Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism argues that Surrealism worked as a powerful agitator to disrupt dominant ideas of modern art in the United States. Unlike standard accounts that focus on Surrealism in the U.S. during the 1940s as a point of departure for the ascendance of the New York School, this study contends that Surrealism has been integral to the development of American visual culture over the course of the twentieth century. Through analysis of Surrealism in both the museum and the marketplace, Sandra Zalman tackles Surrealism's multi-faceted circulation as both elite and popular. Zalman shows how the American encounter with Surrealism was shaped by Alfred Barr, William Rubin and Rosalind Krauss as these influential curators mobilized Surrealism to compose, to concretize, or to unseat narratives of modern art in the 1930s, 1960s and 1980s - alongside Surrealism's intersection with advertising, Magic Realism, Pop, and the rise of contemporary photography. As a popular avant-garde, Surrealism openly resisted art historical classification, forcing the supposedly distinct spheres of modernism and mass culture into conversation and challenging theories of modern art in which it did not fit, in large part because of its continued relevance to contemporary American culture.

Rene Magritte offers a rethinking of Magritte's art from a position informed by contemporary developments in art theory.

The book employs a wide range of literary and philosophical/cultural theoretical frameworks to analyze Magritte's art. It offers close readings of specific images, paying attention to neglected aspects of Magritte's work, discussing the significance of cabinets of curiosities and encyclopedias, trompe l'oeil, framing and forgeries. It addresses a range of intertextual relations between Magritte's work and that of other Surrealist artists and the art-historical tradition.

This highly readable text explores how Magritte's art challenges conventional notions of originality, canonicity and coherence, revealing his work as being shaped by co-operations and co-options. It demonstrates that uncertainty, incoherence and negation lie at the core of Magritte's oeuvre.

Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism collects, updates, integrates and contextualizes the critic Richard Sheppard's essays on the historical avant-garde. Sheppard's topic in all of these essays is the modernist writers', artists', and philosophers' linguistic and visual responses to a changed sense of reality and human nature. Beginning with an overview of the problematics of European modernism, Sheppard establishes the dialectical relationship between the cultural crisis that occurred during the period 1880-1936 and the different responses from European modernists and the avant-garde. With its combination of classic and new essays and its perspective on the theoretical avant-garde/modernism debate in the United States, Sheppard's volume should give the specialist as well as the general reader an insight into the highest sample of European scholarly discourse on this subject.

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.

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.

From Dada to the Automatists, and from Max Ernst to Andre Breton, Gerard Durozoi provides the most comprehensive and fascinating history of the Surrealist movement to date. 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 20th century. Unlike other histories, which focus mainly on the pre-World War II years of the movement in Paris, Durozoi covers a wider chronological and geographic range, treating in detail the postwar years and Surrealism's colonization of Latin America, the United States, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Italy and North Africa. Drawing on a staggering amount of documentary and visual evidence - including more than 1,000 illustrations, many of them in colour - he illuminates all the intellectual and artistic aspects of the movement, from literature and philosophy to painting, photography and film. All the Surrealist stars and their most important works are here - Aragon, Borges, Breton, Bunuel, Cocteau, Crevel, Dali, Desnos, Ernst, Man Ray, Soupault and many more - for all of whom Durozoi has provided brief biographical notes in addition to featuring them in the main text. For anyone who wants to know more about practically any aspect of Surrealism, from its vexed relations with communism to its exquisite corpses, Durozoi's "History of the Surrealist Movement" should be a valuable reference.

In the same month that the single issue of the only official New York Dada magazine was published, April 1921, the Socie te Anonyme arranged a formal session to discuss the question "What is Dada?" This volume attempts to address that question through a series of engaging essays by such well-known New York Dada scholars as Martin Gaughan, Estera Milman, Ruth L. Bohan, Dickran Tashjian, Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, Michel Sanouillet, David Hopkins and Dafydd Jones.

"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.

The discussion of Cologne consists of four sections that explore different elements and aspects of the movement's expression in this city. The first two sections address the origins of Cologne Dada from the post-war anger and strife that formed the movement's backdrop to the precise events that led to its birth. The third section explores the aesthetics of Cologne Dada while the last examines the fiery relationship between Dadaist politics and aesthetics that culminated with Max Ernst's departure for Paris in 1922. A section on Hanover addresses the political and social nature of the city that gave rise to a particular blend of Expressionist and Dadaist aesthetics dominated by Kurt Schwitters. Hanover supported a politically progressive climate that nurtured the development of Dada, and an avant-garde society of publishers, art collectors, art exhibitors, and theatre patrons. This volume examines lesser known aspects of Schwitter's work, such as his Merz-Evenings and the utopian Merzbau project.