Paul Klee Starker Traum (A Vivid Dream), 1929 Gouache on paper, 10 1/4 x 8 1/4 " Private collection. © 1999 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

From November 4, 1999 to February 26, 2000, the Equitable Gallery will present an international exhibition of twentieth-century art about dreams.

Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, released in Vienna on November 4, 1899, laid the foundation for this century’s scientific view of the human psyche by declaring that dreams are doorways to the unconscious mind. Twentieth-century artists have responded to this revolutionary model of the mind by looking inward to a new muse and capturing their dreams.

In commemoration of the 100-year anniversary of Freud’s book,Dreams 1900-2000 presents sixty paintings, sculpture, prints, photographs, and artists’ books, along with dream sequences from twenty-one films.

Dreams 1900-2000 was organized by the Binghamton University Art Museum of the State University of New York, with support from the Lucy Daniels Foundation. The Equitable Gallery is sponsored by The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, a member of the Global AXA Group.

Alfred Kubin Jede Nacht besucht uns ein Traum (Every Night a Dream Visits Us), 1903 Ink and wash on paper, 10 3/8 x 9 1/4 " Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.

Dreams 1900-2000: Science, Art, and the Unconscious Mind opens in fin-de-siècle Vienna with two works by symbolist contemporaries of Freud: Alfred Kubin’s Every Night a Dream Visits Us (1903) and Oskar Kokoschka’s The Dreaming Boys (1907). At the opposite end of the century is Dreaming Brain (1999), an interactive movie that allows viewers using a computer to enter the dreams of media artist Steve Miller.

In between, the exhibition presents images of dreams by artists from around the world, including Simon Edmondson from Britain, Rainer Fetting and Hans Bellmer from Germany, Arnulf Rainer from Austria, Enzo Cucchi from Italy, Maya Eizin from Sweden, Olga Bulgakova from Russia, Eng Tow from Singapore, Arturo Rivera and Alfredo Castañeda from Mexico, Juan González from Cuba, and Javier Silva Meinel from Peru.

Seiji Tôgô Surrealistic Stroll, 1929 Oil on canvas, 25 1/4 x 19" The Yasuda Kasai Fine Art Foundation, Seiji Tôgô Memorial, Yasuda Kasai Museum of Art, Tokyo.

While some artists have re-created the fragmented appearance of dreams in the style of their work, others have drawn inspiration from the symbolic content of their own dreams. For example, Jasper Johns dreamed the first American flag on which he based his famous series, which includes Two Flags (1980).

Links between Freudian psychoanalysis and surrealism will be probed, such as Salvador Dalí’s dreamlike merging of objects by similarity of form, as in Morphological Echo (1936), and René Magritte’s free association of words and pictures in Key of Dreams (1952).

The exhibition will also highlight artistic responses to Freud’s most influential critics, Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan. Jung’s view of dreams as expressions of archetypal symbols from a collective unconscious resonates in abstract expressionism, such as the geometric shapes in Adolph Gottlieb’s Night Flight (1951). Lacan’s belief that the structure of the unconscious mind is similar to that of language is the basis of certain conceptual artforms, such as the word associations in John Baldessari’s Blasted Allegories (Colorful Sentence) (1978).

Film still from Persona, 1966 Sweden. Directed by Ingmar Bergman.

Film was invented in France in the mid-1890s, while Freud was writing his revolutionary book. Early filmmakers claimed that moving pictures were best suited to visually present the displacements of time and space characteristic of dreams. Visitors to the exhibition will view rare, early films of dreams, including Edwin S. Porter’s An Artist’s Dream (1900) and Georges Méliès’ The Ballet Master’s Dream (1903). The varied representations of dreams by filmmakers is demonstrated by a program of dream sequences from films directed by Charlie Chaplin, Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa and others.

Installations in the exhibition include Finnish artist Maaria Wirkkala’s Dream Screen, which she will create by blowing coal dust onto a gallery wall. What appears at first like a minimalist black square opens up as a window onto the theater of the night. Another minimalist echo is created by Korean artist Duck-Hyun Cho’s six-foot-high black box, Dialogue, which is filled with shadowy layers of reflecting memories. Memory is also the theme of Bill Viola’s video installation Reflecting Pool (1977-79) in which reality and illusion mix in the dark waters.

Rainer Fetting Dream × 76, 1991 Oil on canvas, 59 7/8 x 48 " Courtesy of the artist, Berlin.

The exhibition includes powerful sculpture such as Germaine Richier’s Man of the Night (1954), a bronze hybrid of a man and a bat, and Michael Lucero’s ceramic Midnight Dreamer (1984), a large reclining head covered with images from the sleeper’s dream.

An interesting historical note is provided by Jim Dine’s lithograph The Wolf Man’s Dream (c. 1990), which was inspired by Freud’s most famous patient, the key to whose cure was Freud’s interpretation of his terrifying dream of wolves. The exhibition also features a very rare painting of the dream by the actual Wolf Man, the Russian aristocrat and artist Sergei Pankejeff.

Dreams 1900-2000 was curated by Lynn Gamwell, Director of the Binghamton University Art Museum, who organized the first exhibition of Freud’s personal art collection, The Sigmund Freud Antiquities: Fragments from a Buried Past, which was shown at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1990-91.

The exhibition, which will travel to the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien in Vienna and the Passage de Retz in Paris, is accompanied by a catalogue edited by Gamwell and published by Cornell University Press in their prestigious series on the history of psychiatry. It includes essays by Gamwell; Ernest Hartmann, a psychiatrist who is a leading expert on the biology and psychology of dreaming; and art critic Donald Kuspit.

The Equitable Gallery presents works from all fields of the visual arts, including exhibitions originating outside of New York that would not otherwise have a presence in the city, as well as works from New York collections that would benefit from preservation and public presentation. The Equitable Gallery is located in the atrium lobby of Equitable Tower, 787 Seventh Avenue at 51^st Street in New York City. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free.