Antonio Berni, Argentine artist known for his socially committed art.

Berni had his first exhibition when still a teenager and received a scholarship to study painting in Europe in 1925. After visiting Madrid he settled in Paris, where he studied with the painters André Lhote and Othon Friesz. He received a second scholarship in 1927 that enabled him to come into contact with the Surrealists.

While in France he explored Surrealism, revolutionary politics, and the psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud. He began to produce paintings and collages that reflected the influence of Surrealism and of Giorgio de Chirico in particular. The Nap and Its Dream (1932), for example, is a cryptic image in which a shuttered ...