Surrealism

Imagine That!: Activities and Adventures in Surrealism (Art Explorers)

The Art Explorer series of interactive art books offers a new approach to art! Written by an expert in the field, it encourages kids to describe and interpret what they see in famous artworks, then to try some of the techniques themselves. Imagine That! Activities and Adventures in Surrealism, the first book in this new series, draws children into the fantastic, imaginative world of surrealism, highlighting the work of six famous surrealist artists: Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Merit Oppenheim, and Frida Kahlo. For each artist, a color reproduction of his or her famous artwork is paired with questions to get kids looking at the art and thinking about what they see. A short paragraph explains how the work was made and the artist's intentions, and a brief bio gives children a peek at the person behind the art. Easy-to-follow activities then provide hands-on experience with the artist's techniques, subject areas, and media, each illustrated with examples by actual kids. Techniques include collage, watercolour painting, drip painting, drawing, frottage, watercolour resist painting, printmaking, sculpture, and more.

The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Salvador Dali (Adventures in Art)

This lively and fun introduction to DaliÂ’s life and art focuses on eleven masterpieces, inviting readers to explore their imagination as they discover the works of the great artist.

The book presents the strange, humorous, and wildly inventive paintings of Salvador Dali. The author helps children unlock the mysteries of DaliÂ’s artwork by explaining his use of detail, color and illusion. Each double-page spread in this delightful book explores a single work to illustrate the ideas and influences that shaped DaliÂ’s work. The author introduces themes such as dream imagery, landscape painting, portraiture, and satire. Throughout the book, the artistÂ’s sense of playfulness and mystery shine through, revealing to children the wondrous qualities of art.

Surrealism and the Art of Crime

Corpses mark surrealism's path through the twentieth century, providing material evidence of the violence in modern life. Though the shifting group of poets, artists, and critics who made up the surrealist movement were witness to total war, revolutionary violence, and mass killing, it was the tawdry reality of everyday crime that fascinated them. Jonathan P. Eburne shows us how this focus reveals the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the thought and artwork of the surrealists and establishes their movement as a useful platform for addressing the contemporary problem of violence, both individual and political.

In a book strikingly illustrated with surrealist artworks and their sometimes gruesome source material, Eburne addresses key individual works by both better-known surrealist writers and artists (including André Breton, Louis Aragon, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí) and lesser-known figures (such as René Crevel, Simone Breton, Leonora Carrington, Benjamin Péret, and Jules Monnerot). For Eburne "the art of crime" denotes an array of cultural production including sensationalist journalism, detective mysteries, police blotters, crime scene photos, and documents of medical and legal opinion as well as the roman noir, in particular the first crime novel of the American Chester Himes. The surrealists collected and scrutinized such materials, using them as the inspiration for the outpouring of political tracts, pamphlets, and artworks through which they sought to expose the forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the state, its courts, and respectable bourgeois values.

Concluding with the surrealists' quarrel with the existentialists and their bitter condemnation of France's anticolonial wars, Surrealism and the Art of Crime establishes surrealism as a vital element in the intellectual, political, and artistic history of the twentieth century.

René Magritte (Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists)

Presents a biography of René Magritte

Essential Poems and Writings of Robert Desnos

Edited with an introduction and extensive essays by Mary Ann Caws. Translators include: Mary Ann Caws, Terry Hale, Martin Sorrell, Bill Zavatsky, Jonathan Eburne, Timothy Ades, Patricia Terry, Katharine Conley, and Paul Auster. This is the most comprehensive anthology of the writings of Robert Desnos to be assembled into the English language. The extensive poetry section is bilingual. Includes poetry, manifestos, novels, cinema writings, and more.

Salvador Dali and the Surrealists: Their Lives and Ideas, 21 Activities (For Kids series)

The bizarre and often humorous creations of René Magritte, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and other surrealists are showcased in this activity guide for young artists. Foremost among the surrealists, Salvador Dalí was a painter, filmmaker, designer, performance artist, and eccentric self-promoter. His famous icons, including the melting watches, double images, and everyday objects set in odd contexts, helped to define the way people view reality and encourage children to view the world in new ways. Dalí's controversial life is explored while children trace the roots of some familiar modern images. These wild and wonderful activities include making Man Ray-inspired solar prints, filming a dreamscape video, writing surrealist poetry, making collages, and assembling art with found objects.

Fishboy

In the brilliant idiom of a modern Melville or Conrad, an odyssey of discovery by a bold and outrageous talent--the PEN/Hemingway Award--winning author of The Ice At The Bottom Of The World.

Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution

Salvador Dal''s writings from the period in which he was most closely allied with the Surrealists have never before been translated into English. These short fictions, essays, and poems contain all the egotistic brio one might expect from Dal', but they also reveal an earnest and even sentimental artist. They document Dal''s friendships with fellow Spaniards Luis Buiuel and Federico Garc'a Lorca, his entry into the world of the Parisian Surrealists, his passion for the emerging arts of photography and cinema, and the development of his "Paranoid-Critical Method," the theoretical basis for Dal''s work throughout his life. In 1934, Dal' and Andra Breton would break forever--"The only difference between me and a Surrealist is that I am a Surrealist," he later said--but in the period 1927-1933, such distinctions were unnecessary.

Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare

Rene Magritte: Now You See It-Now You Don't (Adventures in Art (Prestel))

The books in Prestel's Adventures in Art series do a wonderful job of balancing respect for art with an understanding of what holds a young child's interest. Now You See It--Now You Don't is filled with excellent reproductions of the paintings of René Magritte, carefully printed in color, with a lot of white space around each one. Designed with confidence in a child's ability to find the paintings fascinating, the layout is calm, and the text is full of fun. "What a horrible meal!" reads the caption over the famous image of the plate of ham with a human eye staring out from the middle of the meat. Throughout the book such comments are written in the same proper, school-board script Magritte himself used to caption such pictures as "This is not a pipe" (which depicts--of course--a pipe). Of a painting of six everyday objects with wonky captions (such as an empty glass labeled "the storm,") titled The Key to Dreams, readers are asked, "What do you think this picture could be called?" The book reproduces many old, black-and-white, surrealist snapshots, and even introduces Man Ray to the reader. This is the sort of multifaceted book that should enthrall the parent as well as the preschooler, and probably everyone in between. --Peggy Moorman

In his mysterious paintings, Rene Magritte shows us how to see normal things in a different way. Heavy stones become light and float in the sky like clouds, a country scene shatters into lots of different pieces and a steam train chugs out of a fireplace.