Beginning in 1920s Europe, the avant-garde shifted to an investigation of the human unconscious. Processing the incomprehensible aspects of humanity and feelings of alienation encountered in modern society in the wake of World War I, Surrealism’s practitioners believed that the irrational mind offered a superior reality to that of the exterior realm—which they saw as a social condition shaped by conformist and restrictive ideologies. André Breton, Surrealism’s leading theorist, defined the movement in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924):

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. 

Due in part to its inception and influence outside the US, the movement’s presence in the history of American Art has often been discounted. The holdings of the O’Brien Art Foundation and The Marty O’Brien Collection of American Art reflect the range of styles and concerns that together, into the 1940s, formulated more of a surreal sensibility than one school or scene. Unlike European Surrealism, the related style percolating in the US tended to blend the social and surreal.

Through a series of exhibitions in the 1930s—Newer Super-Realism (1931) at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936) at the Museum of Modern Art—the works of figures like Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and André Masson informed a new aesthetic strain within American modernism.

Geographically, temporally, and culturally removed from the manifesto-driven mandates of European Surrealism—which focused on dreams and automatic thought as subject matter—artists working in the US adapted stylistic interpretations to their own narrative ends. Images varied from “super-reality” to abstraction of symbols and hieroglyphics. The latter can be seen in Werner Drewes’s Annunciation II (1945) and J. Jay McVicker’s Embryonic Forms (1949).

For example, Charles Howard’s The Mother (Makes the Son) Plants the Seed (1937) exemplifies disturbing imagery of disfigured human bodies and deconstructed environments reflect on wartime fear, existential dread, and spiritual disenchantment, which are also subjects in Ruth Gikow’s Psychosis – Two Napoleons and a Josephine (c. 1937) and Harry Brodksy’s What do my children build (1948). 

Other artists, including Julio De Diego and Gray Foy, considered the impact of all-encompassing technologies on American life and the human psyche. For example, Foy’s Untitled suggests a representation of speed itself: a disorienting phenomenon increasingly associated with technology pervading the everyday. In the words of critic and historian Robert Pincus-Witten: “[Foy’s works are] delineated with such delicacy that they render invisible the actual pressure of the mark upon the paper’s surface, as if the imagery miraculously had been blown into place.”

Here, a warped passenger train rushes along acutely angled tracks crossing seamlessly into an interior space lined with windows to the outside world. Populated by humanoid figures sprouting hair and biomorphic growths, the scene exemplifies one facet of American Surrealism’s combination of modern life and the fantastic—a combination Foy dubbed “super-reality.”

Artists working contemporaneously also adopted a style often called Social Surrealism to portray disquietude in the face of atrocities such as the economic strife of the Great Depression, rising fascism, and the violence of World War II as in Joseph Vogel’s Lament (1936). One figurative and the other highly abstract, respectively, Seymour Fogel’s Air Raid (1940) and Mauricio Lasanksy’s Dachau (1946) reflect the conflict and intensity of this period through high contrast, allegorical plays of dark and light.

Air Raid focuses on an abstracted human body rendered in a tortured pose, arms and hands splayed and surrounded by the chaos of sharp diagonals and skewed building parts. Dachau, titled after the longest running concentration camp built by Nazi Germany in 1933, is composed of aggressive and frenetic mark-making in shapes buried deep in shadow, just beyond intelligibility and gesturing to the inhumanity of this history.

In many works from this period, the human figure is similarly presented in impossible spatial situations that bring together the personal with broader social and political realities. Painted shortly after World War II, William Ashby McCloy’s The Bird Has Flown The Coop (1947) features a group of frail human-like figures with elongated limbs against a moody gray sky punctuated by doors to nowhere.

A phrase referring to escaping limits to freedom, the work’s title exudes a sense of simultaneous sorrow and rejoice at the war’s end, echoed by a soft white glow of sun peaking through the storm clouds. McCloy, a professor of art at both Drake University and the University of Iowa, worked closely with John Steuart Curry as assistant on his murals projects, the influence of which can be seen in the rural environs of this work and the murals McCloy made independently. 

Hughie Lee-Smith’s Artist’s Life No. 1 (1939) depicts individual figures at work on various artistic pursuits—painting, drawing, sewing, teaching—against a city skyline in the far distance. Speaking to the isolation experienced by many artists, especially his own as a Black artist, the painting renders figures in fragmented vignettes sectioned off by rectangular canvases throughout the composition. Making work concerned with racial disparities and oppression in society more widely, Lee-Smith often focused on what he described as feelings in his soul rather than the unconscious.

Artist’s Life, No. 1 was created during Lee-Smith’s time with the Karamu House print workshop, a community art center and the country’s oldest running Black theater based in Cleveland where he graduated in 1938 from the Cleveland School of Art. He often aimed in his work to realize the impact of art on social justice, especially as part of the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In turn, his practice retained an optimistic tone: the possibility of togetherness, exemplified in this image of community engagement.

The influence of Surrealism in the US frequently took on a regional character, as exemplified by artists like Dorr Bothwell who is represented in the collection by the screenprint Comment on Fashion (1947). Born in San Francisco, Bothwell moved to Los Angeles in 1934 where she worked with post surrealist imagery alongside artists Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg.

Another California artist, Claire Falkenstein, is represented in the collection by Values (1945). Although best known as a sculptor, during the 1940s, Falkenstein occasionally produced surrealist paintings, which combined Cubist elements with hard-edged abstraction and recalled Dada imagery from the 1920s. 

Like Bothwell, the Danish artist Knud Merrild was another figure influenced by Surrealism with a regional background. After immigrating to the US in 1921 where he landed in New York, the artist also found a home in New Mexico where he was in the orbit of the modernist writer D.H. Lawrence, and later, Los Angeles where he worked as a set designer among other related jobs. His work Alpha & Omega (1935) consists of oil cloth, magazine clippings, and newspaper, recalling the popular collage technique of Dada as a means to engage the constructions of mass media and consider the relationship of fine art to lesser valued forms of art, such as handcraft. In his incorporation of photographs, such as the cropped pin-up girl, Merrild nods to Hollywood and other tropes at the time that anticipated developments of Pop.

In Loren MacIver’s The Poet (1940), the artist takes as her subject the torso of a body with its neck shaped like a vase from which floral and star shaped marks spring. MacIver was the first female artist represented in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and particularly revered for her depiction of light. This can be seen in the washy blue background of The Poet, resonant with the hazy, dreamy backdrop of Anita de Caro’s Untitled (Spider) (1935) that lends the body in focus a sense of generative magic.