Thank you for downloading our history program Witness from the BBC World Service.

I'm Louis Adagogo and today I'm taking you back to October 1942

and the first major exhibition of surrealist art in New York. The exhibition was designed by one of the most influential artistic minds of the

20th century, the French artist Marcel du Chaun.

I've been talking to Carol Janice, who played a part in that exhibition.

It's October 1942 and in a large 19th century mansion in Central Manhattan a group of some of the most celebrated

avant-garde artists of the age are mounting an exhibition.

But this is no ordinary exhibition of paintings hung on walls.

At their last exhibition in Paris a few years earlier, the surrealist poet Andre Breton and the artist Marcel Duchin had hung sacks of coal from the ceiling and given visitors flashlights so they could see in the darkened rooms.

This new exhibition in New York, designed by the man who 25 years earlier had shocked the

art world by signing a white porcelain new rhino and calling it art,

promised to be equally unusual.

I was gaga over Duchamp as a youngster, you know, I thought he was fantastic.

Carol Janus was the son of the art gallery owner, Sydney Janus, and knew Duchan well.

He was very witty and always a charming, most civilized and delightful person.

And he has been lauded as, well, the father of conceptual art, really.

Yes, yes, there's no question about it.

Duchin and his contemporaries created not just surrealism, but Dardaiism, cubism, futurism.

They'd come of age during the turmoil of the First World War.

By 1942, Europe was plunged into a second one.

Duchon was among the artists who'd taken sanctuary in America. The money from this exhibition in New York would be sent back to France to help the war effort.

But surrealism was never serious for long.

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