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 […]
Tag Archives: Surrealism
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 have just discovered a fascinating book (originally published in Quebec as Les Écrivains Noir et le Surréalisme) titled The Black Surrealists by Jean-Claude Michel, a teacher in Miami. I don’t recall this book being cited in Robin Kelley’s Black Brown and Beige (reviewed earlier on this blog), which is a shame because it contains […]
Today marks the 65th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima, which resulted in at least 70,000 immediate and direct fatalities (an additional 40,000 were killed outright in the bombing of the historic city of Nagasaki three days later—40,000 more died there in the following months from injuries). To commemorate this occasion, […]
I am in the process of reading Ferdinand Alquié’s The Philosophy of Surrealism (an important book I hope to return to in the near future) and came across the striking passage below from André Breton’s Soluble Fish (1924). Alquié includes this brief excerpt while discussing water imagery in the section titled “Derealization” of Chapter 2, […]
Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings From Africa and the Diaspora Edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley University of Texas Press. 2009. 395 pages. A title in the Surrealist Revolution series. ••• African-American historian Robin Kelley and Surrealist Franklin Rosemont (who passed away in 2009) have produced a provocative compilation of Surrealist texts […]
I just had the opportunity to read André Breton: Magus of Surrealism by Anna Balakian, the first American scholar to seriously investigate Surrealism. Balakian, who passed away in 1997 (see obituary in The New York Times, August 15, 1997), published Literary Origins of Surrealism in 1947, after having interviewed Breton when he lived in New […]
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