History of the Surrealist Movement Gérard Durozoi University of Chicago Press, 2002 This massive work, originally published in France in 1997, is actually a history of surrealism as it manifested itself in the visual arts—painting, sculpture, and film. The movement’s core literary expression receives short shrift in the book’s 800-plus pages. The political battles of […]
Tag Archives: Andre Breton
Dada/Surrealism was the sole academic journal to devote itself to the study of these two related currents in the U.S. The scholarly study of Surrealism emerged here just slightly later than it did in France, with the publication of Anna Balakian’s Literary Origins of Surrealism in 1947. Dada/Surrealism‘s first issue appeared in 1971 and it […]
To mark André Breton’s birthday—February 19, 1896—Criticism &c. presents here an excerpt from an essay by Julien Gracq, author of The Castle of Argol and Balcony in the Forest, which was written on the 100th anniversary of Breton’s birth and was printed in Le Monde. This English translation appeared in the journal L’Esprit Createur. • • • […]
The regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi is richly deserving of a definitive overthrow and Criticism &c. is in firm sympathy with the Libyans who are attempting—against long odds—to achieve one. The pathetic intervention of Britain, France, Italy (Libya’s fomer colonial master and present neo-colonial patron) and the U.S., with the blessing of the sclerotic Arab League, […]
I recently came across an entry on Georges Henein in Multicultural Writers Since 1945: an A-to-Z Guide. The author is Cristina Boidard Boisson, an academic who wrote a doctoral dissertation on Henein and Surrealism at the University of Cadiz in 1993. The entry is quite good on Henein’s biography, however the break with Breton in […]
To mark André Breton’s birthday, I am sharing a brief excerpt from Anna Balakian’s biography, André Breton, Magus of Surrealism. Balakian was the first American scholar to study Surrealism (her Literary Origins of Surrealism was published in 1947) and despite the fact that she was an academic, she can be characterized as demonstrating a strongly […]
I have just come across a recent interesting article on Henein and the Egyptian Surrealists in The Journal of Aesthetic Education (Vol. 44, No. 4, Winter 2010). The author is Patrick Kane. A translation of Henein’s manifesto can be found in Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, as well as selections […]
The massive ongoing uprising in Egypt provides us with an opportunity to recall an almost forgotten group of revolutionaries and artists—the Egyptian Surrealists. Robin Kelley and the late Franklin Rosemont included them in the book Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (reviewed earlier on Criticism &c.), but I recently came […]
Constellations of Miró, Breton By Paul Hammond City Lights Books, 2000 The period spanning André Breton’s return to France in 1946 to his death in 1966 is too often dismissed by critics as a mere coda to the productive decades of the twenties and thirties. This attitude essentially obscures a third of Breton’s life, drawing […]
I recently had the opportunity to examine the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of André Breton’s Œuvres Complètes, as well as the rare illustrated Album André Breton volume. The first volume came out in 1988 and the fourth, and final one, just appeared in 2008. The Pléiade editions are beautifully produced books, although one wishes […]
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