Surrealist Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Museum Overview
Originally the
Museum of Fine Arts (MFA)
in Boston was opened in 1876 and at that time it was located in Copley Square
where it was home to 5.600 works of art. As the years went by the art collection
at the MFA grew as did the number of visitors and in 1909 the museum moved to its
current location in Huntington Avenue.
Today the MFA houses nearly 450,000 works
and welcomes more than one million visitors every year who come to the museum to
see art collections ranging from Ancient Egypt to Contemporary or to see special
temporary exhibitions or to participate in various educational programs.
Plan Your Visit
When planning your visit to the MFA it is worthwhile checking their schedule on
their website in order to find out what special exhibitions are going on at the
time of your visit and also to check that all the galleries you want to see are
open and that there haven't been any sudden changes. From Saturday through Tuesday
the MFA is open from 10.45am-4.45pm and from Wednesday through Friday from 10am
to 9.45pm. Visitors are requested to enter at the Huntington or State Street Corporation
Fenway Entrance. If you need a hotel room near the museum, visit
Bostonhotels.org.
Surrealist Art at the Boston MFA
Surrealist artworks can be seen in the central gallery of the third level of the
museum. There you will find paintings displayed by surrealist artists such as Arshile
Gorky (1904-1948) who, after experimenting with a number of different types of art
eventually turned to surrealism in the 1930s, Roberto Matta (!911-1922) who was
one of Chile's best-known painters. Matta produced illustrations and articles for
surrealist journals such as "Minotaure". In the Charlotte F. and Irving W. Rabb
Gallery one can see "Nuage et Oiseaux" by Miro who was considered by the poet and
philosopher Andre Breton to be "the most surrealist of us all".
As mentioned above,
make sure you check the museum's website before your visit because if you are looking
for something specific like more surrealist work then you never know, there may
be a special temporary exhibition going on at that time that may interest you. An
example of one of these special exhibitions was "The Romance of Modernism: Paintings
and Sculpture from the Scott M. Black Collection" which included surrealist works
by Rene Magritte (1898-1967) whose many famous paintings include "The Empty Mask"
– s work which evokes the fear of the invisible which is a theme running through
many of this artist's paintings and it reflects the surrealists' fascination with
the unconscious.