A collection of newly translated writings by the French sociologist and surrealist.

García Lorca at the Edge of Surrealism: The Aesthetics of Anguish examines the variations of surrealism and surrealist theories in the Spanish context, studied through the poetry, drama, and drawings of Federico García Lorca (1898–1936). In contrast to the idealist and subconscious tenets espoused by surrealist leader André Breton, which focus on the marvelous, automatic creative processes, and sublimated depictions of reality, Lorca’s surrealist impulse follows a trajectory more in line with the theories of French intellectuals such as Georges Bataille (1897–1962), who was expelled from Breton’s authoritative group. Bataille critiques the lofty goals and ideals of Bretonian surrealism in the pages of the cultural and anthropological review Documents (1929–1930) in terms of a dissident surrealist ethno-poetics. This brand of the surreal underscores the prevalence of the bleak or darker aspects of reality: crisis, primitive sacrifice, the death drive, and the violent representation of existence portrayed through formless base matter such as blood, excrement, and fragmented bodies. The present study demonstrates that Bataille’s theoretical and poetic expositions, including those dealing with l’informe (the formless) and the somber emptiness of the void, engage the trauma and anxiety of surrealist expression in Spain, particularly with reference to the anguish, desire, and death that figure so prominently in Spanish texts of the 1920s and 1930s often qualified as “surrealist.” Drawing extensively on the theoretical, cultural, and poetic texts of the period, García Lorca at the Edge of Surrealism offers the first book-length consideration of Bataille’s thinking within the Spanish context, examined through the work of Lorca, a singular proponent of what is here referred to as a dissident Spanish surrealism. By reading Lorca’s “surrealist” texts (including Poetaen Nueva York,Viaje a la luna, and El público) through the Bataillean lens, this volume both amplifies our understanding of the poetry and drama of one of the most important Spanish writers of the twentieth century and expands our perspective of what surrealism in Spain means.

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.

A lively history of the Surrealists, both known and unknown, by one of the last surviving members of the movement—artist and bestselling author Desmond Morris. Surrealism did not begin as an art movement but as a philosophical strategy, a way of life, and a rebellion against the establishment that gave rise to the World War I. In The Lives of the Surrealists, surrealist artist and celebrated writer Desmond Morris concentrates on the artists as people—as remarkable individuals. What were their personalities, their predilections, their character strengths and flaws? Unlike the impressionists or the cubists, the surrealists did not obey a fixed visual code, but rather the rules of surrealist philosophy: work from the unconscious, letting your darkest, most irrational thoughts well up and shape your art. An artist himself, and contemporary of the later surrealists, Morris illuminates the considerable variation in each artist’s approach to this technique. While some were out-and-out surrealists in all they did, others lived more orthodox lives and only became surrealists at the easel or in the studio. Focusing on the thirty-two artists most closely associated with the surrealist movement, Morris lends context to their life histories with narratives of their idiosyncrasies and their often complex love lives, alongside photos of the artists and their work.

In 1932, against the troubled background of the Depression, the American art community had its first glimpse of the revolutionary art of the Surrealists. Combining a fascination for Freud's new symbolic language of dreams with a radical utopianism, the Parisian movement galvanized an emerging American avant-garde. New galleries opened to exhibit the terrifying, insane works of Surrealist artists, and new magazines sprang up to publish a startling crop of Surrealist poetry, criticism, and vociferous attacks on mainstream culture and politics.Four years later, a major Surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York catapulted Surrealism into the cultural limelight. Soon the art of Man Ray was selling cologne and swimwear and Salvador Dali was designing shop windows and a pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Andre Breton and his circle, exiled in Manhattan during World War II, were unable to assert control over this new kind of Surrealism. If anything, their cultural dislocation in these years gave Americans the edge in developing new Surrealist concepts and movements such as Abstract Expressionism.This innovative and vividly written cultural history tells the story of Surrealism's remarkable sea change during its years in America, from a fiercely leftist, strongly literary avant-garde movement into an apolitical, almost exclusively visual style. Exploring both high and low cultural perspectives, Dickran Tashjian shows how the American avant-garde selectively filtered and reshaped European Surrealism to meet its own agendas, and how it in turn was reinterpreted, depoliticized, and commercially exploited by mainstream American culture and thefashion/advertising industry.