The must-see art of the summer

Season of surreality

By GREG COOK | June 10, 2011

Summer art in New England means driving up Route 1 in Maine with the car windows down, past the odd and amazing roadside metal giraffes and caterpillars, and discovering — as I did a few summers back — a nondescript house that turns out to be Fawcett's Antique Toy & Art Museum. Inside is an astonishing time-machine collection, ranging from early Disney toys to the cowboy duds the radio (!) Lone Ranger wore. When you're done there, sure, you'll find intellectual challenges (the ICA's survey of Eva Hesse's sculptural sketches) as well as eye candy (Tomi Ungerer's menacingly whimsical illustrations, vintage circus photos, Andrew Wyeth's studies for his iconic 1948 painting Christina's World). Wyeth — like artists from Edward Hopper to Iraq War artist Steve Mumford — have been attracted here from Away for decades. They come for adventure.

"MAN RAY/LEE MILLER: PARTNERS IN SURREALISM" | JUNE 11–DECEMBER 4

Lee Miller tracked down Man Ray in Paris in 1929, hoping he'd teach her photography. He was a celebrated Surrealist artist. She was a ravishing flapper fashion model. At first Ray reluctantly took her on, but they soon became creative partners — and lovers. This exhibit rounds up 76 sexy, surreal artworks by the pair, as well as their circle — Picasso, Ernst, Calder, Corbusier. "You are so young and beautiful and free, and I hate myself for trying to cramp that in you which I admire most," Ray wrote her in 1931, a year before she dumped him, and moved to New York to find her own way. "I shall try to be everything you want me to be toward you, because I realize it is the only way to keep you."

PEABODY ESSEX MUSEUM | 161 Essex St, Salem, MA | 866.745.1876

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ARTICLES BY GREG COOK

CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN | May 13, 2013
What does it mean to be a man? That's the question at the heart of this smart, sumptuous exhibit — one of the best shows in the region this year.

MERRY PRANKSTERS | May 07, 2013
Parked out front of Brown University's gray modernist Granoff Center on a recent sunny morning were one of those 15-foot-tall inflatable rats that unions install in front of businesses they're protesting and a limousine sloppily painted to resemble a yellow and black school bus.

ALTERED IMAGES | April 30, 2013
Among the handsome Washington Street storefronts of AS220's renovated Mercantile Block building, with their neo-old-timey signs, is the residents' entrance to the building. It is against AS220's religion to leave any space empty that can be filled with art. So the lobby is the AS220 Resident Gallery, which occupants of the building take turns filling with their stuff.

IN THE CITY | April 23, 2013
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Providence art scene is how the city itself has been such a rich subject. A decade ago, the city became a galvanizing topic as artists fought to protect the old mills that served as their homes and studios from demolition — with mixed success. But lately, the community's industrial architecture itself has attracted artists' attention.

THE AFTERMATH OF ATROCITY | April 16, 2013
From the ruins of the Iraq war emerges Wafaa Bilal's "The Ashes Series" and Daniel Heyman's "I Am Sorry It Is So Difficult To Start," on view at Brown University's Bell Gallery.