This year marks the centenary of Surrealism, or more specifically the publication of its founding manifesto and attendant journal. The title of the latter, La Révolution surréaliste (issued from 1924 to 1929), made plain the movement’s ambition: nothing less than a social and political revolution, a radical synthesis of unconscious desire and waking reality. Hamstrung both by Communist resistance to its “interior model” and by the rise of fascism and a new World War, this sur-reality never came to pass in the terms imagined by its originators. Its influence nevertheless remains everywhere, not merely in the slick corporate seductions of popular advertising but in anticolonial, anti-racist, and activist projects in which the marvelous and mysterious might still have a role to play. Here, we review eight books that make the history, reach, and lasting impact of this movement abundantly clear.
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Nadja by André Breton, trans. Richard Howard
As Surrealism’s best-known novel, André Breton’s Nadja, written in 1928, predictably undermines the very premise of novelistic narrative and expectation. Where the book truly distinguishes itself is in making unpredictability—what Breton and his cohorts deemed “objective chance”—the shifting center of writing itself. Beginning with the query “Who am I?,” Nadja renounces linear progression for a series of divagations and distractions, mirroring the narrator’s own passage through the streets of Paris. The elusive figure of the book’s title is an embodiment of enigmatic femininity, or rather male projections thereof, but it is the city of Paris that is Nadja’s true protagonist. Of particular note is the allusive incorporation of photography, whether of banal urban spaces charged with mystery (shopfronts, empty squares), works by key artists in Surrealism’s orbit (Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico), or portraits of individual Surrealists themselves (Benjamin Péret, Robert Desnos).
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Dada & Surrealism by Matthew Gale
Surrealism’s self-proclaimed “revolution” was no sui generis event. It emerged out of an earlier, and no less radical, phenomenon: Dada, which had arisen in Europe around 1916. As nationalist violence convulsed the Continent during World War I, a range of expatriate poets, painters, and iconoclasts gathered in neutral Zurich to defy both the commerce and the concept of Art with a capital A (as well as the cultural chauvinism that propped up both). Their raucous sound poetry, performances, and typographic experiments held up a mirror to the war’s chaos, turning its by-products—chance, accident, senselessness—into new modes of creative provocation from Berlin to New York to Cologne to Paris. The Surrealists came to prize collective, collaborative organization as the vehicle of revolt, replacing Dadaist nihilism with a renewed investment in painting, film, and other media. Even Surrealism’s subsequent political applications, however, owed an abiding debt to Dada in their refusal of the social status quo. This accessible volume by Matthew Gale details the transformation of Parisian Dada into Surrealism and examines the two movements’ shared ground and profound differences.
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Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement by Whitney Chadwick
Recently reprinted with a new foreword, this volume remains indispensable for grasping the place of women in Surrealism’s development—for grasping, that is, their roles as artists and authors rather than simply muses or wives. Surrealism set out to upend the sexual bedrock of bourgeois mores. Yet even as it broke new ground for subsequent feminist and queer generations, its revolution hinged on exclusively male, heterosexual drives. Surrealist authors and artists routinely invoked “woman” as a kind of talismanic symbol—the femme-enfant who might bring man closer to his primal desires. As Whitney Chadwick documents in packed, thematic chapters, numerous real women, including the photographers Dora Maar and Claude Cahun, the painters Kay Sage and Leonora Carrington, and the authors Suzanne Césaire and Lise Deharme, flourished even in the teeth of Surrealist chauvinism. While deftly handling the popular (and biographical) sensation of a painter like Frida Kahlo, Chadwick expands the pantheon of Surrealist women to less recognized individuals and a range of striking experiments in various media.
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Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, eds. Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley
Despite the centrality of non-Western cultures to the Surrealist imagination—and despite the movement’s significant anti-colonialist activism—individuals of color found their voices muted in most accounts of Surrealism’s history. This anthology restores the salience of voices from Africa and the Black Atlantic that abounded in original Surrealist publications, only to be marginalized in its canon. Essays, poems, and manifestos by individuals of color—from Martinique, Guyana, Haiti, Harlem, and other points on the globe—shed vital light on Surrealist practice as late as the 1990s. Surrealism’s influence on both the Négritude and Black Arts movements reveals its early anti-fascist agitation to be not merely a product of a historical (anti-colonialist) moment but a possible model for radical politics more universally.
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Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS, eds. Dawn Ades and Simon Baker
As the “pope” of Surrealism, André Breton exerted officious control over the movement until its dissolution after World War II. This does not mean that his leadership went unchallenged. Edited by the philosopher and writer Georges Batailles, the journal Documents served as a clearinghouse for various dissident Surrealists by 1929. Responding to Breton’s call for collective, communist action, Bataille famously dismissed the established Surrealists as “bloody idealists.” For Marx’s dialectical materialism, Documents substituted a Surrealist affinity for ethnography and anthropology, religious ritual and taboo. In addition to paintings by Picasso, Miró, and André Masson and photographs by Jacques-André Boiffard and Eli Lotar, the journal featured writing on neolithic Japanese figurines, Congolese masks, and human sacrifice in Central American culture. While not free of European preconceptions, these efforts energized Surrealist efforts with what Bataille called a “war machine against received ideas”—the premise for a 2006 exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery and this richly illustrated catalogue.
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Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris by Robin Walz
Cubist and Futurist attention to the cinema, broadsheets, and other kinds of mass media galvanized the Surrealists’ affinity for startling juxtapositions, especially as evinced in the medium of collage (or its simulated effects). More than any avant-garde before them, however, the Surrealists remained invested in narrative. Fantastic and mysterious tales were everywhere, if one knew how and where to look for them. And the Surrealists did look: at flea markets, in lowbrow news columns (faits divers), and among other seemingly throwaway phenomena from mass print culture. The popular detective novel series Fantômas (begun in 1911 and made into silent films by 1913) held a particular sway for the Surrealists. In the stories’ “displaced identities, detours, paradoxes, and violence,” Robin Walz writes, the Surrealists found reflected some of their most prized phenomena, hiding in plain sight. Examining the landmark Surrealist novel Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon, Walz also considers the psychic resonances of the city’s passages: iron-and-glass galleries that were the ancestors of the later, 20th-century mall (and that so captured the imagination of the philosopher Walter Benjamin, a keen reader of Aragon’s work).
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Remade in America: Surrealist Art, Activism, and Politics, 1940–1978 by Joanna Pawlik
Tracing Surrealism’s impact as far afield as Korea and the Philippines, the Metropolitan Museum’s 2021 exhibition “Surrealism Beyond Borders” set into relief its truly transnational reach. Published the same year, Joanna Pawlick’s volume offers a more in-depth consideration of a specific aspect of this reach: the movement’s varied and often surprising afterlife in the United States. The American exile of many key Surrealists during World War II contributed to the rise of Abstract Expressionism—an influence long explored in almost exclusively formalist terms. Far less familiar has been the movement’s consequence for marginalized groups. While many abstract painters took up the legacy of “automatic” drawing in their work, Pawlik tells us, Black artists (particularly in Chicago) and political activists seized upon the Surrealist affinity for narrative along with its fundamentally leftist and anti-colonialist ideology. Pawlik also demonstrates how certain individuals used Surrealism against its own grain; despite Breton’s infamous homophobia, for instance, a number of American artists on both coasts used Surrealism as the impetus for their own strain of liberatory “queer psychedelia.”
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Why Surrealism Matters by Mark Polizzotti
In their pop ubiquity, Dalí’s melting clocks and Magritte’s bowler-hatted bourgeois appear today as anything but subversive. Surrealism’s assimilation by corporate advertising has further deadened any shock its images once might have evinced. Setting to one side what he rightly calls the “overexposed visual works” of Surrealism, author Mark Polizzotti queries the relevance of a phenomenon often reduced to clichés and sound bites. For all its (now outmoded) gestures of revolt, Surrealism may rightly be said to have defied a range of social and political orthodoxies: racial and colonialist paradigms, sexual morality, and the insatiable European appetite for war. Just as vitally, it used culture as an active vehicle of that defiance, rather than a passive reflection. From the American Beat poets to aspects of the anti-Vietnam War movement to the cinema of David Lynch, Surrealism’s influence is everywhere. Even as he places the movement in historical context, Polizzotti reminds us that the Surrealists understood their project to be a transhistorical one: “a state of mind that has manifested itself sporadically in every age and in every country.”