A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant Garde, 1920-1950 Book

"Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen." -André Breton

In 1932, against the troubled background of the Depression, the American art community had its first glimpse of the revolutionary art of the Surrealists. Combining a fascination for Freud's new symbolic language of dreams with a radical utopianism, the Parisian movement galvanized an emerging American avant-garde. New galleries opened to exhibit the "terrifying," "insane" works of Surrealist artists, and new magazines sprang up to publish a startling crop of Surrealist poetry, criticism, and vociferous attacks on mainstream culture and politics. Four years later, a major Surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York catapulted Surrealism into the cultural limelight. Soon the art of Man Ray was selling cologne and swimwear and Salvador Dalí was designing shop windows and a pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. André Breton and his circle, exiled in Manhattan during World War II, were unable to assert control over this new kind of Surrealism. If anything, their cultural dislocation in these years gave Americans the edge in developing new Surrealist concepts and movements such as Abstract Expressionism. This innovative and vividly written cultural history tells the story of Surrealism's remarkable sea change during its years in America, from a fiercely leftist, strongly literary avant-garde movement into an apolitical, almost exclusively visual style. Exploring both "high" and "low" cultural perspectives, Dickran Tashjian shows how the American avant-garde selectively filtered and reshaped European Surrealism to meet its own agendas, and how it in turn was reinterpreted, depoliticized, and commercially exploited by mainstream American culture and the fashion/advertising industry. 85 b/w illustrations.

Author Biography: Dickran Tashjian is Professor of Art History in the School of Fine Arts at the University of California, Irvine. His other books include Skyscraper Primitives and Joseph Cornell: Gifts of Desire.