Dal. Picasso. Ernst. Magritte. Maddox. Breton. Artaud, Fondane, Masson--all are to be found in this gallery of surrealist artists. Focussing on surrealist visuality--defined as the visual expression of internal perception or, in Andr Breton's words, internal representation--the contributors to this handsomely illustrated volume shed new light on one of the twentieth century's most exciting cultural movements.

Dal. Picasso. Ernst. Magritte. Maddox. Breton. Artaud, Fondane, Masson--all are to be found in this gallery of surrealist artists. Focussing on surrealist visuality--defined as the visual expression of internal perception or, in Andr Breton's words, internal representation--the contributors to this handsomely illustrated volume shed new light on one of the twentieth century's most exciting cultural movements.

"Free Rein" is a gathering of seminal essays by Andre Breton, the foremost figure among the French surrealists. Written between 1936 and 1952, they include addresses, manifestoes, prefaces, exhibition pamphlets, and theoretical, polemical, and lyrical essays. Together they display the full span of Breton's preoccupations, his abiding faith in the early principles of surrealism, and the changing orientations, in light of crucial events of those years, of the surrealist movement within which he remained the leading force.

Having broken decisively with Marxism in the mid-1930s, Breton repeatedly addresses the horrors of the Stalinist regime (which denounced him during the Moscow trials of 1936). He argues for the autonomy of art and poetry and condemns the subservience to "revolutionary" aims exemplified by socialist realism. Other articles reflect on aesthetic issues, cinema, music, and education and provide detailed meditations on the literary, artistic, and philosophical topics for which he is best known. "Free Rein" will prove indispensable for students of Breton, surrealism, and modern French and European culture.

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.

In this pathbreaking study, the historical relationship between nineteenth-century spiritualism and twentieth-century surrealism is the basis for a general examination of conflicting movements in literature, art, philosophy, science, and other areas of social life. Because spiritualism delved into the world beyond humanity and surrealism was founded on the world within, the two provide a provocative frame for examining the struggles within modern culture. Cottom argues that we must conceive of interpretation in terms of urgency, desire, fierce contention, and impromptu deviation if we want to understand how things come to bear meaning for us. He demonstrates that even when Victorians holding seances and surrealists composing manifestoes were most foolish, they had much that was valuable to say about the life (and death) of reason.

A groundbreaking reading of Duchamp's work as informed by Asian "esoterism, " energetic spiritual practices identifying creative energy with the erotic impulse. Considered by many to be the most important artist of the twentieth century, the object of intensive critical scrutiny and extensive theorizing, Marcel Duchamp remains an enigma. He may be the most intellectual artist of all time; and yet, toward the end of his life, he said, "If you wish, my art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual or cerebral." In Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life, Jacquelynn Baas offers a groundbreaking new reading of Duchamp, arguing in particular that his work may have been informed by Asian "esoterism, " energetic spiritual practices that identify creative energy with the erotic impulse. Duchamp drew on a wide range of sources for his art, from science and mathematics to alchemy. Largely overlooked, until now, have been Asian spiritual practices, including Indo-Tibetan tantra. Baas presents evidence that Duchamp's version of artistic realization was grounded in a western interpretation of Asian mind training and body energetics designed to transform erotic energy into mental and spiritual liberation. She offers close readings of many Duchamp works, beginning and ending with his final work, the mysterious, shockingly explicit Etant donnes: 1 Degrees la chute d'eau 2 Degrees le gaz d'eclairage, (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas). Generously illustrated, with many images in color, Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life speculates that Duchamp viewed art making as part of an esoteric continuum grounded in Eros. It asks us to unlearn what we think we know, about both art and life, in order to be open to experience.

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

Duplessis provides a historical introduction to surrealism and examines its techniques and its use in poetry, painting, architecture, and theatre.

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. -- .

Not far from Milan, in the hills of the northern Italian countryside, lies the estate of famed Italian artist Enrico Baj. This jewel of a book offers a unique lens through which to consider a true artistic giant of the late twentieth century associated with Dada, Surrealism, Art Informel, and CoBrA, as well as Nuclear Art, a movement he cofounded. Organized as a tour of the artist s home, from full rooms designed with a great attention to detail to entire walls covered floor to ceiling with paintings by the artist to a headboard carved directly into a wall, almost every surface of the house is covered in work made by Baj himself. While his subject matter may have been deeply serious (many of Baj s works reveal an obsession with nuclear war and the abuse of political power), as this book shows, his work was always playful and vibrant, often incorporating bits of found materials like military medals, seashells, rope, and twine. Whether one focuses on the luxurious trim and tassel of a bedroom curtain or the deeply personal arrangement of treasured sculptures on a dressing room table, every corner of the estate is energized by the element of surprise. This book showcases the artist s individual touch and provides a wealth of playful vignettes to inspire homeowners, collectors, and artists alike.

Lee Miller: Photography, surrealism, and beyond offers a major new critical discussion of the work of one of the most significant twentieth-century photographers. Applying art-theoretical analyses and insights afforded by previously unseen material in archives and collections, Patricia Allmer undertakes revisionary readings of many of Miller's works, including Portrait of Space, Severed Breast from Radical Mastectomy and the famous series of war photographs produced for Vogue. At the same time she sheds new light on Miller's relations with surrealist groups and American avant-gardes, on her experiences in Paris, Egypt and World War II Europe and on her critically neglected post-war activities. Above all, Lee Miller: Photography, surrealism, and beyond focuses critical attention on the works themselves. As a result it will be of great interest to students and scholars of twentieth-century photography, modernism and surrealism. -- .

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.

One of the most admired artists of the twentieth century, Max Ernst was a proponent of Dada and founder of surrealism, known for his strange, evocative paintings and drawings. In Prehistoric Future, Ralph Ubl approaches Ernst like no one else has, using theories of the unconscious-surrealist automatism, Freudian psychoanalysis, the concept of history as trauma - to examine how Ernst's construction of collage departs from other modern artists. Ubl shows that while Picasso, Braque, and Man Ray used scissors and glue to create collages, Ernst employed techniques he himself had forged-rubbing and scraping to bring images forth onto a sheet of paper or canvas to simulate how a screen image or memory comes into the mind's view. In addition, Ernst scoured the past for obsolete scientific illustrations and odd advertisements to illustrate the rapidity with which time passes and to simulate the apprehension generated when rapid flows of knowledge turn living culture into artifact. Ultimately, Ubl reveals, Ernst was interested in the construction and phenomenology of both collective and individual modern history and memory. Shedding new light on Ernst's working methods and the reasons that his pieces continue to imprint themselves in viewers' memories, Prehistoric Future is an innovative work of critical writing on a key figure of surrealism.

In this examination of Samuel Bak's most recent collection of paintings inspired by the little boy from the famous Stroop Report photo taken in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943, Gary A. Phillips and Danna Nolan Fewell consider the historical and visual implications of this iconic image and its contemporary evocations. A survivor of the Vilna liquidation and a child prodigy whose first exhibition was held in the Vilna Ghetto at age nine, Bak weaves together personal history and Jewish history to articulate an iconography of his Holocaust experience. Bak's art preserves memory of the twentieth-century ruination of Jewish life and culture by way of an artistic passion and precision that stubbornly announces the creativity of the human spirit.

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.

A new understanding of Marcel Duchamp and his significance as an artist through an investigation of his non-art activities-archiving, art-dealing, and, most persistently, curating. This groundbreaking and richly illustrated book tells a new story of the twentieth century's most influential artist, recounted not so much through his artwork as through his "non-art" work. Marcel Duchamp is largely understood in critical and popular discourse in terms of the objects he produced, whether readymade or meticulously fabricated. Elena Filipovic asks us instead to understand Duchamp's art through activities not normally seen as artistic-from exhibition making and art dealing to administrating and publicizing. These were no occasional pursuits; Filipovic argues that for Duchamp, these fugitive tasks were a veritable lifework. Drawing on many rarely seen images, Filipovic traces a variety of practices and projects undertaken by Duchamp from 1913 to 1969, from his invention of the readymade to the release of his last, posthumous work. She examines Duchamp's note writing, archiving, and quasi-photographic activities, which resulted in the Box of 1914 and the Green Box; his art dealing, marketing, and curating that culminated in experimental exhibitions for the Surrealists and his miniature museum, The Boite-en-valise; and his administrative efforts and clandestine maneuvering in order to posthumously embed his Etant donnes into a museum. Demonstrating how those activities reflect the artist's questioning of reproduction and originality, as well as photography and the exhibition, Filipovic proposes that Duchamp's "non-art" labor, and in particular his curatorial strategies, more than merely accompanied his more famous artworks; in a certain sense, they made them. Through Duchamp's elusive but vital activities he revised the idea of what a modern artist could be. With this fascinating book, Filipovic in turn revises the very idea of Duchamp

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.

During the pivotal years between the world wars, Surrealist artists on both sides of the Atlantic responded through their works to the rise of Hitler and the spread of Fascism in Europe, resulting in a period of surprising brilliance and fertility. Monstrosities in the real world bred monsters in paintings and sculpture, on film, and in the pages of journals and artists' books. Despite the political and personal turmoil brought on by the Spanish Civil War and World War II, avant-garde artists in Europe and those who sought refuge in the United States pushed themselves to create some of the most potent and striking images of the Surrealist movement. Trailblazing essays by four experts in the field trace the experimental and international extent of Surrealist art during these years--and, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, its irrepressible beauty.

"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.

In examining Dada in the Low Countries, Hubert van den Berg is faced with a complex situation that as much critiqued as embraced Dada. Largely an individual affair, and lacking the community "center" of Dada in Zurich, Berlin and the other Dada "capitals," van den Berg focuses equally on Dada's reception and on its exercise. Primarily a case of selective appropriation, Dada in the Low Countries nevertheless possessed an international reach, achieved in the relationships it posed between Dada and the Post-World War I Constructivist International and De Stijl. For the author, Dada in Belgium and the Netherlands is less a case of its "story" than of specific cases of its "use." The involvement of Clement Pansaers, Paul van Ostaijen, Theo van Doesburg, and German artist Kurt Schwitters, figure prominently in the historical mapping of van den Berg's complex and elusive subject.

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.

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.