Tensions between resistance to Surrealism as cultural imperialism and the embrace of it as a universalist vision of freedom unfettered run through the show.
Surrealism
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A Fanciful Collection of Over 4,000 Rare Surrealist Books and Periodicals
Collectors Laurens Vancrevel and Frida de Jong, who have been building a collection of international Surrealist literature since the 1960s, donated the trove to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
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The Surrealist Roots of the “Vaporwave” Genre
The aesthetic niche combining electronic music and digital art finds an ancestor in Surrealism, particularly in the self-taught French painter Yves Tanguy.
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Climbing a Symbolic Mountain With a Surrealist Writer
Long out of print, Mount Analogue, René Daumal’s cult classic, offers a tale of renunciation and self-acceptance.
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A Fleeting Glimpse of Francesca Woodman
Woodman was one of the 20th century’s great surrealists.
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An Ebay Purchase That Revealed the Everyday Lives of French Surrealists
Reading between the lines of contact information for friends, graphologists, psychoanalysts, and plumbers, Brigitte Benkemoun’s Finding Dora Maar reveals a map of a bygone France.
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Penelope Rosemont’s Essays Expand the Surrealist Canon
Threaded through this collection is an optimistic belief in Surrealism as a world-changing political and poetic practice.
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How Surrealism’s Playful Aesthetic Was Deeply Political
The Surrealists’ insistence on irrationality was not a sport, but an attempt to engage in the political debates of their time.
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An English Translation of Belgian Surrealist Writing
Authors Paul Nougé, Paul Colinet, and Louis Scutenaire exhibited a staunch ethic of underground and elliptical obscurity.
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A New Collection of Surrealist Writings Focuses on Women Authors
The Milk Bowl of Feathers shows how women’s contributions to the Surrealist literary canon captivatingly crack the wall of Surrealist phallocracy.
Posted inArt
The Erotically Charged Technophilia of Cyberpunk Paintings
The late Cuban artist Agustin Fernandez created a gloomy, gritty body of works that imagine a hyper-sexed, electronic corporeality.
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Max Ernst’s Collage Novels Are Part Séance, Part Victorian Underworld, and All Uncanny
Ernst’s trailblazing “collage novels” employ the dreamlike conjunction — the fusion or juxtaposition of unlike elements whose collision makes perfect sense, in a free-associated way.