During such cataclysmic events in Europe as the Spanish Civil War and World War II, many émigré artists found a welcoming home in Mexico City. Figures such as Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Wolfgang Paalen and Alice Rahon spent significant years in the Mexican capital. Each of them was associated with Surrealism as it had developed in Europe under the watchful eye of Andre Breton, the "high priest" of the movement (who had also come to Mexico in the late 1930s). Their work was shown side-by-side or shared affinities with that of Mexican painters such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Carlos Orozco Romero and María Izquierdo and many others. This lecture will explore the complex and fascinating reasons why Surrealism enjoyed such popularity in Mexico around 1940 and how Mexico City rivaled Paris as a center of Surrealist artistic invention.

Edward J. Sullivan is professor of the history of art at New York University. He is the author of over thirty books and exhibition catalogues in the field of Latin American and Caribbean art. Much of his scholarship has focused on Mexican art of the twentieth century. Among his most recent publications are The Language of Objects in the Art of the Americas and Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico 1935-1950.

Mexican Cultural Institute
2829 16th Street NW DC
6:30pm, February 7th 2013
Free Admission, RSVP recommended:
rsvp@instituteofmexicodc.org