Enchanted Ground is about the challenge to modernist criticism by Surrealist writers-mainly Andre Breton but also Louis Aragon, Pierre Mabille, Rene Magritte, Charles Estienne, Rene Huyghe and others-who viewed the same artists in terms of magic, occultism, precognition, alchemy and esotericism generally. It introduces the history of the ways in which those artists who came after Impressionism-Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh-became canonical in the 20th century through the broad approaches we now call modernist or formalist (by critics and curators such as Alfred H. Barr, Roger Fry, Robert Goldwater, Clement Greenberg, John Rewald and Robert L. Herbert), and then unpacks chapter-by-chapter, for the first time in a single volume, the Surrealist positions on the same artists. To this end, it contributes to new strains of scholarship on Surrealism that exceed the usual bounds of the 1920s and 1930s and that examine the fascination within the movement with magic.

Penrose' wrote Andre Breton `est Surrealiste dans l'amitie' and `The Friendly Surrealist' is an apt description for the man who more than any other nurtured friendships and connections which introduced European Surrealism to the British art world. Roland Penrose embraced the fantasies and rebellions of the Surrealist movement through his friendships with artists such as Picasso, Man Ray, Miro, Ernst and Tapies. His own works, which often reveal the true emotions behind his relationships with his wives, Valentine Boue and Lee Miller, constitute an important contribution to British Surrealist art.

'Describes with plenty of colour how surrealism, from Rene Magritte's bowler hats to Salvador Dali's watches, was born and developed' The Times During the 1920s, in the Parisian neighbourhood of Montparnasse, a unique flowering of avant-garde artistic creativity became the cradle of Dada and Surrealism. In this crowd biography, Sue Roe tells the story - from Duchamp to Dali, via Man Ray and Max Ernst - of the salons and cafes, alliances and feuds, love affairs and scandals, successes and suicides of one of the most important and long-lasting artistic achievements of the twentieth century. 'Supercharged. Highly colourful . . . they're all here, the big names of the time - behaving badly, and, at times, quite madly too' Observer 'Roe is a talented writer, fascinated by la vie Boheme. She can find phrases that perfectly capture the feeling of a neighbourhood' Sunday Times 'Brings together some of the chief protagonists in one of the 20th century's most inventive art movements. A vivid read' Radio Times 'A skilled and graceful writer' Daily Telegraph

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.

Are women s orgasms more intense than men s? What did Andre Breton think of homosexuality? Can love be separated from physical desire? In 1928 a group of surrealist writers and artists held twelve round table discussions to address these questions.

Calling them researches into sexuality, their bizarre and humorous conversations are now made available in this new edition in all their surreal and salacious detail. Their research spanned the most critical period for surrealism, a time of bitter political disputes, echoed in the intensity of these meetings and in the range of participants, including Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Yves Tanguy, Benjamin Peret and Pierre Naville.

Well before the so-called sexual revolution, their erotic exchanges broke sexual taboos and encouraged surrealists to openly share the libidinal themes they explored in their writing and art. In doing so, JoAnn Wypijewski writes in the new introduction, they are revealed as lovers and prigs, fantasists and humanists, adventurers in mind if not always in flesh flawed, foolish, brilliant, clangingly sexual human beings.

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

Perhaps no 20th-century artist utilized puns and linguistic ambiguity with greater effect - and greater controversy - than Marcel Duchamp. Through a careful "unpacking" of his major works, the author finds that Duchamp may well have the last laugh. She examines how he interpreted notions of mechanical reproduction in order to redefine the meaning and value of the art object, the artist, and artistic production. The book begins with Duchamp's supposed abandonment of painting and his subsequent return to material that mimics art without being readily classifiable as such. Her book questions his paradoxical renunciation of pictorial and artistic conventions while continuing to evoke and speculatively draw upon them. She offers analyses of his major works including "The Large Glass", "Fountain", and "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even". Duchamp, a poser and solver of problems, was occupied by issues of genre, gender and representation. His puns, double entendres, and word games become poetic machines, all part of his intellectual quest for the very limits of nature, culture and perception. Judovitz demonstrates how Duchamp's redefinition of artistic modes of production thro

Largely self-taught as an artist, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) developed a unique ability to transform interior and unconscious impulses into figurative forms and intensely claustrophobic compositions. Emerging into notoriety in the period following World War II, Bacon took the human body as his nominal subject, but a subject ravaged, distorted, and dismembered so as to writhe with intense emotional content. With flailing limbs, hollow voids, and tumurous growths, his gripping, often grotesque, portraits are as much reflections on the trials and the traumas of the human condition as they are character studies. These haunting forms were also among the first in art history to depict overtly homosexual themes. 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 series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Grotesque Visions focuses on the radical avant-garde interventions of Salomo Friedlander (aka Mynona), Til Brugman, and Hannah Hoech as they challenged the questionable practices and evidentiary claims of late-19th- and early-20th-century science. Demonstrating the often excessive measures that pathologists, anthropologists, sexologists, and medical professionals went to present their research in a seemingly unambiguous way, this volume shows how Friedlander/Mynona, Brugman, Hoech, and other Berlin-based artists used the artistic grotesque to criticize, satirize, and subvert a variety of forms of supposed scientific objectivity. The volume concludes by examining the exhibition Grotesk!: 130 Jahre Kunst der Frechheit/Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Arts, 1870-1940. In contrast to the ahistorical and amorphous concept informing the exhibition, Thomas O. Haakenson reveals a unique deployment of the artistic grotesque that targeted specific established and emerging scientific discourses at the turn of the last fin-de-siecle.

Mamas of Dada focuses on the lives and works of six representative female supporters of the Dada movement: Emmy Hennings, Gabrielle Buffet, Germaine Everling, Celine Arnauld, Juliette Roche, and Hannah Hoech. Paula K. Kamenish selected these women for their avant-garde pursuits in the chief centers of Dada's rebellious activity and, more important, because they left behind a written record of their involvement with the movement, which was short lived - from 1916 to 1924 - but widespread geographically. The rebellious spirit of the Dada period proved portable and adaptable, and the movement led to later forms of surrealism at the same time that it borrowed from Expressionism, Constructivism, Futurism, and Cubism. Its influence was felt on sculpture, painting, dance, music, textile art, film, decoupage, photomontage, mask making, and poetry. Some female Dadaists were active participants - appearing in literary journals, on stage, or in galleries - while others were observant and recording witnesses, but each played a role in supporting the movement and its more prominent members. Female Dadaists motivated the hesitant Hugo Ball, tempered the mechanical Francis Picabia, and nurtured the inventive but temperamental Raoul Hausmann. Some women inspired or gave a home to a wandering Tristan Tzara, while another provided a satiric chastisement of Dadaists in New York, Barcelona, and Paris. Each woman helps us chronicle and better understand Dada's European (and sometimes American) manifestations. Unlike their Futurist and Surrealist sisters, whose contributions were grudgingly accepted by male artists and writers, female Dadaists were able to join more readily in the movement's unified attack on social norms. And, because of their individual talents and insights, they did so in ways that were often quite different from methods adopted by their male counterparts.

In this study of surrealism and ghostliness, Katharine Conley provides a new, unifying theory of surrealist art and thought based on history and the paradigm of puns and anamorphosis. In Surrealist Ghostliness, Conley discusses surrealism as a movement haunted by the experience of World War I and the repressed ghost of spiritualism. From the perspective of surrealist automatism, this double haunting produced a unifying paradigm of textual and visual puns that both pervades surrealist thought and art and commemorates the surrealists' response to the Freudian unconscious. Extending the gothic imagination inherited from the eighteenth century, the surrealists inaugurated the psychological century with an exploration of ghostliness through doubles, puns, and anamorphosis, revealing through visual activation the underlying coexistence of realities as opposed as life and death. Surrealist Ghostliness explores examples of surrealist ghostliness in film, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation art from the 1920s through the 1990s by artists from Europe and North America from the center to the periphery of the surrealist movement. Works by Man Ray, Claude Cahun, Brassai and Salvador Dali, Lee Miller, Dorothea Tanning, Francesca Woodman, Pierre Alechinsky, and Susan Hiller illuminate the surrealist ghostliness that pervades the twentieth-century arts and compellingly unifies the century's most influential yet disparate avant-garde movement.

Corpses mark surrealism's path through the twentieth century, providing material evidence of the violence in modern life. Though the shifting group of poets, artists, and critics who made up the surrealist movement were witness to total war, revolutionary violence, and mass killing, it was the tawdry reality of everyday crime that fascinated them. Jonathan P. Eburne shows us how this focus reveals the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the thought and artwork of the surrealists and establishes their movement as a useful platform for addressing the contemporary problem of violence, both individual and political.In a book strikingly illustrated with surrealist artworks and their sometimes gruesome source material, Eburne addresses key individual works by both better-known surrealist writers and artists (including Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Aime Cesaire, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dali) and lesser-known figures (such as Rene Crevel, Simone Breton, Leonora Carrington, Benjamin Peret, and Jules Monnerot). For Eburne "the art of crime" denotes an array of cultural production including sensationalist journalism, detective mysteries, police blotters, crime scene photos, and documents of medical and legal opinion as well as the roman noir, in particular the first crime novel of the American Chester Himes. The surrealists collected and scrutinized such materials, using them as the inspiration for the outpouring of political tracts, pamphlets, and artworks through which they sought to expose the forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the state, its courts, and respectable bourgeois values.Concluding with the surrealists' quarrel with the existentialists and their bitter condemnation of France's anticolonial wars, Surrealism and the Art of Crime establishes surrealism as a vital element in the intellectual, political, and artistic history of the twentieth century."

Bringing together many Surrealist texts that have never previously been available in English, this collection is an essential guide for anyone who wishes to understand the Surrealist movement. Including a wealth of original works, it traces its development in the words of the Surrealists themselves, offering a definitive expression of Surrealism as a collective movement. It shows the extent of Surrealist positions and interests and shows how, having become a major cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century, the issues it has raised remain central to current debates.Covering the period 1922-91, these key texts illuminate its philosophical, political and ethical positions and locate Surrealism in a broader social and cultural context. Comprising statements from Surrealist groups in Paris, Belgium, Romania, Sweden and Czechoslovakia, and signed by the major participants, it reveals the international dimension of Surrealism and shows how it has maintained vitality in response to changing social and political exigencies. Chapters cover the historical orientation of Surrealism; its involvement with revolutionary politics; its ethical concerns and its defense of the 'security of the spirit'; and its position on colonialism. In particular, the volume brings attention to the extent to which Surrealism represented a 'collective adventure' in which their shared interests brought together groups of individuals to explore themes in common. In this sense, Surrealism truly represented, as Andre Masson once described it, a 'collective experience of individualism'.

When first published in France in 1984, Le surrealisme was widely acclaimed as the definitive survey of the surrealist movement. Clearly and elegantly translated, Surrealism is now the premiere English-language study of the literary and artistic movement whose revolutionary goals and accomplishments continue to exert a profound influence on modern art and literature. In this extraordinary historical and critical survey Chenieux-Gendron first examines the radical strains in literary movements up to two hundred years earlier and other inspirations and influences upon surrealist endeavours. She then explores the movement's philosophical, aesthetic, and psychological underpinnings, and clearly defines its central concepts and practices, such as its theories of poetic images, automatic writing, and black humour.

My Life was written in Moscow in 1921-1922, when Chagall was thirty-five years old. Although long out-of-print, it remains one of the most extraordinarily inventive and beautifully told of all autobiographies. The text is accompanied by twenty plates which Chagall prepared especially to illustrate his life story. Together, the words and pictures paint an incomparable portrait of one of the greatest painters of this century, and of the now vanished milieu which inspired him.

No Italian painter of this century has aroused so much comment, from eulogy to outright condemnation, as Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). One of the initiators of surrealism, he is a key figure in modern art; his influence on later painters, particularly during his metaphysical period, is second only to Picasso's. De Chirico relied on imagery from the unconscious to create art with mythological, philosophical, and historical overtones.

The definitive survey of the literary and artistic aspects of surrealism.

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.

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.

In this beautiful monograph, a collection of revelatory essays focuses on five common images in Rene Magritte's work-fire, shadows, curtains, words, and the fragmented body. Featuring vibrant reproductions of more than 100 works, this book helps readers understand how the artist employed these images in ways both deceptive and realistic. The book explores how he distorted accepted interpretations of classic symbols; why he so often used words as elements of his paintings; and how he applied aspects of the theater in his works. As Magritte's paintings have become subsumed by the very commercialism they sought to ridicule, this volume takes a fresh look at an artist whose familiarity masks an incredible gift for deception and rapier-like intellect.

"Eastern Dada Orbit" is composed of two distinct parts and describes two largely unexplored aspects of Dada. The first, "Dada in Central and Eastern Europe" (including the former Soviet Union), edited by Gerald Janecek, was a previously closed field that scholars have since discovered reveals the significant influence of Dada on the region. The second part of this volume, "Tada=Dada (Devotedly Dada) for the Stage: The Japanese Dada Movement 1920-1925," focuses upon the equally under researched area of Dada in Japan. Toshiharu Omuka traces the particular place of Dada within the dynamic development of Japanese modernism.