Friday 11 June 2021

london international surrealist exhibition

Held at the New Burlington Galleries off Savile Row in Mayfair from this day through 4 July 1936, the organising committee hosted works from several popular and influential artists of the movement, including Alexander Calder, S. H. Tauber-arp, Victor Brauner, Gala and Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Len Lye, René Magritte and Paul Klee and attracted a thousand visitors per day with Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, the US, the UK, New Zealand, Italy, Roumania and Czecho-Slovakia represented and distinguished presenters delivering a series of lectures to large assembled audiences. Salvador Dalí wore a diving helmet whilst giving his seminar on fantômes paranoïaques authentiques and nearly suffocated at the dais and had to be rescued by poet David Gascoyne with a spanner.