Surrealism revisited: heavy breathing at the Met.(various artists, and works; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York)

"Surrealism: Desire Unbound," which opened last week at the Metropolitan Museum, is an oddly evangelical exhibition. It seeks to renew the appeal of a movement that sprang from the spiritual wreck of Europe after the First World War and sank in the larger catastrophe of the Second. This is a tall order, given the relative meagreness of canonical Surrealist art. Limp clocks by Salvador Dali are about as good as it gets. The curators, led by Jennifer Mundi, of the Tate Modern, in London, where the show originated, and the many scholars who contributed essays to an ambitious catalogue cope with this by casting a wide net. The show encompasses paintings, drawings, photographs, ...