Surrealist Art and Writing, 1919–1939

Fresh analysis of Surrealism in historical, social, and intellectual context.

Surrealist Art and Writing offers a fresh analysis of Surrealism - of the artists Dali, Ernst, Masson, and Tanguy and the writing of Surrealism's leaders - André Breton, Aragon and Eluard. Spector uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine how the ideas and images of this avant-garde movement grew up in antipathy to middle class values.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 to politics and psychology. Examining Surrealism's main phases from a variety of perspectives, Jack Spector emphasises the rebellion of the protagonists against their middle-class education. 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 a coherent 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 30s, integrating them into contemporary artistic and ideological currents.