Fine art in the year ahead

Melting timepieces and eerie dreamscapes haunt the work of Salvador Dalí, the Spanish surrealist with flared mustachio and a flair for self-promotion. A comprehensive exhibition of his paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the headlining museum shows of 2005.

Salvador Dalí, which opens Feb. 16 after its initial showing in Venice, is the largest of several exhibitions to commemorate the centenary of the artist's birth.

The Surrealists, whose heyday was the 1920s and '30s but who inspired (and continue to inspire) artists beyond that era, are well represented this year. Two New York shows tap into the renewed popularity of Surrealism: The Metropolitan Museum of Art examines the work of Max Ernst, a self-taught German painter and one of the founders of the Paris Surrealist movement, April 5 to July 10. And the National Academy Museum mounts the exhibition Surrealism USA, looking at the movement's American and European adherents from 1930 to 1950. The show runs from Feb. 17 to May 8. [Editor's note: The original version misstated the time span of work covered by the exhibit.]

"Surrealism draws large audiences," says Robert Storr, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and now a professor at New York University. Viewers are attracted to the psychology and dream narratives, along with the storytelling, he says.

Latino and Hispanic art continues to be featured in large and small museums, testimony to the fact that these ethnic groups are among the fastest-growing in the US. The Museo del Barrio in New York has mounted Retratos: 2,000 years of Latin American Portraits, featuring work from such icons as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to artists less well known north of the border. The show, which began in December, runs through March 20.

Like TV shows and fashion, museums are also revisiting the 1970s. It seems that 30 years has lent enough distance to conceptual art for it to be evaluated on its own merits. These artists, "the Old Masters of the experimental genre," as Professor Storr calls them, are now in their 50s and 60s, and are revered by today's artists. "They were the radicals once upon a time."

Storr points to the work of Barry Le Va, whose series of installations in the 1970s created a stir. His primary method was to scatter objects and debris across a floor, creating what he calls "distributions," much like crime scenes. The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia's Accumulated Vision, Barry Le Va opens Friday and continues through April 3.

Another Post-Minimalist artist, Richard Tuttle, will be celebrated in a major retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from July 2 to Oct. 23. "Tuttle's work is crowd-pleasing. It's decorative in the best sense of the word," Storr says.

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