A Thanksgiving Weekend Art Escape: 3 Must-See Exhibitions in Philadelphia
Just an hour’s train ride from New York, Philadelphia is an ideal day trip, blending art, culture and food in a refreshing escape. Despite recent turmoil in the city’s art scene—including the firing of the Philadelphia Art Museum’s CEO and director Sasha Suda and the closure of UArts due to financial difficulties—Philadelphia remains rich in cultural offerings. This season, three unmissable exhibitions make the short trip worthwhile, offering the chance to dive into the depths of surrealism, explore a beautiful new art space with its poetic marriage of art, nature and architecture and witness the legacy of a once-misunderstood artist who has finally come into his own.
“Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100” at the Philadelphia Art Museum
The news of Suda’s dismissal arrived on the same day the museum was opening one of its most important shows of the year: “Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100,” a sweeping survey celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist movement, now landing in its final chapter in Philadelphia—its only U.S. venue—after traveling to multiple international institutions (the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid and the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg) since its debut last year at the Centre Pompidou.
The press preview and opening unfolded in a visible state of disarray, with the institution refusing to offer any comment beyond the vague official statement issued the day before. Some wall texts had not yet been installed when the press arrived, and many still bore Post-it notes indicating needed revisions. Yet even through the chaos, the exhibition revealed itself as an ambitious attempt to offer a new reading of the movement, especially from the vantage point of the Americas.
“Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100” foregrounds the relationship between Surrealism and artists in the Americas, focusing on those who fled from Europe to Mexico and the U.S. during World War II. Organized through six thematic sections, the show explores the movement’s central ideas. The opening section, “Waking Dream,” traces the development of Surrealist imagery and experimental techniques in the 1920s—from the found-object constructions of Man Ray and the collages of Max Ernst to the hallucinatory canvases of Giorgio De Chirico, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí. Throughout, the exhibition offers new and sometimes unexpected readings, spotlighting lesser-known figures whose contributions to this dreamworld have long been overlooked.
The exhibition opens, strikingly, with the luminous Piazza d’Italia by Giorgio de Chirico and immediately shifts expectations. Instead of beginning with André Breton’s 1924 Manifesto and its Parisian orbit, the show widens the frame toward metaphysics, dissonant spaces and unstable meaning. De Chirico’s cityscapes, with their stalled time and theatrical shadows, offer a prehistory of Surrealism rooted not in automatic writing or dream transcription but in metaphysical estrangement. It is a reminder that Surrealism arose not from a single impulse but from a broader early-20th-century appetite for rupture, disorientation and new psychological terrains.
Before Surrealism had a name, the artists who would form its Parisian core were already experimenting with ways to escape the pressures of taste, reason and social propriety. They practiced automatic writing and recorded their dreams in meticulous detail. They held séance-like gatherings where visions were spoken, drawn or performed, attempting to access creativity as an unfiltered current from the unconscious. When Breton formalized these explorations in his manifesto, Surrealism emerged as a method rather than a style: creation as the channeling of the mind’s deepest, least disciplined impulses.
Visual artists expanded this principle into an arsenal of techniques for accessing the mind’s “wild depths.” In the 1920s, collage fused incompatible fragments into unsettling wholes; automatic drawing carved rapid, spontaneous marks that bypassed intention; Man Ray’s rayographs turned photographic paper into shadow-charged fields where the spiritual and psychological could reappear; and the exquisite corpse transformed collective play into hybrid creatures no single mind could invent. Each method attempted to short-circuit reason and invite the irrational to surface.
Among the most compelling rediscoveries in the exhibition are Wolfgang Paalen’s fumage works. By burning or smoking the surface to leave unpredictable marks, Paalen extended Surrealism’s embrace of chance into both abstraction and cultural encounter. Still lifes and totemic landscapes draw directly on Indigenous Northwest Coast art, filtered through the museums he visited. His assemblages—an umbrella covered in natural sponges, a clock whose numerals are glass eyes and whose hands are feathers—stage collisions between natural and manufactured materials, utility and uselessness, rational design and magical thinking.
Roberto Matta and Gordon Onslow Ford adopt similarly fertile approaches. Working through semi-automatic methods, they transform mark-making into a mapping of invisible forces. Matta called his works “psychological morphologies,” imagining space as a fluctuating psychic terrain beyond three dimensions. Their drawings and paintings channel energy, matter and consciousness into forms that toe a line between scientific diagram and subconscious vision. Here, the boundaries between reality and imagination blur in the act of painting itself.
Surrealism’s fascination with the unconscious quickly extended outward into landscapes and creatures that mirrored inner strangeness. The Surrealists believed that modern rationality, embodied by the cult of science, had estranged human beings from themselves and that deep encounters with nature could restore a sense of the marvelous.
Landscape painting, especially in Ernst’s hands, became a psychological portal: forests flickered with dream logic; skies opened onto cosmic abysses; microorganisms and celestial bodies became emblems of hidden forces, hinting early on at the interconnectedness of micro and macro. Paul Klee’s Fish Magic encapsulates this microcosmic universe—its luminous field interrupted by a single clock, the sober reminder of human linearity intruding on the deeper time of nature. The following section explores how Surrealists engaged with natural history, often turning themselves into beautiful or terrifying hybrid creatures moving between the boundaries of the real and the imagined, the familiar and the monstrous, reaching for the mythic.
The mythical figure of the chimera from Greek mythology—a lion’s head, goat’s body, serpent’s tail—became one of Surrealism’s most generative symbols. Its improbable anatomy aligned perfectly with the movement’s fascination with metamorphosis and irrational combination. Max Ernst made the chimera a recurring motif in the early 1920s, blending avian wings, female torsos and predatory heads into new forms. This spirit of composite invention reappears throughout the exhibition, including in Suzanne Van Damme’s marine-earthly creatures and other interspecies visions.
Desire, what Breton called “mad love,” also occupied a central place in Surrealism and receives its own dedicated section in the show. Erotic passion was treated as a destabilizing force capable of revealing profound psychological truths, especially when it violated bourgeois morality. Erotic imagery—most often centered on the female body—became a site of projection, fantasy, liberation and contestation. Male artists tended to idealize or fetishize their muses, while female Surrealists reoriented eroticism toward power, agency and internal transformation. Fascinating here are the photocollages by Czech artist Jindřich Štyrský: privately published in small editions, they approached sexuality and homosexuality with hedonistic openness, framing eroticism as a dismantling of false morality.
Yet by the 1930s, Surrealist imagery had darkened: if monsters haunted the imagination even before war, the rise of fascism in Spain and across Europe gave these mythical beasts new urgency as metaphors for the violent era approaching. Rather than depict political events directly, Surrealists unleashed these creatures as symbols of the barbarism gathering around them. The Minotaur (half man, half bull) became a symbol of uncontrollable instinct trapped in the labyrinth of the unconscious, mirroring a Europe sliding toward catastrophe.
These symbols were not escapist; they were a way to reclaim mythic imagination as a tool of resistance, resilience and renewal. To see mythically meant to see metaphorically—metaphor in Greek meaning not simply to see beyond but to be carried beyond the limits of linear time and literal thought, toward deeper universal truths.
The fall of France in 1940 scattered Surrealist artists across the globe. Some remained in occupied Paris; many fled. Mexico became a vital refuge, culminating in a landmark 1940 exhibition in Mexico City that assembled more than one hundred works by artists from fifteen countries. Meanwhile, New York became the movement’s wartime capital. Publications, exhibitions and the arrival of exiled Surrealists invigorated a generation of younger American artists—Pollock, Rothko, Gorky, Gottlieb—who absorbed Surrealism’s emphasis on the unconscious and made it foundational to their own emerging vocabularies.
Reviving the ancient bond between art and ritual, Surrealism embraced magic, alchemy and the supernatural. This fascination with the occult became a way to reinvigorate art and imagine healing in a devastated world. The 1947 postwar Surrealist exhibition in Paris staged an immersive, esoteric journey through demons, witches, rituals and mythic archetypes, aiming to renew Surrealism’s original promise: pushing human consciousness toward freedom.
This mystical, spiritual dimension reaches a peak in the artists of South America, who brought ancient Indigenous spiritual traditions into their Surrealist vocabulary, reconnecting art with elemental forces. For instance, Breton saw Frida Kahlo as an authentic expression of surreality rooted in Mexico’s ecology, mythology, politics and artistic traditions. The exhibition highlights Surrealism’s intersections with esotericism across the Americas—from Roberto Montenegro to Guillermo Meza—and how exile became a search for primordial origins, as in the work of Alice Rahon.
However, the climax arrives in the final room, which is entirely dedicated to celebrating the symbolically powerful work of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. The two artists—both at the center of a remarkable market rediscovery—were closely linked: after meeting in Paris in the 1930s and later reuniting in Mexico as lifelong friends, they developed parallel iconographies in which women appear as witches, priestesses, alchemists and guides across dimensions.
Their paintings draw on magic, Gurdjieff-Ouspensky mysticism, esoteric traditions and medieval panel painting to build worlds where transformation is continuous and female agency is cosmological. Carrington saw benevolent magic as a potential redemption for humanity, a belief that echoes through their visionary universes. The exhibition foregrounds the luminous, symbolic force of their work as they navigate the porous line between earthly, time-bound reality and the timeless dimensions of mythic imagination.
Leonora Carrington’s The Pleasures of Dagobert is the star of the room: a richly detailed, mystical panorama teeming with fantastical creatures, vivid colors and dreamlike sequences. Its mythic, abstract narrative charts a journey of the human soul across multiple realms. Seen in person, the record-setting $28.5 million paid by Argentine collector Eduardo F. Costantini at Sotheby’s in May 2024 feels entirely justified. This may be the last chance to view what, before last week’s Kahlo result, was the most expensive Surrealist painting by a woman artist in the U.S. before it travels to the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires.
The surrounding works underscore the epic scale of their imaginative project: portals, masks, metamorphoses, intersecting spiritual systems and journeys through hell and heaven rendered within a single pictorial cosmos. Varo’s Celestial Pablum embodies this spirit—magical, alchemical and inhabiting a realm of fairy-tale archetypes. Together, Carrington and Varo represent not just a continuation of Surrealism but one of its most transformative legacies, where the unconscious expands beyond dream life into mythic, spiritual and cosmic dimensions. The room dedicated to Carrington and Varo, with its symbolic density and luminous canvases, is already worth the entire show.
The Calder Gardens
One of Philadelphia’s newest cultural jewels, Calder Gardens has already become a destination in its own right. For the city, its opening this September marks a “homecoming” of sorts: Alexander Calder was born here, and the site now links his legacy to Philadelphia’s thriving art scene. Designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning firm Herzog & de Meuron, with landscaping by Piet Oudolf, the building unfolds as an organic architectural masterpiece. Calder’s sculptures seem to inhabit the space as living beings, finding a delicate balance between the austere stillness of his stabiles and the lyrical, floating grace of his mobiles.
The rotating exhibitions draw from the Calder Foundation’s holdings and other collections, showcasing works that span Calder’s 50-year career—from mobiles and stabiles to paintings, drawings and pieces from three generations of the Calder family. The architecture is intentionally porous, encouraging a dynamic interplay between the sculptural forms and the surrounding environment. This architectural concept echoes a previous experiment by Alexander S.C. Rower, Calder’s grandson and director of the foundation, in the Tokyo show “Calder: Un effet du Japonais.”
In this new venue, wall labels and detailed didactics are minimal or omitted altogether, allowing visitors to engage with Calder’s works through experience rather than exposition. The space itself becomes part of the art, making tangible Calder’s long-standing exploration of the relationship between indoor and outdoor environments. Like the Tokyo exhibition, the architecture becomes a stage where sculptural forms, natural elements and surrounding space create subtle conversations. The exploration of the organic possibilities of line evolution is a leading element throughout Alexander Calder’s career, shaping a formal journey into the rhythm of nature and natural circles.
The design deconstructs the very idea of sculpture, asking the same questions Calder posed throughout his life—how space and form can coexist and resonate in ways that transcend the traditional boundaries of art and architecture. Creating an oasis of connection and introspection, this singular museum venue in Philadelphia presents Calder’s art in a way that feels both timeless and contemporary, with a marriage of art and architecture that transcends boundaries and creates a living, breathing experience.
“Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets” at the Barnes Foundation
No trip to Philadelphia is complete without a visit to the Barnes Foundation, which is currently hosting the most comprehensive survey of Henri Rousseau’s work in recent years. Often described as a naïve outsider artist, Rousseau is revealed here in all his brilliance as a masterful myth-maker and shrewd entrepreneur, adept at navigating the nascent art world. Known for his lush jungle scenes and seemingly simple, childlike approach to art, Rousseau’s work at the Barnes shows the true depth of his exploration into the unconscious, nature and human psychology, elevating him to the stature of a key figure in modern art.
“Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets” brings together 18 pieces from the Barnes’s collection along with major loans from the Musée d’Orsay and private collections. With nearly 60 works on display, the show delves into Rousseau’s carefully crafted myth—a self-proclaimed outsider whose profound insights into human nature, the art world and modern society were ahead of his time. While his work may seem simple at first glance, walking through the exhibition reveals the astute social commentary woven into his paintings.
One of the most striking examples of Rousseau’s ability to combine the real with the fantastical is War (1894). This allegorical work captures the emotional turmoil of his time, particularly France’s trauma following the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. The spectral female figure flying over a battlefield filled with corpses delivers a haunting message, stripping away heroism and exposing the horrors of conflict. Rousseau’s mastery of psychological portraiture shines through here, allowing viewers to see the war not as a narrative but as a psychic storm.
Rousseau’s exploration of bourgeois life is equally insightful. In The Wedding (1905), a group of figures stands before a dreamlike backdrop, their expressions caught between pride and unease. What seems like a simple group portrait becomes a critique of the bourgeois performance of respectability, where societal norms are exposed as a form of theater. Similarly, in Child with a Doll (c. 1905-06), Rousseau captures the tension between innocence and artifice, using the stiff, solemn pose of the young girl to create an unsettling atmosphere that reveals more than it hides.
Rousseau’s jungle paintings, created between 1904 and 1910, were never just escapist fantasies. Works like Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo (1908) use lush landscapes to explore the primal aspects of human nature as well as the colonial anxieties of the time. These paintings are not depictions of the “exotic” but deeply allegorical works that critique modernity and colonialism. Rousseau’s jungle scenes transform nature into a metaphor for the unconscious, where the untamed dimensions of human instinct can be explored outside the constraints of rational society.
The exhibition culminates with some of Rousseau’s most elusively mystical works—The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), Unpleasant Surprise (1899-1901) and The Snake Charmer (1907). Each of these paintings blends fantasy with fear, inviting viewers to consider the deeper mysteries of human experience at its most primordial essence. In The Sleeping Gypsy, a woman lies in a moonlit desert as a lion hovers protectively—or perhaps predatively—above her. What was once ridiculed at its debut now reads as a timeless vision of disarmed wonder, the unconscious exposed to the gaze of human consciousness for a glimpse into a broader universality.
The exhibition at the Barnes Foundation offers a fresh look at the richness of Rousseau’s art and personality, revealing how he blurred the line between myth and reality as he crafted his own legend. His work, in both its simplicity and its complexity, invites us to see the world as real and enchanted, primal and magical, earthly and transcendent.
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