Paris served as a muse to the Surrealist writers and artists during the 1920s and ‘30s. The Surrealist artists hoped to disrupt familiar expectations and provoke social action and personal and political change by stimulating the mind and the senses. Photography became a democratizing factor in the dissemination of culture and a model for Surrealist concepts and values, blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, objectivity and subjectivity, and the everyday and the extraordinary.

Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris explores Paris as the literal and metaphoric base of Surrealism. It will include approximately 200 works by an array of photographers who lived and worked in Paris during the period, including Eugène Atget, Brassaï, TAndré Boiffard,T Man Ray, Jindich Štyrský, Maurice Tabard, Roger Parry, Ilse Bing, Germaine Krull, Josef Breitenbach, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and André Kertész, as well as the films of Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, and others. The selected works were chosen for their power to suggest the mystery, wonder, and anticipation felt by writers and artists as they wandered the maze of Paris streets.

These photographs and films render the banal extraordinary and depict familiar monuments and scenes in new and unusual ways that explore the city’s relationship to the Surrealist movement whose influence would endure throughout the twentieth century. Twilight Visions is the first exhibition to examine the intersection of documentary photography, manipulated photography, and film within the broader social, political, philosophical, and cultural contexts that defined Paris during the interwar years. Photographs and films will be exhibited alongside a range of magazines, books, postcards, and other ephemera from the period, encompassing both high art and popular cultural forms in the exhibition’s portrayal of the city’s Surrealist transformation.

The exhibition is organized by art historian Therese Lichtenstein for the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. The accompanying illustrated catalogue will include essays by Lichtenstein and by art historians Julia Kelly, Colin Jones, and Whitney Chadwick.