Surrealism: Recommended Reading List of Books & Catalogs

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  Hatje Cantz Surrealism in Paris Surrealism rose from the ruins of interbellum Europe to become one of the most influential artistic and literary movements of the twentieth century. Under the leadership of André Breton, Surrealist artists undertook a passionate search for freedom in all of its forms,” delving into the imagery and language of the subconscious through the revolutionary methods of automatism, radical juxtaposition and chance. Surrealism in Paris reproduces a spectacular selection of artworks from the Fondation Beyeler’s exhibition of the same name. Featuring key paintings, sculptures and works on paper by Hans (Jean) Arp, Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio di Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, René Magritte, Man Ray, André Masson, Joan Miró, Meret Oppenheim, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso and Yves Tanguy, and essays by a host of renowned scholars, this substantial catalogue revisits a crucial moment in French cultural history. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Philippe Büttner. Text by Philippe Büttner, Julia Drost, Annabelle Görgen-Lammers, Robert Kopp, Philip Rylands, et al. Hbk, 9.75 x 12.25 in. / 290 pgs / 304 color. Publication Date: 1/31/2012 List Price: US $75.00

  Moderne Kunst Nürnberg The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer The Pendulum, the Pit, and other Pecularities Jan Svankmajer (born 1934) is one of the most celebrated animation filmmakers in the world. Widely imitated and hugely influential for several generations of directors and animators, including Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and the Brothers Quay, Svankmajer populates his surreal universe with sentient household objects, morphing clay figures, grotesquely exaggerated everyday sounds and a mood of paranoia pitched somewhere between Kafka and Poe. Among his best known works are the feature films Alice (1988), Faust (1994) and Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), and the short Dimensions of Dialogue (1982--chosen by Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animations ever). His most recent film is 2010’s Surviving Life. The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer is the first monographic overview of this major artist’s work. Including excellent film stills, sculptures, illustrations and an interview with the filmmaker, it spans nearly 40 years of visionary creativity. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Ursula Blickle, Gerald A. Matt. Text by Gaby Hartel, Norbert M. Schmitz, Bert Rebhandl. Interview by by Gerald A. Matt. Clth, 8.25 x 9.25 in. / 240 pgs / 160 color. Publication Date: 4/30/2012 List Price: US $55.00

  Turner Alan Glass The debut exhibition of the Canadian-born Surrealist artist Alan Glass (born 1932) was organized by André Breton and Benjamin Péret. Glass settled in Mexico in 1962, developing relationships with local and migré artists such as Leonora Carrington, Manuel Felguérez and Pedro Friedberg. This volume offers the first survey of his Cornell-like art object” boxes and his drawings. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Masayo Nonaka. Clth, 9.75 x 13 in. / 340 pgs / 350 color. Publication Date: 6/30/2012 List Price: US $50.00

  MFA Publications André Breton: Surrealism And Painting Originally published in 1928 and augmented throughout the author's life, Surrealism and Painting is the single most important statement ever written on Surrealist art. While many pages have been devoted to visual Surrealism, this is the only book on the subject by the movement's founder and prime theorist. It contains André Breton's seminal treatise on the origins and foundations of artistic Surrealism, with his trenchant assessments of its precursors and practitioners, and his call for the plastic arts to "refer to a purely internal model," to excavate the "dark continent" of consciousness. Also included are essays--many of them classics in their own right--on Picasso, Duchamp, Kahlo, Dali, Ernst, Masson, Gorky, Picabia, Miro, Magritte, Kandinsky, Hantai and others, as well as pieces on Gallic art, outsider art and the folk arts of Haiti and Oceania. But above and beyond the subject matter, what makes this book so enduringly compelling is Breton's signature . . . . [see book details]

  Introduction by Mark Polizzotti. Paperback, 8.25 x 10.5 in. / 448 pgs / 34 b&w. Publication Date: 9/2/2002 List Price: US $29.95

  Exact Change Paris Peasant Paris Peasant (1926) is one of the central works of Surrealism, yet Exact Change's edition is the first U.S. publication of Simon Watson Taylor's authoritative translation, completed after consultations with the author. Unconventional in form--Aragon consciously avoided recognizable narration or character development--Paris Peasant is, in the author's words, a mythology of the modern.” The book uses the city of Paris as a stage or framework, and Aragon interweaves his text with images of related ephemera: café menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments and newspaper clippings. A detailed description of a Parisian arcade (nineteenth-century precursor to the mini-mall) and another of the Buttes-Chaumont park, are among the great set pieces within Aragon's swirling prose of philosophy, dream and satire. André Breton wrote of this work: no one could have been a more astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms; no one else could have been carried away by such intoxicating reveries . . . . [see book details]

  By Louis Aragon. Translated and with an introduction by Simon Watson Taylor. Pbk, 6 x 8 in. / 228 pgs. Publication Date: 9/30/2011 List Price: US $15.95

  Exact Change The Adventures Of Telemachus This is the first paperback edition in English of one of the most important and entertaining works of Surrealist fiction. Aragon’s 1922 novel boldly appropriates the title and plot of a didactic seventeenth-century epic, recounting the adventures of Odysseus’ son Telemachus; but the moralistic underpinnings of the original are replaced by a Surrealist’s dedication to the strange, the beautiful and the erotic. Though a classic of Surrealism, this is not automatic writing; on the contrary, it is a wryly self-conscious book, full of the kinds of intertextual games associated with writers such as Borges and Calvino. As the Huberts comment in their Introduction, Aragon did not have to liberate his mind through automatic exercises; but by mastering and playing with the narrative… he succeeded in freeing himself from the constraints of mimeticism… descend[ing] into the diabolical nirvana of Dada.” . . . . [see book details]

  By Louis Aragon. Translated and with an Introduction by Renée Riese Hubert and Judd D. Hubert. Paperback, 6 x 8 in. / 144 pgs. Publication Date: 2/2/2004 List Price: US $13.95

  Exact Change The Hearing Trumpet Leonora Carrington (1917–2011), the distinguished British-born Surrealist painter who made her home in Mexico City, was also a writer of extraordinary imagination and charm, and The Hearing Trumpet is perhaps her best loved book. It tells the story of 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that her family has been plotting to have her committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is wide open. It is also the scene of a mysterious murder. Occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, The Hearing Trumpet is a classic of fantastic literature that has been translated and celebrated throughout the world. . . . . [see book details]

  By Leonora Carrington. Introduction by Helen Byatt. Pbk, 6 x 8 in. / 224 pgs. Publication Date: 2/2/2004 List Price: US $15.95

  Exact Change Maldoror & The Complete Works of The Comte De Lautréamont André Breton described Maldoror as "the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential." Little is known about its pseudonymous author, aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846) and early death in Paris (1870). Lautréamont bewildered his contemporaries, but the Surrealists modeled their efforts after his black humor and poetic leaps of logic, exemplified by the oft-quoted line, "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." Maldoror 's shocked first publisher refused to bind the sheets of the original edition--and perhaps no better invitation exists to this book, which warns the reader, "Only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger." This is the only complete annotated collection of Lautréamont's writings available in English, in Alexis Lykiard's superior translation. For this latest edition, Lykiard updates his introduction to include recent scholarship. . . . . [see book details]

  By Comte De Lautréamont. Translated and with an Introduction by Alexis Lykiard. Pbk, 6 x 8 in. / 352 pgs. Publication Date: 4/30/2010 List Price: US $17.95

  Wakefield Press The Leg of Lamb Its Life and Works A foundational classic of Surrealist literature, The Leg of Lamb brings together the arch-Surrealist Benjamin Péret's short prose: a smorgasbord of automatic writing and fantastical narratives employing everything from the cinematic antics of Buster Keaton and slapstick animation to the storytelling devices of detective novels, alchemical operations and mythology. The Leg of Lamb consists of 24 delirious narratives, including the novella-length works "And the Breasts Were Dying" and "There Was a Little Bakeress." Péret's adult fairy tales bear equal allegiance to Lewis Carroll and the Marquis de Sade, and present one of the clearest examples of Surrealist humor, in which the boundaries between character and object blur, and where a coat rack, artichoke or a pile of manure is just as likely as Napoléon, El Cid or Pope Pius VII to take on the role of hero and adventurer. Péret himself edited this collection toward the end of his life. Originally . . . . [see book details]

  By Benjamin Péret. Pbk, 6 x 9 in. / 201 pgs / 4 b&w. Publication Date: 4/30/2011 List Price: US $17.95

  Exact Change Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution Writings 1927-1933 Salvador Dalí's writings from the period in which he was most closely allied with the Surrealists have never before been translated into English. These short fictions, essays and poems contain all the egotistic brio one might expect from Dalí, but they also reveal an earnest and even sentimental artist. They document Dalí's friendships with fellow Spaniards Luis Buńuel and Federico García Lorca, his entry into the world of the Parisian Surrealists, his passion for the emerging arts of photography and cinema, and the development of his Paranoid-Critical Method,” the theoretical basis for Dalí's work throughout his life. In 1934, Dalí and André Breton would break forever--”The only difference between me and a Surrealist is that I am a Surrealist,” he later said--but in the period 1927-1933, such distinctions were unnecessary. . . . . [see book details]

  By Salvador Dalí. Translated by Yvonne Shafir. Paperback, 6 x 8 in. / 192 pgs. Publication Date: 10/2/2004 List Price: US $13.95

  The Museum of Modern Art, New York Dalí & Film Salvador Dalí was one of the most famous--and one of the most notorious--artists of the twentieth century, recognized as much in the popular imagination for his flamboyant personal style and his penchant for showmanship as for his groundbreaking artworks in many media. Dalí & Film investigates, for the first time in depth, the part played by film as a key influence on Dalí's art, as well as his extensive involvement in film-based projects. This illuminating volume presents both the major paintings that reflect the artist's famous preoccupation with film and materials related to the key film projects on which he worked. Throughout his long career, cinema contributed to Dalí's understanding of both the power and the uses of illusion. In 1929 and 1930 he collaborated with the influential Spanish Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buńuel on the startling and highly controversial films Un Chien andalou and l'Age d'or. Many years later, Dalí worked . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Matthew Gale. Text by Dawn Ades, Montse Aguer, Félix Fanes, Matthew Gale. Clothbound, 9.75 x 11.5 in. / 238 pgs / 110 color / 65 b&w. Publication Date: 12/15/2007 List Price: US $60.00

  Exact Change Hebdomeros & Other Writngs The artist Giorgio de Chirico's novel, Hebdomeros is a dream-like book of situations and landscapes reminiscent of his paintings. In his introduction John Ashbery calls the book the finest work of Surrealist fiction,” noting that de Chirico invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel... his long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom of narration... his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are more real than reality.” Hebdomeros is accompanied by an appendix of previously untranslated or uncollected writings, including M. Dudron's Adventure, a second, fragmentary novel translated by John Ashbery. . . . . [see book details]

  By Giorgio de Chirico. Introduction by John Ashbery. Translated by John Ashbery and Mark Polizzotti, et al. Paperback, 6 x 8 in. / 280 pgs. Publication Date: 2/2/2004 List Price: US $17.95

  Richter Verlag Hans Arp: Die Natur der Dinge German-French sculptor, painter and poet Jean Arp (1886-1966) is one of the most important pioneers of twentieth-century nonfigurative art. A founder of the Zurich and Cologne Dada movements, a key Surrealist and Constructivist and later a founder of the Paris Abstraction-Création movement, he was always at the forefront of his era's evolving avant-gardes. His work was by turns powerful, organic, anthropomorphic, biomorphic, geometric, coincidental and formal, evoking "the natural process of compression, hardening, of coagulation, of thickening, of growing together." In general, Arp preferred not to talk about his abstractions, citing the fact that sculptural forms in nature do not illustrate, but rather paraphrase and produce concrete forms themselves. He did not want to work according to nature, but like nature. This beautifully produced volume, which documents the complete range of Arp's artistic and poetic oeuvre, is published on the occasion of the opening of Germany's Arp Museum extension, designed by . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Klaus Gallwitz. Text by Astrid von Asten, Isabel Ewig, Walburga Krupp, Eric Robertson, Fritz Usinger. Hardback, 8.75 x 11 in. / 236 pgs / 103 color / 20 b&w. Publication Date: 2/1/2008 List Price: US $95.00

  Kerber Meret Oppenheim: From Breakfast In Fur And Back Again One of the most unusual women of the twentieth century, Meret Oppenheim most famously created the legendary Le Déjeuner en Fourrure, her 1936 assemblage of a tea cup and a fur. But Oppenheim was not just a Surrealist mouthful--though she provided the movement with one of its most recognizable symbols. Like her counterparts Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Man Ray, she used found materials freely in her artworks, often to the point of creating a critical alienation of the viewer from an otherwise familiar object. Her greater oeuvre has often been subsumed by the dominance of the ubiquitous fur cup, a situation which this publication aims to remedy, presenting a career-spanning selection of witty drawings, paintings, objects, collages, poems and designs for applied artworks”--fantastic clothes, jewelry and furniture. Shortly before her death, Oppenheim and editor Thomas Levy developed the idea of realizing some of her applied artworks; those that . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Thomas Levy. Essay by Belinda Grace Gardner. Interview by Daniel Spoerri. Hardcover, 8.5 x 10.5 in. / 256 pgs / 232 color / 50 b&w. Publication Date: 3/2/2004 List Price: US $35.00

  The Museum of Modern Art, New York Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937 Taking Joan Miró's notorious declaration of 1927--"I want to assassinate painting"--as its point of departure, this richly illustrated volume is the first to focus on Miró the "anti-painter," identifying the core practices and strategies the artist used to challenge painting between 1927 and 1937. Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937 surveys the various material, iconographical and rhetorical forms of Miró's attacks on painting by presenting, in chronological sequence, 12 distinct series of works, beginning with a remarkable group of paintings on unprimed canvas and concluding with Miró's return to Realism in "Still Life with Old Shoe" (1937). Acidic color, grotesque disfigurement, stylistic heterogeneity and the use of resistant, ready-made materials are among the key tactics of aggression that are explored in this extraordinary presentation of the interrelated and oppositional series of paintings, collages, objects and drawings Miró produced during this crucial decade of his long career. This volume integrates close scrutiny . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Anne Umland. Text by Anne Umland, Jim Coddington, Robert S. Lubar, Jordana Mendelson, Adele Nelson. Hbk, 8 x 11 in. / 242 pgs / 200 color. Publication Date: 11/1/2008 List Price: US $50.00

  Exact Change Joseph Cornell's Dreams Joseph Cornell is well known for the oneiric quality of his art and films. Many have tried, often in vain, to put into words the strange power of his boxes--toy-like constructions whose playfulness and humor are anchored in a profound melancholy and loneliness. Slot machines of visions,” said Octavio Paz. Cornell himself is said to have enjoyed children's responses to his work; perhaps because nothing prepares one better for viewing a Cornell box than having an unbiased mind. Catherine Corman has combed through the voluminous diaries that Cornell kept throughout his life, now in the care of the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, in search of the artist's own dreams. What she found are brief flashes of images, and short, enigmatic narratives of illumination--the verbal equivalent of Cornell boxes. In 1993, Mary Ann Caws edited a large portion of Cornell's diaries for publication by Thames & Hudson, an invaluable sourcebook for . . . . [see book details]

  Edited and Introduction by Catherine Corman. Paperback, 6 x 8 in. / 160 pgs. Publication Date: 6/15/2007 List Price: US $15.95

  MFA Publications Utopia Parkway: The Life And Work Of Joseph Cornell No artist ever led a stranger life than Joseph Cornell, the self-taught American genius prized for his disquieting shadow boxes, who stands at the intersection of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Legends about Cornell abound--as the shy hermit, the devoted family caretaker, the artistic innocent--but never before Utopia Parkway has he been presented for what he was: a brilliant, relentlessly serious artist whose stature has now reached monumental proportions. Cornell was haunted by dreams and visions, yet the site of his imaginings couldn't have been more ordinary: a small house he shared with his mother and invalid brother in Queens, New York. In its cluttered basement, he spent his nights arranging photographs, cut-outs and other humble disjecta into some of the most romantic works to exist in three dimensions. Cornell was no recluse, however: admired by successive generations of vanguard artists, he formed friendships with figures as diverse as Duchamp, . . . . [see book details]

  By Deborah Solomon. Paperback, 6.25 x 9.25 in. / 448 pgs / 59 b&w. Publication Date: 11/2/2004 List Price: US $22.50

  Hatje Cantz Max Ernst: Dream and Revolution The relevance of the art of Max Ernst (1891-1976) has boomed again in recent years, as a younger generation of painters takes inspiration from his hallucinated image horde and embraces his example as an artist devoted to self-renewal and the realms of the fantastical. Rock musicians and writers as diverse as Mission of Burma, Thurston Moore and J.G. Ballard have also drawn fruitfully on his achievements. Ernst's German Romantic iconography, reconceived in the Surrealist looking glass, is endlessly suggestive and generative: nighttime forests, caves and cliffs, dead moonlight, spectral faces and figures all populate his scenarios, and his ongoing relevance is further assured by his combination of this iconography with techniques such as collage, frottage, grattage and decalcomania, several of which were his own innovations. Max Ernst: Dream and Revolution assesses the entirety of this unique career. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Kirsten Degel. Text by Werner Spies, Iris Müller-Westermann, Ludger Derenthal. Hbk, 8.75 x 11.25 in. / 256 pgs / 218 color / 70 b&w. Publication Date: 2/1/2009 List Price: US $60.00

  La Fábrica Man Ray: Unconcerned But Not Indifferent Unconcerned But Not Indifferent is one of the most beautifully produced and revelatory monographs on Man Ray ever published. It draws exclusively on one of the largest Man Ray archives, that of the Man Ray Trust, which has remained largely unexcavated since it was brought to the U.S. in the late 1990s, and whose full scope has never before been published. The book is structured chronologically across the four phases of Man Ray's working life, in New York, Paris, Los Angeles and Paris again. Works reproduced here range from typographic studies done in 1908, through paintings, objects and sculptures to Man Ray's pioneering photography, from the "Rayographs" (abstract photographs produced from found objects) and "Solarizations" (a procedure of tonal reversion developed by Man Ray and Lee Miller), to his fantastic portraits of André Derain, Erik Satie, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Hans Bellmer, Joyce Mansour and many others--plus many rare . . . . [see book details]

  Edited and text by Noriko Fuku, John P. Jacob. Clth, 9 x 11 in. / 392 pgs / 85 color / 249 b&w. Publication Date: 12/31/2009 List Price: US $65.00

  Poligrafa Marcel Duchamp: Works, Writings, Interviews By his own testimony, Marcel Duchamp considered painting a "means of expression, not an end in itself. One means of expression among others, and not a complete end for life at all." His legendary "Large Glass," for example, can be seen as simply the culmination or sum of numerous experiments conducted over an eight-year period. For this reason, every aspect of his oeuvre--painting, installation, writing, interviews--is of potentially equivalent interest, and any Duchamp primer needs to present his more ephemeral contributions, in aphorisms, diagrams and conversation, alongside his visual experiments. Works, Writings, Interviews does this job splendidly, exploring the artist's many-faceted activities, analyzing his work as an entirety and gathering his key interviews and writings. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Gloria Moure. Hbk, 8.75 x 11.25 in. / 160 pgs / 120 color. Publication Date: 10/31/2009 List Price: US $45.00

  D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. Magritte: Attempting the Impossible The ongoing relevance of Belgian painter René Magritte may lie in the semiotic character of his work and its ability to create chasms between the world, its surfaces and the signs we use to occupy it. Magritte's paintings offer a space for the viewer to contemplate the emptiness of signs and to locate that emptiness in a world we recognize--indeed, the artist relies on the props of normalcy in order to upend, invert and collapse them into the terra incognita where life leaves off and art begins. "The mind loves the unknown," he avowed, "it loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown." In Attempting the Impossible we have a new definitive Magritte monograph, replacing David Sylvester's volume of the early 1990s. Featuring more than 300 works, it contains much unpublished material and includes chapters covering Magritte's photography, drawings and influence on German and . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Siegfried Gohr. Hbk, 10.5 x 13 in. / 336 pgs / 400 color. Publication Date: 6/30/2009 List Price: US $85.00

  Brinkmann & Bose Unica Zürn: Alben The German artist and writer Unica Zürn (1916-1970) joined the ranks of Surrealism in the 1950s, after moving to Paris and taking up residence with the German-born Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Drawn to the movement's espousal of automatic drawing and writing, Zürn pursued Henri Michaux's declaration that "the hand dreams," making a vocation of these techniques with drawings and paintings that are labyrinthine in detail, as one form sprouts out of another. Zürn has left us an account of the sensation of automatic drawing: "After an initial moment when the pen 'swims' hesitantly on the paper, she discovers the place assigned to the first eye. It is only when she is being watched from the depths of the paper that she begins to get her bearings and, effortlessly, one motif is added to another." This lovely limited-edition survey reproduces drawings done between 1954 and 1967. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Erich Brinkmann. Epilogue by Rike Felka. Hbk, 8.75 x 11.5 in. / 336 pgs / 300 color / Edition of 800 copies. Publication Date: 6/30/2010 List Price: US $195.00

  Exact Change Dark Spring By Unica Zürn Dark Spring is an autobiographical coming-of-age novel that reads more like an exorcism than a memoir. In it author Unica Zürn traces the roots of her obsessions: The exotic father she idealized, the "impure" mother she detested, the masochistic fantasies and onanistic rituals which she said described "the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood." Dark Spring is the story of a young girl's simultaneous introduction to sexuality and mental illness, revealing a different aspect of the "mad love" so romanticized by the (predominantly male) Surrealists. Unica Zürn (1916-1970) emigrated in 1953 from her native Berlin to Paris in order to live with the artist Hans Bellmer. There she exhibited drawings as a member of the Surrealist group and collaborated with Bellmer on a series of notorious photographs of her nude torso bound with string. In 1957, a fateful encounter with the poet and painter Henri Michaux . . . . [see book details]

  Translated and with an Introduction by Caroline Rupprecht. Paperback, 6 x 8 in. / 128 pgs. Publication Date: 10/1/2008 List Price: US $13.95

  The Katonah Museum of Art/The Mint Museum Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage were two of Surrealism's leading painters, who together elaborated de Chirico's world of isolate and obdurate forms into eerie landscapes sparsely populated with biomorphic life forms. Here, for the first time, the work of this dynamic couple is explored in depth. An essay by Stephen Robeson Miller examines the intersection of Sage's and Tanguy's biographies with their work, accurately recounting for the first time Sage's conversion to Surrealism. A second essay by Jonathan Stuhlman traces the ways in which Sage's art influenced Tanguy's. These essays are accompanied by color plates containing several previously unreproduced works and photographs. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Stephen Robeson Miller, Jonathan Stuhlman. Flexi, 8 x 11 in. / 104 pgs / 69 color / 19 b&w. Publication Date: 8/31/2011 List Price: US $40.00

  Exact Change Last Nights Of Paris Written in 1928 by one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, and translated the following year by William Carlos Williams (the two had been introduced in Paris by a mutual friend), Last Nights of Paris is related to Surrealist novels such as Nadja and Paris Peasant, but also to the American expatriate novels of its day such as Day of the Locust. The story concerns the narrator's obsession with a woman who leads him into an underworld that promises to reveal the secrets of the city itself... and in Williams' wonderfully direct translation it reads like a lost Great American Novel. A vivid portrait of the city that entranced both its native writers and the Americans who traveled to it in the 20s, Last Nights of Paris is a rare collaboration between the literary circles at the root of both French and American Modernism. . . . . [see book details]

  By Philippe Soupault. Translated by William Carlos Williams. Paperback, 6 x 8 in. / 192 pgs. Publication Date: 1/15/2008 List Price: US $13.95

  Hatje Cantz Surreal Objects Sculptures and Objects from Dalí to Man Ray Beautiful as the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table is the most famous formulation of the Surrealist effect, penned by the Comte de Lautréamont in the 1860s and adopted as a rallying cry by André Breton at the inception of the Surrealist movement. Lautréamont's vivid simile lent itself both to poetry and to visual art, and the Surrealist artists were quick to grasp that an entirely new kind of sculpture could be made from such potent combinations of commonplace objects. Duchamp's Dada-era objects, Freud's theories of the fetish, the "uncanny" and sexual symbolism and the popularity in Europe of African votive objects supplied further stimulus, and soon Breton, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and even Picasso had populated this infant genre with a whole slew of disquieting (and sometimes fun) inventions--May Ray's 1920 "Cadeau" (a clothes iron with tacks attached) and Dalí's 1936 lobster telephone . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Ingrid Pfeiffer, Max Hollein. Text by Laurence Madeline, Angela Lampe, Ulrich Lehmann. Hbk, 9.5 x 11.75 in. / 288 pgs / 230 color. Publication Date: 5/31/2011 List Price: US $60.00