An Art That Changed the Way We Perceive

Uniting words and images, the masters of Dadaism and Surrealism “changed the way one read or interpreted a work of art ever after.”

The speaker was Judi Freeman, associate curator of 20th-Century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and curator of “The Dada and Surrealist Word-Image,” on exhibit through Aug. 27.

Dada and surrealist artists may not have been the first to wed words and images, Freeman said in an interview, but what they did with language irreversibly altered the look of art and the way that art is looked at.

Take Rene Magritte’s landmark work “La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” When Magritte painted the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe) beneath a depiction of a pipe, the viewer realizes that he is not looking at a pipe but a representation of a pipe. “The artist used those words to say this image is not what you think it’s about,” Freeman said.

“Suddenly, in the evolution of art, the word becomes an additional voice in the work, where before lines and colors were the only voices. And it wasn’t just the way that words were used, it was the idea that suddenly anything goes. The use of words changed what was admissible in art; they opened up a whole new world and later artists felt a kind of freedom to introduce the unconventional into otherwise conventional modes . . . a concept that’s absolutely at the heart of modernism today.”

The show contains 72 paintings, photographic works and graphics, mostly from 1915 through 1940, by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Magritte, Joan Miro, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters and others.

The exhibit, relatively modest in size and installed beside the museum’s Frank Stella survey, looks “minuscule,” Freeman said. “But the contrast between the two shows is very telling. Stella is saying ‘what you see is what you see,’ and the Dada and surrealist artists are saying ‘what you see is only what you see, and that’s not all there is.’ ”

Organized by the County Museum of Art, the exhibit will travel to Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, West Germany.

OPEN CALL: The Palos Verdes Art Center seeks submissions for “Shoot For It,” a juried photography exhibit, Aug. 18 to Sept. 30. Photographers should send three slides and $10 to the center, 5504 Crestridge Road, Rancho Palos Verdes, by July 10. Cash awards will be given, and one artist will be the subject of a future solo exhibit at the center. A prospectus is available at the center. Information: (213) 541-2479).