Luis Bunuel: A Life in Letters provides access for the first time to an annotated English-language version of around 750 of the most important and most widely relevant of these letters. Bunuel (1900-1983) came to international attention with his first films, Un Chien Andalou (with Dali, 1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930): two surprisingly avant-garde productions that established his position as the undisputed master of Surrealist filmmaking. He went on to make 30 full-length features in France, the US and Mexico, and consolidated his international reputation with a Palme d'Or for Viridiana in 1961, and an Academy Award in 1973 for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. He corresponded with some of the most famous writers, directors, actors and artists of his generation and the list of these correspondents reads like a roll call of major twentieth-century cultural icons: Fellini, Truffaut, Vigo, Aragon, Dali, Unik - and yet none of this material has been accessible outside specialist archives and a very small number of publications in Spanish and French.

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.

A series of personal and historical encounters with surrealism from one of its foremost practitioners in the United States. "Penelope Rosemont has given us, better than anyone else in the English language, a marvelous, meticulous exploration of the surrealist experience, in all its infinite variety."-Gerome Kamrowski, American Surrealist Painter One of the hallmarks of Surrealism is the encounter, often by chance, with a key person, place, or object through a trajectory no one could have predicted. Penelope Rosemont draws on a lifetime of such experiences in her collection of essays, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields. From her youthful forays as a radical student in Chicago to her pivotal meeting with Andre Breton and the Surrealist Movement in Paris, Rosemont-one of the movement's leading exponents in the United States-documents her unending search for the Marvelous. Surrealism finds her rubbing shoulders with some of the movement's most important visual artists, such as Man Ray, Leonora Carrington, Mimi Parent, and Toyen; discussing politics and spectacle with Guy Debord; and crossing paths with poet Ted Joans and outsider artist Lee Godie. The book also includes scholarly investigations into American radicals like George Francis Train and Mary MacLane, the myth of the Golden Goose, and Dada precursor Emmy Hennings. Praise for Surrealism: "Rosemont is not delivering dry abstractions, as so many academic 'specialists,' but telling us about warm and exciting human encounters, illuminated by the subversive spirit of Permanent Enchantment."-Michael Loewy, author of Ecosocialism "This compelling and well-drawn book lets us see the adventures, inspirations, and relationships that have shaped Penelope Rosemont's art and rebellion."-David Roediger, author of Class, Race, and Marxism "The broad sampling of essays included here offer a compelling entry point for curious readers and an essential compendium for surrealist practitioners."-Abigail Susik, professor of art history, Willamette University "Rosemont's welcome memoir has a double virtue, as testament to the enduring radiance of Surrealism, and as a memento to the Sixties, revealing a sweetly beating wonderment at the heart of that absurdly maligned decade."-Jed Rasula, author of Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century "Artist, historian, and social activist, Rosemont writes from the inside out. Like a rare, hybrid flower growing out of the earth, she complicates, expands, and opens the strange and beautiful meadow where Surrealism continues to live and thrive."-Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Wild Milk "In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Penelope Rosemont, long a keeper of surrealism's revolutionary flame, shows how a penetrating look into the past can liberate the future."-Andrew Joron, author of The Absolute Letter "Rosemont recreates the feverish antics and immediate reception her close-knit, sleep-deprived, beat-attired squad find in the established, moray-breaking Parisian and international surrealists. Revolution is here, between the covers."-Gillian Conoley, author of A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems and translator of Thousand Times Broken: Three Books by Henri Michaux

Salvador Dali is one of the most popular artists in the world, known for his lavish lifestyle, gravity-defying moustache, and bizarre art. This book tells the story of Dali's life and explores the meaning of his Surrealist paintings. It goes beyond his fine art practice and discusses his venture into the commercial world from his extravagant jewelry to his cheeky design for the Chupa Chups lollipops. Surrealism is revealed as a way of life; illustrations bring to life the extraordinary Dream Ball at the Coq Rouge, his fabulous home at Port Lligat, and his underwater fantasy at the World Fair's Surrealist pavilion. Fun, provoking, and endlessly frustrating, Dali is brought under the spotlight.
Catherine Ingram brings her specialized knowledge to the book, while Andrew Rae, an award-winning illustrator, vividly portrays the text.

Czech poet and photographer Jindrich Heisler (1914-1953) joined the Czech Surrealist Group in 1938, just as Nazi occupation of the country was driving the movement and Czech artists underground. Heisler published his first book of poetry a year later. In his brief and courageous career-Heisler died suddenly at the age of thirty-eight-he produced some of the most remarkable assemblage work of the Surrealist movement, including what is arguably the single-most important photobook produced in the 20th century, From the Strongholds of Sleep (1940-41). This gorgeously illustrated volume-with eighty color images of Heisler's assemblage pieces-introduces English-speaking audiences to his work, translating many of his writings for the first time and offering in-depth analysis of his postwar years in Paris in the company of Andre Breton, Benjamin Peret, the illustrator Toyen, and other major figures of the Surrealist movement. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: The Art Institute of Chicago03/31/12-07/01/12

First published to great acclaim in 1996, New Yorker writer and art critic Calvin Tomkins' biography of the influential artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) has been out of print for many years. Now, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, is publishing a new and revised edition of the landmark biography to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Duchamp's first Readymade, "Bicycle Wheel," a later version of which is in MoMA's collection. Duchamp is widely considered one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, yet his personal life remained an enigma throughout his avidly scrutinized career. Tomkins, from his unique vantage point as both an accomplished art critic and a friend of Duchamp's since the late 1950s, presents a piercing portrait of Duchamp, adeptly analyzing his art and career while also recounting his personal life, influences and relationships. This thoroughly researched, eminently readable book is by far the most authoritative Duchamp biography.

'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

In this thought-provoking work, Dorothee Brill examines notions of shock and the senseless in Dada and Fluxus, pairing two distinctly radical art movements that challenged the very notion and purpose of art. Laying out a genealogy of surrealisms, she addresses the senseless in artistic production as a strategy toward shock--generally considered to be characteristic of the historical avant-garde. Examining the changing correlation between the notions of shock and the senseless in their artistic use in prewar Europe and postwar America, Brill arrives at a new understanding of the overstrained and generally pejorative catch phrase of "shock for shock's sake."

Alejandro Jodorowsky is a theatre director, writer of graphic novels and comics, novelist, poet, and an expert in the Tarot. He is also an auteur filmmaker who garnered attention with his breakthrough film El Topo in 1970. He has been called a "cult" filmmaker, whose films are surreal, hallucinatory, and provocative. The Transformative Cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky explores the ways in which Jodorowsky's films are transformative in a psychologically therapeutic way. It also examines his signature style, which includes the symbolic meaning of various colors in which he clothes his actors, the use of his own family members in the films, and his casting of himself in leading roles. This total involvement of himself and his family in his auteur films led to his psycho-therapeutic theories and practices: metagenealogy and psychomagic. This book is the only the second book in the English language in print that deals with all of Jodorowsky's films, beginning with his earliest mime film in 1957 and ending with his 2019 film on psychomagic. It also connects his work as a writer and therapist to his films, which themselves attempt to obliterate the line between fantasy and reality.

In this provocative and stimulating book, David Hopkins addresses the homosocial structures in Dada and Surrealist art with an eye to their relevance to current artistic and theoretical debate. Bestriding the book is the pivotal figure of the artist Marcel Duchamp, who was at the center of various groups of artistic and literary figures--predominantly male--in Europe and America. And at the heart of the investigation are Duchamp's relationships with these men, the various interactions of those within the groups, and the impact of this type of male camaraderie on the artworks they produced.

Hopkins looks at specific moments in the careers of Duchamp and some of his associates--Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Andre Breton--and discusses in detail the reception of Duchamp's ideas in the post-war period. He goes on to trace the influence of the homosocial nature of Surrealism and Dada on the art world from the 1950s to the work of contemporary male and female artists.

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.

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

Surrealist women's writing: A critical exploration is the first sustained critical inquiry into the writing of women associated with surrealism. Featuring original essays by leading scholars of surrealism, the volume demonstrates the extent and the historical, linguistic, and culturally contextual breadth of this writing. It also highlights how the specifically surrealist poetics and politics of these writers' work intersect with and contribute to contemporary debates on, for example, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, otherness, anthropocentrism, and the environment. Drawing on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, the essays in the volume focus on the writing of numerous women surrealists, many of whom have hitherto mainly been known for their visual rather than their literary production. These include Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Colette Peignot, Suzanne Cesaire, Unica Zurn, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Rikki Ducornet. -- .

The Surrealist Movement is an international intellectual movement that has led a sustained questioning of the basis of human experience under twentieth- and twenty-first century modernity since its founding in the early 1920s. Influenced by the psychoanalytical teachings of Sigmund Freud, Surrealism emerged among the generation that had witnessed the insanity and horror of the First World War, and was conceived of as a framework for investigating the little-understood phenomena of dreams and the unconscious. In these territories the surrealists recognized an alternative axis of human experience that did not align with the rational, workaday rhythms of modern life, and which instead revealed the extent to which individual subjectivity had been constrained by post-Enlightenment rationalism and by the economic forces governing the post-industrial world. Against these trends, the Surrealist Movement has sought to re-evaluate the foundations of modern society and reassert the primacy of the imagination for almost a century to-date. This book offers focused introductions to numerous writers, poets, artists, filmmakers, precursors, groups, movements, events, concepts, cultures, nations and publications connected to Surrealism, providing orientation for students and casual readers alike. Historical Dictionary of Surrealism, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 200 cross-referenced entries on the Surrealist Movement's engagement with the realms of politics, philosophy, science, poetry, art and cinema, and charts the international surrealist community's diverse explorations of specific thematic territories such as magic, occultism, mythology, eroticism and gothicism. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about surrealism.

This immersive dive into the life and work of Salvador Dali unlocks the secret of this creative genius and reveals for the first time how his erotically charged paintings changed the world of modern art. In turns beloved and reviled, twentieth century art, painter, filmmaker, and designer Salvador Dali set Europe and the United States ablaze with his uncompromising genius, sexual sadism, and flirtations with megalomania. His shocking behavior and work frequently alienated critics; his views were so outrageous, even prominent Surrealists tried to ostracize him. Still, every morning he experienced "an exquisite joy-the joy of being Salvador Dali," and, through a remarkable talent that invited bewilderment, anger, and adoration, rose to unprecedented levels of fame-forever shifting the landscape of the art world and the nature of celebrity itself. In this stunning volume, rich with more than 150 full-color images, noted art historians Jean-Pierre Isbouts and Christopher Heath Brown discuss the historical, social, and political conditions that shaped Dali's work, identify the impact of Modern as well as Old Master art, and present an unflinching view of the master's personal relationships and motivations. With their deeply compelling narrative, Isbouts and Brown uncover how Dali's visual wit and enduring cult of personality still impacts fashion, literature, and art, from Andy Warhol to Lady Gaga, and seeks to answer why, in an age of shock and awe, Dali's art still manages to distress, perplex, and entertain.

In Surrealism at Play Susan Laxton writes a new history of surrealism in which she traces the centrality of play to the movement and its ongoing legacy. For surrealist artists, play took a consistent role in their aesthetic as they worked in, with, and against a post-World War I world increasingly dominated by technology and functionalism. Whether through exquisite-corpse drawings, Man Ray's rayographs, or Joan Miro's visual puns, surrealists became adept at developing techniques and processes designed to guarantee aleatory outcomes. In embracing chance as the means to produce unforeseeable ends, they shifted emphasis from final product to process, challenging the disciplinary structures of industrial modernism. As Laxton demonstrates, play became a primary method through which surrealism refashioned artistic practice, everyday experience, and the nature of subjectivity.

100 years after the Dada soirees rocked the art world, the author investigates the role that music played in the movement. Dada is generally thought of as noisy and unmusical, but The Music of Dada shows that music was at the core of Dada theory and practice. Music (by Schoenberg, Satie and many others) performed on the piano played a central role in the soirees, from the beginnings in Zurich, in 1916, to the end in Paris and Holland, seven years later. The Music of Dada provides a historical analysis of music at Dada events, and asks why accounts of Dada have so consistently ignored music's vital presence. The answer to that question turns out to explain how music has related to the other arts ever since the days of Dada. The music of Dada is the key to understanding intermediality in our time.

Dada: The Collections of The Museum of Modern Art is the first publication devoted exclusively to MoMA's unrivalled collection of Dada works. Beginning with a core group acquired on the occasion of the landmark Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition of 1936, enriched in 1953 by a bequest selected by Marcel Duchamp, and steadily augmented over the years, the Museum's Dada collection presents the movement in its full international and interdisciplinary scope during its defining years, from 1916 through 1924. Catalyzed by the major Dada exhibition that appeared in Paris, Washington, D.C., and at The Museum of Modern Art in 2005-6, the book benefits from the latest scholarly thinking, not only as found in the exhibition's catalogues but also in the critical responses to them, as well as in an ambitious series of seminars organized around the show. Featuring generously illustrated essays that focus on a selection of the Museum's most important Dada works, this publication highlights works in many media, including books, journals, assemblages, collages, drawings, films, paintings, photographs, photomontages, prints, readymades and reliefs. It also includes a comprehensive catalogue of the Museum's Dada holdings, including those in the Museum's Archives and Library. Edited by Anne Umland and Adrian Sudhalter, members of the Museum's Department of Painting and Sculpture, this book inaugurates an ambitious new series of scholarly catalogues on the Museum's collection.

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.

A lavishly illustrated volume that views Russian avant-garde art through the lens of Dada. This is the first book to approach Russian avant-garde art from the perspective of the anti-art canons associated with the international Dada movement. The works described and documented in Russian Dada were produced at the height of Dada's flourishing, between World War I and the death of Vladimir Lenin-who, incidentally, was a frequent visitor to Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, the founding site of Dada. Like the Dadaists, the Russian avant-gardists whose works appear in this volume strove for internationalism, fused the verbal and visual, and engaged in eccentric practices and pacifist actions, including outrageous performances and anti-war campaigns. The works featured in this lavishly illustrated volume thrive on negation, irony, and absurdity, with the goal of constructing a new aesthetic paradigm that is an alternative to both positivist and rationalist Constructivism as well as metaphysical and cosmic Suprematism. The text and images show that, while not neglecting the serious project of public agitation for Marxist ideology, the artists often pushed the Dadaesque into Russian mass culture, in the form of absurdist and chance-based collages and designs. In such works, Russian "da, da (yes, yes)" was converted into a defiant "nyet, nyet (no, no)". Russian Dada, which accompanies a major exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, includes 250 images, almost all in color, and essays by leading art historians. An appendix provides a wide selection of primary texts-historical writings by such key figures as Nikolai Punin, Kazimir Malevich, Varvara Stepanova, and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Essays by Margarita Tupitsyn, Victor Tupitsyn, Natasha Kurchanova, Olga Burenina-Petrova Artists Natan Altman, Vasilii Ermilov, 41 Degrees, Ivan Kluin, Gustav Klutsis, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Valentina Kulagina, Vladimir Lebedev, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksei Morgunov, the Nothingdoers, Ivan Puni, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Sergei Sharshun, Varvara Stepanova, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Vladimir Tatlin, Igor Terentiev, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Ilya Zdanevich, Kirill Zdanevich Copublished with Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid

In a speech given in Prague in 1935, Andre Breton asked, 'Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?'. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such an art, Breton always struggled to make a theoretical connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism and the form that surrealist art and literature took. Obscure Objects of Desire explores ways in which such a connection might be drawn, addressing the possibility of surrealist works as political in themselves and drawing on ways in which they have been considered as such by Marxists such as Benjamin and Adorno and by recent cultural critics. Encompassing Breton's and Aragon's textual accounts of the object, as well as paintings and the various kinds of objet surrealiste produced from the end of the 1920s, Malt mobilises the concept of the fetish in order to consider such works as meeting points of surrealism's psychoanalytic and revolutionary preoccupations. Reading surrealist works of art and literature as political is by no means the same thing as knowing the surrealist movement to have been a politically motivated one. The revolutionary character of the surrealist work itself, in isolation from the polemical positions taken up by Breton and others on its behalf, is not always evident; indeed, the works themselves often seem to express a rather different set of concerns. As well as offering a new perspective on familiar works such as the paintings of Salvador Dali, and relatively neglected ones like Breton's poemes-objets, this book recuperates the gap between theory and practice as a productive space in which it is possible to recontextualize surrealist practice as an engagement with political questions on its own terms.

When Dada burst onto the European stage in 1916, it shocked and scandalized the public of its day with art forms, ideas, and attitudes which were so revolutionary that it is only in recent decades that they have begun to find recognition within the broad cultural movement known as postmodernism. In fact, many postmodern artistic and intellectual tendencies can be seen to have descended via an underground tradition from the experiments of the Dadaists earlier this century. Yet, the existence of this close link has been largely neglected by scholars. This book, for the first time, examines in depth the link between modernism and postmodernism and demonstrates the extensive similarities, as well as the few crucial differences, between the ideas and art of the Dadaists, on the one hand, and those of contemporary postmodern thinkers and artists on the other. Although they did not have access to postmodern terminology, it is clear that many Dadaists were essentially attempting to escape constrictive Enlightenment and modern(ist) structures in order to create a proto-postmodern space of difference, Otherness, and flux. Their successes, failures, and compromises in this respect are very illustrative for anyone interested in the progress of our own intellectual and artistic culture in its wavering between modern and postmodern. This book offers a much-needed historical perspective and solid basis for the on-going debate on postmodernism.