Art institutions often understandably pivot toward exhibitions of family-friendly eye candy during the warm-weather months. I still don’t know how Monsters & Myths ended up spending the whole summer in the Frist’s upper-level galleries, but it was a wonderfully dark and weird surprise. This display of surrealist painting and sculpture featured works by Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte and Max Ernst, the last of whose show-stopping “Europe After the Rain II” was the great work of the exhibition. Monsters & Myths offered a brooding and brutal examination of national violence and fascism that spoke to contemporary anxieties through the lens of the greatest conflicts of the past century. Summertime sadness, indeed. JOE NOLAN
Best Spooky Summertime Museum Exhibition
Monsters & Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s at the Frist Art Museum
"Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach,” Salvador Dalí The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art: The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1938.269. © 2019 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
