SPRING PROGRAMS 2015
“Surrealism and the
Search for the Marvelous
through the Visual Arts”
Dr. Dennis Raverty, Art Historian
Partly Funded by the New York Council for the Humanities
May 27, 2015
Andre Breton, founder of Surrealism, was a medical student when he enlisted as a psychiatric nurse during the First World War. His theories led him to diagnose war as an illness, with Europe as the patient suffering a collective “nervous breakdown”. Surrealism sought to channel, into works of art, the collectively repressed frustrations that had led to the devastation; the irrational juxtapositions and hallucinatory images created a movement unlike any other.