Out of this World
Surreal & Fantastic Art in Photography
Keith de Lellis Gallery, New York
October 3 – November 15, 2024
In honor of the 100th anniversary of Surrealism Keith de Lellis Gallery presents an exhibition “Out of this World” featuring vintage photographs that honor some of the leading figures of the Surrealist movement along with some lesser-known artists that were contributing to the art of surrealism with surprising images many of which have rarely been exhibited.
The following artists are represented in the exhibition:
Pierre Adam (French, 1894-?)
David Attie (American, 1920-1982)
Cecil Beaton (British, 1904-1980)
Gordon Coster (American, 1906-1988)
Louise Dahl-Wolfe (American, 1895-1989)
Loomis Dean (American, 1917-2005)
Fernand Fonssagrives (French, 1910-2003)
Philippe Halsman (American, 1906-1979)
Lejaren Hiller (American, 1880-1969)
Florence Homolka (American, 1911-1962)
Edward James ( British, 1907-1984)
Frederick Kiesler (Austrian-American, 1890-1965)
Paul Le Boyer ( French, 1861-1952)
Herbert Matter (American, 1907-1984)
Angus McBean (Welch, 1904-1990)
NASA
PaJaMa (PAul, JAred, MArgaret) = Paul Cadmus (1904-1999), Jared French (1902-1989), Margaret French (1906-1998)
Norman Parkinson (British, 1913-1990)
Mario Perotti (Italian, 1909-1999)
George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955)
Edward Quigley (American, 1898-1977)
Percy Rainford (American-Jamaican, 1901-1976)
Emery P. Revesz-Biro (Hungarian-American, 1895-1975)
Eric Schaal (German, 1905-1994)
Pavel Tchelitchew (Russian-American, 1898-1957)
Rolf Tietgens (German-American, 1911-1984)
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880-1964)
Hi Williams (American, 1886-1965)
The Museum of Modern Art presented its’ landmark exhibition “FANTASTIC ART DADA SURREALISM” in 1936-1937, an ambitious textbook survey documenting the art of that category and its precedents and distillation to other cultural art forms and mediums. The hefty MoMA catalog identifies the genre of art as “The fantastic and the marvelous in European and American Art” and further described this art in terms of “the irrational, the spontaneous, the enigmatic and the dreamlike.”
Surrealism permeated the culture in portrait photography, advertising photography, fashion photography, dance photography and almost any other genre of photography that permitted the artist the leeway to experiment with images that piqued their imagination.
Louise Dahl-Wolfe, one of the foremost fashion photographers of the post World War II era, collaborated with Russian artist Pavel Tchelitchew in the early 1940s to create a wildly imaginative surrealist set for a color-infused fashion layout for Harper’s Bazaar. This dreamy technicolor lit tableau features three soigne models surrounded by drapery, fabric and news papered walls amongst the iconography of a fashion designers’ studio.
Another interior and one of the most important pictures in the exhibition is a diptych photomontage by Frederick Kiesler -photography by Percy Rainford- of the interior of Marcel Duchamp’s 14th Street New York studio festooned with all the detritus that this trailblazing artist could manage to populate his studio with. This image was published in Charles Henri Ford’s 1945 issue of the art magazine View that was dedicated to Marcel Duchamp.
Portrait photographers gravitated to surrealism to create complex and innovative images that went far beyond static portraiture. George Platt Lynes’ portrait of the actress Ruth Ford, (sister of Charles Henri Ford), created a delightful study of the actress who was often referred to as “the hummingbird” by her many artist friends. In George Platt Lynes’s image a hummingbird sits on top of Ford’s veil-wrapped visage while three eggs are floating on the upper right margins of the picture frame.
Hi Williams was the go to photographer in the American food industry in the 1930s famous for his mastery of the carbro printing process, an early color printing technique, that was both laborious and expensive to produce. He created a still life photograph of utilitarian rubber items: a toy duck, a gas mask, a ball shoe and glove etc. all sitting on a sandy platform with a painted backdrop featuring blue sky and clouds. If it wasn’t clear that this was an homage, he titled this colorful 1941 photograph “Rubber Dali”.
KEITH DE LELLIS GALLERY
41 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022
