Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Combining a fascination for Freud’s new symbolic language of dreams with a radical leftist utopianism Surrealism galvanized an emerging avant-garde. New galleries opened up to exhibit the ‘terrifying’ ‘insane’ works of Surrealist artists and new magazines sprang up to publish a startling crop of Surrealist poetry crit- icism and vociferous attacks on mainstream culture and politics. Only four years later a major Surrealist exhibi- tion at the Museum of Modern Art catapulted Surrealism into the cultural limelight and the atten- tions of high-fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Soon the art of Man Ray was selling cologne and swimwear; and the manic Salvador Dal? was designing windows for Bonwit’s and a pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Even Andr? Breton and his circle exiled in Manhattan during World War II were unable to assert control over this new kind of Surrealism. If anything their cultural dislocation in these years gave Americans the advantage in devel- oping new Surrealist concepts and new movements such as Abstract Expressionism. In this innovative and vividly written cultural his- tory Professor Dickran Tashjian tells the story of Surrealism’s remarkable sea change during its years in the United States from a fiercely leftist strongly liter- ary avant-garde movement into an apolitical almost exclusively visual style. Exploring both ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural perspectives he shows how the American avant-garde selectively filtered and reshaped European Surrealism to meet its own agendas and how it was in turn reinterpreted. (MP)