Surrealist art and writing, 1919-1939
By: Jack J. Spector.
Series: Contemporary artists and their critics
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 322
Subjects: Surrealism -- Europe.; Arts, Modern -- 20th century -- Europe.
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.