Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology - Softcover

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9780262532013: Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262532018 ISBN 13: 9780262532013

Publisher: Mit Pr, 2002

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Art and writings by Surrealist painters and poets from a wide range of countries.

In 1951 Robert Motherwell published a collection of writings called The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. Conceived as a sequel to that volume, Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology does for Surrealism what Motherwell's book did for Dadaism. The concept and contents were discussed with Robert Motherwell and met with his enthusiastic approval.

The essays, manifestos, poems, and texts in this anthology offer a composite picture of the Surrealists―their convictions, styles, and spirit―from the movement's beginnings in France just after World War I to its second flowering in America after World War II. The book includes writers and artists from Belgium, Chile, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Guyana, Italy, Martinique, Mauritius, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, Senegal, Uruguay, and the United States. Caws's main criterion for inclusion was that the works be the best and most representative of the different forms of Surrealism. Among others, the artists and writers include Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Selavy, Max Ernst, Mina Loy, Francis Picabia, and Tristan Tzara.

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About the Author:

Mary Ann Caws, an art historian, literary critic, and translator, is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature in the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is the author, editor, or translator of more than forty books in the fields of poetry and the avant-garde.

From Publishers Weekly:

While the lessons of surrealism have been pretty well assimilated by contemporary artists, the encyclopedic inclusivity of this selection, along with its global perspective and attention to women artists, provides plenty of surprises and new perspectives on this unconscious-driven movement. Renowned scholar and translator of French modernism Caws (The Eye of the Text, etc.), whose anthology Manifesto: A Century of Isms has just appeared (Forecasts, Feb. 19), makes her first, necessary act here to ignore what the rather dictatorial Andr‚ Bretonfounder, primary theorist and tireless proselyte of the movementdeemed "surrealist" in his time, and to include work that is not just "automatic writing" or collaborative in nature, the two types of writing Breton championed most. Memoirs, poems, fables, manifestos, games and collaborative works, as well as photomontages, paintings, drawings and odd, scandalous objects, are included by artists well-known and not: Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray, Philippe Soupault, Hans Bellmer, Kay Boyle, the founders of "negritude" Aim‚ C‚saire and L‚opold S‚dar Senghor, Salvador Dal�, Duchamp, Frida Kahlo, Michel Leiris, the underrecognized painter Dorothea Tanning (wife of Max Ernst), Mina Loy, Antonin Artaud, Leonora Carrington and Joseph Cornell make their appearances among many others. Because it leans more toward the painterlyi.e., imagistic and spasmodically creativeside of the movement and less toward the exacting political and philosophical side, the book can seem unfocused, and the lack of scholarly material, such as chronologies or biographic introductions, may leave one in the dark about the minor figures and how they fit in. But Caws's goal (as with Manifesto) is to present an active constellation of work beyond the canonizing and historicizing of the academy, placing the work back in the lap of the creative reader, in the here and now of the culture today. On that level, this anthology succeeds richly.

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