Surrealist Rarities for LACMA
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| Félix Del Marle, L'Addition (The Bill), 1933. LACMA, purchased with funds provided by Wendy Stark |
LACMA's one really famous Modern painting is René Magritte's The Treachery of Images. Despite that, the museum's small holding of Surrealism is uneven. Lately LACMA has been building that part of the collection—on a budget—with purchases of multiples (Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim) and works of interesting, lesser-known artists of the global Surrealist movement.
One example is L'Addition (The Bill) by French artist Félix Del Marle (1889–1952). Del Marle shared a Paris studio with Italian Futurist Gino Severini. Over a long, under-the-radar career Del Marle painted in Futurist, Surrealist, and De Stijl idioms. The Bill is a small painting (13 by 16 in.) that sold at Sotheby's this May for $107,950. That's almost what LACMA paid for The Treachery of Images in 1978 ($115,000), given the massive inflation of Surrealist prices in the interim. Wendy Stark supplied acquisition funds.
Del Marle's center of attention is the disembodied eye. This has roots in Baroque paintings of martyred Saint Lucy, with her eyes on a platter. Del Marle's painting preceded by two years Magritte's The Portrait, the tabletop still life with an eye peering out of a slice of ham.
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| Eileen Agar, Woman's Head, 1942. LACMA, purchased with funds provided by the Robert H. Halff Endowment with additional funds provided by Ruth Eliel and Bill Cooney |
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| Kurt Seligmann, The Turk, 1932. LACMA, purchased with funds provided by the Ducommun and Gross Endowment with additional funds provided by Rowland Weinstein |
Swiss artist Kurt Seligmann went to art school with Giacometti and became part of the Surrealist circles of Paris and New York. He was expelled after telling Andre Breton that he (Breton) didn't know much about Tarot cards. The Turk conjoins the form of a Turkish shoe with a profile head. Christie's sold it for 32,500 euros in 2014.
Seligmann's postwar works imagined medieval troubadours as figurative abstractions in bleak, Yves Tanguy landscapes. (Seligmann was friends with Tanguy and wife Kay Sage, and LACMA is showing The Turk next to Tanguy's I Await You.) Seligmann's 1962 death was, some might say, Surrealist. He slipped on ice while shooting rats stealing birdseed and accidentally shot himself in the head.
The Agar and Seligmann works have recently gone on view in BCAM's Modern galleries.
Comments
> of Surrealism is uneven
> gone on view in BCAM's
> Modern galleries.
The ongoing management of LACMA gives it the overall quality of "uneven."
Just as the Louvre really shook me up into realizing just how inadequate 1965-1986 LACMA was, looking more closely at the Met's exhibition schedule (now and for the past several years) has done the same thing.
I originally had a vague sense that the LA Times art critic's opinion of LACMA perhaps was partly affected by a personal clash with Govan or Barron, etc. But, holy hell, if anything he has been too kind.
The way BCAM will or won't mesh with the Geffen Galleries in 2026 (and later) will say a lot about LACMA. Right now, for budgetary, technical and creative reasons, those buildings along with the Resnick Pavilion come off like the Museum of TikTok-Instagram Influencers and Starving Artists.
... In any case, Breton wrote the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. It formally crossed the Atlantic in 1942 when Breton gave a lecture at Yale. LACMA became its own museum in 1961. As with all pre-war, art movements, LACMA was late to the game.
It did have a chance to catch up with the Arensberg Collection. But the Board at the time did not recognize its importance. Arguably, in these parts, surrealism and Duchamp did not obtain intellectual legitimacy until 1963, the Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum.