A Boatload of Madmen
Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde 1920-1950
Dickran Tashjian
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| 'Tashjian brilliantly reassesses the impact of Surrealism on an emerging American avant-garde and on American culture in this intensive study' | | – Publishers Weekly |
'Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen' – André Breton
In 1932, against the troubled background of the Depression, the American art community had its first glimpse of the revolutionary art of the Surrealists and the Parisian movement galvanized an emerging American avant-garde. New galleries opened to exhibit the 'terrifying', 'insane' works of Surrealist artists, and new magazines sprang up to publish a startling crop of Surrealist poetry, criticism, and vociferous attacks on mainstream culture and politics.
Four years later, a major Surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York catapulted Surrealism into the cultural limelight and grabbed the attention of high-fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Soon the art of Man Ray was selling cologne and swimwear and Salvador Dali was designing shop windows and a pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
This innovative and vividly written cultural history tells the story of Surrealism’s remarkable sea change during its years in America, from a fiercely leftist, strongly literary avant-garde movement into an apolitical, almost exclusively visual style.
Exploring both 'high' and 'low' cultural perspectives, Professor Tashjian shows how the American avant-garde selectively filtered and reshaped European Surrealism to meet its own agendas, and how it in turn was reinterpreted, depoliticized, and commercially exploited by mainstream American culture and the fashion / advertising industry.
Surrealism ( series)
Dada: Art and Anti-Art ( series)
Surrealism and the Politics of Eros 1938–1968
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|  |  | | | | ISBN 0500976120 | | ISBN-13 978-0500976128 | | | | 23.2 x 18.1 cm | | Paperback with flaps | | 448pp | | Illustrated in black and white throughout | | First published 2002 | | | | £18.95 | | | |  | | | | 
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