History of the Surrealist Movement

History of the Surrealist Movement

Author: Gérard Durozoi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis US

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 832

ISBN-13: 9780226174112

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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 twentieth century. Unlike other histories, which focus mainly on the pre-World War II years of the movement in Paris, Durozoi covers both 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 documentary and visual evidence--including 1,000 photos, many of them in color--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, Buñuel, Cocteau, Crevel, Dalí, 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.


Surrealism

Surrealism

Author: Anna Balakian

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9780226035604

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First published in 1959, Surrealism remains the most readable introduction to the French surrealist poets Apollinaire, Breton, Aragon, Eluard, and Reverdy. Providing a much-needed overview of the movement, Balakian places the surrealists in the context of early twentieth-century Paris and describes their reactions to symbolist poetry, World War I, and developments in science and industry, psychology, philosophy, and painting. Her coherent history of the movement is enhanced by her firsthand knowledge of the intellectual climate in which some of these poets worked and her interviews with Reverdy and Breton. In a new introduction, Balakian discusses the influence of surrealism on contemporary poetry. This volume includes photographs of the poets and reproductions of paintings by Ernst, Dali, Tanguy, and others.


Literary Origins of Surrealism

Literary Origins of Surrealism

Author: Anna Balakian

Publisher:

Published: 1947

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13:

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Describes the relation of surrealism to the social and psychological revolt of the first post war period as revealed by its deep antipathy for bourgeois society in order to show that surrealist writings have contributed no so much to each other as to one general revolution in poetic mysticism and lead to the development of a new philosophy of reality.


Surrealism and the Art of Crime

Surrealism and the Art of Crime

Author: Jonathan Paul Eburne

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780801446740

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Corpses mark surrealism's path through the twentieth century, providing material evidence of the violence in modern life. Though the shifting group of poets, artists, and critics who made up the surrealist movement were witness to total war, revolutionary violence, and mass killing, it was the tawdry reality of everyday crime that fascinated them. Jonathan P. Eburne shows us how this focus reveals the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the thought and artwork of the surrealists and establishes their movement as a useful platform for addressing the contemporary problem of violence, both individual and political. In a book strikingly illustrated with surrealist artworks and their sometimes gruesome source material, Eburne addresses key individual works by both better-known surrealist writers and artists (including André Breton, Louis Aragon, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí) and lesser-known figures (such as René Crevel, Simone Breton, Leonora Carrington, Benjamin Péret, and Jules Monnerot). For Eburne "the art of crime" denotes an array of cultural production including sensationalist journalism, detective mysteries, police blotters, crime scene photos, and documents of medical and legal opinion as well as the roman noir, in particular the first crime novel of the American Chester Himes. The surrealists collected and scrutinized such materials, using them as the inspiration for the outpouring of political tracts, pamphlets, and artworks through which they sought to expose the forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the state, its courts, and respectable bourgeois values. Concluding with the surrealists' quarrel with the existentialists and their bitter condemnation of France's anticolonial wars, Surrealism and the Art of Crime establishes surrealism as a vital element in the intellectual, political, and artistic history of the twentieth century.


Surrealist Photography

Surrealist Photography

Author: Christian Bouqueret

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2008-04-29

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0500410925

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The classic Photofile series brings together the best work of the world's greatest photographers in an attractive format and at a reasonable price. Handsome and collectible, the books each contain reproductions in color and/or duotone, plus a critical introduction and a bibliography. Paris in the early 1920s saw the growth of a new art form called surrealism. Both a formal movement and a spiritual orientation, surrealism embraced ethics and politics as well as the arts. Surrealists sought to create a medium that liberated the subconscious mind, and many artists and photographers captured this revolution through photographic images. This new survey includes works by Max Ernst, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, René Magritte, Meret Oppenheim, and more.


The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism

The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism

Author: Patrick Lepetit

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2014-04-24

Total Pages: 549

ISBN-13: 1620551764

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A profound understanding of the surrealists’ connections with alchemists and secret societies and the hermetic aspirations revealed in their works • Explains how surrealist paintings and poems employed mythology, gnostic principles, tarot, voodoo, alchemy, and other hermetic sciences to seek out unexplored regions of the mind and recover lost “psychic” and magical powers • Provides many examples of esoteric influence in surrealism, such as how Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon was originally titled The Bath of the Philosophers Not merely an artistic or literary movement as many believe, the surrealists rejected the labels of artist and author bestowed upon them by outsiders, accepting instead the titles of magician, alchemist, or--in the case of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo--witch. Their paintings, poems, and other works were created to seek out unexplored regions of the mind and recover lost “psychic” and magical powers. They used creative expression as the vehicle to attain what André Breton called the “supreme point,” the point at which all opposites cease to be perceived as contradictions. This supreme point is found at the heart of all esoteric doctrines, including the Great Work of alchemy, and enables communication with higher states of being. Drawing on an extensive range of writings by the surrealists and those in their circle of influence, Patrick Lepetit shows how the surrealists employed mythology, gnostic principles, tarot, voodoo, and alchemy not simply as reference points but as significant elements of their ongoing investigations into the fundamental nature of consciousness. He provides many specific examples of esoteric influence among the surrealists, such as how Picasso’s famous Demoiselles d’Avignon was originally titled The Bath of the Philosophers, how painter Victor Brauner drew from his father’s spiritualist vocation as well as the Kabbalah and tarot, and how doctor and surrealist author Pierre Mabille was a Freemason focused on finding initiatory paths where “it is possible to feel a new system connecting man with the universe.” Lepetit casts new light on the connection between key figures of the movement and the circle of adepts gathered around Fulcanelli. He also explores the relationship between surrealists and Freemasonry, Martinists, and the Elect Cohen as well as the Grail mythos and the Arthurian brotherhood.


In Montparnasse

In Montparnasse

Author: Sue Roe

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-08-18

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1101981199

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"Describes with plenty of colour how surrealism, from Rene Magritte's bowler hats to Salvador Dali's watches, was born and developed." - The Times (UK) As she did for the Modernists In Montmartre, noted art historian and biographer Sue Roe now tells the story of the Surrealists in Montparnasse. In Montparnasse begins on the eve of the First World War and ends with the 1936 unveiling of Dalí’s Lobster Telephone. As those extraordinary years unfolded, the Surrealists found ever more innovative ways of exploring the interior life, and asking new questions about how to define art. In Montparnasse recounts how this artistic revolution came to be amidst the salons and cafés of that vibrant neighborhood. Sue Roe is both an incisive art critic of these pieces and a beguiling biographer with a fingertip feel for this compelling world. Beginning with Duchamp, Roe then takes us through the rise of the Dada movement, the birth of Surrealist photography with Man Ray, the creation of key works by Ernst, Cocteau, and others, through the arrival of Dalí. On canvas and in their readymades and other works these artists juxtaposed objects never before seen together to make the viewer marvel at the ordinary—and at the workings of the subconscious. We see both how this art came to be and how the artists of Montparnasse lived. Roe puts us with Gertrude Stein in her box seat at the opening of The Rite of Spring; with Duchamp as he installs his famous urinal; at a Cocteau theatrical with Picasso and Coco Chanel; with Breton at a session with Freud; and with Man Ray as he romances Kiki de Montparnasse. Stein said it best when she noted that the Surrealists still saw in the common ways of the 19th century, but they complicated things with the bold new vision of the 20th. Their words mark an enormously important watershed in the history of art—and they forever changed the way we all see the world.