Excerpts from a Wall Street Journal online review (Feb 25, 2020):
Masson, a founding Surrealist, saw the movement as an immersion “into what the German romantics call the night side of things.” However, “towards 1930,” Masson wrote, “a formidable disaster appeared in its midst: the demagogy of the irrational.” “Midnight in Paris” touches on Surrealism’s highs and lows, its darkness, poetry, beauty and banalities, reminding viewers—at the heart of the Dalí Museum, no less—that the movement is much, much more than melting watches.
In 1920s Paris, Surrealist revolution and transgression were in the air, but not everyone agreed on how to make Surrealist works or what they should look like. “Midnight in Paris: Surrealism at the Crossroads, 1929,” an exhibition of 80 paintings, prints, sculptures, drawings, collages, photographs, films and documents at St. Petersburg’s Dalí Museum, proposes to examine Surrealism’s rich visual fabric, conflicts and rivalries during the movement’s heyday in the City of Light. Organized by Didier Ottinger, deputy director of the Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Pompidou, and William Jeffett, chief curator of special exhibitions at the Dalí, it focuses on the moment just before Surrealism burst onto and began to dominate the world stage.
In the final years of Georgia O’Keeffe’s nearly century-long life, she employed and befriended the young sculptor Juan Hamilton. The two would become inseparable, and upon her death in 1986, Hamilton inherited fine art and personal affects from the artist’s estate, including rarely seen pieces from the estate of O’Keeffe’s late husband, Joseph Stieglitz.
Beginning in the early 1960s, Peter Saul began to incorporate imagery borrowed from a range of pop-cultural sources into his exuberant, brightly colored paintings, adopting a style that has proven to be far ahead of its time. His work developed independently from concurrent art historical movements like Pop art, with which it shares some superficially similar concerns. Instead of the cool detachment of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, however, Saul crafted his own unique blend of Surrealism, history painting, vernacular illustration, and the real-life shock and horror of current events.
‘The sports stars of today are the movie stars of yesterday,’ proclaimed the artist. It was true; thanks to rapid advances in TV broadcasting, sporting champions in the 1970s were starting to achieve the same level of popularity as other entertainers.
David Hockney, (born 9 July 1937) is a British painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.
Over the course of his acclaimed 60-year career, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) has employed both representation and abstraction as a means of reckoning with the legacy, collective memory, and national sensibility of post–Second World War Germany, in both broad and very personal terms. 
New essays by eminent scholars address a variety of themes: Sheena Wagstaff evaluates the conceptual import of the artist’s technique; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh discusses the poignant Birkenau paintings (2014); Peter Geimer explores the artist’s enduring interest in photographic imagery; Briony Fer looks at Richter’s family pictures against traditional painting genres and conventions; Brinda Kumar investigates the artist’s engagement with landscape as a site of memory; André Rottmann considers the impact of randomization and chance on Richter’s abstract works; and Hal Foster examines the glass and mirror works. As this book demonstrates, Richter’s rich and varied oeuvre is a testament to the continued relevance of painting in contemporary art.
The study is divided into two parts: the first examines Dalí’s beginnings as an unknown artist. We witness how the young Dalí deployed all the isms―Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism, Fauvism, Purism and Futurism―with playful mastery, and how he would borrow from prevailing trends before ridiculing and abandoning them. The second part unveils the conclusions of Dalí’s lifelong inquiries, as well as the great legacy he left in works such as Tuna Fishing (1966/67) or Hallucinogenic Toreador (1970). It includes previously unpublished homages to Velázquez or Michelangelo, painted to the same end as the variations on past masters done by his contemporary, Picasso.
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