Surrealism is widely thought of as an artistic movement that flourished in Europe between the two world wars. However, during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, diverse radical affinity groups, underground subcultures, and student protest movements proclaimed their connections to surrealism. Radical Dreams argues that surrealism was more than an avant-garde art movement; it was a living current of anti-authoritarian resistance. Featuring perspectives from scholars across the humanities and, distinctively, from contemporary surrealist practitioners, this volume examines surrealism’s role in postwar oppositional cultures. It demonstrates how surrealism’s committed engagement extends beyond the parameters of an artistic style or historical period, with chapters devoted to Afrosurrealism, Ted Joans, punk, the Situationist International, the student protests of May ’68, and other topics. Privileging interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and material culture approaches, contributors address surrealism’s interaction with New Left politics, protest movements, the sexual revolution, psychedelia, and other subcultural trends around the globe. A revelatory work, Radical Dreams definitively shows that the surrealist movement was synonymous with cultural and political radicalism. It will be especially valuable to those interested in the avant-garde, contemporary art, and radical social movements. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jonathan P. Eburne, David Hopkins, Claire Howard, Michael Löwy, Alyce Mahon, Gavin Parkinson, Grégory Pierrot, Penelope Rosemont, Ron Sakolsky, Marie Arleth Skov, Ryan Standfest, and Sandra Zalman.

This autumn season, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting Surrealism and the Dream, the first monographic exhibition devoted to the visual approach of Surrealist artists to the oneiric world. Curated by Jose Jimenez, the show advances Surrealism as an attitude towards life whose roots delve deep into the relationship between image and dream. The comprehensive array of photographs, paintings, collages, objects, sculptures and films that visitors will be able to enjoy points to the blurred nature of the borderline between reality and what appears before us in our dreams.

The first-ever history of the representation of dreams in Western painting, illustrated with works by more than 130 artists Organized by period, from the Middle Ages to the present, this engaging book shows how the idea of the dream, and its depictions, have shifted throughout history, from the biblical dream—a communication from God—to the deeply personal dream, the lighthearted fantasy, the nightmare. Sometimes these ideas have existed simultaneously: thus we have, only a few years apart, Raphael’s limpid High Renaissance composition of Jacob dreaming his Ladder; Albrecht Dürer’s watercolor of a mysterious deluge that he saw in his own slumbers; and Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmarish hellscapes. More recently, movements such as Symbolism and Surrealism have taken the dream as a primary source of inspiration, even conflating dreaming and the creative process itself. This rich vein of visionary art runs from Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, through De Chirico and Dalí, down to the present—demonstrating, as Bergez reminds us, that Morpheus was a god of form as well as of dreams.

The author analyses how the Surrealists utilised the tactics of documentary and how Surrealist ideas in turn influenced the development of documentary photography. This is a study of what Louis Aragon called 'surrealist realism': the exploration of the real-life surreality of the city.

Olga Grushin’s astonishing literary debut has won her comparisons with everyone from Gogol to Nabokov. A virtuoso study in betrayal and its consequences, it explores—really, colonizes—the consciousness of Anatoly Sukhanov, who many years before abandoned the precarious existence of an underground artist for the perks of a Soviet apparatchik. But, at the age of 56, his perfect life is suddenly disintegrating. Buried dreams return to haunt him. New political alignments threaten to undo him. Vaulting effortlessly from the real to the surreal and from privilege to paranoia, The Dream Life of Sukhanov is a darkly funny, demonically entertaining novel.

Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism sheds light on the oeuvre of Alexei Remizov (1877-1957), a great modernist eccentric who has remained largely unknown to Western audiences. Although his original prose garnered him early acclaim and has since entered the Russian literary canon, Remizov's artistic capacity was fully realized only after his experimentation with words and images culminated in a writing process that relies as much on drawing as it does on language. --

Discusses the characteristics of the Surrealism movement which began in Paris in 1924 and presents biographies of twelve Surrealist artists.

Two Surrealist Manifestos were issued by the Surrealist movement, in 1924 and 1929. They were both written by Andr� Breton. Andr� Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. The first Surrealist manifesto was written by Breton and published in 1924 as a booklet (Editions du Sagittaire). The document defines Surrealism as:"Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern." Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. The aim was to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality". Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself.

This is the first time Aragon's seminal French surrealist text has been published in English as a single volume and the translation is accompanied by a CD of eight spoken extracts set to music by Tymon Dogg and Alex Thomas. Aragon's extraordinary prose-poem-essay A Wave of Dreams (Une vague de reves), is a compelling, lyrical, first-hand account of the early days of surrealist experimentation in Paris. Writing in 1924, Aragon vividly describes, and philosophically evaluates, the inner adventures, the hallucinations and encounters with the 'Marvellous' which took the young surrealists to the brink of insanity as a revolutionary new era in Art History was born."