he story of Surrealism's influence on American art is often boiled down to a three-man relay: Matta passed the torch of automatic painting to Arshile Gorky, who slipped it to Jackson Pollock, who raced across the finish line to Abstract Expressionism.
We all know things were more complicated. Just how much more is reflected in the closely packed expanses of "Surrealism USA," the most ambitious exhibition to be seen at the National Academy Museum in some time. Those three gold medalists are here, along with many of their big-time confreres like Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, but so are scores of artists who are almost unknown now - and maybe always have been. If you leave this show disliking Surrealism American style, at least you'll know why.
But "Surrealism USA" is not easy to dismiss. It is too informative, high-spirited and humbling. It reflects how much of the art of any period falls away, and suggests that while the original fullness can never be retrieved, art-historical diligence has its own rewards.
Such diligence has been pursued by Isabelle Dervaux, who left the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2000 to become the National Academy Museum's first curator of modern and contemporary art. The museum calls this show the most in-depth survey of American Surrealism since 1977.
There are some flaws and serious omissions, some because loans fell through. (Pavel Tchelitchew's radiantly ghoulish "Hide-and-Seek," from the Museum of Modern Art, and one of Ivan Albright's clotted, teeming paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago will join the show when it goes to Phoenix.) But the assembled work still gives abundant evidence that Surrealism shook American art to its roots.
Ms. Dervaux has come up with 120 works spanning 1930 to the mid-50's and representing more than 60 artists from across the United States (as well as the European Surrealists who spent time here); they fill five good-size galleries. She has included a lacy etching from 1949 by one Vera Berdich, an artist who taught at the Art Institute of Chicago. There is a small, shining abstraction by Charles Howard, who showed with Surrealism's great New York dealer, Julien Levy. Its metallic bladelike forms stand apart from both the Abstract Expressionist and the realist works in the show's biggest gallery.
While most of the works are two-dimensional, the show is sprinkled with unfamiliar sculptures - early, modestly earthbound pieces by Joseph Cornell, one by Isamu Noguchi that uses real bones - and is laid out with some fanciful curved walls, which add needed hanging space. The final gallery is festooned with string in homage to Duchamp's installation of the 1942 "First Papers of Surrealism" exhibition in New York, organized by André Breton.
Surrealism may have unleashed the unconscious and made irrational juxtapositions de rigueur, but Ms. Dervaux keeps a close rein on things, proceeding in strict chronological fashion with stylistically coherent sections that show how making history needs company.
The show begins by reminding us that in the early 1930's, long before Matta met Gorky, American artists flocked to Surrealism in droves, usually under the sway of the surgical precision of Salvador Dalí's realism. They had seen Surrealist works in European magazines and art galleries. In New York, Levy exhibited Dalí's "Persistence of Memory" in 1932 and gave the artist a solo show in 1934; later, Miró showed with the dealer Pierre Matisse on a regular basis. Also in 1934, Peter Blume's mildly Surrealist "South of Scranton," on view here, caused a scandal when it won first prize at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.
But by the end of 1936, Surrealism was entering the museum establishment. That's when Alfred Barr's 600-work exhibition "Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism," the first large survey, opened at the Museum of Modern Art.
The initial gravitation toward Dalí produced unusual hybrids. Social Realism and American Scene Painting, in particular, needed only slight adjustments to become strange. Sometimes the adjustments seem almost pasted on. Remove the Dalíesque props from Malcolm Roberts's "Deserted Landscape," and what remains is a generic dust bowl farm scene. Things are more organically fused in Alexandre Hogue's "Erosion No. 2 - Mother Earth Laid Bare," where furrows of barren farmland are reshaped into a flattened, exhausted nude and the kitschy earnestness may make you laugh.
