Leann Davis Alspaugh at The New Criterion:
Ten years ago, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary declared “surreal” its word of the year. There were many reasons for its popularity that year. In the century since the 1924 publication of André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme, the movement known as Surrealism has been through its ups and downs. One thing remains constant: a desire to épater les bourgeois, one that continues to astonish even as the notions of what constitutes the bourgeoisie dissolve before our eyes. The terrific exhibition “International Surrealism from Tate: Fifty Years of Dreams,” which shows works selected from the Tate Gallery’s collection and presented at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, takes a refreshingly wide view of Surrealism, reminding us that, while some artists were for a time companions, they soon moved far beyond the often-airless confines of what was initially an exhilarating but ultimately limited endeavor.
It is worth remembering that Surrealism was originally a literary movement, one, as Breton wrote, founded on “pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express—verbally, in writing, or in any other manner—the true function of thought, in the absence of control exerted by reason, and exempt from all aesthetic or moral concern.”
more here.
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