Marcel Duchamp, Dorothea Tanning, and Leonora Carrington anchor a new Surrealist conversation
Surrealism returns to the foreground this week through a museum survey, a new scholarly book, and a painting shaped by war and exile. The latest episode of The Week in Art brings those strands together, with host Ben Luke speaking to curators, an author, and a museum specialist about three artists whose work continues to complicate the history of modern art.
The most substantial of the three stories is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the first major US survey of Marcel Duchamp’s full career since 1973 opens on 12 April 2026. The exhibition later travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it will be on view from 10 October to 31 January 2027. Luke speaks with MoMA curators Ann Temkin and Michelle Kuo about the show, which arrives at a moment when Duchamp’s influence remains central to debates about authorship, irony, and the status of the art object.
The episode also turns to Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World, a new book published this week by Yale University Press. Its author, Alyce Mahon, joins the discussion to trace Tanning’s extraordinary life and work. Tanning’s career has long occupied a distinctive place within Surrealism: intellectually rigorous, psychologically charged, and often overshadowed in broader accounts of the movement. A new publication devoted to her work offers a timely corrective.
The final segment focuses on Leonora Carrington’s Down Below (1940), this episode’s Work of the Week. Carrington painted it while hospitalized in Santander, Spain, in the early stages of the Second World War, before her pivotal move to Latin America. The work is included in The Symptomatic Surreal at the Freud Museum in London, where it is shown alongside drawings from Carrington’s sketchbooks. Luke speaks with Vanessa Boni, the museum’s curator of special projects, about the painting and the exhibition, which runs until 28 June 2026.
Taken together, the three stories show how Surrealism remains less a closed chapter than a living field of inquiry — one that still draws museums, publishers, and scholars back to its unresolved questions about the unconscious, the body, and artistic freedom.
