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."

Contemporary feminist critics have often described Surrealism as a misogynist movement. In "Automatic Woman," Katharine Conley addresses this issue, confirming some feminist allegations while qualifying and overturning others. Through insightful analyses of works by a range of writers and artists, Conley develops a complex view of Surrealist portrayals of Woman.

Conley begins with a discussion of the composite image of Woman developed by such early male Surrealists as Andre Breton, Francis Picabia, and Paul Eluard. She labels that image "Automatic Woman"--a term that comprises views of Woman as provocative and revolutionary but also as a depersonalized object largely devoid of individuality and volition. This analysis largely confirms feminist critiques of Surrealism. The heart of the book, however, examines the writings of Leonora Carrington and Unica Zurn, two women in the Surrealist movement whose works, Conley argues, anticipate much contemporary feminist art and theory. In concluding, Conley shows how Breton's own views on women evolved in the course of his long career, arriving at last at a position far more congenial to contemporary feminists.

"Automatic Woman" is distinguished by Katharine Conley's judicious understanding of how women--and the image of Woman--figured in Surrealism. The book is an important contemporary account of a cultural movement that continues to fascinate, influence, and provoke us.

This early autobiography, which takes Dalá through his late thirties, is as startling and unpredictable as his art. On its first publication, the reviewer of Books observed: "It is impossible not to admire this painter as writer . (Dalá) succeeds in doing exactly what he sets out to do ... communicates the snobbishness, self-adoration, comedy, seriousness, fanaticism, in short the concept of life and the total picture of himself he sets out to portray." Superbly illustrated with over eighty photographs of Dalá and his works, and scores of Dalá drawings and sketches.

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has been collecting Surrealist art since 1965. In something over half a century, what began with a single purchase has now grown into a world-class core collection with works by Dali, Magritte, Man Ray, De Chirico, Ernst and many others. Surrealism, which started as a literary movement, is not a school, but rather a collective attitude or lifestyle in which automatism, chance and the subconscious are key. The museum's collection includes paintings, sculptures, objects, drawings, prints and photographs - as well as a large number of Surrealist publications, magazines, manifestos and pamphlets. This dream collection has now been brought together in a catalogue raisonne for the first time. The catalogue raisonne contains three introductory essays. Sandra Kisters, the current Head of the Collection and Research Department, provides an outline of the Surrealist movement. Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Saskia van Kampen-Prein, explains the acquisition history and establishment of the museum's Surrealist art collection. Surrealism expert Laurens Vancrevel examines the museum's unique, often neglected collection of Surrealist publications. The essays are followed by the catalogue, consisting of 108 short texts about the artworks. Most of the texts were written by Marijke Peyser, who was awarded her doctorate in 2008 with her dissertation on the Zodiaque, a circle of patrons around Salvador Dali. The Duchamp texts are by Bert Jansen, who obtained his doctorate with his thesis on Marcel Duchamp in 2015.

This thought-provoking book re-evaluates the work of one of the most notorious, provocative and visually influential artists of the twentieth century. Robert Radford traces Salvador Dali's career from the crucial early years in Spain, to membership of the Surrealist group in 1930s Paris, and then on to New York and Hollywood, where his purposefully extravagant behaviour made him a media star. The influential figures in his life - Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Bunuel and his wife Gala - are introduced as the book explores Dali's diverse work as painter, writer, film-maker, illustrator, jewellery designer, myth-maker and performance artist.

First published in 1959, "Surrealism" remains the most readable introduction to the French surrealist poets Apollinaire, Breton, Aragon, Eluard, and Reverdy. Providing a much-needed overview of the movement, Balakian places the surrealists in the context of early twentieth-century Paris and describes their reactions to symbolist poetry, World War I, and developments in science and industry, psychology, philosophy, and painting. Her coherent history of the movement is enhanced by her firsthand knowledge of the intellectual climate in which some of these poets worked and her interviews with Reverdy and Breton. In a new introduction, Balakian discusses the influence of surrealism on contemporary poetry.
This volume includes photographs of the poets and reproductions of paintings by Ernst, Dali, Tanguy, and others.

Reprint of the 1935 edition of a study that balances the different manifestations of surrealism in order to see it whole, not just as an art movement backed up by ideas. Gascoyne (author, translator, and early champion of surrealism) also includes the movement's ancestors, such as Dada. Part history

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.

Through an examination of surrealist photographs, objects, exhibitions, activities, and writings, the essays in "Twilight Visions", the beautifully illustrated companion volume to the exhibition of the same name, portray the French capital as a city in the process of metamorphosis-in a kind of twilight state. The Bureau of Surrealist Research, the major Surrealist exhibitions, and the photographs of Paris by Brassai, Andre Kertesz, Ilse Bing, Germaine Krull, and Man Ray, among others, all reflect the tumultuous social and cultural transformations occurring in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. Juxtaposing the strange with the familiar, they seek to break down repressive hierarchies. At the same time, they represent a desire to change the world through experimental activities. Introduced by Therese Lichtenstein, with essays by Therese Lichtenstein, Julia Kelly, Colin Jones, and Whitney Chadwick, this absorbing volume considers the social, aesthetic, and political stances of the Surrealists as they probed hidden aspects of the commonplace and blurred the boundaries between dreams and reality, subjectivity and objectivity. This title is co published by Frist Center for the Visual Arts.

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."

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

With its unprecedented depth and range, this massive new history of Surrealism from veteran French philosopher and art critic Durozoi will be the one-volume standard for years to come. . . . The book discusses expertly the main surrealist artists like Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali and Joan Miro, but also treats with considerable understanding the surrealist writing by Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, Julien Gracq and, of course, the so-called 'Pope of Surrealism, ' Andre Breton. . . . This book should turn up in all serious collections on 20th century art.--Publishers Weekly, starred review From Dada to the Automatists, and from Max Ernst to Andre Breton, Gerard Durozoi here provides the most comprehensive history of the Surrealist movement. Tracing the movement from its origins in the 1920s to its decline in the 1950s and 1960s, Durozoi tells the history of Surrealism through its activities, publications, and reviews, demonstrating its close ties to some of the most explosive political, as well as creative, debates of the twentieth century. Drawing on a staggering amount of documentary and visual evidence--including 1,000 photos--Durozoi illuminates all the intellectual and artistic facets of the movement, from literature and philosophy to painting, photography, and film, thus making History of the Surrealist Movement its definitive encyclopedia.

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.

The paintings of the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte (1898-1967) have exerted an extraordinary fascination, particularly since the enormous increase in awareness and popularity of his work during the 1960s. Magritte shows us a world of silence and isolation in which familiar objects are altered or juxtaposed in 'impossible' combinations in order to create a sense of disorientation and the absurd. Many of his most memorable paintings date from his three prolific years 1927-30, when he lived near Paris and was in close touch with the writer Andre Breton and other French Surrealists. In his pre-war painting, stylistic concerns were of secondary importance to Magritte, whose main interest was in ideas or propositions about the world; for example, many of his paintings explore the relation between objects and words or between the image of an object and the object itself. He deliberately cultivated a cold, unemotive, 'style-less' style. This quality renders the images of violence and macabre sexuality in some of his works all the more disturbing. His own 'impressionist' and vache (ugly, crude) pictures of the 1940s have been rediscovered in the last few years by a younger generation of painters and critics keenly responsive to the later work of other masters of parody and allusion such as Picabia and de Chirico. Richard Calvocoressi's highly successful introduction to Magritte was first published in 1979 and revised and enlarged by the addition of notes to the colour plates and many black-and-white illustrations.

In 1932, at the peak of French colonialism, a group of Martiniquan students at the Sorbonne established a Caribbean Surrealist Group, and published a single issue of a journal called Legitime defense. Immediately banned by the authorities, it passed almost unnoticed at the time. Yet it began a remarkable series of debates between surrealism and Caribbean intellectuals that had a profound impact on the struggle for cultural identity. In the next two decades these exchanges greatly influenced the evolution of the concept of negritude, initiated revolution in Haiti in 1946, and crucially affected the development of surrealism itself. This fascinating book presents a series of key texts-most of them never before translated into English-which reveal the complexity of this relationship between black anti-colonialist movements in the Caribbean and the most radical of the European avant-gardes. Included are Rene Menil's subtle philosophical essays and the fierce polemics of Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, appreciations of surrealism by Haitian writers, lyrical evocations of the Caribbean by Andre Breton and Andre Masson, and rich explorations of Haiti and voodoo religion by Pierre Mabille and Michel Leiris.

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.

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

The legendary poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, a fleeting figure on the periphery of early twentieth-century European avant-gardism, is frequently invoked as proto-Dada and Surrealist exemplar. Yet he remains an insubstantial phenomenon, not seen since 1918, lost through historical interstices, clouded in drifting untruths. This study processes philosophical positions into a practical recovery - from nineteenth-century Nietzsche to twentieth-century Deleuze - with thoughts on subjectivity, metaphor, representation and multiplicity. From fresh readings and new approaches - of Cravan's first published work as a manifesto of simulation; of contributors to his Paris review Maintenant as impostures for the Delaunays; and of the conjuring of Cravan in Picabia's elegiac film Entr'acte - The fictions of Arthur Cravan concludes with the absent poet-boxer's eventual casting off into a Surrealist legacy, and his becoming what metaphor is: a means to represent the world. -- .

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.