Staging Democracy, Selling Surrealism: SFMA and its 1937

When the landmark exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism traveled from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York to the San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMA) in August 1937, it entered a radically different civic and institutional landscape. At MoMA, founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr. designed the exhibition to present the principal movements of modern art in a strictly “objective and historical manner” (see fig. 1)¹ . Grace L. McCann Morley, the first director of SFMA, adopted a distinct polyvocal curatorial approach. According to Berit Potter, Morley intentionally avoided a single voice by inviting input and help from many artists, art dealers, collectors, and external curators.² Responding to historical contingencies and institutional limitations, Morley transformed SFMA into a constructed site of ideological confrontation, staging a clash between European Surrealism and California Post-Surrealism; she turned the museum into an active battleground over artistic legitimacy. Rather than resolving the tensions within modern art, this strategy exposed how democratized access could coexist with systems of elite validation and exchange. This experiment exposed a central paradox: even as the museum democratized its public, the validation, ownership, and circulation of the avant-garde remained dependent on elite capital.

Figure 1. Museum of Modern Art, “Press Release: Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,” New York, 1936, 1.

To understand the profound impact of Morley’s curatorial intervention, we must apply Art Historian T.J Clark’s methodology of examining the specific “conditions of artistic creation” and reception. Clark argues that true art history requires an understanding of “patronage, about art dealing, about the status of the artist, the structure of artistic production.”³ Under this framework, the “class identity” of the audience ultimately shapes what is perceived and how meaning is generated.⁴ When SFMA reopened in 1935, San Francisco was geographically isolated and considered a “far-flung parochial outpost” in the global art world.⁵ Lacking institutional capital, the museum possessed virtually no permanent collection of its own, having opened with only 98 modern French prints.⁶ Concurrently, the city was reeling from the depths of the Great Depression, an era marked by severe economic hardship.⁷ Morley recognized that traditional daytime museum hours meant art catered almost exclusively to the “leisured people.”⁸ In response, she fundamentally altered the conditions of artistic reception by embarking on a “new and democratic experiment.”⁹ Morley kept her exhibition galleries “brilliantly lit”¹⁰ and open until 10:00 pm six days a week.¹¹ This logistical innovation successfully shifted the museum’s class identity to include day laborers, office workers, and members of labor organizations.¹² Morley democratized access to the museum, but not yet the power to define, own, or circulate what was seen inside it.

By bringing this working-class public into the museum, Morley set the stage for a collision with the exhibition’s imported content. In New York, Barr had advanced a “demotic imperative,”¹³ presenting modernism as a universal “way of life” through a “comparative material” section¹⁴ that placed fine art alongside popular and amateur forms, from Disney animation to children’s drawings.¹⁵ This collapse of boundaries between high and low culture unsettled traditional hierarchies of artistic value. While Barr disrupted what could be exhibited by elevating amateur and commercial works, he still maintained absolute curatorial authority over the presentation. Institutional elites, such as Société anonyme founder Katherine Dreier, were horrified; she condemned the inclusion of such materials as “deleterious” and withdrew her loans of Marcel Duchamp’s work from the exhibition.¹⁶ Her reaction tells that the issue was about authority, who had the power to determine what counted as legitimate modern art.

When the exhibition arrived in San Francisco, this imported challenge to elite authority sparked a fierce local backlash. San Francisco Chronicle art critic Alfred Frankenstein was repulsed, blasting the show as a “cross between a three-ring circus and a chamber of horrors.”¹⁷ Declaring it as “the grossest mistake”¹⁸ to assume the surrealist spectacle represented all modern art, he pleaded with the readers to return to traditional, “life-nurturing” aesthetics.¹⁹ His response reflects a broader anxiety within the critical establishment, as the exhibition unsettled existing structures of artistic validation and threatened the establishment's authority to define legitimate art.

However, rather than simply importing Barr’s East Coast controversy, Morley reframed the exhibition to legitimize local artists. In SFMA’s official brochure for the exhibition, as seen in figure 2, Morley wrote that the surrealist works should be “approached in a spirit of open-minded discovery” and reminded viewers that “scholarship admits humor as does art”.²⁰ But beneath this accessible tone lay a highly strategic, localized agenda: rejecting a singular curatorial voice, Morley presented modern art as a field of competing interpretations, a confrontation she staged by juxtaposing established European Surrealism directly against the California Post-Surrealists.

Figure 2. Fantastic Art and Surrealism exhibition brochure, San Francisco Museum of Art, August 6–31, 1937. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Archives.

Founded by Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg, this Los Angeles-based movement positioned itself as the direct ‘antithesis” to European expressionist-Surrealism.²¹ While European artists embraced irrationality, Feitelson vehemently rejected such “subconscious psychic meanderings”.²² Instead, he argued for “logic and cerebral” structure,²³ and rationally ordered composition that he termed “subjective classicism”.²⁴ To highlight this contrast, Morley exhibited established European surrealists such as Joan Miró alongside these Californian Post-Surrealists.²⁵ To heighten the debate, she invited Feitelson to the museum to give a public lecture.²⁶ By granting Feitelson the public platform, Morley transformed SFMA into an active arena, effectively forcing her new, working-class audience to weigh the Europeans' subconscious chaos against the Californians' rationalism. In doing so, Morley shifted the museum from a site of passive viewing to one of active ideological negotiation, where meaning was contested in real time.

Yet, for all the Morleys’ triumphs, the exhibition exposed a fundamental tension in the financial survival of the avant-garde. As Sandra Zalman notes, the 1936-1937 exhibitions pushed Surrealism into the “fraught territory between the avant-garde and the commercial” marketplace.²⁷ Its road appeal made it readily adaptable to consumer culture. This was evident when Salvador Dali designed surrealist window displays for the elite Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Ave to capitalize on the exhibition’s publicity.²⁸

San Francisco reflected the same dynamic. Primary archival correspondence reveals that SFMA essentially operated as an active commercial broker during the exhibition’s run. While laborers wandered the brilliantly lit galleries at night, elite buyers treated the museum as a marketplace. As Morley reported in an August 1937 letter to Elodie Courter, MoMA’s Secretary of Circulating Exhibitions, prominent collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg flew from Hollywood to San Francisco specifically to purchase works right off the museum walls.(see fig. 3)²⁹ . Morley relayed Arensberg’s “serious interest” in buying Yves Tanguy’s Black Landscape for 2500 francs, alongside specific works by Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp.³⁰ MoMA quickly replied to negotiate the sales, noting that Picabia’s Catch as Catch Can carried an insurance value of 5000 francs and offering to cable Europe to secure the final selling prices.(see fig. 4).³¹

Figure 3. Grace L. McCann Morley to Elodie Courter, August 23, 1937, SFMOMA, San Francisco, Archives.

Figure 4. Elodie Courter to Grace L. McCann Morley, August 27, 1937, Secretary of Circulating Exhibitions, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Archives.

This juxtaposition exposes the central paradox of Morley’s 1937 exhibition: the contradiction between democratized access and the realities of the capitalist art market. Morley successfully expanded access by adjusting museum hours so that union members and day laborers could freely engage with international modernism. However, she lacked the institutional capital to secure this art for her public permanently. This financial helplessness would plague her for years; in a 1945 letter, Morley lamented that the museum could rarely afford to purchase works while artists were still becoming known, and by the time they were established, the museum could no longer afford them.³²

Consequently, Morley’s democratic experiment remained tethered to elite patronage. As the avant-garde was increasingly commodified, serving as an entertaining spectacle for mass audiences and an exclusive investment for elite buyers, it entered a crisis of legitimacy. This overexposure prompted critics like Clement Greenberg to warn that the movement’s entanglement with mass culture risked reducing it to manipulative “kitsch.”³³ Ultimately, the 1937 SFMA exhibition reveals a structural institutional paradox: no matter how successfully a curator may democratize the physical space of reception, the cultural validation and material survival of the avant-garde remained inescapably bound to the dictates of elite capital.