DTigers springing from a grenade to jump on a naked odalisque, the photomontage of a hand emerging from a giant shell, women surrounded by the flight of a bird, a locomotive crossing the chimney of a bourgeois living room, so many visions signed Salvador Dali, Dora Maar, Joan Miro, René Magritte, which transform picture rails into firebrands. It is an exhibition that is part explosion, part labyrinth: to celebrate the centenary of the first Manifesto of Surrealism, The Pompidou Center commissioned two curators, Didier Ottinger and Marie Sarré, who designed it as a radial explosion, a honeycombed journey.
Around a central orb housing André Breton’s manuscript, like the tables of the Law of Surrealism, thirteen satellite rooms decline its effects, themes, and extensions. We enter through a replica of the giant sign of the cabaret L’Enfer, located a stone’s throw from the building on Rue Fontaine that housed the den of the dowser Breton. You who enter here, rekindle your hopes: one of the greatest insurrections of the mind known to human history is illustrated by hundreds of works, in front of which we move as if in Alice’s burrow, as if we were x-raying the synapses of an erupting brain.
Fantastic. The Angel of the Hearth (The Triumph of Surrealism)by Max Ernst (1937).
Surrealism is an existentialism
André Breton, in a 1942 text devoted to painting […] Read more
