La obra es una nueva aproximación al tema de la respuesta de los artistas ante la guerra, articulando la relación entre el esfuerzo artístico y la política durante periodos de crisis social. Se analiza la amplia respuesta que la Guerra Civil Española provocó en el trabajo de Miró, Dalí, Caballero, Masson y Picasso, investigando los esfuerzos del surrealismo por establecer un puente entre el pensamiento y el acto político.

This revelatory survey of Surrealist masterworks of the 1930s and 1940s by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, and André Masson presents the movement through a new and timely lens--that of war, violence, and exile. During the pivotal years between the world wars, Surrealist artists on both sides of the Atlantic responded through their works to the rise of Hitler and the spread of Fascism in Europe, resulting in a period of surprising brilliance and fertility. Monstrosities in the real world bred monsters in paintings and sculpture, on film, and in the pages of journals and artists' books. Despite the political and personal turmoil brought on by the Spanish Civil War and World War II, avant-garde artists in Europe and those who sought refuge in the United States pushed themselves to create some of the most potent and striking images of the Surrealist movement. Trailblazing essays by four experts in the field trace the experimental and international extent of Surrealist art during these years--and, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, its irrepressible beauty.

British artists responses to the war in Spain, 1936-1939, including a range of media.

Surreal Friends brings together for the first time the work of three women Surrealist artists, brought together in exile in Mexico in the 1940s: British painter Leonora Carrington, Spanish painter Remedios Varo and Hungarian photographer Kati Horna. For all three women, Mexico offered freedom to explore their art in ways that had not been possible in Europe. Surreal Friends tells the fascinating story of their artistic friendship.

The turbulent years of the 1930s were of profound importance in the life of Spanish film director Luis Buñuel (1900–1983). He joined the Surrealist movement in 1929 but by 1932 had renounced it and embraced Communism. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), he played an integral role in disseminating film propaganda in Paris for the Spanish Republican cause. Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929–1939 investigates Buñuel’s commitment to making the politicized documentary Land without Bread (1933) and his key role as an executive producer at Filmófono in Madrid, where he was responsible in 1935–36 for making four commercial features that prefigure his work in Mexico after 1946. As for the republics of France and Spain between which Buñuel shuttled during the 1930s, these became equally embattled as left and right totalitarianisms fought to wrest political power away from a debilitated capitalism. Where it exists, the literature on this crucial decade of the film director’s life is scant and relies on Buñuel’s own self-interested accounts of that complex period. Román Gubern and Paul Hammond have undertaken extensive archival research in Europe and the United States and evaluated Buñuel’s accounts and those of historians and film writers to achieve a portrait of Buñuel’s “Red Years” that abounds in new information.

Surrealist sabotage and the war on work is an art historical study devoted to international surrealism's critique of wage labour between 1920 and 1980. Topics such as automatism, artworks across media, radical publications and social interventions are examined in relation to the movement's ongoing demand for non-alienated work.

This book was originally published in 1999, and is the first comprehensive study of the British surrealist movement and its achievements. Lavishly illustrated, the book provides a year-by-year narrative of the development of surrealism among artists, writers, critics and theorists in Britain. Surrealism was imported into Britain from France by pioneering little magazines. The 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, put together by Herbert Read and Roland Penrose, marked the first attempt to introduce the concept to a wider public. Relations with the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War and World War Two fractured the nascent movement as writers and artists worked out their individual responses and struggled to earn a living in wartime. The book follows the story right through to the present day. Michael Remy draws on 20 years of studying British surrealism to provide this authoritative and biographically rich account, a major contribution to the understanding of the achievements of the artists and writers involved and their allegiance to this key twentieth-century movement.

The remarkable story of the famous painting by Picasso and its diverse meanings from its conception to the present day 'Enthralling ... This is high-action drama, told like the rest within a huge frame of reference, theme interlocked with theme ... A painting which began its life within a particular political context has emerged as a universal statement on the ever-present horror and suffering of war. Van Hensbergen has treated an extraordinary subject admirably' Evening Standard Of all the great paintings in the world, Picasso's Guernica has had a more direct impact on our consciousness than perhaps any other. In this absorbing and revealing book, Gijs van Hensbergen tells the story of this masterpiece. Starting with its origin in the destruction of the Basque town of Gernika in the Spanish Civil War, the painting is then used as a weapon in the propaganda battle against Fascism. Later it becomes the nucleus of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the detonator for the Big Bang of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s. This tale of passion and politics shows the transformation of this work of art into an icon of many meanings, up to its long contested but eventually triumphant return to Spain in 1981.

Tracing the movement from its origins in the 1920s to its decline in the 1950s and 1960s, Durozoi tells the history of Surrealism through its activities, publications, and reviews, demonstrating its close ties to some of the most explosive political, as well as creative, debates of the twentieth century. Unlike other histories, which focus mainly on the pre-World War II years of the movement in Paris, Durozoi covers both a wider chronological and geographic range, treating in detail the postwar years and Surrealism's colonization of Latin America, the United States, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Italy, and North Africa. Drawing on documentary and visual evidence--including 1,000 photos, many of them in color--he illuminates all the intellectual and artistic aspects of the movement, from literature and philosophy to painting, photography, and film. All the Surrealist stars and their most important works are here--Aragon, Borges, Breton, Buñuel, Cocteau, Crevel, Dalí, Desnos, Ernst, Man Ray, Soupault, and many more--for all of whom Durozoi has provided brief biographical notes in addition to featuring them in the main text.