A radically new history of French surrealism by a brilliant young art historian.
In contrast to the orthodox view that surrealism slid into a terminal decline after the 1930s, Alyce Mahon shows that the movement was instead transformed in the war and postwar years as the Surrealists redefined and extended their interests in social crisis, political engagement, transgressive art, myth, the occult, and the erotic.
Through "the politics of Eros" the Surrealists attempted to shatter the repression intrinsic to bourgeois society by appealing to individual desire as a route to political...