Surrealism

Description

The character of Surrealism had been crystallizing over the previous five years when, in 1924, Andre Breton's Manifeste du Surrealisme defined the word. As conceived in those early days it was not so much a formal movement as a spiritual orientation, embracing ethics and politics as well as the arts. Recourse to dreams, to the unconscious, to chance factors, to automatism dictated the Surrealist mode. Patrick Waldberg prefaces this collection of key documents with an overview of Surrealism from its beginnings to the present time.

Patrick Waldberg (1913-1985) was a American surrealist poet and the first biographer of Max Ernst. Born in Santa Monica, he was educated in France.

Waldberg sensibly gives the bulk of his space to the actual documents of the movement--the manifestos, the editorials, the outcries. Breton, Desnos, Eluard, Aragon, Ernst--these and others are represented. The pictorial documentation is even more lavish--here are all the major figures connected with the movement, 'taken from the life, ' often by the perceptive camera of Man Ray.-- "The Listener"