Surrealist art and writing, 1919-1939

Surrealist Art and Writing offers a fresh analysis of Surrealism, the avant-garde movement that, in its search for contemporary lyricism and imagery, united literature and art with politics and psychology. Examining Surrealism's main phases from a variety of perspectives, Jack Spector emphasizes the rebellion of the protagonists against their middle-class education under the Third Republic, a rebellion that later extended beyond their moral, political, and artistic background. In manifestos and manifestations, the Surrealists promoted Marxist over liberal, politics, Freudian psychoanalysis over French psychiatry, Hegelian dialectics over Cartesian logic, and the outmoded, psychotic, or childish over modernist art. This study offers an overview of the exciting and important interwar period in Europe. In particular it places avant-garde ideas and imagery within the historical and political contexts of the 1920s and 1930s, integrating them into contemporary artistic and ideological currents.

First sentence: At first sight the idiosyncrasies of Surrealist art and writing might seem to detach the movement from its own time and place.

Year

1996

Language

English

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Editions

2

Pages

332

ISBN

9780521657396

Data source: Wikidata