But the work also incorporates another, more fugitive set of forms: the geometric shadows cast by the sculpture’s components on the surrounding surfaces, thereby extending and augmenting the sculpture’s planar structure so convincingly that it’s difficult to tell at a glance where the metal begins and ends. (The first time I saw this work in person, I mistook one particularly sharp-edged shadow for gray paint.) Yet this description is in many respects misleading, or at least very partial. Look from a different angle, and you will see something else entirely: a flat vertical rectangle that gives way to an openwork cube, delineated by two irregular planes that meet at a right angle, echoed by a zigzagging shadow below. The sculpture isn’t a static arrangement of geometric forms so much as a changeable sequence of distinct views and spatial relationships made possible by the viewer’s perambulations. It doesn’t merely occupy space, it defines it, giving it a kind of palpable presence of its own.

When the Museum of Modern Art in New York reopened in 2019, Spatial Composition 5 was among the works given new prominence in its dramatically overhauled collection galleries. More recently, in early 2022, it anchored an arrangement of works at MoMA titled “Katarzyna Kobro: Shaping Space,” an intergenerational survey of geometric abstraction including works by Kobro’s colleagues and contemporaries (Aleksandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, László Moholy-Nagy) as well as postwar artists like Donald Judd, Lygia Clark, and Ulrike Müller. Spatial Composition 5 is, however, not part of MoMA’s collection at all, but a five-year loan from Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland. That institution, cofounded by the artist and her husband, the painter Władysław Strzemiński, in 1931—making it the second-oldest modern art museum in the world, after MoMA itself—has long served as the primary repository for the couple’s works.

Fewer than 20 of Kobro’s sculptures are still extant, supplemented by a handful of posthumous reconstructions made by art historian and curator Janusz Zagrodzki and Kobro’s former student Bolesław Utkin between 1968 and 1972. The rest were casualties of 20th-century Central European history: some were discarded by the Germans who commandeered Kobro’s Łódź apartment after the artist and her family fled following the Nazi invasion of the city in 1939; others, Kobro burned after running out of firewood during the brutal winter of 1945. Those that survived did so against the odds: Kobro’s and Strzemiński’s works, along with the rest of the modernist art in the Muzeum Sztuki collection, were officially declared degenerate in 1941. Yet this limited oeuvre is among the most decisive in the entire history of modernist sculpture, for it attempts to resolve two conflicting imperatives in modernism, and especially the Constructivist tradition: a deep commitment to formal experimentation on the one hand, and to social utility on the other.

Though the significance of her work has been acknowledged only intermittently, Kobro isn’t exactly unknown. She has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, with and without Strzemiński, at major museums since at least the 1970s. In January, she was the subject of a Google Doodle in honor of her 124th birthday. Though gender and geography have been barriers to Kobro’s full canonization, her work also poses certain intractable problems for our understanding of modernism’s historical trajectory. As art historian Yve-Alain Bois argues in his 1984 essay “Kobro and Strzemiński: In Search of Motivation,” Kobro’s and Strzemiński’s works of the interwar years arrived at once too early and too late, shockingly anticipating the formal and theoretical signposts of postwar modernism—medium specificity and Minimalist sculpture’s “theatrical” concatenation of space and time—in a way that not only alters that trajectory, but fundamentally threatens its ideological foundations.

Three decades later, the story of modernism has been pretty thoroughly troubled, as best exemplified by MoMA’s flexible rehang itself, which not only introduced artists from the margins of the canon, but provocatively incorporated teleological ruptures into the display, like the juxtaposition of Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1906) and Faith Ringgold’s Die (1967). Perhaps it’s time to ask again: what happens to the history of 20th-century sculpture if we try to account for the timing of Kobro’s works? And where might it have gone if her career had not been cut short?

THOUGH THEIR NAMES ARE SYNONYMOUS with Poland’s interwar avant-garde, both Kobro and Strzemiński spent their formative years in the waning Russian Empire, and began their careers amid the post-revolutionary ferment of the early Soviet Union. Born in Moscow in 1898 to a Baltic German father and Russian mother, Kobro was raised primarily in Riga, returning with her family to Moscow as a teenager at the onset of World War I. She first met Strzemiński—an ethnic Pole born in Minsk and initially educated as an engineer in St. Petersburg—in 1916, while volunteering at a military hospital where he was a badly wounded patient, having lost both an arm and a leg in battle as an officer with the imperial army.

Kobro began her artistic training in 1917 at the Moscow School for Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, where she joined the Left Federation of the Moscow Union of Painters, led by Olga Rozanova, Malevich, and Rodchenko, and continued her studies there when the school reformed as SVOMAS (the Free State Art Studios) the following year, when Strzemiński also enrolled. SVOMAS had little in the way of a fixed curriculum; workshop leaders were elected rather than appointed, and students were free to choose which one to join. Kobro gravitated to Vladimir Tatlin, Strzemiński to Malevich. Though neither student was a particularly dedicated Communist, the pair enthusiastically participated in early Soviet artistic life, relishing the experimental freedom of these reconstituted institutions and the state’s initial openness to the avant-garde.

Strzemiński began working for IZO Narkompros (the fine art section of the People’s Commissariat for Education), codirecting the All-Russian Bureau of Art Exhibitions with Antoine Pevsner; Kobro, who remained enrolled at SVOMAS, was aligned with—though seems never to have formally joined—the radical student group OBMOKhU (the Society of Young Artists), whose members were at the forefront of the development of Constructivism. In 1920, Strzemiński was appointed to run a regional IZO branch in the provincial western city of Smolensk, and Kobro followed him there a few months later. The artists, who had maintained close ties with Malevich, by that time based in nearby Vitebsk, established a teaching studio modeled on Malevich’s UNOVIS and created agitational graphics for ROSTA, the Russian Telegraph Agency.

Only three of Kobro’s sculptures from this era have been conclusively identified, none of which survives. Her earliest known work, ToS 75—Struktura (1920), is reproduced in the couple’s 1931 book Composing Space: Calculating Space-Time Rhythms with the caption “contrasts of facture and form in materials.” The sculpture, a compact, columnar assemblage of found objects and industrial scrap—machine parts, bolts, screws, bits of wood and cork, and, at the top, a glass panel with “ToS 75” inscribed on either side—is clearly indebted to Tatlin’s constructions, reflecting his emphasis on what he called the “culture of materials.”

A pair of works probably made in Smolensk in 1921–22 reflects a significant shift in direction. Known as Suspended Construction 1 and 2, they were designed to hang from barely visible lengths of wire, as if floating in space, not unlike the hanging constructions Rodchenko showed at the third OBMOKhU exhibition in spring 1921. Suspended Construction 1 featured a solid ovoid form, likely painted white and hung at an oblique angle, with a thin metal rod projecting from its bottom and a dark cube affixed to the side, while Suspended Construction 2 took the form of a metal Möbius strip with a cross and a circle attached to a serrated arm.

By 1922, the political winds in the Soviet Union had shifted: IZO was reorganized the year before, with the party bureaucracy asserting tighter control over artistic production and institutions. Kobro and Strzemiński also recognized that their outlook was increasingly at odds with that of their former Constructivist colleagues, who adopted the motto “art into production” while redefining the artist as a new kind of privileged engineer or inventor whose works belonged on the assembly line rather than in the exhibition hall. In his essay “Notes on Russian Art” (1922), published in the Polish Futurist journal Zwrótnica, Strzemiński offers a scathing assessment of Productivism, characterizing it as not only a misguided abandonment of art’s true purpose—“the rebellion of technology against art, led…by the artists themselves”—but also a kind of poisoned chalice. “Productivist trends are an outcome of a compromise between new art and the authorities in the Soviet Union,” he writes, presciently concluding that “in Russian conditions, art either exists as official art or does not exist at all.” Deciding that their situation was no longer tenable, Kobro and Strzemiński illegally crossed the border into Poland, where they spent the rest of their careers.

If these two artists rejected the Productivist imperative to direct their artistic skills toward expressly utilitarian ends, it was not out of an apolitical dedication to art for art’s sake. In fact, they believed that their Soviet colleagues, eager to leave the “laboratory” phase of Constructivism behind, had foreclosed on art’s true capacity for utility, which lay not in designing consumer goods or architectural interiors, but in researching and articulating essential principles of form while discovering new ways to inhabit and activate space. The lessons of that practice could be applied to almost anything, including the organization of social life as a whole.

OVER THE COURSE OF THE 1920s, Kobro and Strzemiński developed the theoretical program they would eventually term “Unism.” Along the way, they belonged to a succession of mostly short-lived avant-garde groups in Poland, whose internal disputes helped them refine their position. Blok—short for the Bloc of Cubists, Constructivists, and Suprematists—was active from 1924 to 1926, publishing 11 issues of an eponymous journal, before falling apart over tensions between Strzemiński and fellow cofounder Mieczysław Szczuka, an ardent Communist who rejected conventional media like painting and sculpture in favor of the agitational potential of typography and photomontage.

After Blok’s dissolution, the couple, intrigued by the possibilities for putting their spatial research into practice, briefly joined the architecture-oriented group Praesens, but ultimately concluded that its members were too well-versed in the “architecture of compromise,” as Strzemiński later wrote. Finally, in 1929, with former Blok member Henryk Stażewski and poets Julian Przyboś and Jan Brzękowski, they formed Grupa “a.r.,” which alternately stood for awangarda rzeczywista (real avant-garde) or artyści rewolucyjni (revolutionary artists). Active until 1936, Grupa “a.r.” shared a loose aesthetic program, but its primary activity revolved around publishing theoretical texts and, eventually, organizing the Muzeum Sztuki’s founding collection of modern art.

Whereas the “Suspended Constructions” explored the interpenetration of sculpture and space by literally lifting pieces into the air, Kobro’s works of the mid-1920s, made after she settled in Poland, took up the possibilities of openwork construction. The works comprising “Abstract Sculpture 1–3”(all 1924) juxtapose eclectic materials and textures in the manner of ToS 75, but without its dense accumulation of matter. Instead, discrete elements are spaciously arrayed along a vertical axis, with the base absorbed into the composition rather than functioning as a mere support. In Abstract Sculpture 1, a metal hoop with a ball suspended at its center is flanked by two glass planes, the components all balanced atop a tall base without touching one another. Abstract Sculpture 2, by contrast, has a circular base that remains empty, with curving metal components affixed to either side to form a rectangle, with an aluminum loop dangling over the pedestal’s surface. The base of Abstract Sculpture 3 has been reduced to an irregularly shaped disc, on which Kobro has balanced a columnar arrangement of curves and planes.

Kobro’s real breakthrough, however, came the following year, in the form of her first Spatial Composition. Crystallizing her understanding of the relationship between sculptural form and ambient space, the nine known “Spatial Compositions,” completed between 1925 and 1933, are the clearest articulations of Unist principles in sculpture. In Spatial Composition 1, the base as such disappears: made entirely of painted steel planes arranged in an L-shaped plan, the sculpture is a sequence of partly enclosed volumes that frame rectangular voids. Spatial Composition 2 (1928), meanwhile, based around the repeated module of a square, is a study in the spatial effects of fixed proportions, suggesting a cube from which segments have been selectively redacted while prompting the viewer to still intuit their presence.

Other works in the series are more complex and disjunctive. Spatial Composition 4 (1929) likewise employs a fixed ratio (5:8:5) determining the relation between its parts, but adds a more elaborate polychrome scheme. The loosely rectangular structure of intersecting orthogonal planes, with a central white U-shaped curve, is precisely articulated yet subtly confounded through Kobro’s application of paint, distributing primary colors as well as black and gray noncontiguously across the composition, with each side of a given component painted a different color. As a result, the thin edges of each metal sheet take on a new sense of depth depending on the angle of view, changing from two dimensions to three and back again as the viewer circles the work.

In Composing Space: Calculating Space-Time Rhythms, Kobro and Strzemiński advance a novel view of sculptural history that doubles as both an explanation of and a manifesto for Unist work. Copiously illustrated with photographs and diagrammatic drawings of Kobro’s works, the text charts the trajectory of sculpture’s progressive merging with space, from what the authors characterize as the totally closed volumes of ancient Egyptian sculpture, through the “architectonization” of the Gothic, to the dynamism of Baroque sculpture (which “takes on properties that allow it to fly through space, drill a path through it, to overcome space instead of linking to it”). The history culminates in Unist work, in which sculpture and space become one.

Early advocates of the principle of medium-specificity, Kobro and Strzemiński argue that Unism manifests differently in painting and in sculpture. Because paintings have an inherent limit in the borders of the canvas, the painting’s true nature is to be self-contained and indifferent to anything outside the support. (Strzemiński’s “Unist Painting” series of 1931–34 beats Frank Stella to deductive structure by about 30 years.) Sculpture, however, has no such limits, thus the medium’s natural condition is to be unified with its surroundings. As a result, Unist sculpture posits an ambulatory perceiving body, incorporating not just space but the temporal aspect of movement. “Both sculpture and architecture should not be seen as static objects created by four discretely constructed sides,” they write, “but primarily as the process of the passage from one side to another, a function of the changes that happen when we move from one side to another, a spatial rhythm that occurs over time.” And since “any point in space has the same significance as any other,” a sculpture’s components must all be treated as equally important.

Composing Space hints at the implication of this approach: Unism is ultimately about the pursuit of ideal form—rational, nonhierarchical, economical, elegant, and functional—which was as true for social organization as it was for sculptural composition. In subsequent texts, Kobro was more explicit about the broader social vision embedded within her work. In a statement published in the magazine Forma in 1935, she criticized people unable to conceive of sculpture outside of conventional commemorative frameworks like the monument or the memorial. “Sculpture should become an architectural issue, a laboratory experiment into methods of resolving space, into the organization of traffic, an urban planning that sees the city as a functional organism, using the possibilities offered by contemporary art, science, and technology. It should reflect the desire for the supra-individual organization of society.”

Later, in the 1937 essay “A Sculpture Is…,” Kobro reiterates the idea that the Unist sculpture is intended not as a self-sufficient object, but a “laboratory experiment” designed to invent new ways of organizing the movement of bodies and objects in space. Art, she concludes, “should be neither a luxury nor an aesthetic contemplation of forms with which the artist has ornamented the surrounding reality…. The domain of art is the production of socially useful form.”

BY THE MID-1930s, Kobro had effectively stopped creating new sculptures, in part because of the 1936 birth of her and Strzemiński’s daughter, Nika, who was frequently ill and, like Strzemiński himself, required significant care. But it also hints at political shifts, namely the rise of fascism and the looming threat of another world war.

Was it still possible to be a utopian if you lived in Poland in 1937? Jarosław Suchan, a longtime director of Muzeum Sztuki, recently argued that Kobro and Strzemiński did not so much abandon their utopianism as “gradually [reorient] their efforts toward reality ‘here and now.’” This is evident in the increasingly functionalist tenor of both artists’ writings during these years, but also in their overriding focus on establishing a public institution for modernist art that would both promote and preserve tendencies that they knew were always at risk of being stamped out. (The recent purge of progressive museum directors, including Suchan, by Poland’s far-right government makes clear that the threat remains alive today.) Along with the other members of Grupa “a.r.,” they found an advocate in a Łódź city councilman in charge of the departments of culture and education, who offered them a space for their incipient collection. They then leveraged their international contacts, forged through groups like Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création, to successfully solicit donations of artworks from figures such as Hans Arp, Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Joaquín Torres-García, Theo van Doesburg, and Picasso.

Yet arguably such a dialectic between utopianism and pragmatism runs throughout Kobro’s Unist oeuvre, emblematized by the relative ease with which her works have been reconstructed. This is often mentioned as an aside, almost as if a stroke of good luck, given the cruel fate suffered by most of her pieces. But their capacity for reconstruction is fundamental to these sculptures, even if not explicitly acknowledged by the artist herself. In part, this is because Unism de-emphasizes the art object as such: each sculpture was a demonstration of formal and spatial relationships; ratios and proportions mattered more than scale; and none of the works, conceived as formal experiments rather than precious objects, were ever for sale. The massive outdoor replica of Spatial Composition 4 made for a 1986 exhibition in Elbląg, Poland, seems perfectly consistent with Kobro’s own intentions, perhaps even the sort of thing she might have tried herself if she’d had the requisite material resources. At the same time, the essential property of a sculptural idea is that it is relocatable, rebuildable. It would be too convenient, too mystical, to say that Kobro somehow presaged her work’s inevitable destruction, but she certainly spent enough of her life in motion, responding to shifting circumstances, to be skeptical about permanence.

When the German army arrived in Łódź in September 1939, the artists retreated with their daughter to the Eastern city of Wilejka (now Vileyka, Belarus), where Strzemiński’s extended family lived, only to find it occupied by the Soviet Union shortly thereafter. A few months later, they managed to return to Łódź, and attempted to recover the works they had left behind. Though Kobro refused to identify herself as a person of German descent on the Deutsche Volksliste, she opted to sign the so-called “Russian list” (made up mostly of anti-Soviet White Russian émigrés) against Strzemiński’s wishes, protecting the family against deportation or worse, but dooming her marriage—and her postwar career—in the process.

After the war ended, the couple divorced, and Kobro and others who had renounced their Polish citizenship during the occupation were prosecuted. While she avoided prison, Kobro was all but barred from participating in public artistic life: she was dropped from the rolls of the Association of Polish Visual Artists, preventing her from exhibiting her work or teaching, as she had done throughout the 1920s and ’30s, and was reduced to selling felt trinkets to eke out a meager living. She died of cancer in 1951, impoverished and forgotten.

Kobro produced only a handful of sculptures in her final, postwar years: a group of small plaster nudes that depict the female body as a compactly abstracted mass, defined by concave and convex modeling. In fact, the nudes were not so much a departure as a return. In the mid-1920s, alongside her first Spatial Compositions, Kobro created another group of nudes (three of which are known) that are incongruous with the Unist sculptural principles she was then working out. As she described in a response to a 1933 questionnaire published in Abstraction-Création, the nudes served as a kind of respite from the pressures of real intellectual and creative work: “I sculpt after nature as one would go to the cinema for a better rest.” In the 1940s, unable to maintain faith in the utopian aspirations that had driven her earlier, Kobro retreated into the intimacy of the individual body, exchanging a transformative social vision for a private one. 

This article appears under the title “Making Space” in the September 2022 issue, pp. pp. 56–63.

This room—an early favorite on critics’ best-of lists, not to mention a hit on Instagram during the opening—is emblematic of Alemani’s curatorial approach throughout the exhibition, characterized by visually stunning, often unexpected pairings of sculpture in the round with paintings or wall-bound works, deftly installed to meet the formidable spatial challenges posed by the Biennale’s main venues. And yet: what does placing Ursuţa and Trockel side by side tell us about either body of work? Mostly that the two artists employ complementary palettes.

Two sculptures by Hannah Levy (foreground) and paintings
from Kaari Upson’s series “Portrait (Vain German),” on wall.

I’ll admit that it feels a bit churlish, after two-plus years of remote viewing, to complain that an exhibition merely looks great. Alemani’s juxtapositions do, after all, tend to flatter the works. Elsewhere in the Central Pavilion, a set of new sculptures by Hannah Levy featuring silicone skins stretched over uncanny metal armatures anchors an arrangement of effaced and distorted figures dissolving into abstraction: Christina Quarles’s raucous paintings of warped bodies and Kaari Upson’s Portrait (Vain German), 2020–21, completed shortly before her death from cancer, a series of lurid, illegible resin and urethane casts of the surfaces of self-portraits she painted in thick impasto. Recent canvases by Jacqueline Humphries that travesty the expressive hand of gestural abstraction in allover compositions, featuring layered patterns of screen static and emoticons, are set against four sculptures from Sara Enrico’s ongoing series “The Jumpsuit Theme” (2017–), comprising pigmented concrete casts of workwear. Reclining on a shared low pedestal, the sculptures suggest both contorted limbs and looping script—and also, curiously, Humphries’s paintings, given their shared pastel palettes, white grounds, and evocations of bodily calligraphy.

Especially strong is the pairing, greeting visitors to the Arsenale, of Simone Leigh’s monumental bronze Brick House (2019) with a suite of black-and-white collagraph prints by the late Cuban artist Belkis Ayón. An eyeless bust of a Black woman whose torso takes the form of a domed hut, alluding to vernacular building traditions from West Africa and the American South, Leigh’s hybrid of body and architecture finds a haunting inversion in Ayón’s repeated renderings of the mythic figure Sikán, the lone woman featured in the lore of the secretive Afro-Cuban religious fraternity Abakuá. Here the princess, said to have been sacrificed for possessing or betraying a secret, is depicted as a dark silhouette whose sole facial feature is a pair of bright white eyes.

While the pandemic put Alemani in the unenviable position of curating the world’s most prestigious exhibition via Zoom, it also afforded her an extra year to plan, enabling impressive logistical coups like a mini survey of Portuguese painter Paula Rego. Many of the selected artists hail from outside the expected art-world centers, and, for the first time in the Biennale’s 127-year history, a small minority of them—21 out of 213—are male. (This is certainly a welcome demographic shift, though I could live without the celebratory invocation of “sisterhood” in the exhibition text.)

BUT HOWEVER MUCH THE SHOW succeeds as a formal exercise, it is remarkably insubstantial as an exploration of ideas, despite the elaborate theoretical and historical framework Alemani has marshaled around her selections. As she explains in the catalogue, the exhibition takes its cues from the mad dreamscape of Carrington’s stories, “a world free of hierarchies, where everyone can become something else, where humans, animals, and machines coexist in a symbiotic relationship that is sometimes joyous, sometimes disgusting.” From this, Alemani extrapolated three main themes—“the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; [and] the connection between bodies and the Earth”—linking Carrington’s Surrealist fairy tales, originally composed on the walls of her son’s childhood bedroom, to other, denser touchstones, namely Rosi Braidotti’s Deleuzian posthumanist texts, Donna Haraway’s by now iconic “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), and Silvia Federici’s notion of “re-enchanting the world,” all of which are cited repeatedly in the catalogue and wall labels.

Untitled drawings, all colored pencil and ink on paper, ca. 2008–2021, by Shuvinai Ashoona.

What this means in practice is a kind of phantasmagoria of the Surreal-ish, the animalesque, and the machinelike, yoking together works in a manner that too often careens between the flimsily pretextual and the didactic and overdetermined. Walking through the galleries, we face an endless parade of mutant, mutating creatures: Inuk artist Shuvinai Ashoona’s drawings depict encounters between half-human platypuses and walruses chatting in tunics and mittens in the Arctic, while the late Vienna Actionist Birgit Jürgenssen is represented by pseudoscientific renderings of curious specimens, like an insect with the body of a Swiss Army knife, or a sharply attired man with crustacean legs and claws sprouting from one side. Zhenya Machneva depicts anthropomorphized relics of Soviet industry in handwoven tapestries such as Echo (2021), which recasts the gaskets of an old furnace into a face’s gaping maw. Both Marguerite Humeau and Teresa Solar construct slick sculptural fusions of prehistoric fossils and aerodynamic vessels.

Extending the show’s theoretical matrix are five “time capsules” nested within the larger exhibition. These thematic mini-exhibitions of historical women artists are arranged in distinct galleries (designed by the Italian studio FormaFantasma, with colored walls, moody lighting, and plush carpet), and are meant to tease out alternate art-historical genealogies for the Biennale’s contemporary works. In the rambling Central Pavilion at the Giardini, the largest and most central of these mini-surveys, “The Witch’s Cradle,” which Alemani describes as the show’s “fulcrum,” gathers works by women aligned with Surrealism and related interwar movements who play with self-fashioning and the mutability of identity. Alongside the expected names—Carrington, Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, Claude Cahun—are more surprising ones, including the Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage and Josephine Baker, represented by a film recording of a 1925 performance at the Paris music hall Folies Bergère in which she dances a bare-breasted Charleston. “Corps Orbite” focuses on language and feminine embodiment, proposing a provocative, if dubious, alignment between the drawings and writings channeled by late 19th and early 20th century spiritualists, postwar concrete poetry, and Luce Irigaray’s conception of l’écriture feminine. “Technologies of Enchantment,” meanwhile, highlights women Op artists and kinetic sculptors who were marginalized within Italy’s 1960s Arte Programmata movement.

At the Arsenale, where the exhibition space dictates a linear path, two further “time capsules” are more directly situated as precursors to the newer works around them. “A Leaf a Gourd a Shell a Net a Bag a Sling a Sack a Bottle a Pot a Box a Container,” occupying a suggestively uterine chamber with curving walls and pink floors, features an array of vessel-like sculptures and objects that range from Ruth Asawa’s undulating wire constructions and Mária Bartuszová’s delicate plaster ovals that recall cracked eggs to 19th-century papier-mâché models of the female reproductive system belonging to the pioneering Dutch physician Aletta Jacobs. Just outside are recent examples of Thai painter Pinaree Sanpitak’s spare renderings of breasts abstracted into the form of bowls, and British-Kenyan ceramicist Magdalene Odundo’s anthropomorphized clay vases.

Untitled sculptures, 1984–86, by Mária Bartuszová.

The final subsection, “Seduction of the Cyborg,” invokes Donna Haraway’s conception of the cyborg—as a subversive embodiment of boundaries dissolved—to link the avant-garde fascination with prosthetic bodies to the turn-of-the-century figure of the independent, androgynous New Woman. The latter is represented in oblique self-portraits by Marianne Brandt and Florence Henri, and grotesque collages by Hannah Höch. Bafflingly overseen by larger-than-life archival glamour shots of the Dada Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Futurist dancer Giannina Censi, these historical predecessors give way to any number of bizarre contemporary interpenetrations of body and machine throughout the Arsenale: Dora Budor’s “Autophones” (2022), quasi-industrial constructions in wood that cross musical instruments with sex toys; Mire Lee’s Endless House: Holes and Drips (2022), a gory motorized installation of tangled PVC tubes oozing liquid clay; and Tishan Hsu’s synthetic prints patterned with orifices and screens.

ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, ALEMANI’S approach is less transhistorical than pseudomorphic, flattening all the works on view into one strange, hybrid form after another. Consider, for instance, Alemani’s impressively humorless catalogue description of Raphaela Vogel’s riotous installation Können und Müssen (Ability and Necessity, 2022), an oversize anatomical model of a disease-riddled penis carted along on a wheeled plinth by a procession of skeletal giraffes: “A world where animals have won out over humans.” Elsewhere, the consequences of that flattening are more pernicious, stripping away any sense of cultural or contextual specificity: numerous works on view show bodies communing and commingling with the landscape, ranging from Afro-Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino’s commanding watercolors that depict standing or squatting nude females with knotted roots and vines sprouting from their genitals and extremities to Zheng Bo’s “eco-sexual” video Le Sacre du Printemps (Tandvärkstallen), 2021, imagining erotic encounters between queer men and forest flora, not to mention Delcy Morelos’s room-size installation Earthly Paradise (2022), which envelops the viewer in a muddy sensorium of scented earth. But Paulino’s drawings—particularly the “Wet Nurse” series (2005), several examples of which are included here—reflect on the legacy of slavery and colonialism in Brazil and the ways in which value has been forcibly extracted from both Black women’s bodies and the land, while Bo’s video proposes a radical vision of harmonic interspecies coexistence.

Lingering over Alemani’s presentations, then, is an uncomfortable sense that the works on view exist in a state of generic timelessness. Indeed, the Arsenale even ends with a vision of a return to the garden: Precious Okoyomon’s To See the Earth before the End of the World (2022), a massive gallery transformed into a landscape of flora, butterflies, and gurgling streams, with hulking, earthen figures rising up from the ground, all of which will be progressively overtaken by invasive kudzu as it spreads throughout the installation, offering the hopeful possibility of destruction catalyzing a new beginning. This is, I suppose, the nature of dreams; and given how dismal the world looks beyond Venice, who wouldn’t want to dwell here for a while? But eventually, we all have to wake up.  

This article appears under the title “Venice Biennale” in the September 2022 issue, pp. 12–14.

Untitled stained-glass sculptures by Kristi Cavataro in her 2021 exhibition at Ramiken.

Tacked to the walls on either end of the South Bronx studio where sculptor Kristi Cavataro has lived and worked since graduating from Cooper Union in 2015 are two sets of exploratory drawings. On one side is an array of precise renderings showing complex configurations of three-dimensional geometric forms; on the other, a group of freehand abstractions in watercolor. These seemingly divergent impulses come together in Cavataro’s recent sculptures: suggestively architectonic, at times even machinelike, stained-glass constructions, most standing roughly three feet tall, that are crafted by hand through a laborious process of cutting, wrapping, and soldering individual glass tiles into intricate cylindrical compositions. The drawings (only a small fraction of which are ever fully realized) are a way for Cavataro to work through ideas quickly, examining different possibilities and permutations in order to decide “what’s worth pursuing and what’s physically possible.”

Cavataro created her first glass sculptures in 2018, during a residency at Lighthouse Works on Fishers Island, New York. She had no formal training in glass: up to that point, she had focused primarily on more conventional sculptural processes like mold-making and casting. As a result, she felt free to approach the medium unconventionally, without preconceptions about the “right” way to do things. The process she employs is an adaptation of the method developed by Louis Comfort Tiffany in the late nineteenth century—pieces of cut glass are wrapped in copper tape and then soldered, allowing for the creation of volumetric form—but to very different ends. “I think the fact that I’m a sculptor and I see this as a sculptural material,” Cavataro says, “is what allowed me to crack this open and work out something new to do with the technique.”

Untitled stained-glass sculptures by Kristi Cavataro in her 2021 exhibition at Ramiken.

Indeed, what’s most immediately striking about the sculptures is their confounding structural and material presence: alternately freestanding and wall-mounted, they invoke the association of glass with lightness and fragility, only to push against it, both in the technical complexity of their interpenetrating components and their surprisingly large scale. Among the ten untitled works in Cavataro’s first solo show, at Ramiken in Brooklyn in May 2021—several of which reappeared a few months later in MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York”—were a pair of safety orange arches connected by sky-blue rungs and propped up on matching stilts; a vaguely Corbusian cruciform tower in gray, intersected at regular intervals by mauve arms; an armature of conjoined red ovals encasing a checkerboard-patterned base sitting upright on the floor; and a trio of wormlike cylinders inching up the wall, their bodies formed from dazzling green ring-mottled glass.

While critics often assume these works owe a debt to Art Deco, Cavataro cites Minimalist and Post-Minimalist sculpture as a more immediate influence, particularly in her interest in seriality and modular composition: she tends to employ an iterative approach, reusing and reworking particular forms from one sculpture to the next, seeing how a given curve or joint might respond to different situations. “Once I figure something out with form, or shape, or geometry, or material, it opens so many doors and I want to go through all of them,” she says. “There’s a ‘what if this, what if that?’ conversation that happens with the forms, and that is what guides me.”

Kristi Cavataro: Untitled, 2019, stained glass, 34 by 21 by 9 inches.

Because of the pandemic, Cavataro spent much of the past two years alone in her studio, experimenting with materials and refining her process. Accordingly, the works have become increasingly ambitious. When I visited her studio in March, she was at work on a group of new sculptures, tentatively slated for a show at Ramiken in the fall, involving elaborate combinations of intersecting and interlocking components, on a new larger scale.

Though her ranging curiosity about materials has tempted Cavataro in other directions, her work with glass is just beginning. She’s interested in trying out “hot” glass techniques like casting, or making her own colored sheets instead of relying on commercial suppliers; recently, she bought some glass rods, used to make beads, and has been mulling over what to do with them. “It feels very unlimited,” she says. “I have a sense that I could do this for the rest of my life.”

This article appears in the May 2022 issue, pp. 52–53.

View of Zineb Sedira’s “Dreams Have No Titles” at the French Pavilion.

A close runner-up is Simone Leigh’s United States pavilion, which managed to meet the considerable expectations set up by the pre-Biennale hype cycle (including the requisite longform profiles of the artist in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and so on), and served as a welcome reminder of Leigh’s formal and technical range as a sculptor.

View of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s “Re-Enchanting the World” at the Polish Pavilion.

Another highlight is the Polish-Roma artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s installation for the Polish pavilion, comprising an ornate program of textile-based wall murals wrapped around the entire interior. Made from stitched scraps of fabric, the installation is modeled on the astrologically themed fifteenth-century frescoes in the Hall of the Months at Ferrara’s Palazzo Schifanoia, incorporating the Italian Renaissance iconography of the originals into a narrative cycle about Roma history and mythology. Similarly rooted in a sort of art-historical détournement is Ilit Azoulay’s project “Queendom” at the Israeli pavilion, for which the artist drew on an archive of photographs from the Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem documenting thousands of examples of medieval Islamic metalwork, most of which belong today to Western museums, to create new digital artifacts by extracting, manipulating, or combining their features.

View of Ilit Azoulay’s “Queendom” at the Israel Pavilion.

Other artists preferred to manipulate the pavilion buildings directly: Maria Eichhorn’s original proposal was to temporarily relocate the German pavilion during the Biennale so it would be simply absent from the show, then reassemble it, calling to mind her 2016 Chisenhale Gallery solo show “5 weeks, 25 days, 175 hours,” for which she mandated that the institution remain closed and the staff be given paid vacations for the entire run of the exhibition. Eichhorn’s final project is a more scaled back version of this initial concept, involving an excavation of the building’s foundation and the removal of portions of the walls to reveal the many structural changes and additions made to the original 1909 Bavarian pavilion by the Nazis in 1938. At the Spanish pavilion, Ignasi Aballí attempts to correct supposed “errors” in the building’s layout relative to its surroundings by rotating the pavilion by ten degrees through the construction of an additional set of walls, resulting in an irrational space full of dead zones and narrow crevices. Though the artists’ motivations for their architectural interventions were distinct, the end results are ultimately pretty similar (though Eichhorn’s is both more thoughtful and more formally interesting), suggesting the limits of hacking away at the pavilion as a form of institutional critique.

View of Marco Fusinato’s “DESASTRES” at the Australian Pavilion.

Some pavilions I never quite wrapped my head around: I was intrigued by the Australian entry, featuring a durational performance in which artist and musician Marco Fusinato continuously plays an experimental noise composition live during the Biennale’s opening hours, accompanied by a flashing slideshow of randomly generated images from the internet, but the sound was so ear-splittingly loud that I only lasted about a minute (and pitied the gallery attendants, who were, at least, mostly wearing noise canceling headphones.)

By day three, it was clear there would be no obvious runaway hit along the lines of Anne Imhof’s “Faust” at the German pavilion in 2017, or the Lithuanian trio Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė’s “Sun & Sea (Marina)” in 2019. There are plenty of things I’ve enjoyed, but few that I imagine we’ll all still be talking about five years from now.

Read the first and second installments of our Venice Diary. 

Cosima von Bonin, Axe, 2020, at the Giardini.

Indeed, painfully long lines—for food, for bathrooms, for the marquee pavilions—were the major theme of the day, and as a result I only made it through a fraction of my to-do list. I did, however, manage to catch Tomo Savić-Gecan’s elusive Croatian pavilion, a roving and, it turns out, practically invisible, performance that takes place at different times and places every day (announced each morning on Instagram), briefly co-opting other national pavilions in the process. By mid-afternoon on Wednesday, I started to think the pavilion was an elaborate troll, since no one I spoke to had actually seen it: perhaps the “performers” were the would-be viewers, allowing the unseen artist to herd them around the Biennale’s various sites as they waited in vain for something to happen. (There is, after all, a long tradition of experimental curating, barbed participatory art, and institutional critique in Croatian art.) But finally, I arrived at the designated site, the Finnish pavilion, at the appointed time, 2:56 PM, and, against the remarkably apropos backdrop of Pilvi Takala’s video installation “Close Watch,” for which the artist went “undercover” as a mall security guard for six months, a few of my fellow visitors began to act a little weird, albeit in a way one could easily miss if not scouring the crowd for any signs of exceptional activity: a man loitering in the back suddenly did a little hop and a pivot; a woman standing perfectly still abruptly bent her knees.

Works by Jana Euler at the Giardini.

At the Central Pavilion, which houses the second half of artistic director Cecilia Alemani’s exhibition “The Milk of Dreams,” a handful of slightly goofy sculptures by Cosima von Bonin adorned the building’s exterior, including a row of cartoonish sharks on the roof and a rainbow striped axe protruding from a column. These interventions in the pavilion’s otherwise austere architecture hint at the direction the show takes inside: colorful, eclectic, surreal, and prone to unexpected, sometimes insightful, juxtapositions. Katharina Fritsch’s massive sculpture Elefant/Elephant (1987), an exacting, almost life-size facsimile of the titular creature, stands atop a tall plinth in the opening gallery, towering over visitors as they enter. Nearby, a group of recent crystal sculptures by Andra Ursuta suggesting candy-colored alien specimens is set against a selection of Rosemarie Trockel’s monochrome “knitted pictures” from the mid-1980s to the present—machine-made knitted tapestries stretched over canvas—lining the surrounding walls. Elsewhere, a trio of trippy paintings by Jana Euler, known for her hyperreal renderings of impossibly contorted creatures, human and otherwise, flanks a sculptural work, great white fear (2021), comprising 111 miniature white ceramic sharks arranged on a low plinth. In another gallery, a group of new sculptures by Hannah Levy, in which the body is evoked obliquely through uncanny combinations of silicone, PVC, and metal, is combined with the wild figuration of Christina Quarles and a suite of ten pigmented resin wall reliefs by Kaari Upson, collectively titled Portrait (Vain German), 2020–21, cast from a thickly impastoed portrait painted by the artist, so the features are barely legible.

View of “Technologies of Enchantment” at the Giardini.

The show’s mostly contemporary works are offset by small thematic sub-exhibitions of historical women artists in color-coded galleries, described as “time capsules” or “cabinets” that ground and contextualize the show’s major themes. “Technologies of Enchantment,” for instance, focuses on women artists associated with postwar kinetic art movements like Arte Programmata and Zero, including works like Laura Grisi’s Sunset Light (1967), freestanding neon and plexiglass towers, and Maria Apollonio’s Op art reliefs, while “Corps Orbite” brings together Concrete poetry, Surrealist automatic writing, and various forms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century spiritualism as examples of practices rooted in embodied writing.

The largest of these sections, “The Witch’s Cradle,” which Alemani calls the show’s “fulcrum,” is unsurprisingly devoted to women Surrealists, featuring artworks and related archival materials by artists like Amy Nimr, Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, and, of course, Leonora Carrington, whose posthumously published book of eerie children’s stories lends the exhibition its title. It is, however, almost impossible to actually see the works on display, between the room’s golden yellow walls and carpeted floors, moody lighting, and their placement behind reflective glass, making this supposedly crucial gallery a baffling low point in a show that otherwise stands out for its thoughtful attention to the installation of artworks.

Read the first and third installments of our Venice Diary.

Detail of Precious Okoyomon’s installation To See the Earth Before the End of the World, 2022, at the Arsenale.

Any number of other works depict humans that have adopted the characteristics of plant and animal species. A suite of works on paper by the São Paulo–based Rosana Paulino portrays variations on the theme of a nude female figure developing roots, several of them with treelike trunks in place of legs, while a group of new paintings by Felipe Baize shows figures with human torsos and tangled vines or thorny stems for limbs, and Eglė Budvytytė’s video Songs from the Compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars (2020) captures a group of people communing with the landscape, eventually melding with it entirely as their bodies sprout fungi. Tonally distinct is Marianna Simnett’s bizarre, hilarious video installation The Severed Tail (2022), which announces itself to visitors via a long, furry tail peeking out from behind a red curtain and uses animal fetishes like puppy play to explore the boundaries between species. Most dramatically, the final room is given over to Precious Okoyomon’s large scale site-specific installation To See the Earth Before the End of the World (2022), for which the artist constructed a landscape of living plants like kudzu and sugar cane, dotted with figural sculptures made of wool, yarn, and mud that seem to sprout up from the earth itself.

There are also plenty of hybrids of the human-machine variety (not to mention cyborgian riffs on the Surrealist trope of the body in pieces by Tishan Hsu and Jes Fan), including Geumhyung Jeong’s Toy Prototype (2021), an expanded version of an installation originally commissioned by South Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, featuring a tabletop array of the artist’s awkward DIY robots. There’s also a group of works exploring data mining and artificial life by Lynn Hershman Leeson, including a suite of 2021 portraits from her “Missing Person” series that the artist purchased on a website selling computer-generated stock images, alternately printed here on mirrors and as a wallpapered grid.

Myrlande Constant, Guede (Baron), 2020, at the Arsenale.

Also ubiquitous at the Arsenale are tapestries and other fiber-based works, often drawing explicitly on the artists’ respective cultures and craft traditions, including Sámi artist Britta Markatt-Labba’s embroidered landscapes, a trio of exquisite sequined and beaded Vodou flags by Myrlande Constant, and Violeta Parra’s jute embroideries of the 1960s, inspired by pre-Columbian techniques and motifs, that depict scenes from modern Chilean history. Though seemingly abstract, Igshaan Adams’s wall-spanning tapestry Bonteheuwel/Epping (2021), made of eclectic materials including wood, beads, seashells, bone, and wire, alludes to one of the many “desire lines” that traversed apartheid South Africa: footpaths crossing segregated communities.

View of Jakup Ferri’s installation “The Monumentality of the Everyday” at the Kosovo Pavilion.

As far as the national pavilions at the Arsenale go, Ukraine is the must-see one, albeit mainly for reasons of solidarity: the pavilion features Kharkiv-based artist Pavlo Makov’s understated Fountain of Exhaustion. Aqua Alta (2022), comprising a pyramid of wall-mounted funnels, with water trickling down progressively more slowly. Originally created in 1995 to reflect on post-Soviet ennui, the work’s reception here is now inevitably colored by the war: a series of adjacent vitrines was meant to hold archival materials related to the original installation but, as a placard announces, they hadn’t arrived in time for the opening, a reminder of the remarkable logistical feats required to get the work to Venice in the first place, given

View of Skuja Braden’s installation “Selling Water by the River” at the Latvian Pavilion.

that the artist and his family have spent much of the past three months living in a basement shelter in their home city. (The same, I imagine, goes for many members of the curatorial team.) Makov’s somber installation was jarringly, if accidentally, juxtaposed with Jakup Ferri’s Kosovo pavilion in an adjacent gallery, a Day-Glo environment of paintings and patterned rugs covering the space’s walls and floors. But my favorite of the day was the Latvian pavilion, a ludicrous installation of hundreds of porcelain objects by the duo Skuja Braden, arranged into surreally domestic configurations: for instance, a vanity table lined with porcelain daggers, skulls, and painted votives, the feet of its ornate tufted chair capped by eyeballs. The press release mentions various buzzwords (Zen Buddhism, post-socialism, neoliberalism) by way of an explanation for this riotous mise-en-scene, but they’re hardly necessary; the work accomplishes an all too rare feat of speaking for itself.

Read the second and third installments of our Venice Diary.

This comparative ambivalence extended to the show’s contextualization of the movement. Whereas “Cubism and Abstract Art” advanced a causal history of modernism, tracing a direct genealogy from the broken brushwork of Impressionism to the faceted planes of Cubism, and from Cubist dissection of form to the abstract geometry of Suprematism and De Stijl, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” introduced a more haphazard lineage: the loose, transhistorical category of “fantastic art” encompassed an eclectic range of materials, from the work of premodern fabulists like Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Hieronymus Bosch, and William Blake, to art made by children and the mentally ill, advertisements, and even a Walt Disney cartoon. As Barr suggests, Surrealism is inherently resistant to the kind of formalist reading that anchored the previous exhibition: in the catalogue, he writes that under Breton’s leadership Surrealism springs from the ashes of Paris Dada after its 1922 demise, harnessing its predecessor’s anarchic anti-rationalism into a more systematic theoretical program, rooted in the exploration of the unconscious mind—but not in a corresponding aesthetic program. Surrealism was not a style, but a “mental attitude and a method of investigation,” as writer Georges Hugnet contends elsewhere in the show’s catalogue. This, for Barr, explains the fact that Surrealist artistic output tended in two formally irreconcilable directions: on the one hand, the dream imagery characteristic of Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte, in which impossible scenes are rendered with naturalistic precision, and on the other, the biomorphic pseudo-abstractions of André Masson and Joan Miró, rooted in the practice of automatic drawing. Per Hugnet: for the Surrealists, “what a work of art expresses formally is of no importance—only its hidden content counts.”

View of the exhibition “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage,” 1968, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Three decades later, with the 1968 exhibition “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage,” MoMA revisited the movement, this time retrospectively. In curator William Rubin’s account, two years after Breton’s death, European Surrealism is officially done as a living, breathing movement, the advanced art baton long since handed off to Abstract Expressionism and Pop in New York. While Rubin reiterates Barr’s sentiments about Surrealism’s privileging of a shared philosophy over a cohesive style, he nevertheless attempts to find a place for these unruly avant-gardes in MoMA’s essentially formalist narrative of modern art: “No matter what the radicality of an artist’s démarche, or his commitment to extrapictorial concerns, he sets out from some definition of art,” Rubin wrote in the show’s catalogue. “Hence, despite the postures assumed by some of the Dada and Surrealist artists, they were all in an enforced dialogue with the art that preceded them.” But even as Rubin sets out to bring Surrealism—scathingly, and in some circles fatally, dismissed by Clement Greenberg as literary, reactionary, and academic—back into the modernist fold, an element of Barr’s initial skepticism persists in his exhibition’s overdetermined narrative, which is, in the end, primarily concerned with the “heritage” of the show’s title. By the early 1940s, the Surrealist émigrés who flee Europe for New York during World War II have little left to say as artists in their own right, Rubin argues, but their arrival is nevertheless catalytic for the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. In this account, long dominant in Anglophone art history, Surrealism’s capital achievement is opening a door for a generation of wayward American painters, who quickly pass through it and never look back.

Critics and historians of modern art may have regarded Surrealism with suspicion but the public loved it: both MoMA shows drew significant crowds and traveled to multiple additional venues; that Rubin’s show was met by protesters—a mix of Yippies, Chicago Surrealists, and members of the anarchist art collective Black Mask—outraged at what they saw as the premature memorialization of a still-active movement only seemed to heighten its allure. In the popular imagination, Surrealism was stripped of its politics, understood instead as an art of outré hijinks embodied by the madcap figure of Dalí.

Lee Miller: The Cloud Factory, Assyut, Egypt, 1939, printed 2007.

This picture was complicated by the 1978 exhibition “Dada and Surrealism Reviewed” at the Hayward Gallery in London, which placed the production of little magazines and journals at the center of Dada and Surrealist activity, both as the movements’ “principal platforms” for reaching an audience and their most coherent articulation of group identity and collective authorship. Emphasizing the central significance of magazines likewise directed new attention toward the Surrealist use of photography, both in terms of its treatment of the found image and the camera experiments of Surrealist artists.

Rosalind Krauss cites the show as a turning point in her 1981 essay “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” in which she argues that the conventional art-historical privileging of painting and sculpture by figures such as Rubin had led to a fundamental misreading of Surrealist art. For Krauss, photography was not only the medium in which the Surrealists made their most significant artistic contributions, but “the key to the dilemma of Surrealist style,” namely its confounding lack of one. Informed by semiotic theory, Krauss argues that the crux of Breton’s hazily defined concept of “convulsive beauty”—and thus Surrealist aesthetics as a whole—is “an experience of reality transformed into representation,” emblematized by the uncanny manipulations of the real produced by Surrealist photographers. Krauss elaborated on this argument in 1985 in the exhibition “L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism,” co-curated with Jane Livingston, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., but Krauss’s dense catalogue essays, simultaneously published in the journal October, were arguably more influential than the show itself, recasting Surrealism as an art of fetishistic transgression rather than baroque fantasy, and an ideal screen for theoretical projection.

Marcel Jean: Armoire Surréaliste, 1941, oil on wood, 72 3/4 by 83 by 35 1/2 inches.

“Surrealism Beyond Borders,” which debuted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this past October and is currently on view at Tate Modern in London, attempts to shift the terms of Surrealist history once again. The show opens under the sign of exile: Marcel Jean’s Armoire Surréaliste (1941), a massive painting on hinged wooden panels bearing a trompe l’oeil rendering of a wardrobe’s doors and drawers opening to reveal a landscape stretching out into the distance. Made while the artist and his wife were stranded in Budapest—where they had moved temporarily from Paris in 1938 and then found themselves unable to return due to the war—it directs the Surrealist trope of everyday objects transformed into the stuff of dreams toward a more concrete, and politically poignant, desire for a secret passage to elsewhere. As signaled from the outset, the show’s conception of a Surrealism “beyond borders” is defined by people and concepts in motion, voluntarily or otherwise. Instead of a Paris-based interwar movement whose precepts and membership rolls were determined by Breton, Surrealism, in this telling, is an idea invented and reinvented in many times and places—Prague, Belgrade, Port au Prince, Mexico City, Tokyo, Cairo, Chicago, and, yes, Paris—with Breton’s inaugural circle one interconnected node among many. In a sense, the show proposes that Surrealism isn’t an art movement at all, but something more diffuse: a phenomenon, a network, an impulse in the air, or, as the show’s lead curators, Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, put it in their catalogue essay, a model of “rhizomatic connectivity.”

The choice of Jean’s Armoire Surréaliste as an opening salvo also hints at other more subtle but no less significant historiographic revisions that the show proposes. The first is its relatively late date, after what is commonly held to be the heyday of Surrealism, which is posited here as roughly the movement’s midpoint rather than its end—in fact, the show includes more postwar objects than prewar ones. The second is its medium, painting, conveniently and perhaps conservatively restored to the center of the Surrealist story, with both photography and Surrealist objects—sculptural agglomerations of incongruous found materials—largely confined to their own dedicated subsections, presented at the Met in small side galleries.

View of the exhibition “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” 2021–22, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Departing from Jean’s imaginary portal, the sprawling show unfolds as a sequence of broad thematic clusters that intermingle works from different periods and locations, leveling the priority of Paris and the heroic interwar phase. One of the largest groupings, “The Work of Dreams,” which was spread across a long wall at the Met in a playfully undulating hang, sets canonical examples of Surrealist dream imagery like Max Ernst’s Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924) alongside those likely to be familiar only to regional specialists. The Polish-Jewish painter Erna Rosenstein’s Ekrany (Screens, 1951) depicts the heads of her murdered parents floating, in grisaille, against a crisp blue backdrop, as if projected on one of the titular screens. Behind it is an eerie nocturnal forest, alluding to the nightmarish memory of the couple’s 1942 death in the woods at the hand of a smuggler who was supposed to help the family escape Nazi-occupied Poland. (The artist managed to survive the attack, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.) Skunder Boghossian’s Night Flight of Dread and Delight (1964), made while the Ethiopian-born artist was living in Paris, is a celestial panorama occupied by winged creatures soaring into outer space, synthesizing the influences of Coptic art, Négritude, the Surrealist paintings of Wifredo Lam and Roberto Matta, and the work of Nigerian magical realist writer Amos Tutuola.

Malangatana Ngwenya: Untitled, 1967, oil on hardboard, 43 7/8 by 75 3/4 inches.

Though the section “Beyond Reason,” which takes up the Surrealist antipathy toward logic and order, includes textbook contributions like René Magritte’s Time Transfixed (1938), portraying a miniature train hovering in midair as it speeds out of the fireplace of an elegant bourgeois interior, the wall text prioritizes the work of Japanese “Scientific Surrealists,” who responded to accusations of escapism from members of the country’s ascendant proletarian art movement by asserting they would use reason as a “weapon.” Koga Harue’s Umi (The Sea, 1929), for instance, among the show’s standout works, combines technological imagery from mass media sources—including depictions of a submarine, a German zeppelin, and a factory cross-section—into a mechanized seascape, with a young woman in a bathing suit and cap, copied from a postcard set depicting “Western beauties,” raising her arm to preside over the scene. Another section, “Revolution, First and Always,” juxtaposes Dalí’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), 1936, a gruesome depiction of a decaying body pulling itself apart in a desolate landscape, with an untitled 1967 work depicting a crowded field of graphically outlined monsters with bloodied claws and fangs by Mozambican painter Malangatana Ngwenya, an allegory for his experiences of political persecution as a member of the Liberation Front of Mozambique fighting for independence from Portugal in the 1960s.

These thematic groupings are punctuated by smaller sections devoted to “convergence points,” framed as particularly instructive hotbeds of group activity: Paris, with its Bureau of Surrealist Research, founded in 1924, serving as both a publicity organ and a clearinghouse for information and correspondence; Cairo, whose group Art et Liberté/al-Fann wa-l-Hurriyya issued a 1938 manifesto, “Long Live Degenerate Art!,” proclaiming art’s absolute independence from any state ideology; Mexico City, where many European exiles, including Breton, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, Wolfgang Paalen, and Alice Rahon, were drawn during and after World War II, making contacts with existing avant-garde groups like the circle around the journal Contemporáneos, eager for alternatives to the dominant muralism; and Chicago, where a countercultural Surrealist group formed in 1966, devoted primarily to the production of antiwar agitprop, direct action, and underground publications rather than conventional artworks. More unwieldy is “Haiti, Cuba, Martinique,” which doesn’t so much name a meeting point, or three, for that matter, as identify the homes of influential artists and writers who intermittently left for the metropole and returned, among them the Cuban painter Lam and Martinican writers Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, taking Surrealism and transforming it into a more rigorous and politically committed vision of antifascist, anticolonial liberation. Conversely, other sections function as case studies of lesser-known figures—the Illinois-born Black poet and jazz musician Ted Joans; documentary photographer Eva Sulzer, part of the circle around the Mexico City–based journal Dyn; and the Spanish painter Eugenio Granell—who exemplify the show’s emphasis on Surrealism as an art of “travel, exile, [and] displacement” by rarely staying in one place for long. Granell, for instance, a leftist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, fled Spain after the fall of the republic, initially for the Dominican Republic, until that country’s military dictatorship sent him into exile once again, then Guatemala, where he was soon driven out as a result of his opposition to an increasingly influential faction of Stalinist artists and writers. Eventually offered a teaching position at the University of Puerto Rico in 1950, where he remained for seven years before relocating to New York, he played an influential role in introducing Surrealism to the island: displayed alongside Granell’s own creaturely paintings are works by the members of El Mirador Azul (The Blue Lookout), a Surrealist group formed by his students, attesting to the long aftereffects of these itinerant wanderings.

Eugenio Granell: The Magical Blazons of Tropical Flight, 1947, oil on linen, 25 1/4 by 28 3/4 inches.

“Surrealism Beyond Borders” arrives at the tail end of a decade-long wave of “global exhibitions” like “Other Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum (2014) and “International Pop” at the Walker Art Center (2015): revisionist histories of canonical movements heretofore assumed to be the exclusive province of Western Europe and North America, now revealed to be far more dynamic and geographically dispersed. What distinguishes this one is that Surrealism was explicitly international from the outset; this was, indeed, part of its mythology and self-image. Surrealist circles sprang up around the world—the first ones, in Tokyo and Belgrade, appeared almost immediately after the Manifesto’s publication—with varying degrees of allegiance to Breton, adapting Surrealist ideas to local circumstances. Surrealism could be malleable enough to offer artists in different places whatever they needed from it: a rejection of the status quo, of bourgeois order, of colonial power, of social and political restriction. The Paris circle was also far from exclusively French, with many of its most recognizable participants arriving from abroad: Man Ray, Max Ernst, Magritte, Dalí, Miró. All this is acknowledged even in conventional accounts like Barr’s and Rubin’s, but taken primarily as a sign of Breton’s enlightened despotism and the Paris movement’s resounding success in disseminating its vision of the avant-garde. The show’s revision, then, is primarily a shift in priority or emphasis rather than a wholesale redefinition.

In eschewing chronology and, for the most part, geography, as organizing criteria, the curators wish to push against the perception that Surrealism is primarily a Parisian movement, bequeathed by Breton to provincial, often colonial, satellites. Rejecting the notion that the Surrealism practiced in Colombia or Turkey in the 1950s is merely a belated reiteration of the innovations of 1920s France, they insist, instead, that artists outside Breton’s immediate orbit had just as much claim to Surrealist strategies and watchwords.

Yet this thematic approach also largely lets Breton and company set the terms, unquestioningly accepting the categories and concepts that the Paris circle held up as central to Surrealist theory and practice, and slotting in works from elsewhere accordingly, giving each grouping a grab-bag quality. In many of the sections, the work is genuinely remarkable enough to distract from this categorical flimsiness; elsewhere it shows. In the wall text for the section devoted to Automatism, the concept is polemically introduced by way of the short-lived 1940s journal Surreal, based in Aleppo, rather than Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto, though neither the journal nor the Aleppo Surrealists’ work is actually on view. Instead, it is represented by an eclectic and mostly unremarkable group of works, largely characterized by anodyne abstraction. A massive canvas by the French painter Jean Degottex, L’espace dérobé (The Hidden Space, 1955), featuring two informel-ish slashes of muddy color on a grubby white ground, is perhaps the show’s nadir: an utterly nondescript work taking up too much wall space, with little to say about Surrealism’s postwar trajectory—particularly given that the artist never joined the group—except that, according to the wall text, Breton happened to be a fan. What is the advantage of including this work as an exemplar of automatism instead of, say, one of Masson’s 1920s sand paintings, for which he threw sand over spontaneously applied areas of wet gesso, allowing the resulting forms and the chains of associations they inspired to dictate the rest of the composition, if not simply for the sake of being noncanonical?

Ted Joans: Long Distance, 1976–2005, ink and collage on perforated computer paper, dimensions variable.

Moreover, this approach threatens to obfuscate as much as illuminate, avoiding as it does sufficient historical context to explain when, why, and how Surrealist practice took hold in different places, and what it meant at different moments, under varying sociopolitical circumstances. Is the everyday made strange in Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer’s Byt (The Flat, 1968)—a stop-motion short clandestinely produced in the run-up to the Prague Spring, in which a man is held captive by his seemingly possessed apartment—coterminous with that of Brassaï’s “Involuntary Sculptures” (1932), close-up photographs of found detritus, made monumental by the camera’s framing, or Raoul Ubac’s Le Combat des Penthésilées (1937), a solarized tangle of fragmented bodies, titled after Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 tragedy about the mythological queen of the Amazons? All three are yoked together in the section “The Uncanny in the Everyday,” which ostensibly explores how Surrealist photographers “tapped into the rich vein of estrangement embedded in the ordinary world,” but in practice flattens radically disparate work into an almost undifferentiated mass of weird pictures. The same might be said for almost all the show’s thematic sections. While the substantial scholarly catalogue fills in many of these contextual blanks, its form—dozens of short essays homing in on particular circles or phenomena—prevents a syncretic view. That this is by design doesn’t make it less frustrating: the show dedicates an entire subsection to the fascinating figure of Ted Joans, who committed himself to Surrealism as a child after encountering the movement in copies of avant-garde periodicals like Minotaure tossed out by his aunt’s white employers, formally joining the movement after a chance encounter with Breton in Paris in the early 1960s, yet after multiple visits to the exhibition and a close read of the catalogue, I remain unsure of who else belonged to the group at the time of his arrival.

Nevertheless, the exhibition’s accomplishments are undeniable, not least in the sheer volume of research undertaken by the curatorial team (D’Alessandro and Hale, along with Carine Harmand, Sean O’Hanlan, and Lauren Rosati), highlighting any number of heretofore marginal figures in the annals of Surrealism whose future prominence now seems assured. Its most decisive intervention is in putting to rest the long-held belief that Surrealism had sputtered out by the onset of World War II, just as art-world hegemony passed from Paris to New York: as the show makes abundantly clear, outside that particular Atlantic axis, Surrealism took new shape in response to a radically reoriented postwar world order.

Kitawaki Noboru: Diagram of I Ching Divination (Heaven and Earth), 1941, oil on canvas, 35 3/4 by 45 3/4 inches.

But there is a fundamental question that the show refuses to answer even provisionally, and without which its narrative collapses under the weight of methodological indecision: what makes an artist a Surrealist? The show’s criteria for inclusion is murky, encompassing both those who explicitly identified with Surrealist groups and “fellow travelers” who participated in Surrealist activities or circles without ever formally joining, along with artists like Hector Hyppolite and Maria Izquierdo, whose works were claimed by Breton for Surrealism, regardless of their own interests and motivations, and others with no direct connection to Surrealism at all, among them Yayoi Kusama (who has explicitly denied a Surrealist element to her work) and the Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Golestan, killed by a landmine on assignment in Iraq in 2003, included on the basis of a striking, if uncharacteristic, 1976 photographic series, “Az Div o Dad” (Of Demon and Beast), comprising composites of Qajar Dynasty monarchs and animals made by holding archival images in front of the camera with the shutter left open. On the other hand, I will admit to being stumped by Kitawaki Noboru’s spare and schematic painting Diagram of I Ching Divination (Heaven and Earth), 1941, which seems fundamentally remote from Surrealist concerns as elaborated elsewhere in the exhibition, regardless of the artist’s self-identification. In attempting to keep the tent as big as possible, the exhibition dilutes the definition to the point of meaninglessness, exacerbated by the nonchronological installation, which elides the particulars of each artist’s encounters with Surrealism in favor of perceived affinities and thematic allegiances.

Remedios Varo: The Flight, 1961, oil on canvas, 48 by 39 1/2 inches.

I suspect that this sense of evasiveness, dubiously spun as an advantage in D’Alessandro and Gale’s surprisingly circumlocutory introductory essay, reflects a profound anxiety about the very enterprise of a “global exhibition,” and the gambit of canon formation, or reformation, that it inevitably entails. Hesitant to replace old protagonists with new ones, to pick winners, to pluck new masterpieces out of obscurity, the show declines to commit to any position at all, preferring a view of Surrealism as undefinable and amorphous—in today’s parlance, more a vibe than anything else. But as a result, the Pope in Paris paradoxically looms larger than ever, even if he rarely appears outright: in the absence of an affirmative definition of what Surrealism is or was, all routes eventually pass through Breton, as the shared point of contact who holds together heterogeneous artists and groups. But if the show fails to convincingly knock Breton off his pedestal, or to advance a coherent narrative to rival the received ones it wishes to displace, it is generative in its breadth, gesturing toward the possibility of more complete and complex histories of Surrealism that may one day be written.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Powder Box, circa 1918, paint and metallic powder on wood, 11 ¾ by 6 ½ inches diameter.

Taeuber-Arp arrived at abstraction early and decisively, recognizing that the gridded structure of embroidery, weaving, and other textile techniques lent itself naturally to geometric compositions. The exhibition, organized chronologically, opens in the mid-teens, by which point Taeuber-Arp was already creating varied arrangements of horizontal and vertical planes neatly organized into irregular grids. Warm earth tones, reds, and purples, anchored by large rectangles of black, dominate a group of small embroideries, preparatory drawings, and composition studies in gouache and pencil that she created following her return to her native Switzerland in 1914, after completing applied art studies in Munich and Hamburg. In subsequent works, she adopted a freer hand. A set of gouaches, titled each titled a variation on Free Vertical-Horizontal Rhythms (1919), features wavering asymmetrical patches of color, cut and pasted onto white paper grounds. Another group of drawings from the following year involves quadrangular strokes of colored gouache distributed in varied groupings across white grounds.

Having mastered the grid, Taeuber-Arp turned, in the late teens and twenties, toward more complex compositions, often incorporating irregular shapes as well as abstracted riffs on figural motifs. She also adapted these designs to suit a staggering range of functional objects—dazzling beaded necklaces and handbags, embroidered pillow covers and tablecloths, woven rugs and tapestries—by individually rendering these motifs and patterns as small gouache fragments that she combined into different configurations to suit the demands of a given project. The results have a collagelike quality, emphasized in the galleries through the display of several works alongside the modular preparatory gouaches. Among them is Oval Composition with Abstract Motifs (1922), a wool rug that intersperses rectilinear planes of color with concentric circles, the most prominent of which loosely suggests a standing haloed figurine. Other juxtapositions show how Taeuber-Arp translated designs from one type of object to another. Occupying the upper right corner of a circa 1920 embroidery, for instance, is the radically simplified silhouette of a woman’s head—half bubble-gum pink, half white—framed by neatly parted hair, with a single punched-out circle suggesting an eye. The two-toned head appears again in a beaded bag from the same year, this time in a more aggressive—or festive—palette of clashing pinks and turquoise, befitting the shift from decor to wearable accessory.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Aubette, 127 (axonometric drawing of the “Five O’Clock” tearoom in the Aubette, Strasbourg, France), 1927, gouache, metallic paint, ink, and pencil on diazotype, 48 ½ by 39 inches.

Taeuber-Arp left Zurich in 1926 to join her husband, fellow Dadaist Jean (Hans) Arp, in Strasbourg. Shortly thereafter, the Arps, along with De Stijl cofounder Theo van Doesburg, were commissioned to redesign the interior of the Aubette, a new multi-venue entertainment center housed in an eighteenth-century building. Taeuber-Arp was responsible for the bar and tearoom. She created a program of gridded geometric compositions for the walls and ceilings. At MoMA, her initial compositional sketches, an axonometric drawing of the tearoom, and related interior design commissions are juxtaposed with her contemporaneous artworks, including a striking group of photographs and works on paper depicting cityscapes from her travels across Europe with Arp during the 1920s. Much as the Aubette interiors allowed Taeuber-Arp to expand her experiments with designing between two and three dimensions to an architectural scale, the cityscapes adapt her abstract method to the depiction of space, compressing each scene into a sequence of flattened bands and planes of color. Indeed, throughout the exhibition, the curators emphatically frame her art and design work as deeply intertwined, countering a tendency—dating back to the posthumous catalogue raisonné of her work Arp compiled in 1948—to downplay her applied art efforts as something like a side hustle.

Ironically then, Taeuber-Arp’s paintings and wood relief sculptures of the 1930s are significantly overrepresented, with some fifty examples spread across several large galleries. An active participant in the international Constructivist group Cercle et Carré, founded in 1929, and its successor, Abstraction-Création, she primarily employed in these works a limited vocabulary of stark colored circles, rectangles, and crosses floating on—or, in the case of the reliefs, projecting from—black or white grounds. The results are accomplished and elegant, but generically of their moment and milieu. Among the few notable exceptions is a group of works dating from 1934–39 that play with iterations on the flared contours of a Greek amphora. A trio of the latter, all titled variations on Gradation, features these undulant silhouettes abruptly truncated on one side and arranged into vertical stacks, at once recalling papier collé and the flickering motion of a film strip.

Equally remarkable is a group of drawings in the show’s final gallery, made in the last years of Taeuber-Arp’s life, as she and Arp moved frequently to evade the advancing German troops. With few supplies at her disposal, she turned to pencil and paper, creating deceptively simple abstract drawings in which knotted arrangements of seemingly spontaneous lines are revealed, up close, to be meticulously composed of small pencil strokes, layered to give the lines the opacity and fluidity of ink. Increasingly, as the couple’s exile dragged on, Taeuber-Arp’s looping curves became constrained by nets of crossing lines, turning grids into prisons.

Recalling Edward Steichen’s 1908 nocturnal portraits of Rodin’s Monument to Balzac, the resulting photographs (all 2021) are moody and atmospheric, investing work more commonly known for cerebral detachment with a thrilling sense of high drama. In Untitled (Sfumato), titled after a Renaissance painting technique for softening the transitions between areas of light and shade, an ambient haze descends on a skylit row of wall-mounted boxes, interrupted by the dark outline of a sculpture in the shape of an open rectangular prism on the floor nearby, which appears to slice through their gleaming surfaces. Shot from a distance in an otherwise pitch-black gallery, Untitled (Skylight) is bisected by an eerie green glow spilling across the floor beneath a sextet of steel cubes, as if they were somehow generating their own light. Two smaller photographs taken in the show’s final gallery, Untitled (Night) and Untitled (MoMA), foreground the crisp geometric shadows cast by light streaming through the glass doors at the exit, echoing the form of the late stack, in black aluminum, on the adjacent wall.

Though this new series is less deadpan than Lawler’s best-known works—think, for instance, of the infamous dalliance between an Abstract Expressionist masterpiece and an ornate porcelain vessel that she depicted in Pollock and Tureen (1984)—it maintains their characteristic bite. The photographs flatter Judd’s pieces, but do so by flagrantly embracing the qualities he most forcefully disavowed. In an oft-cited 1971 interview in Artforum, Judd asserted that he intended for his works to be seen in natural light, proclaimed that he didn’t care at all about the shadows they produced, and, most notoriously, rejected the very concept of composition (“taking some little part down here to adjust it to balance some big part up there”) as European and obsolete. Aside from intentionally disregarding Judd’s preferred conditions of display, Lawler playfully travesties his “specific objects” by recasting them as her own readymade compositional elements.

Untitled (Reflection), 2021, dye sublimation print on museum box, 48 by 69 ⅝ inches.

This is particularly evident in the pairs and trios of photographs that depict the same works from different vantages, often to strikingly different effects. In Untitled (First Night), the contours of the room and its contents all but dissolve into broad planes of tone: a gray gradient across the walls and a stepped mass of black below, where overlapping rectangular forms in plywood and Plexiglas meet the floor. Untitled (Second Night) pulls back on this ensemble, allowing the gallery’s more prosaic details—wall labels, air ducts, the glowing green LED of a ceiling alarm—to intrude. Untitled (Reflection) likewise returns to the tenebrous scene of Untitled (Sfumato) from clear across the gallery, so the works appear as a series of compressed forms: a wedge of perforated metal cuts into an open rectangle, which in turn frames a silvery square. Lawler augments this loosely Suprematist arrangement with a trail of red light from an exit sign cascading down the liquid expanse of polished floor like an Impressionist sunrise dotting the water, piling together allusions to the art historical tradition Judd intended to leave behind. Then again, as the photographs subtly hint, MoMA’s collection revolves around artists who likewise thought their works had dramatically broken with tradition, the Impressionists and Suprematists among them. Lawler’s backhanded homage might also be seen as a modernist memento mori: nothing stays radical forever.