Bazaar Recommends: 5 Art Books On Surrealism
We highlight key reads to understand the most radical avant-garde movement in art history in all its diversity
Salvador Dalí: The Impossible Collection
A lighter read for the more visually inclined, slowly flick through 100 individual works of the surrealist superstar Salvador Dalí in this gorgeously handcrafted monograph that features a luxury clamshell case made in Italy.
Offering the chance to familiarise yourself with the foremost member of the collective, who was anagrammatically nicknamed “Avida Dollars” for his ability to hone vast commercial success and capture the public’s imagination, Salvador Dalí: The Impossible Collection encompasses Dalí’s paintings, drawings, sculpture, films, sensationalist public appearances, alongside his furniture and jewellery designs, selected by curator and art historian Paul Moorhouse.
Written by Paul Moorhouse. Published by Assouline, assouline.com
Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art
The first survey of the life and work of surrealist Leonora Carrington, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art offers a remarkable insight into the world of the fantastical, dark and satirical artists and writers that came to be at the centre of Mexican cultural life, following her emigration from a post-war Europe. Most importantly, a rare collection of brilliant reproductions of her paintings are included, alongside photographs and a biography detailing her various influences and uncompromising independence.
A contemporary of Breton and other well-known Parisian surrealists, Leonora’s highly symbolic paintings are characterised by a plethora of cryptic, often anthropomorphic figures that rival the fantasies of Bosch. In Mexico, her oeuvre eventually expanded to include plays, sculptures, textiles created alongside Mexican master weavers and seminal murals in the country’s institutions.
Written by Susan L. Aberth. Published by Lund Humphries, lundhumphries.com
Compulsive Beauty
An exhaustive deconstruction of surrealism, leading art historian and theorist Hal Foster takes a more definitive look at the movement in Compulsive Beauty.
Establishing the Freudian notions of convulsive beauty, the marvellous and objective chance as seminal concepts through which surrealist work can be understood, Hal proposes that surrealism is ultimately predicated on the repression of the uncanny, often looking to marginalised works such as the dolls of Hans Bellmer, Giacometti’s sculptures and the group’s various photomontages. Unveiling the underlying anxieties of mechanisation and commodification and the angst of the early 20th century, Hal demonstrates just how intertwined supposedly playful surrealism and fascism can be.
Written by Hal Foster. Published by MIT Press, mitpress.mit.edu
Surrealism in Egypt
Delving into the Cairo-based collective Art et Liberty’s artworks, exhibitions and critical writings, Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group (AL) outlines the collective’s extensive activity to reform surrealism into a more actively anti-fascist and socially empowering movement, finding the original Parisian movement too self-involved.
Sam Bardaouil draws on previously unpublished primary documents and more than 200 field interviews to lay out the distinct work of the collective that responded to the polarising social and political concerns of Egyptians at the time. AL artists and activists such as Anwar and Fouad Kamel, Kamel El-Telmissany, the provocative poet and radical publisher Georges Henein, Ramsès Younan and feminist painter Inji Efflatoun utilised crude bodies, dream sequences and abstractions to draw on issues of the oppression of women and the working class, and economic and racial injustice. While currently recognised as one of the most influential yet short-lived chapter of Egyptian art history, many of their members at the time were exiled or imprisoned, leaving little behind.
Written by Sam Bardaouil. Published Bloomsbury Publishing, bloomsbury.com
Surrealism and Photography in 1930s Japan
In this pioneering study, Jelena Stojkovic sheds light on the practise of a number of Japanese surrealist photographers and the extensive network of practitioners that stretched across Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka.
Largely working in secret, Jelena draws on primary sources and extensive archival research, including over 100 photographs to chart the rich photographic output, most of which was previously unseen outside of its country of origin, and played a critical yet overlooked role in visualising new strands of thought and action.
Written by Jelena Stojvokiv. Published by Routledge, routledge.com
Images courtesy of respective publications
From the Winter 2020 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR Interiors, The Art Issue