Elza Adamowicz

Illustrated throughout, a revealing look at the life and work of surrealist artist and collector André Breton. This is the first comprehensive study in English of surrealist leader André Breton's lifelong commitment to the visual arts. As an essayist, art critic, collector, gallery director, and artist, he actively promoted many painters, from turn-of-the-century Moreau and outsider artists to fellow surrealists like Ernst and Masson. The book tracks both the development of Breton's surrealist aesthetics within the Parisian avant-garde art scene and the centrality of art to his political agenda. It also highlights Breton the collector and collagist--the works he displayed in his Paris apartment, ranging from Oceanic masks to African sculptures, paintings to pebbles, are themselves seen as an ever-changing assemblage.

The Eye of the Poet: André Breton and the Visual Arts

Michael Sheringham

A Bibliography (1972-1989) : (supplement to Michael Sheringham: André Breton, a Bibliography)

André Breton

Eric Robertson

This collection of critical essays celebrates the subversive and challenging creativity of the Dada movement, born in pacifist Zurich in 1916 in violent reaction to the First World War. It examines the collective and individual activities that took place under the name of Dada in Zurich, Cologne, Berlin, Paris, New York and Barcelona, and explores the various creative forms employed, including text, collage, photomontage, objects, dance, performance and film. The authors suggest new ways of understanding the work of the most famous Dadaists, while also casting light on the contribution of hitherto neglected figures. Far from attempting to reduce Dada to a homogeneous movement, or to define a unifying principle beneath and beyond the multiple directions taken by Dadaists, this collection aims to respect the diversity and heterogeneity of the movement's collective activities as well as the specificity of its individual actors.

Volume 1: Dada Discourses

Dada and Beyond

A new analysis of Surrealist collage in France, leading to a radical reassessment of Surrealism.

Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse

Surrealist Collage in Text and Image

This collection of essays, inspired by André Breton's concept of the limites non-frontières of Surrealism, focuses on the crossings, intersections and margins of the surrealist movement rather than its divides and exclusion zones. Some of the essays originated as papers given at the colloquium 'Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers' held at the Institute of Romance Studies, University of London, in November 2001. Surrealism is foregrounded as a trajectory rather than a fixed body of doctrines, radically challenging the notion of frontiers. The essays explore real and imaginary journeys, as well as the urban dérives of the surrealists and situationists. The concept of crossing, central to a reading of the dynamics at work in Surrealism, is explored in studies of the surrealist object, which eludes or elides genres, and explorations of the shifting sites of identity, as in the work of Joyce Mansour or André Masson. Surrealism's engagement with frontiers is further investigated through a number of revealing cases, such as a political reading of 1930s photography, the parodic rewriting of the popular 'locked room' mystery, or the surrealists' cavalier redrawing of the map of the world. The essays contribute to our understanding of the diversity and dynamism of Surrealism as an international and interdisciplinary movement.

Crossings/frontiers

Surrealism

International, iconoclastic, inventive, born out of the institutionalised madness of the First World War, Dada erupted in cities throughout Europe and the USA, creating shock waves that offended polite society and destabilised the cultural and political status quo. In spite of its sporadic and ephemeral character, its rich and diverse legacy is still powerfully felt nearly a century later. Following on from Dada and Beyond Volume 1: Dada Discourses, the sixteen essays in this collection provide critical examinations of Dada, placing particular emphasis on the ongoing impact of its creative output. The chapters examine its pivotal figures as well as its more peripheral protagonists, their different geographic locations, and the extraordinary diversity of their practices that included poetry, painting, printmaking, dance, performance, theatre, textiles, readymades, photomontage and cinema. As the book’s authors reveal, Dada not only anticipates Surrealism but also foreshadows an extraordinary array of more recent tendencies including action painting, conceptual art, outsider art, performance art, environmental and land art. In its privileging of chance and automatism, its rejection of formal artistic institutions, its subversive exploitation of mass media and its constant self-reconstitution and self-redefinition, Dada deserves to be seen as a cultural phenomenon that is still powerfully relevant in the twenty-first century.

Dada and Its Legacies

"Dada and Beyond, Volume 2"

This is the first comprehensive study of bodily images in Dada. Travelling between the international centres of the movement, from Zurich to Berlin, Paris to New York, it examines a diverse range of media, including art, literature, performance, photography and film. Its overall approach is to confront Dada’s bodily images not as organic unities but as fictions that reflect on the disjunctive, dehumanised society of war-torn Europe. These fictions occupy an ambivalent space between the battlefield (in their satirical exposure of ideology) and the fairground (in their playful manipulation and joyful renewal of the body). The book features analyses of works by Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Hannah Höch, Marcel Duchamp and others, and will appeal to scholars and students of European history, cultural history, art and literature.

Elza Adamowicz

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