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.
Surrealism
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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.
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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.
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Birding with Max Ernst
In the Museum of Modern Art’s current Ernst retrospective, the artist’s avian alter ego, Loplop, reveals a realer reality.