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Picasso once said, "It is my misfortune--and probably my delight--to use things as my passions tell me." And so he did, throughout his long life, across a stylistically pluralist oeuvre in which his amorous life could be traced through the lines of women's faces. For Picasso always used his lovers as his models (or his models as his lovers, depending on your point of view), and Marie-Thérèse Walter was no exception. Picasso met the 17 year old in 1927, and she soon became his favorite model and muse, as well as his secret lover. Over the next ten years, Picasso intensified his sculptural and graphic work, stylistically ranging between classical and surrealist, went through an acrimonious and unsuccessful divorce with his wife Olga, and fathered a daughter named Maya with Marie-Thérèse, who lived in vain that one day Picasso would marry her. She hanged herself after his death. This publication, which features a multi-disciplinary selection of masterpieces by the artist, is the second in a series devoted to Picasso and Women; The Time with Françoise Gilot was published last year.Essay by Markus Müller.Hardcover, 9 x 10.5 in. / 240 pgs / 160 b&w. ... Read more

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The most comprehensive and up-to-date survey available about women Surrealists features an outstanding array of artists from
the early twentieth century to modern times.

Surrealism, and in particular its women practitioners, has undergone a resurgence of interest in the past decade as evidenced by numerous exhibitions in the world's leading museums. Now, 90 years after the birth of Surrealism, comes the most comprehensive study yet of the women who contributed so much to this fascinating movement. Angels of Anarchy reconsiders the art-historical tradition of women Surrealists. It draws on an international range of artists to investigate how their practices responded to, developed, enriched, and even subverted the conventions and traditions of art history. One hundred colour images by thirty artists are accompanied by essays that illuminate fascinating aspects of the Surrealist approach. By presenting these important artists side-by-side for the first time, Angels of Anarchy allows for an unprecedented appreciation of the variety and depth of these artists' contributions to the field of Surrealism and art in general. ... Read more

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When Dada burst onto the European stage in 1916, it shocked and scandalized the public of its day with art forms, ideas, and attitudes which were so revolutionary that it is only in recent decades that they have begun to find recognition within the broad cultural movement known as postmodernism. In fact, many postmodern artistic and intellectual tendencies can be seen to have descended via an underground tradition from the experiments of the Dadaists earlier this century. Yet, the existence of this close link has been largely neglected by scholars.This book, for the first time, examines in depth the link between modernism and postmodernism and demonstrates the extensive similarities, as well as the few crucial differences between the ideas and art of the Dadaists on the one hand, and those of contemporary postmodern thinkers and artists on the other. Although they did not have access to postmodern terminology, it is clear that many Dadaists were essentially attempting to escape constrictive Enlightenment and modern(ist)structures in order to create a proto-postmodern space of difference, otherness, and flux.Their successes, failures, and compromises in this respect are very illustrative for anyone interested in the progress of our own intellectual and artistic culture in its wavering between modern and postmodern. This book offers a much-needed historical perspective and solid basis for the on-going debate on postmodernism. ... Read more

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"Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism" collects, updates, integrates and contextualizes the critic Richard Sheppard's essays on the historical avant-garde. Sheppard's topic in all of these essays is the modernist writers', artists', and philosophers' linguistic and visual responses to a changed sense of reality and human nature. Beginning with an overview of the problematics of European modernism, Sheppard establishes the dialectical relationship between the cultural crisis that occurred during the period 1880-1936 and the different responses from European modernists and the avant-garde. With its combination of classic and new essays and its perspective on the theoretical avant-garde/modernism debate in the United States, Sheppard's volume should give the specialist as well as the general reader an insight into the highest sample of European scholarly discourse on this subject. ... Read more

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Is creativity a therapeutic, culturally enriching and health-giving pursuit, or is it an outpouring of darkly unconscious, neurotically dangerous material?What have been some of the important modern influences on our assumptions and ideas about creativity?

Using a fascinatingly varied but beautifully controlled blend of approaches, Kevin Brophy explores questions of what creative writers might think they are doing and what might be influencing those ideas.In a world where creative writing is becoming institutionalised through university courses, he argues for the importance of continuing instability, theoretical sophistication and unsettled differences over what creativity is. ... Read more

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How did women Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington and Claude Cahun take up the question of female identity in terms of their own aesthetic and intellectual practice? What was the response of women analysts such as Joan Riviere to Freud's psychoanalytic construction of femininity? These are among the questions that Natalya Lusty brings to her sophisticated and theoretically informed investigation into the appropriation of 'the feminine' by the Surrealist movement. Combining biographical and textual methods of analysis with historically specific discussions of related cultural sites such as women's magazines, fashion, debutante culture, sexology, modernist lesbian subculture, pornography, and female criminality, the book examines the ambiguities and blind spots that haunt the work of more central figures such as Andre Breton, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Walter Benjamin, and the Surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer.Lusty's examination of a series of psychoanalytic Surrealist themes, including narcissism, fantasy, masquerade, perversion, and 'the double', illuminates a modernist preoccupation with the crisis of subjectivity and representation and its ongoing relevance to more recent work by Cindy Sherman and Judith Butler. Her book is an important contribution to modernist studies that will appeal to scholars and students working across a diverse range of fields, including literary studies, gender studies, visual culture, cultural studies, and cultural history. ... Read more

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Through an examination of Surrealist photographs, objects, exhibitions, activities, and writings, the essays in Twilight Visions, the beautifully illustrated companion volume to the exhibition of the same name, portray the French capital as a city in the process of metamorphosis-in a kind of twilight state. The Bureau of Surrealist Research, the major Surrealist exhibitions, and the photographs of Paris by Brassai, Andre Kertesz, Ilse Bing, Germaine Krull, and Man Ray, among others, all reflect the tumultuous social and cultural transformations occurring in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. Juxtaposing the strange with the familiar, they seek to break down repressive hierarchies. At the same time, they represent a desire to change the world through experimental activities. Introduced by Therese Lichtenstein, with essays by Therese Lichtenstein, Julia Kelly, Colin Jones, and Whitney Chadwick, this absorbing volume considers the social, aesthetic, and political stances of the Surrealists as they probed hidden aspects of the commonplace and blurred the boundaries between dreams and reality, subjectivity and objectivity.
Copub: Frist Center for the Visual Arts ... Read more

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"Her book is immediately indispensable. . ." -- American BookReview

"A first-rate cultural history, of interest to both the art historianand the general reader." -- Kirkus Reviews

The French/European story of Surrealism has been written; the story ofabstract expressionism has been told. But the connection between them,how one acted as a catalyst for the other, has been a long-missingchapter in the history of art. Martica Sawin finally provides it.

In this fascinating account of what was happening within Surrealismduring the crucial years 1938-1947, Martica Sawin documents the culturaltransfer that took place when the greater part of the prewar Surrealistgroup was transplanted to the Western Hemisphere. Eminently readable,clearly told, and biographically rich, Sawin's year-by-year narrativepieces together when and how the refugees arrived and their variouspoints of contact with the future abstract expressionists. ... Read more

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How America Stole Europe's Artistic Thunder
So much art history and criticism is just a pose of knowledge instead of its communication. This book, thankfully is not one of these. Focusing on one of the pivotal points in the history of art, this work tells the story of the effect the European Surrealist painters had on the American Abstract Expressionists. Sawin communicates in clear readable prose that usually succeeds in avoiding the petentious, tautological jargon that passes for art writing elsewhere.

The interest in this story is in the way it reveals the start of a kind of artistic Munro doctrine. The European emigres with their Parisian sophistication, aloofness, and arrogance come over as Masters but then have all their best ideas stolen and Americanized before trickling back with their tails firmly between their legs to a Paris that had all but forgotten them during the War.

The period concentrated on in this book is a dividing point in the history of modern art, marking a watershed between two clear movements determined by two opposing trends, something Sawin could have perhaps emphasized more.

First there was a move towards increasing explicitness in art, which climaxed in the efforts of Surrealists like Dali, Masson, Ernst, and Matta to drag the processes of the mind out into the daylight. This tended to strip away the veils of mystery and made art almost unnecessary, so this was quickly followed by a move to mask and hide the subject of paintings as we see in the work of the abstract expressionists like Pollock, and the colorfield painters like Rothko. This was a vital and no doubt self-interested U-turn entered into by artists and the art establishment.

The view from the mind's eye....
When the 20th Century began, proto-Cubists like Cezanne and the last remnants of the Impressionist movement like Monet dominated European art. No one could foresee the rise of Surrealism. Surrealism was a reaction to it's times that exploded in France in the years following WWI and later migrated to the United States during WWII. In SUREALISM IN EXILE, Martica Sawin says surrealism was inspired by many events. Certainly the surreal literary movement led by writers such as Baudelaire affected the visual arts.Similarly, the writing of anthropologists and sociologists beginning to make "scientific" contact with traditional societies also played a role.

However, Sawin suggests it was the personal experiences of artists like Max Ernst who had served at the front with the German army in WWI and French artists like Paul Eluard who faced him on the battlefield who felt the need to explore surrealism --"Rational" realism was too narrow. Later on, others joined the movement. Onslow Ford, whose physician father had witnessed the slaughter at Gallipoli as an English medical officer and returned home bitter, became a primary player after watching his father slip into depression and madness.

Ford was to say at a later date in New York that artists needed to "tear down the veils one by one that hide the reality of our own incomprehensible universe." He and the other surrealists felt the rationalist view was too restrictive.The surrealist artist could tap into the collective unconscious described by Jung (whose book on that subject was published in 1939) and bring to light a broader view of reality. Ford said artists could escape the cubist-driven semi-abstact dead end they found themselves in by opening their third eye--the Cyclopian eye, or the mind's eye, or the inner eye, and tap into their unconscious.

Sawin's book is a history of Surrealism, a movement that borrowed and incorporated ideas from the Navaho sand painters, the Tsimshian Indians (totem poles), German fairy tales, Celtic myths, Tarot cards, and menhirs--dolmans in Brittany. From these inspirational sources the Surrealists created paintings such as "Rotary Disks" --an optical illusion comprised of revolving concentric circles; "Star, Flower, Personage, Stone' --depicting alchemical transformation; and other physical transformations of space that exploded the confines of the convential 3-D world humans see owing to their limited view of reality. Surrealist art attempted to depict time and change seen by a third eye.

SURREALISM IN EXILE is filled with photographs (black and white) of the lives and works of the Surrealists, beginning with the early works in France and ending with the later works from the New York school in the late forties.If you are interested in exploring the influences that affected the work of Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Kandinski and other modern artists this book is invaluable. I gave it 4 stars because there are no color photos. ... Read more

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This book brings to life the story of the main periods of Surrealism, presents the most important works and puts in perspective a movement that would lastingly influence contemporary art. ... Read more

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Now back in stock: A collection of fabulous photographs by the foremost Surrealist artists.

Much has been written about Surrealist painting and sculpture, but most of the erotic, disorienting, and exquisite Surrealist photographs of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Brassai, Salvador Dali, Andre Kertesz, and Hans Bellmer have remained all but unknown--until now. Traditional criticism has viewed Surrealist photography as a pale imitation of authentic Surrealist work. The assumption has been that photography, a "realistic" medium, is fundamentally incompatible with a cause devoted to the wildly subjective, the world of dreams, and the unconscious. As a consequence, Surrealist photography, a major body of twentieth-century art, has remained largely unexplored.

L' Amour fou is the first book to study the crucial role photography did in fact play in the Surrealist movement. It shows how photographers enlisted into the service of "subjective" Surrealism their medium's very claim to "objective" reality. Of greatest interest, of course, is the book's abundant reproductions of the fantastic and distorted photographic creations that must be acknowledged as an important part of the Surrealist oeuvre.

Other Details:200 duotones, 24 full-color illustrations. 9 x 12" trim size. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C./Abbeville Press, New York, co-publishers. First published 1985. ... Read more

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Surrealism, a significant artistic and intellectual movement that dominated the 20th century still inspires an avid interest today. Surrealist exhibitions proliferate the world over, and books devoted to the movement's illustrious participants abound. Rather than the lingering memory of a past poetic and pictorial adventure, Surrealism has proven to be a permanently relevant force.

Written by Sarane Alexandrian, a friend and secretary to André Breton and one of Surrealism's most prominent historians, this book offers a dynamic comparison of the great and minor masters of Surrealism, via more than 200 illustrations demonstrating the myriad possibilities of these visionary and revelatory works. This volume pays tribute to the powers of the imagination, the random surprises of daily life and the observation of inexplicable phenomenon, while recognizing the sense of sacredness conveyed by cosmic mysteries, and adding to all the creative marvels seized by these artists the climax of their own inspiration. This book reveals how Surrealist painting, through its spirit and its audacious techniques, was fully engaged in the battle of modern art. ... Read more

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Surrealist Painters
A treatise on the surrealism movement, covering all of the major names and some of the most obscure and super-real works by them, from Dali to Miro, //Surrealist Painters// by Sarane Alexandrian explores and explains some of the most interesting aspects and people of the intellectually and visually challenging movement of surrealism in the early twentieth century.

Beginning with brief, to-the-point biographies of the artists whose work is featured in the book, explaining a bit of their background, creative process, and art, the breadth of knowledge on all of the facets of the surrealist movement is astounding, though the depth of specific knowledge seems not to be the focus. The second, and best, section of the book is the gallery; in alphabetical order, of selected works by each featured artist, is by far one of the most interesting and stimulating collections of art in recent art books. Though one flaw may come with the formatting of it, in an "All biographies first, and then all artwork last" type of organization, which can lead to a lot of flipping back and forth, and seems a bit strange, it does fit the theme of the art--to be challenging.

Reviewed by Jordan Dacayanan ... Read more