Surrealist Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Museum Overview
The Los Angeles County Museum
of Art is the largest art museum in western America. It has over 100,000 objects
on display and is extremely important internationally bringing almost a million
visitors to Southern California every year. The seven-building complex is undergoing
a ten-year expansion known as the Transformation and designed by the Renzo Piano
Building Workshop. Artworks in the museum span the world and most of the history
of art. The LACMA's specialties include Asian, Japanese, Latin American and Islamic
art collections.
Plan Your Visit
LACMA is located on Wilshire Boulevard between Fairfax and Curson avenues – midway
between Downtown LA and Santa Monica. For directions and any other information go
to the LACMA website. If you need a hotel room near the museum, we recommend
Los Angeles Hotels, the leading hotel booking site for LA.
Via CheapHotels.org you can find
cheap hotel rooms in Los Angeles The museum is open every
day except Wednesdays, Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is open on Mondays, Tuesdays
and Thursdays between 12 noon and 8pm. It is open on Fridays till 9pm and on Saturdays
and Sundays between 11am and 8pm. After 5pm you can pay what you want for general
admission and non-ticketed exhibitions and on the second Tuesday of every month
general admission to the permanent galleries and non-ticketed exhibitions is free
to all.
Surrealist Art at the LACMA
Surrealist art plays an important part at the LACMA in its permanent collection
of art which includes works by Victor Brauner, Andre Breton, Federico Castellon,
Marcel Duchamp, Lorser Feitelson and many more. Every now and again there are special
exhibitions which feature other surrealists. For example n 2007 there was a special
exhibition dedicated to the renowned surrealist Salvador Dali. It was called "Salvador
Dali: Painting and Film" which aimed to illustrate the cinematic influences and
elements that are present in Dali's work as well as the contribution he made to
cinema. Surrealist art became prominent in the 1920s when many artists adopted this
non-linear sometimes nonsensical style of art which out rightly defies "normal",
earthy art. Another surrealist exhibit at the LACMA consisted of 68 works by Rene
Magritte including some of his signature pieces. This particular exhibition, "Magritte
and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images", also included about 31 pieces of
contemporary art by artists such as Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Vija Celmins
and Robert Gober who had been influenced by Magritte's surrealist work. At the center
of the exhibition stood Magritte's masterpiece "The Treachery of Images (This is
not a pipe)" which is his most famous word and image painting featuring a pipe accompanied
by a simple French sentence which says "This is not a pipe". This is what surrealism
is all about – looking beyond what your eyes can see. It is this philosophical approach
to art which attracted many post-war artists to join the surrealist movement.