Surrealism and Painting [Paperback]

Andre Breton (Author), Andre Masson (Painter), Joan Miro (Painter), Salvador Dali (Painter), Marcel Duchamp (Painter), Rene Magritte (Painter), Pablo Picasso (Painter), Yves Tanguy (Painter), Francis Picabia (Painter), Max Ernst (Painter)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2, 2002

Originally published in 1928 and augmented throughout the author's life, Surrealism and Painting is the single most important statement ever written on Surrealist art. While many pages have been devoted to visual Surrealism, this is the only book on the suject by the movement's founder and prime theorist. It contains Andra Breton's seminal treatise on the origins and foundations of artistic Surrealism, with his trenchant assessments of its precursors and practitioners, and his call for the plastic arts to "refer to a purely internal model." Also included are essays--many of them classics in their own right--on Picasso, Duchamp, Kahlo, Dal', Ernst, Masson, Gorky, Picabia, MirA, Magritte, Kandinsky, and others, as well as pieces on Gaulish art, outsider art, and the folk arts of Haiti and Oceania. But above and beyond the subject matter, what makes this book so enduringly compelling is Breton's signature mixture of rigorous erudition and visceral passion, his sense of adventure, and his discoveries of many of Modernism's most prominent figures early in their careers. Long unavailable in English, Surrealism and Painting is not only a supremely exciting work of art criticism, but also one of the three or four indispensable references for any serious discussion of modern art.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

André Breton (1896-1966) was the founder of the Surrealist movement, and its leading exponent. His works include the Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924), several volumes of poetry and essays, and the autobiographical narrative Nadja (1928).

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: MFA Publications (September 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0878466282
• ISBN-13: 978-0878466283
• Product Dimensions: 10.6 x 8.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #271,181 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mark Polizzotti is an award-winning biographer, critic, translator, editor, and poet. His books include the collaborative novel S. (1991; with Harry Mathews, Jean Echenoz, et al.), Lautreamont Nomad (1994; revised ed. 2005), Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton (1995; revised ed. 2009), a monograph on Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados (2006), and Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (2006). His essays and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, ARTnews, The Nation, Parnassus, Partisan Review, and elsewhere. The translator of over thirty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, Andre Breton, Jean Echenoz, and Maurice Roche, he directs the publications program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent poetic prose adventure through surrealist visual arts, April 16, 2011

By 

D. Riverblue Cloudwalker "Riverblue" (California) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Surrealism and Painting (Paperback)

THe first reviewer may not have realized that when this book was published in 1965, all the art images were in black and white, so there is no color art version of this book. However, you are not buying this book for the images in it: you can go elsewhere for those. You are buying this book because you want to understand and have intuitive-emotional-textural experience of the powerful, moving Surrealist Vision of Andre Breton, as finely elucidated by this, his poetic-prose guide through the inner-psyche's surreal worlds of the major Surrealist artists.

It is one thing to read Breton's Surrealist Manifestoes, which can be somewhat strident or contrary, and lack at times the poetic element. In this book you will find the corrective and the balance, which is Breton's marvelous ability to travel directly inside the surrealist painting, and describe the journey as he walks those odd landscapes, exhilarated now to find an amoeba beside him, or curious to traverse Tanguy to locate the central place of "matrices and moulds."

If you have difficulty appreciating the surrealists, you will be enlightened to walk along with Breton as he describes the tactile and imaginal experience. If you already appreciate them, your love will be increased by experiencing the paintings translated to words. Breton says of Tanguy: "Yves Tanguy became the first to have gained admittance to the realm of the Mothers. In other words, the realm of matrices and moulds...a world of total latency."

In our times when we find the popular mind and culture so addicted to the literal, the factual, the historic, the rational, the concrete, the external, it is time again to turn to the artists and intellectuals whose genius it was to be able to travel the inner worlds, the realms of metaphor and symbol, imagination and dream, to find there expressions of our psyche's marvelously free imaginal spaces, and solutions there for our psyche's deep longings, so neglected in a world numb to archetype, symbol and myth. To do this you could find few better guides than Andre Breton.

6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pictures are black and white, June 26, 2009

By 

Ozgur Keles - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Surrealism and Painting (Paperback)

Pictures are black and white. Paper quality is not good. Find and buy a color version.