Do You Love Dreams?

What should we make of the fact that six exhibitions of Surrealist art open in Los Angeles this month? Is there something millennial afoot? An insider plot to manipulate the art market? Couldn’t anybody come up with an idea for something new to show?

The answer is more elemental than any of that. Officially launched in Paris in 1924 with the publication of Andre Breton’s “First Surrealist Manifesto,” Surrealism pivots on the idea that knowledge of true reality can only be gained through insights of the unconscious mind.

Largely a figurative school, it continues to be one of the most accessible and greatly loved art movements of the 20th century for the simple reason that we all dream. Speaking in a conspiratorial whisper, Surrealism validates our glimpses of other realms and urges us to unleash the id and drift for a while in the ether, where desire is the law of the land. It’s an attractive invitation, and these six shows--three at the Hammer Museum and three in commercial galleries--will no doubt be well attended.

Originally a European school that began to fracture with the onset of World War II, Surrealism nonetheless has an auspicious history in Southern California, which has always had a reputation as a haven for dreamers and kooks. The subject of an exemplary exhibition curated by Susan Ehrlich and mounted last year by the Hammer Museum (“Pacific Dreams: Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art, 1934-1957”), Surrealism was introduced to the West Coast by the community of European intellectuals and artists who sat out World War II here. Traditionally dismissed as a hick town in terms of culture, L.A. rose to the occasion of their presence and embraced Surrealism with a staunch, if small, circle of advocates that included avant-garde collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg (who moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1924), dealers Frank Perls and Paul Kantor, and artist, art dealer and collector William Copley. (An heir to the Copley newspaper fortune, Copley, who died this year, is one of the great unsung heroes of L.A.’s nascent avant-garde.)

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Most of the original players are gone now, but as can be seen in this flurry of exhibitions,the work lives on. First up is “Rene Magritte: The Poetry of Silence,” opening today at UCLA’s Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, which offers Angelenos their first substantial look in more than 30 years at work by the great Belgian Surrealist.

Assembled by Hammer curator Elizabeth Shepherd, the art on view is largely drawn from Houston’s Menil Collection, which lent 33 of the 45 Magritte works on view. Spanning the artist’s entire career, the exhibition attempts to illuminate specific aspects of his sensibility.

Says Shepherd of the artist, whose work was first seen here in 1948 in a show at the Copley Galleries: “I wanted to give a sense of Magritte’s evolution; the early work is filled with a sense of apprehension and can be quite disturbing, while the late work tends to be more serene and has less of the dark edge common to the paintings he made as a young man.”

One of three sons born to a middle-class Belgian couple, Magritte was severely traumatized at the age of 14 when his mother drowned herself in the Sambre River near their home. He stood on the riverbank and watched as his mother’s body, her nightgown wrapped around her head, was dragged from the water; that image--of a head shrouded in cloth--was to turn up in several of his paintings.

Inspired by the work of Giorgio di Chirico, Magritte began in the 1920s to develop the Surrealist themes and images he’s become known for: incongruous juxtapositions; the blurring of the line that distinguishes interior and exterior settings; commonplace items such as combs and matchsticks swollen to gigantic proportion; birds, clouds, businessmen in bowler hats and boulders that appear to be levitating. The implied subtext in nearly all his work is that we mustn’t rely on what our eyes tell us in our quest to unravel the mysteries of life.

“The marvelous thing about Magritte was his ability to use commonplace things to stimulate thoughts on highly complex issues,” says Shepherd of the artist, who has a second exhibition now on view at the Montreal Museum of Art that is slated to travel to Dusseldorf, Germany, this fall. “At a glance, his work can seem like a simple visual pun, but on a deeper level he’s exploring complex philosophical issues--reality versus perception, for instance, or the relationship between abstract thought and the physical world.”

Opening in an adjacent Hammer gallery is “Visionary States: Surrealist Prints From the Gilbert Kaplan Collection.” A New York-based publisher and amateur conductor specializing in the compositions by Gustav Mahler, Kaplan began collecting graphic work by the Surrealists in 1970 when he was smitten with a work by Magritte.

“I was drawn to Surrealism for its ability to reveal how flexible the line can be between the real and the unreal,” says Kaplan, who built a collection of approximately 200 works by 23 artists and co-authored the 1982 catalogue raisonne “The Graphic Work of Rene Magritte” with Timothy Baum, a poet and scholar specializing in Surrealism. The Hammer show marks the first time Kaplan’s collection has been exhibited in depth, and several of the 120 works on display are extremely rare.

Wander out into the Hammer courtyard and you’ll find “Jean Arp Sculpture: 5 Forms,” a series of works created by the French artist who was one of the founding fathers of Dada. An art movement launched in 1916 largely as an outcry against the insanity of World War I, Dada is credited with preparing the ground for Surrealism to take root. The five Arp works on view span three decades in the artist’s career and chart the evolution of his relationship with abstracted organic form.

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Across town at the Manny Silverman Gallery is “Joseph Cornell: Collages and Box Constructions,” opening Thursday. Cornell first exhibited in Los Angeles in 1941 when New York’s seminal advocate of Surrealism, dealer Julien Levy, temporarily abandoned Manhattan for a year in L.A., where he mounted several bold exhibitions. Cornell was the subject of one of them, and the artist showed here again with William Copley in 1948, at the Ferus Gallery in the late ‘50s, in 1967 at the Pasadena Museum of Art (which gave him his first retrospective) and with the James Corcoran Gallery in the 1970s. His work hasn’t been exhibited here since then, however, making Silverman’s exhibition big news.

An eccentric recluse who lived for 54 years in the same house in Queens, N.Y., until his death in 1972, Cornell devoted his life to the fabrication of collages and small assemblages, created in wooden boxes, that were essentially shrines to the things that enchanted him: starlets, the nighttime sky, cherished trinkets, Victorian mementos, relics of the physical world such as gems, fossils and butterflies. Though deeply melancholic, Cornell’s work is rigorously austere in composition and execution. Hence, it never lapses into the merely quaint or sentimental; rather, it speaks in hushed tones of an imploded universe where loneliness and delight have merged into one.

“Cornell speaks to people on many different levels and the interest in him is steadily growing,” says Silverman of the artist, who’ll be the subject of four exhibitions opening this fall in Europe. “Fortunately, Cornell was incredibly prolific and never had that moment in his career when every collector felt they had to have one of his pieces, so his work hasn’t all disappeared into private collections.

“It is, however, nearly impossible to get works from the ‘40s because he was producing less work then. So I’m mostly showing later work from the ‘50s and ‘60s, many of which deal with key Cornell motifs--penny arcades, constellations, the Medicis and apothecary jars.”

The show comprises 22 boxes and 12 collages obtained from New York’s C&M; Arts, which handles the sales of any works deemed suitable for de-acquisition by the Cornell Foundation, administrators of the artist’s estate.

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Also noteworthy is “Man Ray: Paris/L.A.,” an ambitious exhibition opening Saturday and jointly presented by the Track 16 and Robert Berman galleries in Bergamot Station. The two galleries share the same building and are knocking out a wall to create a single, large environment for the show.

America’s most critically acclaimed Surrealist, Man Ray was born in Philadelphia in 1890 but moved in 1921 to Paris, where he spent the next 19 years developing the work that established his career. Forced to return to America in 1940 by the war, he settled in L.A. planning to hustle the film industry, as film was one of many forms he experimented with. The studios wanted nothing to do with an avant-garde artist, however, and the 11 years he spent here were disappointing.

His debut show here took place in 1941 at the Frank Perls Gallery and failed to sell a single thing. In the five-year period following his arrival, he had six museum shows (two of them at the Los Angeles Museum of History and Art); this may have been great for his ego, but it didn’t help much financially. It’s not surprising that the artist left L.A. in 1951 and returned to Paris, where he’d made a comfortable living, and never looked back.

Man Ray, who died in 1976, has been the subject of numerous museum shows, including retrospectives at LACMA in 1966 and at MOCA in 1989. To find him in a commercial gallery with 200 works for sale, however, is rare indeed. How did dealers Robert Berman and Tom Patchett of Track 16 pull it off? It’s a long story, Berman says.

“Following Man Ray’s death in 1976, his widow, Juliet Ray, hung on to everything, and as the demand for his work increased in the years after he died, she began hiding things,” Berman begins. “Consequently, by the time Juliet died in 1991, her four brothers [the executors of the estate] inherited a lot of work. The French government stepped forward at that point demanding a huge amount of money from them, so they struck a deal: An auction would be held and enough work would be sold to settle their debt to the government. Any remaining works could then be taken out of the country by the brothers.

“More than 600 works were sold at the auction, which was held last year in London,” he continues. “I attended the auction with Tom Patchett and together we bought 50 works, all of which will be included in the show [95% of the works on view here are for sale]. We’re also exhibiting works loaned by Timothy Baum, work obtained directly from the estate and a few things acquired from various sources.

“Man Ray produced a lot of art, so we narrowed our focus to works pertaining to L.A. The exhibition also includes letters and ephemera, as well as several works Man Ray owned by other artists, such as Henry Miller and Bill Copley.”

The key piece in the Bergamot show is “Le Beau Temps,” says Berman of the final painting Man Ray completed in Paris before leaving for the United States. A bleak accounting of the sins Man Ray saw the human race committing as it moved toward war, the painting is on loan from a consortium of French dealers and collectors who purchased it in last year’s auction.

“My hope is that it will be acquired by an American institution because it belongs here,” says Berman, who sees the painting as a bridge between Man Ray’s years in Paris and L.A.

For more Man Ray, Magritte and Cornell, one can visit “Imaginary Realities: Surrealism, Then and Now,” which opens Thursday at Louis Stern Fine Arts in Hollywood. A group show combining pieces by first-generation Surrealists such as Salvador Dali, Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst with art by contemporary artists from the United States and South America who employ Surrealist strategies, the exhibition features works by 31 artists. Among them is Ed Ruscha, whose show of new work, “Vowels,” a series of 100 books with vowels painted on the covers, opened last week at the Larry Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills.

And the beat goes on. . . .

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Surrealism in L.A.

Dates and times for the upcoming Surrealist and Dada exhibitions:

“Rene Magritte: The Poetry of Silence,” “Visionary States: Surrealist Prints From the Gilbert Kaplan Collection,” “Jean Arp Sculpture: 5 Forms,” UCLA’s Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. Opens today. Regular schedule: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Through Jan. 5. (310) 443-7094.

“Joseph Cornell: Collages and Box Constructions,” Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood. Opens Thursday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends Nov. 19. (310) 659-8256.

“Man Ray: Paris/L.A.,” Track 16 Gallery and the Robert Berman Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica. Opens Friday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Ends Dec. 27. (310) 264-4678, (310) 315-9506.

“Imaginary Realities: Surrealism, Then and Now,” Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood. Opens Thursday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Fridays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends Nov. 12. (310) 276-0147.

Ed Ruscha’s “Vowels,” Larry Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills. Tuesdays to Fridays, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Ends Sept. 28. (310) 271-9400.