Customer Reviews

History of the Surrealist Movement

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This book is awesome. I've purchased histories of Surrealism before--all of which are now desperately out-dated and out of print besides...including the great Abrams book on Dada and Surrealism. This book beats them all. For one, it covers not just the Surrealists in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, but examines the spread of the movement to the US, Africa, Japan, India, and South America during the 1940s-1960s. For two, it deals with all media: painting, sculpture, poetry, philosophy, fiction, film, etc. For three, it features biographies of all the major stars, and also of all the minor players in their orbits. For four, it includes 1000 illustrations--many of them documentary and never published before this book was originally released in the French edition, as well as many many color plates scattered throughout the text. A beautiful production, and a terrific text by Durozoi, who was linked to the Surrealists in the 1950s and 1960s by virtue of his involvement with philosophy.

I'm keeping this simple -- here's an art book where the text and editorial content matches the illustrations in terms of quality and awesome-osity. And the illustrations in this book are AWESOME.

Over 790 pp with something like over 800 illustrations and about 40% of them are in color. Great appendices, too: 50 pp of "Notes on Principal Surrealists and Some of Their Close Followers," a 25 p Bibliography, Index of Names, and Index of Periodicals.

This book is a translation of a French history of the surrealist movement, and the author has done the homework. It is divided into detailed sections so that the reader knows what happened and when, and the substance of the contradictions and conflicts that made up surrealism in its heyday. Of course much of the good reading comes from Breton's activities, which defined many of these debates. What it doesn't do is to delve into rhetoric, theory or the philosophy of surrealist practice--instead it is pure art history, sticking to the core of surrealist development. There is much material on Breton's conflict with the left which is very useful, and much which isn't detailed--such as some of the controversy surrounding Chirico and Dali, which one would expect to be there. This change of emphasis reflects a very academic view of surrealism, one that does not necessarily get caught up in some of the more famous surrealist troubles, and instead wants to take us inside Breton's world and reconstruct what was significant for his inner circle.

the book came quickly to me and it is new, with the plastic protection unopened

La voz de Durozoi
es ese soplo
de aire sahariano
que hacía falta
a la historiografía
del Surrealismo
en todas sus variantes:
el pincel de nubes,
el beso petrificado
y los alaridos elegíacos
que sueltan las sirenas
(esos cisnes de agua salada)
al caer en las redes
de los sonámbulos.

Cualquiera que lea este libro
querrá morder la nariz de Breton
en castigo por su impiedad.

Cualquiera que curse sus páginas
deseará que los almanaques ardan en reversa
para recobrar el sabor de un movimiento
capaz de transformar el sueño en vida,
deseo y revolución.