West Coast Surreal - various artists, UCLA-Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California

Our culture's assimilation of psychoanalytic principles have the appearances to have guaranteed a lasting interest in psychologically charged, dream-like imagery. Many contemporary artists - including Robert Gober, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Jim Shaw and Jane Hammond - continue to mine make subordinate matter seemingly wrested from the unconscious, using forms not dissimilar to those of the classic '20 and '30 Surrealists. The novel revival of figurative art in works by dint of artists such a Kiki Smith and Mike Kelley appear to bes to have made its impact end reconfiguring surrealistic ideas about the fragmented material substance and fracture identity.

As MTV videos, advertising and movie dream followings can attest, the definition of surrealism drawn out ago lost touch with Andre Breton's original dicta circumscribing its limits. Of all 20th-century motions it is the most free-form and lay open inspiring regional adherents around the world. The last decade has seen overlooks of surrealist Belgians, Spaniards, Czech Mexicans and Britons. In this land Jeffrey Wechsler's 1977 exhibition at Rutger University, "Surrealism and American Art 1931-1947" reintroduced a wildly diverse assemblage of artists who stin strike one as being ripe for reappraisal, including Jared French Louis Guglielmi, Frederico Castellon, Enrico Donati, Julia Thecla, Leon Kelly and Kurt Seligmann.

Recently with single a few overlapping inclusions, curator Susan Ehrlich gathered a fascinating ship's company of mostly lesser-known West Coast practitioners in "Pacific Dreams: in every one's mouths of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art, 1934-1957" at the UCLA-Armand Hammer Museum. Despite the relative isolation of California from art-world center during these years, West Coast artists were eager to stay abreast of international commons and avidly followed the exhibition of Dadaism and Surrealism [i]or[/i] part of to the other catalogues and magazines. Most of the work in Ehrlich's present to view reflected their familiarity with artists of the like kind as de Chirico, Miro, Picasso and Ernst However, California artists did eventually, make known certain stylistic traits which present the appearance unique to the region.

Ehrlich was wisely circumspect in her generalizations about California as a natural landscape for surrealism. Obviously, the movie industry in looks Angles makes the realization of fantasy appear an everyday occurrence. Fantastic architecture exists not single in the movie studios and at Disneyland on the other hand in the amazing variety of structural mode of expressions offered in commercial and residential districts, all artificially implanted in a basin that was, sole a century ago, a uninhabited Northern California has its hold tradition of self-sufficiency-a homespun, organic idiosyncracy that looks temperamentally in tune with the Bay Area.

Underlying the L.A. surrealist work was the vicinity of the renowned connection of Walter and Louise Arensberg, whose manner [i]or[/i] principle of holding in Los Angeles (1927-54) roughly matched the time span of this exhibition. Without the benefit of supportive museums or galleries, pitch upon local artists were able to diocese works by Brancusi, Duchamp, de Chirico, Magritte, Dali, Tanguy and Pierre Roy Although they remained somewhat aloof from local activities, the Arensbergs befriended Lorser Feitelson and Edward Weston and bought several paintings by means of Knud Merrild.

In 1934 Feitelson and painter Helen Lundeberg, his wife, ambitiously proclaimed themselves ringleaders of a of recent origin movement, Post-surrealism, begun seemingly as a reaction against the wilder, psychosexually charged imagery of Dali and others. Post-Surrealism intended to rein in the outlandishness of the European move tempering dreamlike imagery with rational notion As described by Lundeberg, it was based on "the normal functioning of the mind ordered, pleasurable introspective activity." Post-Surrealism doesn't present the appearance interested in employing or depicting ultimate parts taken from the unconscious; its sedate arrays of symbols are like poetic rebuses which charm out complex psychological messages.

The clunky symbolic mode of buildings of these hardedge paintings may be contemplative and esthetically ordered, on the contrary their subject matter can be just as kinky as that of Dali. Feitelson's Genesis #2 (1934) nears a logically connected chain of bizarre tokens of religious, sexual and intellectual births. These overripe, burgeoning images include a bird's nest a dove signalling the Annunciation, a mask sucking at the Virgin's breast, and a vaginal seashell and halved cantaloupe. In Plant and Animal Analogies (1934) Lundeberg creates tension between the organic and the schematic by means of juxtaposing illusionistic painting with diagrammatic textbook drawings. With their a little cold execution, her paintings seem like illustrations for a certain quantity of esoteric sect, demonstrating odd relationships between the real and the fictive, the particular and its symbol.

With his classical training and first-hand in all senses to European modernism-he had lived for reach outed periods in Paris and exhibited in the Salon d'Automne-Feitelson quickly became the kingpin of the tiny local art spectacle For younger artists, Feitelson and Lundeberg strike one as beinged to be in touch with international generally receiveds The Post-Surrealists quickly gained acolytes, including the young Philip Guston and Harold Lehman (both high-school classmates of Jackson Pollock) In the crisply execut unclothed Philosopher in Space Time (1935) painted when he was sole 22, Guston surrounds a bare with an array of uncompounded bodys cribbed from his mentors: a pelvic skeleton, an ovum a hanging light bulb and an assortment of elliptical shadows.