A boatload of madmen: Surrealism and the American avant-garde, 1920-1950

The American art community had its first glimpse of Surrealism in 1932. Its revolutionary art galvanised an emerging avant-garde. New galleries opened to exhibit the works of Surrealist artists, and new magazines sprang up to publish a startling crop of Surrealist poetry, criticism and attacks on mainstream culture and politics. Only four years later, a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art catapulted Surrealism into the cultural limelight and the attentions of high-fashion magazines like "Harper's Bazaar" and "Vogue". Soon the art of Man Ray was selling cologne and swimwear; and the manic Salvador Dali was designing windows for Bonwitt's and a pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Even Andre Breton and his circle, exiled in Manhattan during World War II, were unable to assert control over this new kind of Surrealism. In this cultural history, Professor Dickran Tashjian tells the story of Surrealism's remarkable sea change, from a fiercely leftist, strongly literary, avant-garde movement into an apolitical almost exclusively visual style. Exploring both high and low cultural perspectives, he shows how the American avant-garde selectively reshaped European Surrealism to meet its own agendas, and how it was in turn reinterpreted, de-politicized and commercially exploited by mainstream American culture and the fashion and advertising industries. Dickran Tashjian teaches in the Programme in Comparative Culture at the University of California, Irvine, and is the author of several books, including "Joseph Cornell: Gifts of Desire".