101 SURREALISTS

The faces of surrealism, 100 years after its founding.

Morris, “one of the last surviving Surrealists,” celebrates the centenary of the groundbreaking movement by offering a concise overview of its origins in tandem with short biographies of famous and lesser-known artists. The movement officially came into being in 1924 when French poet André Breton published a manifesto that defined surrealism and linked it to a theory of creativity “free from aesthetic or moral concern.” In his introduction, the author observes that although the movement was started by writers, the term was actually coined by visual artist Pablo Picasso, who sought to explain the “realer than real” effects that he was creating through his art. Yet art historians credit Picasso’s friend, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, with creating the word because he was the first to mention it in the art criticism he published. Almost all of the individuals Morris includes are, like Picasso, visual artists, including such fellow luminaries as Joan Miró, Frida Kahlo, and Man Ray. The only one who is not is Breton, the sole representative of literary surrealism. Among the more obscure, but no less interesting, artists Morris features are painter Leonor Fini, whom Morris calls “the highly skilled sex goddess of the surrealist movement,” collagist Georges Hugnet, and filmmaker/artist Len Lye. In keeping with the playfully perverse nature of surrealism, the book, which contains no artist images, presents each biography in green-and-pink ink and offers a summary of each artist’s life as a set of vertically oriented notes. This delightful compendium will appeal primarily to art history buffs.

A fittingly exuberant tribute to a singular art movement.