Online Tour: Dali Museum, 'Midnight In Paris'

ST. PETERSBURG, FL — When Salvador Dalí & Luis Buñuel’s film Un chien Andalou premiered in the City of Light, Paris was an avant-garde hothouse rife with artistic conflict and friendly rivalry.

Midnight in Paris: Surrealism at the Crossroads, 1929 examines this particularly rich and vital creative era by examining the works, friendships and clashes of Jean Arp, André Breton, Luis Buñuel, Alexander Calder, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy and others.

Through a host of 20th-century works from the renowned Centre Pompidou in Paris, Midnight in Paris, 1929 brings to life the personal relationships and the intellectual passions that threatened to tear apart the newly formed artistic movement called Surrealism.

Surrealism was born from the minds of André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon in Paris in 1924. The three poets would soon be joined by other writers, artists, and filmmakers who similarly sought to liberate themselves from rational control, and wished to put imagination at the basis of their work.

In this creative pursuit, they experimented with psychological theories about automatism, dreams, the unconscious, and psychoanalysis. In the history books, the year 1929 is most often associated with the financial crisis that erupted on Wall Street and rippled through the world’s economies. For surrealism too, 1929 was marked as much by crisis as by innovation.

Audio narration by Eugenie Bondurant.