

This exhibition is sponsored by City Arts Tacoma and AA Party Rentals.