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Philadelphia is now hosting three major art-world happenings—and that’s not including the spectator sport of the board-vs.-director battle at the Philadelphia Art Museum. But that institution is where Dreamworld, the 100th anniversary show of surrealism that has been touring Europe, is making its only American stop, which makes it a major event. Elsewhere in the city, the Barnes Foundation is presenting Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets, which highlights the institution’s large holdings of the painter’s work and brings many important examples together for the first time. Then there’s the recently opened Calder Gardens, which is a tribute to one of the city’s native sons, Alexander Calder.

That complex of museums on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, in the center of Philadelphia, is a reminder of how important art has become to the city’s sense of itself. Along with a Rodin museum that often gets overlooked, Philadelphia has become a true unsung art center.

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Just days before the launch of Dreamworld—which highlights and pays tribute to the wealth and depth of the Philadelphia Art Museum’s own collection—the museum’s board chose to fire Sasha Suda, the museum’s well-regarded leader. It’s unfathomable to me that the board of a major art institution would fire its director on the eve of a prestigious exhibition, but Suda seems to have resigned herself to the fact that she could not satisfy her overbearing trustees. But I digress.

When the show debuted at the Centre Pompidou last year, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of André Breton’s surrealist manifesto, it had an encyclopedic feel. Sprawling and digressive, it seemed to want to offer a taxonomy of surrealism. And, in that way, it looked more like the Whitney’s current show of ’60s surrealism—a wide, kitchen-sink approach that can seem aimless. To be sure, there were some extraordinary works in the Paris version of the show that did not make it to Philadelphia. (The one I missed most was René Magritte’s La Durée poignardée, from 1938, the famous sexual image of a locomotive emerging from a mantled fireplace.) The Philadelphia Museum’s Dreamworld offers a more directional approach to understanding surrealism, beginning with Giorgio de Chirico, the proto-surrealist, and continuing through artists like Max Ernst, Man Ray, André Masson, and Joan Miró. There are early, challenging Magritte works and spooky Salvador Dalí paintings. And, like the Paris show, Dreamworld reminds us of the many, many female artists who were involved in the movement at all stages—including Dorothea Tanning and Kay Sage—and culminates in a room of works by Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington. Some of these works were in the previous versions of this show, but here, they take pride of place. The Philadelphia Museum was also able to show off its magnificent holdings of Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko—all of whom made surrealist work before their breakthrough to abstract expressionist styles that would eventually transform modern art. To top it all off, the exhibition arrives at a moment when surrealism has become a dominant theme in the art world. Next week, Sotheby’s is selling a major collection of surrealist art, called Exquisite Corpus, assembled by Nesuhi Ertegun and sold by his wife’s estate. Elsewhere, the major dealers Emmanuel Di Donna and Ben Brown have collaborated on an important show of work by René Magritte and the sculpture team of François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne, which is a must-see stop on the fall gallery tour of Madison Avenue. There are also a number of other works around town, and in the auctions, that are not strictly works of surrealism, but certainly rely on the idea of the uncanny and the way the unconscious erupts into rational life.

There wasn’t any doubt for Albert Barnes, who considered Rousseau an example—like Horace Pippin, who also appears frequently in the Barnes collection—of artistic talent emerging in a painter with no formal training. Barnes managed to amass the world’s largest collection of Rousseau’s work. To make room for Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets, the foundation removed works from the museum’s dogmatic display into the temporary exhibition, and was able to bring a number of works from Paris and other museums to show Rousseau’s breadth and evolution as a painter.

The show attempts to give Rousseau the recognition he felt he deserved. But it also labors to show how the artist, who made small landscapes that could decorate middle-class homes, was constrained by his desire to make a living to supplement his small pension. The exhibition culminates in a room uniting three of his large canvases that had the greatest impact on his proto-surrealist reputation. The Sleeping Gypsy, from 1897, is the most recognizable; its dreamlike atmosphere features a lion hovering over a sleeping figure with a stringed instrument beside her, and a river and mountains in the background. The darker and more enigmatic Snake Charmer, from 1907, exudes an eerie calm. The entire room—which also includes Unpleasant Surprise, from 1899-1901—makes the case for seeing Rousseau as a proto-surrealist, and far more than a self-taught portraitist painter of imaginary landscapes. Across the parkway from the Barnes stands the Calder Gardens, which isn’t quite a museum, although it is operated by the Barnes Foundation. It is more of a showcase for Alexander Calder’s art, which comes from the Calder Foundation, an institution that is hard to define but plays an active role in the artist’s market. Like the Mirós and the abstract expressionists shown in Dreamworld, the works on display at the Calder Gardens—a few dozen stabiles, mobiles, and assorted other works—remind us how one branch of surrealism evolved into abstraction; Calder’s early Constellation works were on theme with what others were groping toward. And while Calder’s own connection to Philadelphia is relatively slim, why let that detract from a good museum trip in the city?