This free-standing sculpture is a French window with a teal-colored frame and black, leather-lined glass panes standing on a flat, shallow base. Each door is made up of four, vertically stacked, equally sized panes. The doors are hinged on a narrow frame and open with small, clear knobs placed next to the second pane down from the top. The doors are slightly ajar. Black writing in capital block letters on the top surface of the base is legible in this photograph. It reads, “FRESH WIDOW COPYRIGHT ROSE SELAVY 1920.”
Marcel Duchamp, Fresh Widow, original 1920, fabricated 1964, painted wood, glass, black leather, paper, and transparent tape, Gift of Deborah and Ed Shein, 2008.33.1

Surrealism

Surrealism took shape in 1920s Paris championed by writer André Breton. It built on Dada, a World War I–era movement that rejected individual expression in favor of chance and absurdity. Surrealism which used dreams and the unconscious as inspiration, became an international movement that lasted for decades.

  • A charcoal-gray, pointed, tower-like form wrapped with cords or vines rises to our left against a barren desert in this horizontal painting. Light falls from our left onto the sharply pointed tip of the tower. A deep, jagged shadow cast from a formation outside of our view to our left falls across the oatmeal-brown desert floor. Two rounded white forms, perhaps stones, lie near the lower right corner, and cast ink-black shadows on the ground. The horizon comes just over a third of the way up the composition. Along the horizon, two clusters of buildings and low hills are painted with tones of hazy indigo blue and tan. The sky above is ice blue, and a veil-like cloud stretches from the horizon to our left of center up into the right corner. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner, “Kay Sage 40.”
  • Blades of forest, pine, and sage green intermixed with slivers of cobalt and sky blue, crimson red, and rose pink create a band of abstracted tree-like forms across this horizontal painting. The blues, red, and pink are concentrated on a structure, presumably a tree, at the front center. To our left of center, geometric shapes like circles, triangles, and rectangles create the impression of a beaked bird, with each shape being fractured into bands of emerald green, royal blue, brick red, and butter yellow. Closer examination finds other birds nearly obscured within the dark, accordion-like patterns of the leaves, including a flock of red-eyed, black, razor-like birds to our left and another creature with a bird-like head and humanoid body to our right. Across the top third of the composition, the sky is pale blue to our left and brightens to shell pink and then light yellow around a disk-like form, to our right. A couple geometric, stylized shapes read as clouds near the upper left corner. Next to a tiny, white line drawing of two abstracted, animal-like forms in the lower right corner, the artist signed his name, “max ernst,” in white paint and the date, “1939” in red.
  • This free-standing sculpture is a French window with a teal-colored frame and black, leather-lined glass panes standing on a flat, shallow base. Each door is made up of four, vertically stacked, equally sized panes. The doors are hinged on a narrow frame and open with small, clear knobs placed next to the second pane down from the top. The doors are slightly ajar. Black writing in capital block letters on the top surface of the base is legible in this photograph. It reads, “FRESH WIDOW COPYRIGHT ROSE SELAVY 1920.”
  • An interior window framed by brown curtains shows a view into a landscape with grass, shrubs, trees, and a dirt path beneath a blue sky with white clouds in this vertical painting. Upon closer inspection, the three legs of a wooden easel, the clip holding a canvas at the top, and a white, stapled edge draws our attention to the fact that a painted canvas rests directly in front of the window. 
  • A sky streaked with azure blue stretches over a gray landscape in this surreal, vertical painting. The sky and land meet halfway up the canvas at a series of short, sharp, charcoal-gray peaks, like canine teeth. Small, diffuse, butter-yellow ovals waft above the peaks. Nine fluffy, cotton-ball like shapes cast narrow shadows across the gray-streaked plane. Three amorphous shapes float over the land closer to us. A ginger-brown, drippy form is to our left, a teal-green, bean-shaped object surrounded with fuzzy white tentacles is to our right, and a peacock-blue, L-shaped drip floats in the distance near the horizon. Thinly painted white and gray lines squiggle or sweep onto the canvas from the left edge. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right, “Yves Tanguy 29.”

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