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Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968. Alyce Mahon. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005. Pp. 240. $50.00 (cloth).
Reviewed by Clark V. Poling, Emory University
In the title of her book, Alyce Mahon indicates two of her chief goals. To counteract the notion of a "marginalization" suffered by surrealism after 1945 and indeed the relative dearth of scholarly literature on the period, she devotes well over half of the book to the activities of the movement from the end of the Second World War on. And to correct the tendency in much of the scholarship to treat surrealism narrowly as an artistic or literary movement, she stresses its involvement in politics, especially a politics of the erotic. She argues that far from being on the margins, surrealism in the postwar period operated in the thick of intellectual debates in France and, in its ideals and in the installation of its exhibitions, had a considerable effect on new artistic movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, the collaborative way in which the exhibitions were created continued an emphasis on group activity which had marked the movement from its beginnings in the early 1920s and was itself an expression of collectivist, radical politics.
Mahon embeds these arguments in a broad survey of surrealist activities in France from the "International Surrealist Exhibition," held in Paris in early 1938, to their involvement in artistic manifestations tied to the uprisings in Paris of May 1968. The last major public expressions of the surrealists' politics, these activities took place between the death of their leader André Breton in September 1966 and the official end of the movement in October 1969. In her coverage of the last thirty years of the movement, she parallels Gérard Durozoi's much longer and broader-ranging History of the Surrealist Movement (English edition, 2002), though she dwells in considerably greater detail on the key exhibitions staged by the group and connects them more thoroughly with political issues. Like Lewis Kachur, in his Displaying the Marvelous (2001), she stresses the importance of the installations as artistic expressions in themselves, but she...