BOATLOAD OF MADMEN PA

by TASHJIAN,DICKRAN

• ISBN13: 9780500282854
• ISBN10: 0500282854
• Edition: 00
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2001-09-17
• Publisher: THAMES&HUD

Summary

In 1932, against the troubled background of the Depression, the American art community had its first glimpse of the revolutionary art of the Surrealists. Combining a fascination for Freud's new symbolic language of dreams with a radical utopianism, the Parisian movement galvanized an emerging American avant-garde. New galleries opened to exhibit the "terrifying", "insane" works of Surrealist artists, and new magazines sprang up to publish a startling crop of Surrealist poetry, criticism, and vociferous attacks on mainstream culture and politics.

Four years later, a major Surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York catapulted Surrealism into the cultural limelight. Soon the art of Man Ray was selling cologne and swimwear and Salvador Dali was designing shop windows and a pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Andre 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 edge in developing new S