Surrealism

by Caws, Mary Ann

• ISBN13: 9780714856735
• ISBN10: 0714856738
• Edition: Abridged
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-06-23
• Publisher: Phaidon Press

Summary

Surrealism is a survey of the twentieth century's longest lasting and, arguably, most influential art movement. Championed and held together by André Breton for over forty years, Surrealism was France's major avant-garde artistic tendency from 1924 onwards, rapidly spreading around the globe to become an international phenomenon. During World War II Surrealism's exiled artists and writers had a major impact on American art and were a primary influence for the Abstract Expressionist generation. The official surrealist movement continued to the end of Breton's life in 1966, and its legacy is still pervasive today, in contemporary art as well as in numerous quotations from surrealist imagery in cinema, advertising and the media.

Author Biography

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, English and French, at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her many publications include writings on surrealist and modernist art and literature and translations of writers and poets such as Andre Breton, Rene Char, Stephane Mallarme and Tristan Tzara. Her books include Robert Motherwell: What Art Holds (Columbia University Press, 1995); The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter (MIT Press, 1997) and Picasso's Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar (Little, Brown/Thames & Hudson, 2000). Books she has edited include Joseph Cornell's Theatre of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters and Files (Thames & Hudson, 2000); Manifesto: A Century of Isms (University of Nebraska Press, 2000); and Surrealist Love Poems (Tate/University of Chicago Press, 2002).