This 2005 study traces the development of Surrealist theory of visual art and its reception, from the birth of Surrealism to its institutionalization in the mid-1930s. Situating Surrealist art theory in its theoretical and discursive contexts, Kim Grant demonstrates the complex interplay between Surrealism and contemporary art criticism. She examines the challenge to Surrealist art raised by the magazine Cahiers d'Art, which promoted a group of young painters dedicated to a liberated and poetic painting process that was in keeping with the formalist evolution of modern art. Grant also discusses the centrality of visual art in Surrealism as a material manifestation of poetry, the significance of poetry in French theories of modern art, and the difficulties faced by an avant-garde art movement at a time when contemporary audiences had come to expect revolutionary innovation.

An interrogation of the notion of space in Surrealist theory and philosophy, this study analyzes the manifestations of space in the paintings and writings done in the framework of the Surrealist Movement. Haim Finkelstein introduces the 'screen' as an important spatial paradigm that clarifies and extends the understanding of Surrealism as it unfolds in the 1920s, exploring the screen and layered depth as fundamental structuring principles associated with the representation of the mental space and of the internal processes that eventually came to be linked with the Surrealist concept of psychic automatism. Extending the discussion of the concepts at stake for Surrealist visual art into the context of film, literature and criticism, this study sheds new light on the way 'film thinking' permeates Surrealist thought and aesthetics. In early chapters, Finkelstein looks at the concept of the screen as emblematic of a strand of spatial apprehension that informs the work of young writers in the 1920s, such as Robert Desnos and Louis Aragon. He goes on to explore the way the spatial character of the serial films of Louis Feuillade intimated to the Surrealists a related mode of vision, associated with perception of the mystery and the Marvelous lurking behind the surfaces of quotidian reality. The dialectics informing Surrealist thought with regard to the surfaces of the real (with walls, doors and windows as controlling images), are shown to be at the basis of Andre Breton's notion of the picture as a window. Contrary to the traditional sense of this metaphor, Breton's 'window' is informed by the screen paradigm, with its surface serving as a locus of a dialectics of transparency and opacity, permeability and reflectivity. The main aesthetic and conceptual issues that come up in the consideration of Breton's window metaphor lay the groundwork for an analysis of the work of Giorgio de Chirico, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, Andre Masson, and Joan Miro. The concluding chapter considers several issues that dominate the Surrealist spatiality in the 1930s. Derived from the various spatial concepts associated with the screen paradigm, at times in contradistinction to them, these issues, as the author argues, reflect a gradual eclipse of the screen paradigm in the early years of the decade.

Written by the foremost scholars for a general audience, Abrams' Masters of Art series has proved its popularity over the years, becoming the industry's best-selling art history monograph series. In each book, forty full-page colorplates are accompanied by commentaries discussing each individual work. Other illustrations show the artist at varied points in his career, his contemporaries, and comparative works. The series is now being reissued in paperback, and will be redesigned to bring a contemporary feel to these classic Abrams titles. The individual artists selected for this first round of revisions - Van Gogh, Monet, Dali, Renoir, Bosch, and Leonardo da Vinci - were chosen because of their enduring popularity and their continued influence on the art of today.

Through a unique blend of art, photography, film, and architecture, "The Surreal House "presents the individual dwelling as a place of mystery and wonder. Fusing house and dream, it probes the relationship between interior and shell, object and space, and it elaborates "the marvelous" and "compulsive beauty" as espoused by Andre Breton. The haunted house, the cabinet of curiosities, the ruined castle, the cage, the cave, the box, the labyrinth, the bell jar, and the womb are among the uniquely surreal habitats explored.

Shaped by the irrational and the subversive, the flip side of the modernist paradigm of the functional, rational dwelling, "The Surreal House" is ripe for discovery. Mirroring the surrealist love of poetic juxtaposition, the project brings together works by artists such as Edward Hopper, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Joseph Cornell, and Salvador Dali. A surreal legacy is to be found in the interiors of little-known Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino, in Frederick Kiesler's model for "The Endless House" (1957-59), in sculptures by Louise Bourgeois and Rebecca Horn, and in installations by Edward Kienholz and Ilya Kabakov. Contemporary architecture is represented by the work of Rem Koolhaas and Diller & Scofidio, among others.

A manifesto for a poetic reading of the house, "The Surreal House" reflects on the unquestionable importance of the dwelling, the cradle of our being, in the imaginative realm. This richly illustrated account brings together a host of commentators and historians, and accompanies a major exhibition.

Although Paul Delvaux (born 1897) is an artist of international standing, his work is relatively little known in the Anglo-Saxon world. This book, the first on the artist written in English, places Delvaux's work in the tradition of European figurative painting, as well as in the more immediate context of twentieth-century Surrealism, exploring the relationship between them as they came together in the artist's works from the 1930s.David Scott identifies Delvaux's most characteristic contribution to twentieth-century art as that of problematizing academic history painting by "surrealizing" it. He concentrates on recurrent themes in Delvaux's art, notably his continuing, indeed unremitting, focus on the nude, and on the question of the "legibility" of the works, given the contradictory pictorial codes - academic and Surrealist - that Delvaux adopts in them.

In A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning's Chasm, Catriona McAra offers the first critical study of the literary work of the celebrated American painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012). McAra fills a major gap in the scholarship, repositioning Tanning's writing at the centre of her entire creative oeuvre and focusing on a little-known short story "Abyss," a gothic-flavoured, desert adventure which Tanning worked on intermittently throughout her creative life, finally publishing it in 2004 as Chasm: A Weekend. McAra performs a major reassessment of the visual and literary principles upon which the surrealist movement was initially founded. Combining a groundbreaking methodological approach with reference to cultural theory and feminist aesthetics as well as Tanning's unpublished journals and notes, McAra reveals Tanning as a key player in contemporary art practice as well as in the historical surrealist milieu.

Surrealism and the Exotic is the story of the obsessive relationship between surrealist and non-western culture. Describing the travels across Africa, Oceania, Mexico and the Caribbean made by wealthy aesthetes, it combines an insight into the mentality of early twentieth century collectors with an overview of the artistic heritage at stake in these adventures. Featuring more than 70 photographs of artefacts, exhibitions and expeditions-in-progress, it brings to life the climate of hedonism enjoyed by Breton, Ernst, Durkheim, and Mauss, It is an unparalleled introduction to the Surrealist movement and to French thought and culture in the 1920s and 1930s.

Related link: www.anthropologyarena.com
eBook available with sample pages: 0203218752

This book offers a new perspective on a long-debated issue: the role of the occult in surrealism, in particular under the leadership of French writer Andre Breton. Based on thorough source analysis, this study details how our understanding of occultism and esotericism, as well as of their function in Bretonian surrealism, changed significantly over time from the early 1920s to the late 1950s.

This is a retrospective large-format volume delineating the surreal art of De Es Schwertberger. It presents colour reproductions of his work, and describes the influences upon him of Goya, Dali and the literature of Franz Kafka.

How the exhibition spaces of Surrealism anticipated installation art. Surrealism in its late phase often abandoned neutral exhibition spaces in favor of environments that embodied subjective ideologies. These exhibitions offered startled viewers an early version of installation art before the form existed as such. In Displaying the Marvelous, Lewis Kachur explores this development by analyzing three elaborate Surrealist installations created between 1938 and 1942. The first two, the "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme" (1938) and the "Dream of Venus" at the New York World's Fair (1939), dealt with the fetishization of the female body. The third, "First Papers of Surrealism" (1942), focused not on the figure but on the entire expanse of the exhibition space, thus contributing to the development of nonfigurative art in New York. Kachur presents a full visual and verbal reconstruction of each of the exhibitions, evoking the sequence that the contemporary viewer would have encountered. The book considers Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali, two artists who are not usually compared, within a common framework. Duchamp specialized in frustrating the spectator, using his ironic wit to call into question the definition of the work of art. Dali was a master at disorienting the senses by establishing and then undermining everyday spatial and object properties. The Surrealist challenge, as voiced by Andre Breton, was to evoke the marvelous. Duchamp and Dali extended that challenge to the physical and commercial realm of the exhibition installation.

The first monograph to analyze the Surrealist gesture of photographic appropriation, this study examines "found" photographs in three French Surrealist reviews published in the 1920s and 1930s: La Revolution surrealiste, edited by Andre Breton; Documents, edited by Georges Bataille; and Minotaure, edited by Breton and others. The book asks general questions about the production and deployment of meaning through photographs, but addresses more specifically the construction of a Surrealist practice of photography through the gesture of borrowing and re-contextualization and reveals something crucial both about Surrealist strategies and about the way photographs operate. The book is structured around four case studies, including scientific photographs of an hysteric in Charcot's clinic at the Salpetriere hospital, positioned as poetry rather than pathology; and one of the first crime-scene photographs, depicting Jack the Ripper's last victim, radically transformed into a work of art. Linda Steer traces the trajectory of the found photographs, from their first location to their location in a Surrealist periodical. Her study shows that the act of removal and re-framing highlights the instability and mutability of photographic meaning an instability and mutability that has consequences for our understanding both of photography and of Surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s.

Is creativity a therapeutic, culturally enriching and health-giving pursuit, or is it an outpouring of darkly unconscious, neurotically dangerous material? What have been some of the important modern influences on our assumptions and ideas about creativity? Using a fascinatingly varied but beautifully controlled blend of approaches, Kevin Brophy places the creative writer and artist within a modern history of arguments over questions of creativity. He discusses creativity as a social-cultural practice, presenting creativity as a historical, political and inevitably compromised practice which must always be in dispute.In a world where creative writing is becoming institutionalised through university courses, he argues for the importance of continuing instability, theoretical sophistication and unsettled differences over what creativity is.

Surrealism was a broad movement, which attracted many adherents. It was organized and quite strictly disciplined, at least until the death of its leader, Andre Breton, in 1966. As a consequence, its membership was in a constant state of flux: persons were constantly being admitted and excluded, and often the latter continued to regard themselves as Surrealists. The wide-ranging nature of the Surrealist movement was spread over many countries and many different art forms, including painting, sculpture, cinema, photography, music, theater, and literature, most notably poetry. The Historical Dictionary of Surrealism relates the history of this movement through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 600 cross-referenced dictionary entries on persons, circles, and groups who participated in the movement; a global entry on some of the journals and reviews they produced; and a sampling of major works of art, cinema, and literature."

Along with Russian constructivism and surrealism, Dada stands as one of the three most significant movements of the historical avant-garde. Born in the heart of Europe in the midst of World War I, Dada displayed a raucous skepticism about accepted values. Its embrace of new materials, of collage and assemblage techniques, of the designation of manufactured objects as art objects as well as its interest in performance, sound poetry, and manifestos fundamentally shaped the terms of modern art practice and created an abiding legacy for postwar art. Yet, while the word Dada has common currency, few know much about Dada art itself. In contrast to other key avant-garde movements, there has never been a major American exhibition that explores Dada specifically in broad view. "Dada"--the catalogue to the exhibition on view in 2006 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and The Museum of Modern Art in New York presents the hybrid forms of Dada art through an examination of city centers where Dada emerged: Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, New York, and Paris. Covered here are works by some 40 artists made in the period from circa 1916, when the Cabaret Voltaire was founded in Zurich, to 1926, by which time most of the Dada groups had dispersed or significantly transformed. The city sections bring together painting, sculpture, photography, collage, photomontage, prints and graphic work.
Relying on dynamic design and vivid documentary images, "Dada" takes us through these six cities via topical essays and extensive plate sections; an illustrated chronology of the movement; witty chronicles of events in each city center; a selected bibliography; and biographies of eachartist--accompanied by Dada-era photographs.

Published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Dali's birth, a compact museumgoer's guide to the life, times, and works of one of the most notorious personalities of twentiethcentury art, and one of its most intriguing minds." The Little Book of Dali" provides a portable guide that is still a fully detailed biographical portrait. With an introduction followed by over seventy thematic entries on various aspects of Dali's life and work, numerous full color reproductions of his most significant paintings, as well as an excellent chronology and bibliography this volume is both comprehensive and accessible.
Flammarion presents its series of informative, richly illustrated guides, covering lifestyle and cultural topics. Find out everything you want to know about your favorite subject in one handy volume.
- Unique thematic treatment with extensive use of key words and cross-referencing
- Over 70 alphabetically organized bite-sized entries in every title
- Attractive slimline format
- 100 color illustrations
- Summaries of key facts and dates in easy-reference tables
- Exclusive buyer's guide or list of useful addresses to find out more

During World War I, an international group of young artists and writers fled to Zurich, in neutral Switzerland. In reaction to the horror of the war and the onslaught of new technology, as well as to the suffocating aesthetic of futurism and cubism, these artists began to create a new kind of art - art that was antilogical, anti-aesthetic, anarchistic, confrontional, shocking. Performing and exhibiting at the famous Cafe Voltaire, these artists called the new art "Dada". Dada: The Coordinates of Cultural of Cultural Politics, the first in the eight-volume series Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, provides parameters for the historical and sociological context of Dada. In a collection of essays from internationally respected scholars, Dada's manifestations in visual arts, theater, the media, and literature, as well as the correspondence between Dadas and their various manifestos, are explored to present a nuanced examination of the movement. In addition, the volume addresses the relevancy of an extensive study of Dada to present-day concerns.

Surrealism was a revolution. Unlike other modern movements such as cubism and geometrical abstraction, it was not based purely on artistic innovation; its aim was nothing less than the liberation, in art and in life, of the resources of the subconscious mind. Sarane Alexandrian traces the development of surrealism from its origins in the Dada anti-art revolt of 1916-1920 to the death of its guiding spirit, Andre Breton, in 1966, which marked the end of its existence as a formal entity. The author discusses and illustrates an astonishing variety of surrealist artists, including not only such giants of the movement as Dali, Miro, Duchamp, Tanguy and Magritte, but a host of other remarkable talents. 231 illus., 50 in color.

Dada formed in 1916, embedded in a world of rational appearances that belied a raging confusion - in the middle of the First World War, in the neutral centre of a warring continent, fundamentally at the heart of Western art. This book sets out new coordinates in revision of a formation that Western art history routinely exhausts through its characterisation as a `revolutionary movement' of anarchic cultural dissent, and does so in order to contest the perpetuated assumptions about Dada that underlie the popular myth. Dada is difficult and the response to it is not easy, and what emerge from the theoretical readings developed here are profoundly rational bases to the Dada non-sense that pitted itself against its civilised age, critically and implicitly to propose that Dada courses as vitally today as it did in 1916. The Zurich Dada formation initiated deliberate and strategic cultural engagements that struggled then, as they do now, to cohere in any sense as a `movement', extreme in their ranges as diametrically hostile oppositionalities. Dada may be given art historically as identifiable along a trajectory of sustained ruptures and seizures, but it confounds all attempts at defined or definitive readings. This book duly offers not a history of Dada in Zurich but theoretical engagements of the emergencies and now the residue of the years 1916-19 - from `lautgedichte' to laughter, masks to manifestos, chance to chiasmata - rounding to the `permanent' Dada by which the formation ultimately breaks the containment and deep peace of art historical chronology.

Touch suggests a broad range of physical, intellectual, and emotional connections that serve to undermine the dominance of vision in histories of modernism. By exploding notions of the very nature of art, the artists considered in this beautifully illustrated monograph introduced fundamentally new conceptions of subjectivity and engagement for the modernist era. While offering an entertaining and engaging history of dada and surrealism, Please Touch presents a persuasive argument highlighting the role of "tactility," which it defines as a decentralized, fragmented, and intimate form of knowing. In this compelling volume, Janine Mileaf offers the first full-length consideration of Marcel Duchamp's readymades and their profound legacy in the transatlantic context of dada and surrealism. This book embraces a broad range of art objects: consumer items such as the urinal and bottlerack that Duchamp "sneaked" into art exhibits; flea-market assemblages fabricated by his interwar avant-garde successors Man Ray, Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Meret Oppenheim, and others; and the bricolage boxes of American surrealist Joseph Cornell.
Please Touch is an intriguing exploration of some of the twentieth century's most important art and artists that will appeal to a broad range of art historians and interdisciplinary scholars.

How might artistic practice offer unique insight into the cataclysmic debacle of war? "Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War" plumbs this provocative question through an ambitious account of a pivotal period in European cultural history. The book focuses on the relation between artistic endeavor and politics during a period of social crisis. By scrutinizing the widely varying responses to the Spanish Civil War in the work of Miro, Dali, Caballero, Masson, and Picasso, the author investigates Surrealism's efforts to bridge the divide between political thought and political act.
Robin Adele Greeley examines such central works as Miro's "Still Life with Old Shoe" and Dali's "Autumn Cannibalism" in the context of contemporary works and historical events. She also examines such topics as Surrealism's flirtations with fascism, the movement's relations with the Communist Party and the Popular Front, and the distinct development of Spanish versus French Surrealism. She concludes with an in-depth discussion of Picasso's "Guernica,"

Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada sheds new light on Paris Dada's role in developing the anarchist and individualist philosophies that helped shape the cultural dialogue in France following the First World War. Drawing on such surviving documentation as correspondence, criticism, periodicals, pamphlets, and manifestoes, this book argues that, contrary to received wisdom, Dada was driven by a vision of social change through radical cultural upheaval. The first book-length study to interrogate the Paris Dadaists' complex and often contested position in the postwar groundswell of anarcho-individualism, Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada offers an unprecedented analysis of Paris Dada literature and art in relation to anarchism, and also revives a variety of little known anarcho-individualist texts and periodicals. In doing so, it reveals the general ideological diversity of the postwar French avant-garde and identifies its anarchist concerns; in addition, it challenges the accepted paradigm that postwar cultural politics were monolithically nationalist. By positioning Paris Dada in its anarchist context, this volume addresses a long-ignored lacuna in Dada scholarship and, more broadly, takes its place alongside the numerous studies that over the past two decades have problematized the politics of modern art, literature, and culture.

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dali y Domenech, Marquis of Pubol, was born in Catalonia on May 11, 1904, and died on January 23, 1989. Best known as a surrealist painter, his artistic output also included film, sculpture, photography and writing. Dali is also notorious for his eccentric behaviour and his involvement with the Dada movement, which often drew more attention to himself than his art. In this new narrative exploration of Salvador Dali, highly respected art and literary historian Mary Ann Caws surveys the life and work of one of the most fascinating and colourful figures in the history of art. She recounts the influence of the Catalan region and dialect on his early life, as well as his expulsions from school and from the School of Fine Arts in Madrid; his involvement with the Surrealists, and his work with Bunuel and their films "Un chien andalou" and "L'Age d'or", and the impact and reception of both films at the time. Dali's turbulent personal life brought him into contact with a rich assortment of intellectual figures and Caws considers his relationships with his family and his lovers, including Elena Diakonova (Gala), who was married to the poet Paul Eluard when they met, and friends such as poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Caws also closely examines Dali's work: his famous Surrealist paintings, 'hand-painted dream photographs' such as "The Persistence of Memory" and "Autumnal Cannibalism?", as well as his writing, photography, sculpture and film. Well-researched, and full of telling anecdotes, "Salvador Dali" will appeal to the large readership who are already familiar with this extraordinary artist, as well as to those who have heard much and wish to know more about the life and work of this pivotal figure in modern art.

The first major collection of poetry written in English by the flabbergasting and flamboyant Baroness Elsa, "the first American Dada." As a neurasthenic, kleptomaniac, man-chasing proto-punk poet and artist, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven left in her wake a ripple that is becoming a rip-one hundred years after she exploded onto the New York art scene. As an agent provocateur within New York's modernist revolution, "the first American Dada" not only dressed and behaved with purposeful outrageousness, but she set an example that went well beyond the eccentric divas of the twenty-first century, including her conceptual descendant, Lady Gaga. Her delirious verse flabbergasted New Yorkers as much as her flamboyant persona. As a poet, she was profane and playfully obscene, imagining a farting God, and transforming her contemporary Marcel Duchamp into M'ars (my arse). With its ragged edges and atonal rhythms, her poetry echoes the noise of the metropolis itself. Her love poetry muses graphically on ejaculation, orgasm, and oral sex. When she tired of existing words, she created new ones: "phalluspistol," "spinsterlollipop," "kissambushed." The Baroness's rebellious, highly sexed howls prefigured the Beats; her intensity and psychological complexity anticipates the poetic utterances of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Published more than a century after her arrival in New York, Body Sweats is the first major collection of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's poems in English. The Baroness's biographer Irene Gammel and coeditor Suzanne Zelazo have assembled 150 poems, most of them never before published. Many of the poems are themselves art objects, decorated in red and green ink, adorned with sketches and diagrams, presented with the same visceral immediacy they had when they were composed.

Dada developed in distinct periods and locations, providing the structure of the book. From Europe and New York during the First World War it spread to Eastern Europe and Japan in the 1920s. Its re-emergence as Neo-Dada in the 1950s and influence on Fluxus in the 1960s was linked to emigres such as Marcel Duchamp and Hans Richter. Survey: International Dada expert Rudolf Kuenzli surveys Dada in its historical context and examines its significant impact and resonance in art and culture today. Linking visual art, performance and literature, this is a fresh treatement of Dada as the Dadaists saw it. A reassessment of one of the twentieth century's most revolutionary movements in the arts, Kuenzli's clear style is accessible to the scholar and the general reader. Works: Each image is accompanied by an extended caption. The book is organized chronologically and geographically around major explosions of Dada activity. From its inception in Zurich during the First World War, we follow Dada to New York, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, Paris, Central and Eastern Europe, and Japan, finally looking at Neo-Dada. Arp's Automatic Drawing; Marcel Duchamp's readymades and Man Ray's assemblages; Francis Picabia's paintings linking machine and human form; collage with political comment from Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch; Kurt Schwitter's all-encompassing concept of Merz; Max Ernst; from the East, the graphics of Lajos Kassak and El Lissitzky; Okada Tatsuo's constructions and fireworks attached to the cover of Mavo magazine. A look at Neo- Dada includes Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning and the Happenings of Hi Red Center. Documents include a comprehensive collection of original Dada writings, researched at the International Dada Archive and sourced from around the world. Poetry, manifestos and statements are presented together with letters between Tristan Tzara and Marcel Duchamp; Beatrice Wood describes 'The Richard Mutt Case' (the first exhibition of a urinal) to her readers of The Blind Man in 1917; and in recent interviews artists such as Allan Kaprow and Arman relate their Dada inheritance.