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The Surreal House
Teachers Resource
Image: Man Ray, Untitled, 1920, Gelatin silver print, 17.7 x 22.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of James Thrall Soby
© Photo SCALA, Florence/The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010
© Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2010
Contents
Introduction to the exhibition
Using this resource
Surrealism
The exhibition
Focus activities
Curriculum links
Artist List
Further reading
Websites
Visiting the Exhibition
Credits
Page
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Introduction to the exhibition
The Surreal House is a major groundbreaking
exhibition exploring the power and mystery of
the house in our collective imagination. It is the
first exhibition to throw light on the significance
of surrealism for architecture and it also reveals
the profound influence surrealism has had on
a host of contemporary artists, filmmakers and
architects. The exhibition installation has been
realised by acclaimed architects Carmody
Groarke and is designed to be experienced as
an extraordinary surreal house in its own right.
The exhibition features over 150 works including
iconic pieces by Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp,
and René Magritte, set alongside more
contemporary works by artists such as Louise
Bourgeois and Rebecca Horn.
The Surreal House presents the ‘house’ as a
place of mystery, wonder, desire and foreboding
as for the surrealists the house was more than
‘a machine for living’ instead it was a ‘stage for
living’. In The Surreal House all the exhibits show
the significance of the unconscious world of
dreams and desires, presenting extraordinary
dwellings that reflect everything that the rational,
functional house does not.
Using this resource
This resource uses The Surreal House exhibition
as a stimulus for teaching, offering opportunities
for pupils to engage with the work of various
surrealist artists. The pack contains:
• Information about Surrealism and The Exhibition.
• A Focus Activities section with colour images of
particular works. Many of these activities can be
adapted to the level of your students and used
by primary, secondary and further education
students alike. The Focus Activities can be
undertaken in response to the exhibition or
remotely by researching the pieces online.
• Curriculum Links. Here there are suggested
tasks aimed at particular year groups. Some
activities can be explored in preparation for
your visit, some during your visit and others can
be tried beyond the exhibition in the classroom.
• Please be aware that some of the works within
the exhibition deal with violence and sexuality
and therefore may be sensitive. Please feel free
to contact us on planning a visit:
[email protected]
020 7382 2333
Salvador Dali, Sleep, c. 1937
Oil on canvas 50 x 77 cm Private collection
© Salvador Dali, Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, DACS, London 2010.
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Surrealism
“Surrealism is not a new or easier means of
expression, nor is it a metaphysic of poetry; it is
a means toward the total liberation of the mind
and of everything that resembles it... We have
no intention of changing men’s habits, but we
have hopes of proving to them how fragile their
thoughts are, and on what unstable foundations,
over what cellars they have erected their unsteady
houses.“
The Bureau of Surrealist Research,
Surrealist Declaration of 27 January,
1925
“I announce to the world this momentous news
item; a new vice has just been born, man has
acquired one more source of vertigo – Surrealism,
offspring of frenzy and darkness. Walk up, walk
up, this is the entrance to the realms of the
instantaneous, the world of the snapshot... the
principle of usefulness will become foreign to all
those who practice this superior vice.”
Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, 1926
The Exhibition
Born out of the nihilism of the Dadaists in the
early 1900s, surrealism shared its subversive spirit
but fused it with lyricism, intent on reconciling
the rational and the irrational for the benefit of
society.
Led by the French writer André Breton, who
wrote The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, the
surrealists were inspired by the work of Sigmund
Freud who believed that the subconscious mind
was released through dreams. According to
Breton, surrealism reunited the realms of dream
and fantasy and linked them to the everyday
rational world to create ‘an absolute reality, a
surreality’.
“For our house is our corner of the world. As has
often been said, it is our first universe, a real
cosmos in every sense of the word.”
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space,
1958
Lower Level
Upper Level
Representing the inside of a house, the Lower
Level takes the visitor on a labyrinthine journey
through a series of intimate chambers of varying
scale that evoke different rooms within the house
including the bathroom, toilet, bedroom, salon,
nursery and cellar. Linked by passages, these
interiors are characterised by dark and light,
sound and silence, compression and expansion.
Works by a host of first generation surrealists and
contemporary artists fill the space.
On the Upper Level, circumnavigating
the hidden chambers below, the visitor is
metaphorically transported to the rooftops
of The Surreal House, a space consisting of
individual bays devoted to a dialogue between
surrealist pieces, contemporary art and
architecture.
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The exhibition
Lower Level
Press to Enter! (Room 1)
The Surreal House claims Marcel Duchamp, longstanding accomplice of the surrealists among
its first architect. Fresh Window, 1920, is twinned
with a clip from Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr,
1928, in which the unflinching hero stands before
the façade of a house as it collapses around him.
He is saved only by the window aperture that
frames him. Both works announce the window
as a key metaphor within The Surreal House, a
threshold between inside and out, the world of
reality and dream, the rational and the irrational.
The fragility and archetypal quality of Keaton’s
house is echoed in the tiny delicate The House of
My Father, 1996–97, by Donald Rodney made
from his own skin. Prière de Toucher, 1947, by
Marcel Duchamp is a nipple form as doorbell
which opens the exhibition.
The House of Freud (Room 2)
Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious had
immeasurable implications for society and for art.
Although an inspiration for surrealism, Freud saw
the unconscious as a battleground of conflicting
drives, where as the surrealists thought of it as the
key to liberating individuals and the world as a
whole.
Freud’s consulting room chair was especially
made to support the contours of his body. It has
an unmistakeable anthropomorphic quality
suggesting the uncanny presence of Freud
himself. Absence also permeates the sculptural
works of Rachel Whiteread. Her Untitled (Black
Bath), 1996, is one of the most resonant pieces
of ‘furniture’ within The Surreal House, evoking
sleep and death itself.
Who I Am (Room 3)
André Breton famously wrote about a glass
house being a reflection of his identity. This idea
of the house as a portrait of the self, exposing
the unconscious world of dreams, desires and
fears is a cornerstone of The Surreal House.
This ‘body-house’ is exemplified by Donald
Rodney’s house (Press to Enter) and also by the
works in this section. One of the first surrealist
painters Andre Masson, perilously wounded
in World War I, subsequently painted himself
with the body of a man eating a minotaur,
flayed to expose a labyrinthine interior. Masson
succeeded in reflecting, as Breton said, the
‘tragic sense of dread’ that engulfed the world at
that time.
Theatre of the Domestic (Room 4)
A series of works are set alongside each other
presenting the interior of the house in the sense
of object and space, container and contained.
The rooms speak of a space alive with psychic
meaning. The ‘house’ is presided over by
Rebecca Horn’s Concert for Anarchy, 1990, an
upside down piano which regularly spews out its
keys in a cacophony of sound. With its castellated
outline, Horn’s piano is reminiscent of an airborn
castle. The ‘bedroom’ is signalled by Sarah
Lucas Au Naturel, 1994. In Jan Svankmaher’s
Jabberwocky, 1970, the toys in the nursery have
a macabre life of their own.
Femme Maison (Room 5)
This section deals with the female or woman of
the house, epitomised by the works of Louise
Image: Rebecca Horn, Concert for Anarchy, 1990 Painted wood, metal and electronic components, 150 x 106 x 155.5 cm.
Tate. Purchased with assistance from The Art Fund and the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1999. ©Tate, London 2010. © DACS 2010.
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Bourgeois and her Femme Maison series, begun
in 1940. These works depict a figure that is half
house, half woman, conjoined as one, making
reference to the site of the household as the place
of female experience. The woman, as Bourgeois
says, ‘shows herself at the very moment that she
thinks she is hiding’. Home is not as safe as it
might seem.
The wardrobe, a mythic house within a house,
is a place of particular resonance for children.
Nowhere is this more poignantly alluded to
than in Self-Portrait (in cupboard), 1932, by the
photographer Claude Cahun.
Panic Space (Room 6)
Victor Brauner, Francis Bacon and Francesca
Woodman each present the human body in a
state of dynamic interaction with a built space
that is either constraining or defining. Francesca
Woodman’s ambiguous photography fuses
her own body within a domestic interior. There
is a tantalising affinity between Woodman’s
photographs, Bourgeois’ Maison Fragiles, 1978,
and Donald Rodney’s The House of My Father.
Haunted House (Room 7)
The haunted house, familiar within 19th
century gothic literature and much favoured
by the surrealists represents everything that the
transparent house of modernism is not. Edward
Hopper’s House by a Railroad, 1925, has
become one of the defining houses of the 20th
century and is the model for both the house in
Hitchcock’s Pyscho and 0001 Cemetery Lane, the
mansion belonging to The Addams Family in the
1960s TV series.
The Electric Palace (Room 8)
Electric Palace presents Jean Cocteau’s film La
Belle et la Bête, a 1946 French romantic fantasy
adaptation of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast
that features the beast’s strange and magical
castle, with candelabras fashioned out of living
arms, supported by sculptural columns of Greek
goddesses with moving eyes.
Upper Level
Vertigo of the Modern (Room 9)
Salvador Dalí’s iconic and rarely seen painting
Sleep, 1937, features a giant disembodied
head, held precariously aloft in a state of fragile
suspension. Behind the closed eyelids is the
hidden domain – the home of dreams. If the
crutches give way, then the head falls to the
ground and the dreamer is awoken from their
slumbers. Juxtaposed is a film of Villa Dall’Ava,
France, 1996, designed by Rem Koolhaas, who
acknowledges a huge debt to surrealism. This
impressive dwelling with a rooftop swimming
pool, teetering on giraffe-like legs, is in every
sense a contemporary reflection of Dalí’s
delirious dream painting.
The Presence of Absence (Room 10)
Giorgio de Chirico’s The Evil Genius of a King,
1914–15, which presents a house with steep
angles, multiple lines of perspective, vivid colours
and strange ‘toys’. The surrealists related strongly
to the haunting nature of enigmatic buildings.
Alongside this is Diller + Scofidio’s Slow House
Project, 1989, questioned the very nature of
architecture, in a similar way to how Duchamp's
Fountain, 1917, questioned the nature of art.
Beyond Geometry (Room 11)
While Buster Keaton, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph
Cornell among others all play on a component
of the surreal house, Dalí took this one step
further creating an amusement hall, that was a
dwelling conceived as a ‘Surrealist House’. Dalí’s
Dream of Venus pavilion, 1939, was a surrealist
funhouse created for New York’s World Trade
Fair in 1939, featuring scantily clad ‘liquid ladies’
in an enormous tank and a 36 foot bed with a
sleeping Venus. Le Corbusier presented a film
showing an apartment alongside Dalí’s work. Le
Corbusier’s apartment was designed for Charles
de Bestequi at 136, avenue des Champs-Elysees,
Paris and was his most overtly surreal creation.
The film clip shows Dalí descending spiral stairs
and the surreal rooftop living room.
The Mother (Room 12)
Brassaï’s, Troglodyte, c.1936, announces the
significance of both the womb and the mythic
cave within surrealist space. Inspired by Freud,
the womb-house offered Tzara, Dalí and other
surrealists a counter position to modernism’s
angularity and functionalism. The most
successful exponents of this material, cosmic
architecture were Robert Matta and Frederick
Kiesler. In the 1920s and 30s the surrealists
ideas about architecture were dominated by
concepts of the ‘mother’. Developed through
a constellation of drawings, models, texts and
proposals during the 1950s, the Endless House
is arguably the key to all of Kiesler’s work as a
visionary architect, designer, artist and theorist.
Though never built, it is clear he envisaged a
loosely modular family home.
Mad Love (Room 13)
Seen as the key to surrealism, the idea of mad
love expresses the hope to remake the world
through emotions. This concept is signalled by
René Magritte’s Lovers, 1928, and exemplified
through a group of works such as Rachel
Kneebone’s ceramics and photographs of
Ferdinand Cheval’s ‘palace’. Celebrated by the
surrealists as a kindred spirit, French postman
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Cheval spent 33 years making his dream creating
an imaginary castle come true. The Palais idéal,
1962, with its heavily ornate cave-like entrances,
is an extraordinary accumulation of architectural
elements that seem to emerge from under a thick
layer of solidified lava.
Portable House (Room 14)
The Portable House explores boxes in the sense
of a cabinet of curiosity. Although Breton, Ernst
and Dalí all made box assemblages, it was
Joseph Cornell who made this form of art his
own. His boxes are miniature constructions,
containers and dream worlds characterised by
delicacy and romanticism. Cornell lived most
of his life in the same suburban house and it
seems that his boxes offered an escape from the
narrow confines of home. It has been suggested
that Cornell helped Marcel Duchamp create his
portable museum, his Boite-en-valise, 1942–53,
displayed within a suitcase.
A Home for Birds (Room 14)
In the early 1940s, Joseph Cornell became
fascinated by the birds he saw in pet shops and
their symbolic value and so began his aviary
series. The bird came to represent for him a
duality of freedom and entrapment. Untitled
(Aviary Parrot Box with Drawers), 1949, shows a
set of tiny drawers promising secrets – if only we
could see inside.
The Divine Concrete (Room 15)
The surrealists who admired strange, mystical
and dream-like environments did not like the
clean functional buildings of the modern world.
Divine Concrete includes Christopher Wood’s
strange and intriguing juxtaposition of Zebra and
Parachute, 1930, a painting within which they
appear strangely situated within a architectural
environment similar to the Barbican complex.
Blasted Architecture (Room 15)
The house, represented since childhood –
with its four sides, four windows, a door, a
pitched roof and a chimney – is also subject to
transformation, attack, fragmentation, distortion
and collapse. Like Keaton’s house at the very
beginning of the exhibition, the house that goes
up must come down; especially true if we think of
the house as a mirror of our own fragile being.
This section is punctuated throughout with
powerful cinematic images of houses under
attack or magically transformed as if in a dream.
In 1974, Gordon Matta-Clark took a house and
split it in two and the image Splitting, 1974, is
shown here.
The Sacrifice (Room 16)
The exhibition concludes with the final sequence
of film-makerAndrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice,
1986, when a hauntingly beautiful house, owned
by the main character of the film is burned to the
ground in an attempt to save all he holds dear.
Image: Claude Cahun, Self portrait (in cupboard), c. 1932
Monochrome print, 11 x 9 cm, Courtesy of Jersey Heritage Collections
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Focus activities
Within this section you will find a series of
activities broken down into five different themes
• Unconscious
• Scale
• Curiosities
• Haunted
• Labyrinth
These themes link to specific artworks and relate
to the sections from the exhibition, unpicking
some of the ideas and processes.
Unconscious
All the works in the exhibition show the
significance of the unconscious. The unconscious
mind and the imagination were major subjects
within surrealist thinking.
Works within the exhibition to look at:
• Sleep, 1937, Salvador Dalí (Vertigo of the
Modern, Room 9)
• La Reine Salomé, 1937, Salvador Dalí (House of
Freud, Room 2)
• Femme Maison, 1983, Louise Bourgeois
(Femme Maison, Room 5)
Suggested Activities:
• Ask the students to look at these artworks. What
do they suggest about what is happening inside
someone’s head?
• Do you remember your dreams? Consider and
discuss the things that sometimes happen in
dreams that would be impossible in reality.
• Use surrealist games (e.g. automatic drawing
or writing) to explore the unconscious
imagination. Within a set time ask students to
write or doodle everything that comes to mind
beginning with the subject of their home. This
can be done either individually or within small
groups working on one large piece of paper
to allow students drawings to cross over each
other.
• Word association games can illustrate this
further. See how far and how quickly your
group can explore linkage of meaning just by
speaking a selection of words out loud in turn.
• Make three-dimentional mind maps using
small cards or post it notes linked with string.
Working in groups, the cards can become
more collaborative and help explore thought
processes even further.
• Write onto long scrolls (till roll paper or
wallpaper is useful for this). Encourage
students to write continually without looking
back at what they have written until they get to
the end.
Image: Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, 1994, White marble, 11.4 x 31.1 x 6.7 cm. Courtesy Cheim & Read, Hauser & Wirth, and Galerie Karsten
Greve. Photo: Christopher Burke
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Scale
The Surreal House presents many images of
houses that have been distorted or altered,
moving the home beyond our preconditioned
expectations. The surrealists were very interested
in the idea of playing with scale, making objects
that were significantly larger or smaller than
expected. By placing these objects within new
contexts the familiar can be challenged.
Works within the exhibition to look at:
• In the House of my Father, 1996-7, Donald
Rodney (Who I Am, Room 1)
• Zebra and Parachute, 1930, Christopher Wood
(The Divine Concrete, Room 15)
Suggested Activities:
• Play with scale – make collages using images
from magazines. Look for things that are shown
in different sizes. Through this, make everyday
objects appear to be either tiny or enormous.
• Take some everyday objects, for example
a key, a cup or a table, measure them and
create sculptures (giant or miniature) using
clay, cardboard or plasticine. Scale them up
as accurately as possible. When complete,
position the work carefully to emphasise the
strange effect of playing with scale. Photograph
them in their new location.
• Make drawings of the Barbican’s architecture.
Cut out images of animals or objects from
magazines and collage them onto the drawings
so that they appear out of context. Look at the
work of Christopher Wood for inspiration.
• Draw onto acetate and use an old-fashioned
over head projector to project the images into
obscure spaces around your school.
• Think about how you expect to experience
a space like your classroom. What would
happen if the furniture and/or objects in the
classroom were moved around or placed
upside down? See how simple changes can
disrupt expectations and make the familiar
strange. Record sound in a variety of spaces
and play them back out in contrasting places.
What do you notice? How does it make you
feel?
Curiosities
The Surreal House shows a number of works
that present display cases and museum like
collections seen within boxes and drawers.
Cabinets of curiosities, bizarre objects and
Image : Christopher Wood, Zebra and Parachute, 1930, Oil on canvas 45.7 x 55.9 cm
Tate. Accepted by H.M. Government in lieu of Inheritance Tax and allocated to Tate 2004. © Tate, London, 2010.
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collections of strange and mysterious things
placed out of context were of huge inspiration to
the surrealists. The idea was that these containers
not only held interesting things, but also served as
a metaphor to represent the idea of the mind that
contained the imagination waiting to be set free.
Works within the exhibition to look at:
• Boite-en-valise (The Portable Museum of
Marcel Duchamp) ,1941, Marcel Duchamp (The
Portable House, Room 14)
• Aviary with Parrot and Drawers, 1949, Joseph
Cornell (A Home for Birds, Room 14)
• La Jongleuse, 1929–1930, Paul Nougé (Theatre
of the Domestic, Room 4)
Suggested Activities:
• Consider the collections of objects seen in these
art works. Ask students to create a museum of
themselves. Start by asking them to think of five
objects that represent them. Alternatively ask
them to find objects in their pockets or bags
and consider what these found objects say
about their personalities. An interesting way to
present selected objects is to place them onto
a photocopier to produce black and white
images. This could be taken further by collaging
the photocopies onto images of alternative
places or make Rayograms using photographic
paper.
• Bring together a collection of things with a
particular surrealist or bizarre theme. This might
be a set of things that don’t appear to work
together. Think about how things are displayed
in museums or how Marcel Duchamp presents
his own museum of himself. Photograph the
collections, or place the objects on plinths or
inside boxes.
• Think about re-labelling the objects in
unexpected ways (e.g. word play / puns
/ anagrams). If you change the name of
something does it make it strange or does it
change its meaning? Magritte famously relabelled drawings of objects to play with this
idea of confusing the audience and making
them reconsider how they look at things.
Haunted
The surrealists loved the symbolism and mystery
of the gothic, the idea of dark spaces and
forgotten treasures, ruins and curiosities. Many
of the works in The Surreal House present the
unexpected and frightening through ghostly and
haunting ideas and images.
Image: Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Aviary with Parrot and Drawers), ca.1949
Box construction 43.8 x 35.6 x 8.3 cm
The Robert Lehrman Art Trust. Courtesy of Aimee & Robert Lehrman, Washington, D.C.
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2010. Photo: Quicksilver Photographers LLC.
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Works within the exhibition to look at:
• Le bras révélateur, 1929–1930, Paul Nougé
(Theatre of the Domestic, Room 4)
• House, 1976, Francesca Woodman (Panic
Space, Room 6)
• From Space, 1976, Francesca Woodman (Panic
Space, Room 6)
Suggested Activities:
• Francesca Woodman’s photographs are
very ghostly. Ask your group to consider how
they are taken. Have they ever taken blurred
photographs like this, perhaps by accident?
• Use mobile phone or digital cameras to
experiment with taking photographs of each
other. Try to indicate movement and evoke a
ghostly atmosphere.
• Make simple pinhole cameras or camera
obscurers to experiment further still.
• Another technique that the surrealists often
used was Decalcomania. Using wet paper,
add washes and blobs of colour and then
pull another sheet of paper over the first. See
what unexpected and unknown images might
appear within the spread of the paint.
Labyrinth
The Surreal House exhibition has been specially
designed to give visitors the feeling that they are
experiencing a space that is out of the ordinary,
with different rooms and walls making up a
maze-like labyrinth. One minute you will find
yourself in a narrow passage, in the next the
walls might reach up to the ceiling, disorientating
your whole experience.
• Enlarge and photocopy blurred photographs
onto acetate or tracing paper. Play with
layering techniques to put two or more of
these images together. Using tracing paper
and washes of watercolour will add to the
translucent quality of the images.
• Consider other methods of distorting images
– e.g. reflections in mirrors, images on uneven
surfaces e.g. on scrunched up paper or
drawing onto three-dimensional surfaces e.g.
folded paper cubes or onto other objects.
• Use a camera to experiment with movement
and light levels further. Use long exposures and
light the subject in different ways, either with lots
of light or in very dark places without the use of
flash.
Image: Paul Nougé, Le bras révélateur, from Subversion des images, 1929–30
Print from original negative
Print by Marc Trivier; Archives & Musée de la Littérature, Brussels. © DACS 2010.
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Curriculum links
The following activities suggest ways of exploring
the installation and the experience of being in the
exhibition as a whole.
Primary Art and Design
– Key Stages 1 and 2
Suggested Activities:
Knowledge, skills and understanding
• Work with your group to consider the
boundaries of what is possible within a
physical space. Whilst in the gallery, map your
movements as you move around the different
spaces. Watch the movement of other visitors
and find a way to record their movement. This
method will remove any control over a drawing
as it will be completely dictated by someone
else’s actions.
• Working on their own, and collaborating with
other, on projects in two and three dimensions
and on different scales.
• Make simple viewfinders from card and use
them to re-look at a particular environment
e.g. the gallery, your classroom, or a school
corridor. Lie on the floor, crouch or stand in
order to see the space in different ways. Make
a series of drawings of what you see from
different angles and perspectives.
• Use a still or video camera to map a space
in your school in a different way. Try playing
with simple techniques to make a film that
changes how we see a space, e.g. stand in a
long line or a circle facing outwards. Pass a
video camera slowly along the line from person
to person, perhaps at waist or low floor level.
Cameras can be wrapped carefully in bubble
wrap, attached inside beach balls or large
polystyrene spheres and rolled around, or
could be securely hung from string from the
ceiling and gently swung from person to person
within a circle. Watching these films together
will show bizarre perspectives and alternative
ways of seeing a well-known space.
• Investigating different kinds of art, craft and
design through the visit to the Barbican.
Exploring and developing ideas
• Recording from first-hand observation,
experience and imagination, and explore ideas
through a visit to the Barbican and The Surreal
House exhibition.
• Ask and answer questions about the starting
points for work in consideration of works seen
in the exhibition. Develop ideas from this.
• Collect visual and other information to help
develop ideas in a sketchbook.
Knowledge and understanding
• Explore a variety of materials and processes
used in making art, from within an exhibition of
over 150 artworks.
• Explore the differences and similarities in the
work of artists, architects and designers in
different times and cultures as the exhibition
covers work from the 1920’s until the
contemporary.
• Explore a range of starting points and ideas
for practical work from within the exhibition
– in terms of utilising techniques from the
surrealists (e.g. automatic drawing and
writing), and using particular artworks as a
starting point (e.g. creating museum collections
inspired by the ones in the exhibition).
Secondary Art and
Design – Key Stage 3
Creativity
Investigating and making art, craft and
design
• Producing imaginative images.
• Investigate the possibilities of a range of
materials and processes through the suggested
activities that explore various drawing, making
and recording techniques – for example
collage using magazines and drawings
combined.
Cultural understanding
• Represent observations, ideas and feelings
from what they have seen in the exhibition,
using it as a starting point to design and make
images and objects.
• Exploring and experimenting with ideas,
materials, tools and techniques as inspired by
the vast selection of works in the exhibition.
• Engaging with a range of images and artefacts
from different contexts within The Surreal
House exhibition and using them to inform their
creating and making.
• Understanding the role of the artist.
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Critical understanding
• Exploring visual and sensory qualities of
artworks – including installation, film and
paintings and photographic works in The
Surreal House exhibition.
• Engaging with ideas, images and artefacts,
and identifying how values and meanings
are conveyed as inspired by the work of the
surrealists.
• Developing their own views and expressing
reasoned judgements.
• Analysing and reflecting on work from diverse
contexts within surrealism.
Key Stage 4
• Build on and extend KS3 learning using The
Surreal House exhibition as a stimulus to
develop studio pieces and also further reading
and research.
Artists List
Artists, architects and filmmakers in the
exhibition are:
Georges Allié (1879-1961)
Jean Arp (1886-1966)
Eugène Atget (1857 – 1927)
Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992)
Hans Bellmer (1902 – 1975)
Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010)
Brassaï (1889 – 1984)
Victor Brauner (1903–1966)
Berlinde de Bruyckere (b 1964)
René Burri (b 1933)
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
Joseph Cornell (1903 – 1972)
Salvador Dali (1904 – 1989)
Max Ernst (1891-1976)
Claude Cahun (1894 – 1954)
Maurizo Cattelan (b. 1960)
Vija Celmins (born 1938)
Ferdinand Cheval (1836–1924)
Giorgio de Chirico (1888 – 1978)
Thierry De Cordier (b. 1954)
J Coop Himmelb(l)au (Collective : Wolf Prix,
b.1942 Helmut Swiczinsky, b.1944)
Richard Copans (b. 1947)
Maya Deren (1917–1961)
Diller & Scofidio (Elizabeth Diller, b. 1954 and
Ricardo Scofidio, b. 1935),
Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968)
Giles Ehrmann (1928–2005)
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927)
Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966)
(after Hieronymus Bosch)
Rebecca Horn (b. 1944)
Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967)
John Hejduk (1929 – 2000)
Ilya Kabakov (b.1933) and Emilia Kabakov
(b. 1945)
Buster Keaton (1895–1966)
Edward Kienholz (1927–1994)
Frederick Kiesler (1890 – 1965)
Rachel Kneebone (b. 1973)
Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944)
Nicolas de Larmessin (1640–1725)
John Clarence Laughlin (1905–1985)
Le Corbusier (1887 – 1965)
Zoe Leonard (b. 1961)
Robert Longo (b. 1953)
Sarah Lucas (b. 1962)
Dora Maar (1907 – 1997)
René Magritte (1898 – 1967)
Georges Malkine (1898–1970)
Curzio Malaparte (1898 – 1957)
André Masson (1896–1987)
Matta (1911 – 2002)
Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978)
E L T Mesens (1903 – 1971)
Lee Miller (1907–1997)
Patrick Mimouni (b. 1954)
Noble + Webster (Tim Noble b. 1966 and Sue
Webster b. 1967)
Paul Nouge (1895 – 1954)
Man Ray (1890-1976)
Donald Rodney (1961–1998)
Kay Sage (1898–1963)
Eric Schaal (1905-1994)
Josef Sudek (1896–1976)
Jan Svankmajer (b. 1934)
Yves Tanguy (1900 – 1955)
Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986)
John Tenniel (1820 – 1914)
Emilio Terry (1890–1969)
Paul Thek (1933–1988)
Bernard Tschumi (b. 1944)
Raoul Ubac (1909–1985)
Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963)
Francesca Woodman (1958-1981)
Christopher Wood (1901–1930)
13
Further Reading
Websites
Eds. Jane Alison The Surreal House Architecture
of Desire Barbican Art Gallery and Yale
University Press, 2010
www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery
Mary Ann Caws and Nicola Luckhurst Surrealism
(Themes & Movements) Phaidon, 2004
Alastair Brotchie and Mel Gooding A Book of
Surrealist Games Redstone Press, 1991
Cathrin Klinsohr-Leroy Surrealism (Taschen Basic
Art Series), 2004
Herbert Molderings Duchamp and the Aesthetics
of Chance: Art as Experiment, 2010
Elza Adamowicz Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers,
Columbia University Press, 2010
Lewis Kachur Displaying the Marvellous, 2003
Anna Dezeuze, Samantha Lackey, and David
Lomas Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and
Contemporary Art University of Manchester, 2009
Ghislaine Wood Surreal Things: Surrealism and
Design, V & A Publication, 2007
Michael Robinson Surrealism (The World’s
Greatest Art) , Flame Tree Publishing, 2005
Fiona Bradley Surrealism (Movements in Modern
Art series), Tate Publishing, 1997
www.freud.org.uk
www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition
www.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/haywardgallery-and-visual-arts/hayward-galleryexhibitions/past/undercover-surrealism
www.surrealism.org
www.surrealist.com
www.artmovements.co.uk/surrealism.htm
14
Planning your visit
Farringdon
Barbican
Street
Beech
City Road
Old Street
Bunhill Row
ad
well Ro
Clerken
Aldersgate Street
Silk Str
eet
Barbican
Centre
Liverpool Street
Moorgate
Ho
lbo
rn V
iad
uct
London Wall
Bis
ho
ps
ga
te
For all group bookings and general enquiries
please call Groups Booking Line on
020 7382 7211, (booking line is open 10am–5pm,
Monday to Friday), fax 020 7382 7270 or email
[email protected]
reet
Old St
et
tre
nS
ter
as
tE
ea
Gr
Barbican Art Gallery
Level 3, Barbican Centre
Silk St, London EC2Y 8DS
(Level G) or outside on the Lakeside where there
are plenty of picnic benches and tables.
Waterside Café, just off the Foyer on Level G,
offers full meals as well as sandwiches, drinks
and also children’s meals. It is not suitable for
large groups.
Phones
You can find public telephones in the lift lobby just
across the road from the Level –1 exit, on Level 2,
and on Level 3.
Gallery Opening Times
11am–8pm except Tuesday and Wednesday
11am-6pm, Thursday evenings open until 10pm
Admission
£3 schools groups of 10 or more, Mon–Fri only.
Standard tickets £8 online / £10 on the door.
Concessions £7 online / £8 on the door.
Barbican Member £6 online / £7 on the door.
How To Find Us
Barbican Art Gallery is on Level 3 of the Centre.
Enter via the main entrance on Silk St and cross
the Foyer to the lift and stairs to reach Level 3.
Nearest tube stations:
Barbican, Moorgate, St Paul’s, Liverpool Street.
Nearest train stations: Liverpool St, Farringdon,
City Thameslink, Barbican, Moorgate.
Coach: there is a setting down and picking up
point in Silk St. Parking is limited to the metered
bays in Silk St and Fore St. For further information
contact 020 7606 3030, asking for Parking
Services.
Disabled Visitors
Further Information
Barbican Art Gallery is fully accessible for
wheelchair users. For full Access information
please visit www.barbican.org.uk/visitor–
information/disability–access. You can also
call or email the Barbican Access Manager on
[email protected] 020 7382 7348.
There is medical assistance available on site at
all times.
Cloakrooms
There is a free cloakroom on Level 3, directly
outside Barbican Art Gallery.
Toilets
There are toilets on Level 3 directly outside
Barbican Art Gallery, and in addition on Level –1
for when you are on your way into and out of the
Centre.
Cafes / Packed Lunches
If you have brought packed lunches you can eat
in the Stalls Floor Foyer (Level –1) the Main Foyer
Full evacuation staff are available at all times.
Barbican Education has a full CRB child
protection policy.
If you would like to see the full policy please
contact Barbican Education on 020 7382 2333.
Please contact Barbican Education if you would
like risk assessment information.
Preliminary Visit
Make a preliminary visit before bringing your
group. This will enable you to make best use of
your visit to achieve your teaching and learning
objectives.
If you have any questions during your visit, please
speak to a member of the Art Gallery staff who
will be happy to help.
Contact
We would welcome feedback this teachers’
resource and the exhibition. Please send your
feedback to Education Administrator, Barbican
Education. Barbican Centre, Silk St, London EC2Y
8DS
T: 020 7382 2333 F: 020 7382 7037
E: [email protected]
Credits
Written by Abigail Hunt.
Edited by Hester Alban Davies and Christine
Stewart, Barbican Education.
Curator of The Surreal House: Jane Alison,
Barbican Art Gallery
Barbican Education
Top Tips for Planning your Visit
Beforehand
Book your visit via our dedicated Groups
Booking Line – 020 7382 7211.
See barbican.org.uk/education for information
about other Education events.
Barbican Centre
Silk St, London EC2Y 8DS
T: 020 7382 2333
F: 020 7382 7037
E: [email protected]
The City of London
Corporation is the founder
and principal funder of the
Barbican Centre