As heard on BBC Radio 4's 'A Good Read' 'Where and how Dada began is almost as difficult to determine as Homer's birthplace', writes Hans Richter, the artist and film-maker closely associated with this radical movement from its earliest days. Here, he records and traces Dada's history, from its inception in wartime Zurich, to its collapse in Paris in the 1920s when many of its members were to join the Surrealist movement, to its reappearance in the 1960s in movements such as Pop Art. This absorbing eyewitness narrative is enlivened by extensive use of Dada documents, illustrations and texts by fellow Dadaists. The complex personalities, relationships and contributions of, among others, Hugo Bali, Tristan Tzara, Picabia, Arp, Schwitters, Hausmann, Duchamp, Ernst and Man Ray, are vividly brought to life. Over a hundred years on from the riotous inception of Dada at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, art historian Michael White provides a new introduction and commentary to a book that has become a legend in its own right, influencing a generation of performers and artists since its first publication in 1965 - David Bowie even quoted from Dada: Art and Anti-Art in his Scary Monsters album. Michael White has unearthed Richter's private correspondence with his fellow Dada artists to tell the story of how the book came about and, using previously unseen archive sources, enables us to read between the lines and discover the truth behind this most elusive of art movements.

Emerging amid the brutality of World War I, the revolutionary Dada movement took disgust with the establishment as its starting point. From 1916 until the mid-1920s, artists in Zurich, Cologne, Hanover, Paris, and New York launched a radical assault on the politics, social values, and cultural conformity which they regarded as complicit in the devastating conflict. Dada artists shared no distinct style but rather a common wish to upturn societal structures as much as artistic standards and to replace logic and reason with the absurd, chaotic, and unpredictable. Their practice encompassed experimental theater, games, guttural sound-making, collage, photomontage, chance-based procedures, and the "readymade," most notoriously Marcel Duchamp's urinal, Fountain (1917). Throughout, the Dadaists considered the visual appearance of their work secondary to the ideas and critiques it expressed. In this sense, Dada may be seen as a fundamental precursor to conceptual art. With a selection of key works from some of the most famous proponents of Dada such as Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hoech, Kurt Schwitters, Francis Picabia, and Man Ray, this book introduces this urgent, subversive, and determined 20th-century movement and its lasting influence on modern art. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art History series features: approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions a detailed, illustrated introduction a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

Man Ray, surrealist master and exponent of the Dada movement, managed to reinvent not only the photographic language, but also the representation of the body and face, as well as the genres of the nude and the portrait themselves. This book brings together around 200 photographs produced from the 1920s right up to his death in 1976, all featuring female subjects.Through rayographs, solarisations and double exposures, the female body undergoes a continual metamorphosis of forms and meanings, becoming an abstract form, an object of seduction, classical memory or realistic portrait, in endless playful and refined variations. Among the protagonists of his shots are Lee Miller, Berenice Abbott, Dora Maar and Juliet, a lifelong companion, to whom is dedicated the amazing The Fifty Faces of Juliet portfolio (1943-1944). But these women were, in turn, great artists: as evidence is presented here a corpus of works dating back to the time - between the 1930s and '40s - of their most direct association with Man Ray and with the environment of the Dada avant-garde and Parisian surrealism. This volume offers a wide survey of one of the most exuberant periods of the 20th century, with authentic masterpieces of photographic art such as the Electricite portfolios (1931) and the very rare Les mannequins. Resurrection des mannequins (1938). Text in English and Italian.

Since her death in 2011, the legendary Surrealist Leonora Carrington has been reconstructed and reinvented many times over. In this book, Gabriel Weisz Carrington draws on remembered conversations and events to demythologise his mother, revealing the woman and the artist behind the iconic persona. He travels between Leonora's native England and adopted homeland of Mexico, making stops in New York and Paris and meeting some of the remarkable figures she associated with, from Max Ernst and Andre Breton to Remedios Varo and Alejandro Jodorowsky. At the same time, he strives to depict a complex and very real Surrealist creator, exploring Leonora not simply in relation to her romantic partners or social milieus but as the artist she always was. A textured portrait emerges from conversations, memories, stories and Leonora's engagement with the books that she read. -- .

Surrealism was launched as a literary and artistic movement by French poet Andre Breton in 1924, and by the time of his death in 1966 had become one of the most popular art movements of the 20th century. Its very name has entered everyday usage as a synonym for bizarre. Taking the reader on a narrative journey through the history of Surrealism, this book is a digestible introduction to the movement's key figures, their works and where to find them. Complete with a glossary of key terms and chronology, this new addition to the Art Essentials series provides an indispensable resource for anyone interested in learning about this most influential of art phenomena.

From men in bowler hats, floating in the sky, to a painting of a pipe above the caption "this is not a pipe", Rene Magritte (1898-1967) created an echo chamber of object and image, name and thing, reality and representation. Like other Surrealist works, Magritte's paintings combine a precise, mimetic technique with abnormal, alienating configurations which defy the laws of scale, logic, and science: a comb the size of a wardrobe, rocks that float in the sky, clouds that drift through an open door. The result is a direct yet disorientating realm, often witty, often unsettling, and always prompting us to look beyond the visible, to "what is hidden by what we see." This introductory book explores Magritte's vast repertoire of visual humor, paradox, and surprise which to this day makes us look and look again, not only at the painting, but at our sense of self and the world. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Dada is often celebrated for its strategies of shock and opposition, but in Dada Presentism, Maria Stavrinaki provides a new picture of Dada art and writings as a lucid reflection on history and the role of art within it. The original (Berlin-based) Dadaists' acute historical consciousness and their modern experience of time, she contends, anticipated the formulations of major historians such as Reinhart Koselleck and, more recently, Francois Hartog. The book explores Dada temporalities and concepts of history in works of art, artistic discourse, and in the photographs of the Berlin Dada movement. These photographs-including the famous one of the First International Dada Fair-are presented not as simple, transparent documents, but as formal deployments conforming to a very concrete theory of history. This approach allows Stavrinaki to link Dada to more contemporary artistic movements and practices interested in history and the archive. At the same time, she investigates what seems to be a real oxymoron of the movement: its simultaneous claim to the ephemeral and its compulsive writing of its own history. In this way, Dada Presentism also interrogates the limits between history and fiction.

Painter, sculptor, writer, filmmaker, and all-round showman Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was one of the 20th century's greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics. One of the first artists to apply the insights of Freudian psychoanalysis to art, he is celebrated in particular for his surrealist practice, with such conceits as the soft watches or the lobster telephone, now hallmarks of the surrealist enterprise, and of modernism in general. Dali frequently described his paintings as "hand-painted dream photographs." Their tantalizing tension and interest resides in the precise rendering of bizarre elements and incongruous arrangements. As Dali himself explained, he painted with "the most imperialist fury of precision," but only "to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality." Revolutionizing the role of the artist, the mustache-twirling Dali also had the intuition to parade a controversial persona in the public arena and, through printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and film, to create work that could be consumed and not just contemplated on a gallery wall. This book explores both the painting and the personality of Dali, introducing his technical skill as well as his provocative compositions and challenging themes of death, decay, and eroticism. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

How did women Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington and Claude Cahun take up the question of female identity in terms of their own aesthetic and intellectual practice? What was the response of women analysts such as Joan Riviere to Freud's psychoanalytic construction of femininity? These are among the questions that Natalya Lusty brings to her sophisticated and theoretically informed investigation into the appropriation of 'the feminine' by the Surrealist movement. Combining biographical and textual methods of analysis with historically specific discussions of related cultural sites such as women's magazines, fashion, debutante culture, sexology, modernist lesbian subculture, pornography, and female criminality, the book examines the ambiguities and blind spots that haunt the work of more central figures such as Andre Breton, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Walter Benjamin, and the Surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer. Lusty's examination of a series of psychoanalytic Surrealist themes, including narcissism, fantasy, masquerade, perversion, and 'the double', illuminates a modernist preoccupation with the crisis of subjectivity and representation and its ongoing relevance to more recent work by Cindy Sherman and Judith Butler. Her book is an important contribution to modernist studies that will appeal to scholars and students working across a diverse range of fields, including literary studies, gender studies, visual culture, cultural studies, and cultural history.

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.

Marcel Duchamp's urinal re-named 'fountain' and placed in an art gallery. The classic image that can be seen as a duck or a rabbit, depending on how you look at it. A random object that grabs your attention and, like a Freudian slip, sums up whatever's on your mind. These are just a few examples of surrealist objects, items from everyday life that have something to tell us about the workings of the unconscious. In Reframing Reality, Alison Frank argues that the surrealist object offers a promising new way of understanding surrealism's legacy in cinema. Early studies of surrealist cinema restricted themselves to the handful of films that received official approval from the surrealist group. More recent studies have looked more broadly at films that explore the unconscious as a theme. Reframing Reality is the first to use the specifically surrealist concept of the surrealist object to trace the influence of surrealism in a broader range of films. When objects to do more than just advance the storyline, or have a mysterious meaning that is never fully explained, they are imitating the form of the surrealist object. Reframing Reality finds surrealist objects in films by Luis Bunuel and Jan Svankmajer, who acknowledged the importance of surrealism in their work, but also in the films of Rene Clair, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the directors of the Czech New Wave, for whom surrealism was just one of many influences. By looking more closely at the role of objects in films, particularly those made during times of great change in the industry, we can gain a better understanding of both the legacy of surrealism in cinema and film language more generally.

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.

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s examines the intersection of Hegelian aesthetics, experimental art and poetry, Marxism and psychoanalysis in the theory and practice of the Surrealist movement. Locating Surrealist art and thought between modernist art and revolutionary politics, Steven Harris investigates the consequences of the Surrealists' efforts to synthesize these diverse concerns, through the invention, in 1931, of the object and in the recasting of their activities as a mode of revolutionary science. Providing a context for the cultural and political debates in France and the Soviet Union during the 1930s, he also analyzes the debate on proletarian literature, the Surrealists' reaction to the Popular Front, and their eventual defense of an experimental modern art following their break with the French Communist Party in 1935.

For fans of Mrs Hemingway and The Paris Wife, Whitney Scharer's The Age of Light is the riveting, vivid and powerful story of the photographer Lee Miller and her lover, Man Ray. Model. Muse. Lover. Artist. Paris, 1929. Lee Miller has abandoned her life in New York and a modelling career at Vogue to pursue her dream of becoming a photographer. When she catches the eye of artist Man Ray she convinces him to hire her as his assistant. Man is an egotistical, charismatic force and they soon embark upon a passionate affair. Lee and Man spend their days working closely in the studio and their nights at smoky cabarets and wild parties. But as Lee begins to assert herself, and to create pioneering work of her own, Man's jealousy spirals out of control and leads to a betrayal that threatens to destroy them both . . . 'Powerful, sensual and gripping' - Madeleine Miller, author of Circe 'Fans of Mrs Hemingway and The Paris Wife will love this one' - Elle

One of the greatest collaborations of cinema history, L'Age d'Or(1930) united the geniuses of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali in the making of a Surrealist masterpiece - a uniquely savage blend of visual poetry and social criticism. The film was banned and vilified for many years in many countries, becoming justly legendary for its subversive eroticism and its furious dissection of 'civilised' values. In a remarkable, intuitive reading of L'Age d'Or, Paul Hammond interweaves a detailed account of the extraordinary circumstances of its production with a dazzling interpretation of its aesthetic and political nuances. At once authoritative and polemical, this is a study entirely in tune with its subject, a fitting celebration of a major landmark in world cinema.

The first collection of critical essays on Luis Bunuel's 1972 Oscar-winning masterpiece, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, this anthology brings fresh perspectives to the most sophisticated film of this director whose narrative experimentation was always ahead of its time. Combining some of the world's most distinguished scholars on Bunuel and Spanish cinema with new voices in cultural theory, this volume helps us to rethink not only The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but also Bunuel's entire body of work. Among the topics examined are Bunuel's relationship to surrealism, the transnational (Spanish, French, Mexican, and American) nature of his work, and his dramatic and idiosyncratic rethinking of sex, narrative and gender. Also included are vintage reviews of the film, as well a selected Bunuel bibliography.

A completely new way of looking at and understanding Surrealism, with a focus on the worldwide sweep of the movement "The variety of discoveries, detailed with exceptional scholarship in a ravishing keeper of a catalogue, defeat generalization."-Peter Schjeldahl, New Yorker This groundbreaking book challenges conventional narratives of Surrealism, tracing its impact and legacy from the 1920s to the late 1970s in places as diverse as Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, Romania, Syria, Thailand, and Turkey. In doing so, it presents a more inclusive and accurate understanding of the fundamentally international character and lasting significance of the revolutionary artistic, literary, and philosophical movement. Vibrantly illustrated with more than 300 works of art by both well-known figures-including Dali, Ernst, Kahlo, Magritte, and Miro-and numerous underrepresented artists, this expansive book pushes beyond the borders of history, geography, and nationality to provocatively redraw the map of the Surrealist movement, investigating how its visual languages, ideals, theories, and practices were framed or reframed in contexts far from its Parisian origins. Contributions from more than 40 distinguished international scholars explore themes such as the channels used to transmit ideas; artists' responses to the challenges of political oppression, social unrest, and the effects of colonialism; and experiences of displacement and exile in the twentieth century. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (October 4, 2021-January 30, 2022) Tate Modern, London (February 25-August 29, 2022)

For Rene Magritte, painting was a form of thinking. Through paintings of ordinary objects rendered with illusionism, Magritte probed the limits of our perception-what we see and cannot see, the nature of representation-as a philosophical system for presenting ideas, and explored perspective as a method of visual argumentation. This book makes the claim that Magritte's painting is about vision and the act of viewing, of perception itself, and the process of how we see and experience things in the world, including paintings as things.

Given that the Surrealists were initially met with widespread incomprehension, mercilessly ridiculed, and treated as madmen, it is remarkable that more than one hundred years on we still feel the vitality and continued popularity of the movement today. As Willard Bohn demonstrates, Surrealism was not just a French phenomenon but one that eventually encompassed much of the world. Concentrating on the movement's theory and practice, this extraordinarily broad-ranging book documents the spread of Surrealism throughout the western hemisphere and examines keys texts, critical responses, and significant writers. The latter include three extraordinarily talented individuals who were eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (Andre Breton, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz). Like their Surrealist colleagues, they strove to free human beings from their unconscious chains so that they could realize their true potential. One Hundred Years of Surrealist Poetry explores not only the birth but also the ongoing life of a major literary movement.

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.

"Les diners de Gala is uniquely devoted to the pleasures of taste ... If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you."-Salvador Dali Food and surrealism make perfect bedfellows: sex and lobsters, collage and cannibalism, the meeting of a swan and a toothbrush on a pastry case. The opulent dinner parties thrown by Salvador Dali (1904-1989) and his wife and muse, Gala (1894-1982) were the stuff of legend. Luckily for us, Dali published a cookbook in 1973, Les diners de Gala, which reveals some of the sensual, imaginative, and exotic elements that made up their notorious gatherings. This reprint features all 136 recipes over 12 chapters, specially illustrated by Dali, and organized by meal courses, including aphrodisiacs. The illustrations and recipes are accompanied by Dali's extravagant musings on subjects such as dinner conversation: "The jaw is our best tool to grasp philosophical knowledge." All these rich recipes can be cooked at home, although some will require practiced skill and a well-stocked pantry. This is cuisine of the old school, with meals by leading French chefs from such stellar Paris restaurants as Lasserre, La Tour d'Argent, Maxim's, and Le Train Bleu. Good taste, however voluptuous, never goes out of fashion. In making this exceptionally rare book available to a wide audience, TASCHEN brings an artwork, a practical cookbook, and a multisensory adventure to today's kitchens.The first English edition of Les Diners de Gala was published in 1973 by FELICIE, INC., New York

During 1889, Belgian artist James Ensor (1860-1949) painted a monumental canvas that would be his magnum opus: The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889. The work is one of the most complex paintings ever painted. It was only 40 years after its completion that the monumental canvas was first publicly exhibited at the James Ensor retrospective at the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1929. Needless to say, therefore, that the exhibiting of Ensor's work in 1929 was for many a revelation. Until then it had been seen and was known only to a limited group of visitors and insiders. Between 1889 and 1929, a veritable revolution had taken place in the visual arts. Before and during World War I, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, and Dadaism all came into being. Few explanations can accommodate the full daring and frenzy of such a painting which chaotic composition and barbaric style seem revolutionary, and look far beyond the early 20th century. Since the purchase of the work in 1987 by the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), The Entry has acquired cult status. No other work depicts the notion of belgitude so aptly as The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889, and yet the painting can in the first place be regarded as a somewhat quirky but striking representation of Ensor's vision of humanity.