Three artists who in different ways connect to the Surrealist movement are the subject of this week’s podcast. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first major US survey of the full career of Marcel Duchamp since 1973 opens this weekend, before travelling later in the year to Philadelphia. Ben Luke talks to its curators at MoMA, Ann Temkin and Michelle Kuo.
Dorothea Tanning, Max in a Blue Boat (1947)
© Dorothea TANNING/ADGAP, Paris and DACS, London, 2025
A new book, Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World, exploring the extraordinary life and work of the Surrealist artist, is published this week by Yale University Press and Ben speaks to its author, Alyce Mahon.
Leonora Carrington, Down Below (1940)
© 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, NY and DACS, London.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Down Below (1940), a painting by another of the great women artists of Surrealism, the British Mexican painter Leonora Carrington. It was made while she was hospitalised in Santander in Spain in the early stages of the Second World War, before her pivotal journey to Latin America. The picture is part of an exhibition at the Freud Museum in London, The Symptomatic Surreal, which also features drawings from Carrington’s sketchbooks. We speak to Vanessa Boni, the curator of special projects at the museum, about the work and the show.
- Marcel Duchamp, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 12 April-22 August; Philadelphia Museum of Art, 10 October-31 January 2027
- Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World by Alyce Mahon, Yale University Press, $45 or £30 (hb)
- Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal, Freud Museum, London, until 28 June 2026