Surrealism - Genesis of a Revolution (Temporis Collection)

Surrealists appeared in the aftermath of World War I with a bang: revolution of thought, creativity, and the wish to break away from the past and all that was left in ruins. This refusal to integrate into the bourgeois society was also a leitmotiv of Dada artists, and André Breton asserted that Dada does not produce perspective. Surrealism emerged amidst such feeling. Surrealists and Dada artists often changed from one movement to another. They were united by their superior intellectualism and the common goal to break free from the norm. Describing the Surrealists with their aversive resistance to the system, the author brings a new approach which strives to be relative and truthful. Provocation and cultural revolution: aren’t Surrealists after all just a direct product of creative individualism in this unsettled period?

About the author
Nathalia Brodskaïa is a curator at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. As an author, she has published monographs on Rousseau, Renoir, Derain, Vlaminck, Vallotton and Van Dongen and books on the Fauves and Naive Art. Nathalia Brodskaïa is currently working on a study of French painters at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.