CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/27/2026

Manifestoes, masterpieces and wild experiments in MoMA's 'The Surrealist Book'

Georges Hugnet’s remarkable cover for the 1934 Surrealist book Onan—a collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Georges Hugnet and Louis Christy—features dye-colored sand flowing between two sheets of lead glass. It is reproduced from new release The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors, published to accompany the exhibition on view at MoMA now through January 2027. “A book bound with panes of shattered glass. A manifesto enshrined in polished metal. Pages of love poems merging seamlessly with luminous dreamscapes. Pamphlets of antiwar poetry designed to be slipped into a pocket. For André Breton, Claude Cahun, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Toyen, and many other artists and writers associated with Surrealism, books and bookmaking were central and driving preoccupations,” curators Jodi Hauptman and Starr Figura write. “Artists’ books—books made as works of art, often collaboratively, by painters and poets—were perfect vehicles for subversive experimentation and for the promotion of Surrealism’s revolutionary tenets.”