From its foundation in 1957 to its self-dissolution in 1972, the Situationist International established itself as one of the most radical revolutionary organisations of the twentieth century. This book brings together leading researchers on the SI to provide a comprehensive critical analysis of the group's key concepts and contexts, from its relationship to earlier artistic avant-gardes, romanticism, Hegelianism, the history of the workers' movement and May '68 to the concepts and practices of 'spectacle', 'constructed situations', 'everyday life' and 'detournement'. The volume also considers historically underexamined areas of the SI, including the situation of women in the group and its opposition to colonialism and racism. With contributions from a broad range of thinkers including Anselm Jappe and Michael Loewy, this account takes a fresh look at the complex workings of a group that has come to define radical politics and culture in the post-war period.

Since the rediscovery of British Surrealism at the Children of Alice exhibition at Marcel Fleiss's Galerie 1900-2000 in Paris in 1982, there has been a major revival of interest in Surrealism outside France. Surrealism in Britain is the first comprehensive study of the British Surrealist movement and its achievements. Lavishly illustrated, the book provides a year-by-year narrative of the development of Surrealism among artists, writers, critics and theorists in Britain, from the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London right through to the present day. Michel Remy has conducted personal interviews with many of the artists involved and the book includes an examination of the work of, among others, Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Len Lye, Humphrey Jennings, David Gascoyne, Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff, Roland Penrose, F. E. McWilliam, Conroy Maddox, Emmy Bridgwater, Edith Rimmington, Desmond Morris, Lee Miller, Julian Trevelyan and John Tunnard. Poetry, prose, painting, sculpture, photography and artists' texts all have their place in this fascinating and attractive book.

Presents the essential ideas of the founder of French surrealism

From its auspicious beginnings in the summer of 1966 to the present, the Chicago Surrealist Group-and the Surrealist Movement in the United States, which grew out of it-have continued to foment an exhilarating whirlwind of revolt while playfully igniting the sparks of Poetry, Freedom and Love in the crucible of the Unfettered Imagination. In so doing, it has brightly illuminated the pathways of absolute divergence that define the intrinsically anarchist trajectory of the surrealist adventure. Drawing on the full range of U.S. surrealist publications, from the original journal Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion to the very latest millennial communique from the front lines of the ongoing battle against miserabilism, this volume contains over 200 texts (more than two dozen appearing here for the first time) by more than fifty participants in the Surrealist Movement, making this the most comprehensive, diverse and lavishly illustrated compilation of American surrealist writings to have ever been assembled. Contributors include: Gale Ahrens, Jennifer Bean, Jen Besemer, Daniel C. Boyer, Paul Buhle, Ronnie Burk, Leonora Carrington, Laura Corsigilia, Jayne Cortez, Guy Ducornet, Rikki Ducornet, Schlechter Duvall, Alice Farley, J. Allen Fees, Beth Garon, Paul Garon, Eugenio F. Granell, Robert Green, Miriam Hansen, Diedra Harris-Kelley, Jan Hathaway, Corinna Jablonski, Joseph Jablonski, Ted Joans, Gerome Kamrowski, Robin D. G. Kelley, Don LaCoss, Philip Lamantia, Clarence John Laughlin, Mary Low, Herbert Marcuse, Tristan Meinecke, Casandra Stark Mele, Anne Olson, Nancy Joyce Peters, Charles Radcliffe, Myrna Bell Rochester, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont, Ody Saban, Louise Simons, Martha Sonnenberg, Christopher Starr, Ivan Svitak, Cheikh Tidiane Sylla, Claude Tarnaud, Debra Taub, Dale Tomich, Patrick Turner, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, Jordan West, Joel Williams, Marie Wilson, Haifa Zangana

In this generously illustrated and lively book, Christopher Lloyd sets out and interprets the lifelong achievement of Picasso (1881-1973) as a draftsman. Although there have been many publications about his drawings that have tended to focus on particular periods of his career, this stunning volume specifically examines how drawing serves as the vital thread connecting all of Picasso's art, just as it also links his private world with his public persona of which he was becoming increasingly aware in his later years. Picasso and the Art of Drawing ultimately showcases how the basis of the titular artist's style as painter, sculptor, printmaker, and designer was manifestly achieved through drawing. Distributed for Modern Art Press

The Exile of George Grosz examines the life and work of George Grosz after he fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and sought to re-establish his artistic career under changed circumstances in New York. It situates Grosz's American production specifically within the cultural politics of German exile in the United States during World War II and the Cold War. Basing her study on extensive archival research and using theories of exile, migrancy, and cosmopolitanism, McCloskey explores how Grosz's art illuminates the changing cultural politics of exile. She also foregrounds the terms on which German exile helped to define both the limits and possibilities of American visions of a one world order under U.S. leadership that emerged during this period. This book presents Grosz's work in relation to that of other prominent figures of the German emigration, including Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, as the exile community agonized over its measure of responsibility for the Nazi atrocity German culture had become and debated what Germany's postwar future should be. Important too at this time were Grosz's interactions with the American art world. His historical allegories, self-portraits, and other works are analyzed as confrontational responses to the New York art world's consolidating consensus around Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism during and after World War II. This nuanced study recounts the controversial repatriation of Grosz's work, and the exile culture of which it was a part, to a German nation perilously divided between East and West in the Cold War.

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s examines the intersection of Hegelian aesthetics, experimental art and poetry, Marxism and psychoanalysis in the theory and practice of the Surrealist movement. Locating Surrealist art and thought between modernist art and revolutionary politics, Steven Harris investigates the consequences of the Surrealists' efforts to synthesize these diverse concerns, through the invention, in 1931, of the object and in the recasting of their activities as a mode of revolutionary science. Providing a context for the cultural and political debates in France and the Soviet Union during the 1930s, he also analyzes the debate on proletarian literature, the Surrealists' reaction to the Popular Front, and their eventual defense of an experimental modern art following their break with the French Communist Party in 1935.

The Outsider (Patricide 6) is an investigation into the notion of the Outsider Artist. Including essays from Roger Cardinal (author of 'Outsider Art', 1972) and Michel Remy (author of 'Surrealism in Britain', 2001) alongside articles by Outsider Artists (including George Widener, Chris Hipkiss and Tony Convey) and those who have worked with them.

The first collection of critical essays on Luis Bunuel's 1972 Oscar-winning masterpiece, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, this anthology brings fresh perspectives to the most sophisticated film of this director whose narrative experimentation was always ahead of its time. Combining some of the world's most distinguished scholars on Bunuel and Spanish cinema with new voices in cultural theory, this volume helps us to rethink not only The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but also Bunuel's entire body of work. Among the topics examined are Bunuel's relationship to surrealism, the transnational (Spanish, French, Mexican, and American) nature of his work, and his dramatic and idiosyncratic rethinking of sex, narrative and gender. Also included are vintage reviews of the film, as well a selected Bunuel bibliography.

World-renowned for her work during the Weimar period, Hannah Hoech was a pioneer in many aspects, both artistic and cultural. She was the lone woman of the Berlin Dada movement - the riotous form of art that deconstructed sound, language, and images to re-assemble them into new objects, texts and meanings. Hoech was a pivotal force in the development of collage, paving the way for today's ubiquitous image editing techniques. A determined believer in women's rights, Hoech questioned conventional concepts of partnership, beauty and the making of art, her work presenting acute critiques of racial and social stereotypes, particularly that of her native Germany. Focusing on Hoech's collages, this book examines the artist's career from the 1920s to the 1970s, charting her oeuvre from early works influenced by fashion and mass media, through to her later compositions of lyrical abstraction. It reveals her rapid development of a personal style, which was both humorous and often moving, but also offered critical commentary on society at a time of tremendous social change. Included are essays that examine themes such as the concept of the "New Woman" and the legacy of German colonialism. Featuring international scholarship on a groundbreaking artist, this volume brings together important source texts and reference material, which were first translated into English for the original edition of this book.

Surrealist artist Max Ernst defined collage as the "alchemy of the visual image." Students of his work have often dismissed this comment as simply a metaphor for the transformative power of using found images in a new context. Taking a wholly different perspective on Ernst and alchemy, however, M. E. Warlick persuasively demonstrates that the artist had a profound and abiding interest in alchemical philosophy and often used alchemical symbolism in works created throughout his career.

A revival of interest in alchemy swept the artistic, psychoanalytic, historical, and scientific circles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Warlick sets Ernst's work squarely within this movement. Looking at both his art (many of the works she discusses are reproduced in the book) and his writings, she reveals how thoroughly alchemical philosophy and symbolism pervade his early Dadaist experiments, his foundational work in surrealism, and his many collages and paintings of women and landscapes, whose images exemplify the alchemical fusing of opposites. This pioneering research adds an essential key to understanding the multilayered complexity of Ernst's works, as it affirms his standing as one of Germany's most significant artists of the twentieth century.

This book examines the salient ideas and practices that have shaped Surrealism as a protean intellectual and cultural concept that fundamentally shifted our understanding of the nexus between art, culture, and politics. By bringing a diverse set of artistic forms and practices such as literature, manifestos, collage, photography, film, fashion, display, and collecting into conversation with newly emerging intellectual traditions (ethnography, modern science, anthropology, and psychoanalysis), the essays in this volume reveal Surrealism's enduring influence on contemporary thought and culture alongside its anti-colonial political position and international reach. Surrealism's fascination with novel forms of cultural production and experimental methods contributed to its conceptual malleability and temporal durability, making it one of the most significant avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. The book traces how Surrealism's urgent political and aesthetic provocations have bequeathed an important legacy for recent scholarly interest in thing theory, critical vitalism, new materialism, ontology, and animal/human studies.

What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? Rene Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the pioneers of modern abstraction.

An argument that Modernism is a cognitive phenomenon rather than a cultural one. At the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry, music, and painting all underwent a sea change. Poetry abandoned rhyme and meter; music ceased to be tonally centered; and painting no longer aimed at faithful representation. These artistic developments have been attributed to cultural factors ranging from the Industrial Revolution and the technical innovation of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser argues that the stylistic innovations of Western modernism reflect not a cultural shift but a cognitive one. Behind modernism is the same cognitive phenomenon that led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century: the brain coming up against its natural limitations. Keyser argues that the transformation in poetry, music, and painting (the so-called sister arts) is the result of the abandonment of a natural aesthetic based on a set of rules shared between artist and audience, and that this is virtually the same cognitive shift that occurred when scientists abandoned the mechanical philosophy of the Galilean revolution. The cultural explanations for Modernism may still be relevant, but they are epiphenomenal rather than causal. Artists felt that traditional forms of art had been exhausted, and they began to resort to private formats-Easter eggs with hidden and often inaccessible meaning. Keyser proposes that when artists discarded their natural rule-governed aesthetic, it marked a cognitive shift; general intelligence took over from hardwired proclivity. Artists used a different part of the brain to create, and audiences were forced to play catch up.

The skills of Ithell Colquhoun in her main practice, that of artist and pioneer in this country of surrealistic art, have been long recognised. Additionally, other interests -- alchemy. Earth-magic, active occultism, poetry, druidism, the pre-Christian pagan calendar, the history and membership of the Golden Dawn -- and writing of and involvement in these interests by book publication and in a widely scattered field of correspondence, have created a miscellany of truly gargantuan proportion. Eric Ratcliffe considered it was time to get together some of these pieces, to add something of what is known of Colquhoun's early life and family history and to take the opportunity of listing a comprehensive calendar of her work and exhibitions. The result is neither strictly biographical nor a treatise on any one subject, but it is a first gathering of the roots, passions and multi-directions of this artist. It is a patchwork containing many launch-pads for exploration of the magical and mythical atmosphere which this artist existed in and created. Here therefore is a contribution towards solving a jigsaw and a wind-catch of the minor cyclones of lthell's dedicatory interests, also serving as a record of her accomplishments in the art field.

Masterpiece created out of periodical illustrations explores worlds of terror and surprise. Some consider this Ernst's greatest work.

With Salvador Dali as its figurehead, the great ship of Surrealism traversed the turbulent seas of the early 20th century with sails billowing with dreams and desires. Inspired by the psychoanalytical practice of Sigmund Freud, the Surrealists championed the unconscious as the domain of truth, uninhibited by the standards or expectations of society. With techniques ranging from hypnotism to nocturnal walks to automatic writing, the likes of Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Brassai, and Meret Oppenheim produced paintings, drawings, texts, and films in which they sought to excavate their most intimate and primal instincts. The results abound with sexual fantasies, with mysterious, menacing creatures, and with the juxtaposition of seemingly contradictory objects or ideas. This book introduces the origins and the sensational legacy of the Surrealist movement, one of the most profound and enduring influences on film, theater, literature, art, and thought. Featured artists: Hans Arp, Andre Breton, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Rene Magritte, Andre Masson, Matta, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Meret Oppenheim, Yves Tanguy About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art History series features: approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions a detailed, illustrated introduction a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

The Greek-American artist Kosta Alex (1925-2005) initially trained in figure sculpture in Manhattan. In 1947 he moved to Paris, where he mingled with and exhibited alongside the avant-garde artists of his day. His interest in the flattening of forms led him to create his first series of decoupage-collages in about 1950. Like many other artists of the time, he was drawn to using humble, utilitarian materials such as corrugated cardboard, packaging, newspapers, magazines, wallpaper, timetables, lists, maps, and other scraps culled from daily urban life. He integrated these elements into his art in an often poetic and humorous manner, using screws, nuts, staples, rope, string, and glue to connect them into a cohesive whole. Alex also drew inspiration from classical sculpture, primitive art, and Islamic art, and employed repetitive themes and rhythmic arrangements in his compositions. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he produced groundbreaking collage-reliefs in expanded polystyrene, which Man Ray praised for breaking "the two-dimensional barrier." Handsomely illustrated, Kosta Alex is the first monograph on this intriguing artist. Distributed for Editions Hazan, Paris

This is the first comprehensive study of bodily images in Dada. Travelling between the international centres of the movement, from Zurich to Berlin, Paris to New York, it examines a diverse range of media, including art, literature, performance, photography and film. Its overall approach is to confront Dada's bodily images not as organic unities but as fictions that reflect on the disjunctive, dehumanised society of war-torn Europe. These fictions occupy an ambivalent space between the battlefield (in their satirical exposure of ideology) and the fairground (in their playful manipulation and joyful renewal of the body). The book features analyses of works by Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Hannah Hoech, Marcel Duchamp and others, and will appeal to scholars and students of European history, cultural history, art and literature. -- .

The second of an important multi-volume catalogue project, this publication features work by Francis Picabia (1879-1953) that dates from 1915 into mid-1927. Beginning with Picabia's elaboration of a personal machinist aesthetic, the book continues by looking at the artist's central role in the formulation of the Paris Dada movement. That irreverent movement included Picabia's increasingly provocative mechanomorphic compositions, complemented by his unorthodox writings and graphic designs as well as socially powerful performances. In the 1920s, Picabia turned to striking geometrical abstractions, subversive figurative art, and a collaboration in 1924 with the Swedish Ballet. The volume finishes with a look at Picabia's creations of the mid-1920s, which included memorable collages and flamboyant figurative compositions known as the "monsters." Distributed for Mercatorfonds

What is the relevance of Dada and its artistic strategies in our current moment, one marked by post-truth politics, information floods and big data? How can contemporary art highlight the neglected nuances of cultural representation in the present day? While it may feel like we are living in a period of anomaly with the rise of the alt-right, this book shows how the Dada movement's artistic response to the aggressive nationalism and fascism of its time offers a fruitful analogy to our contemporary era. Dada's counter-cultural strategies, such as the distortion of reality and attacks on elites and rationality, have long been endorsed by artistic avantgardes and subcultures. Dada Data details how modern-day movements have appropriated such tactics in their ways of addressing the public both on- and offline. Bringing together contributions from interdisciplinary scholars, curators and artists working in global contexts that explore an array of artistic modes of persuasion and resistance, the book demonstrates how contemporary art can bring out neglected nuances of our post-truth moment. In linking the Dada movement's counter-cultural activities to modern phenomena such as post-internet art, information floods and big data mining, the book collates original propaganda with diverse artwork from such figures as Hannah Hoech, Paula Rego, Tschabalala Self, Sheida Soleimani and South African artists donna Kukama and Kemang Wa Lehulere. In doing so, Dada Data brings together a rich scrapbook of Dada resources and perspectives that are highly relevant to present-day political concerns. With artistic contributions by IOCOSE, donna Kukama, Kemang Wa Lehulere and Montage Madels.

MAINTENANT 12: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art serves up the controversial theme, "WE ARE ALL A 'LIKE'." With the rise in social media use-and abuse-the concept of "like" has reached whole new levels. There's the idea of an individual's reaction to events, people, images, etc. as a reduction to "Like" or "Dislike" without need for deeper consideration. Then there is the status factor: that something which is "Liked" by the largest number of people is of value. In fact, in the social media orbit, it is seemingly beneficial to offer strong, sharp, simplistic opinions-instead of nuanced, deeper, shaded considerations-simply because they provoke the greatest likelihood of widespread attention. How will this reduction of thought shape the future of interpersonal relations, intellectual advancement, and politics? As we teeter on the brink of nuclear war, the concepts of Dada brilliantly encompass the urgency of present times with both clarity and purposeful confusion. The MAINTENANT series, established in 2005, gathers the work of renowned and emerging dada artists and writers from around the world. The series has been archived in leading international institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art-New York, the BelVUE Museum-Brussels, and more. Renowned contributors have included artists Mark Kostabi, Raymond Pettibon, Giovanni Fontana, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Kazunori Murakami. Writers have included Allen Ginsberg, Gerard Malanga, Charles Plymell, Jerome Rothenberg, and more, with a strong contingent of punk musician-artist-writers including Grant Hart, Mike Watt, and Exene Cervenka.

Emerging amid the brutality of World War I, the revolutionary Dada movement took disgust with the establishment as its starting point. From 1916 until the mid-1920s, artists in Zurich, Cologne, Hanover, Paris, and New York launched a radical assault on the politics, social values, and cultural conformity which they regarded as complicit in the devastating conflict. Dada artists shared no distinct style but rather a common wish to upturn societal structures as much as artistic standards and to replace logic and reason with the absurd, chaotic, and unpredictable. Their practice encompassed experimental theater, games, guttural sound-making, collage, photomontage, chance-based procedures, and the "readymade," most notoriously Marcel Duchamp's urinal, Fountain (1917). Throughout, the Dadaists considered the visual appearance of their work secondary to the ideas and critiques it expressed. In this sense, Dada may be seen as a fundamental precursor to conceptual art. With a selection of key works from some of the most famous proponents of Dada such as Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hoech, Kurt Schwitters, Francis Picabia, and Man Ray, this book introduces this urgent, subversive, and determined 20th-century movement and its lasting influence on modern art. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art History series features: approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions a detailed, illustrated introduction a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

Hugo Ball--poet, philosopher, novelist, cabaret performer, journalist, mystic--was a man extremely sensitive to the currents of his time and carried in their wake. In February 1916 he founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The sound poems and performance art by Ball and the other artists who gathered there were the beginnings of Dada. Ball's extraordinary diaries, one of the most significant products of the Dada movement, are here available in English in paperback for the first time, along with the original Dada manifesto and John Elderfield's critical introduction, revised and updated for the paperback edition, and a supplementary bibliography of Dada texts that have appeared since the 1974 hardcover edition of this book.