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Lena Hoff, Nicolas Calas and the Challenge of Surrealism. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. 2014. Pp. 450. 23 halftones, 8 color plates. Paper $65.
Lena Hoff's Nicolas Calas and the Challenge of Surrealism is a fine study of an understudied and perhaps underappreciated (at least in English-language scholarship) itinerant poet, journalist, critic, and all-out provocateur. A strongly Marxist thinker, who did not believe in so-called proletarian art in the social realist sense (despite an early essay arguing for it), and a lifelong surrealist, who at every turn sought to modify Freudian thought as well as surrealist doctrine, Nicolas Calas (also known as Nikolaos Kalamaris, Nikitas Randos, and M. Spieros) is often mentioned in the Greek context as the one true surrealist-a characterization that Hoff somewhat unquestioningly embraces. But she also provides a much-needed examination of Calas's work that digs deep into the archive in order to take into account the full breadth of his productivity-from poetry to art reviews to social criticism-and that outlines the rich and varied intellectual contexts in which Calas lived and wrote. "Without desire to change, surrealism is reduced to a cult," Calas wrote, and it is his permanent revolt that Hoff tracks patiently and in great detail (254).
Turn any modernist/avant-garde stone and you will find Calas there: a correspondent and critic of the first Greek promulgator of modernism Yorgos Theotokas in the early 1930s; a translator of T.S. Eliot, whose work he did not much like, and the first to compare him to C.P. Cavafy (though George Seferis would do both much more famously a few years later); a member of the French surrealist group in Paris in the mid-to-late 1930s; a collaborator of André Breton in 1940s New York, his initial emigration there partly financed by paintings given to him by Pablo Picasso and Giorgio de Chirico; a correspondent of Leon Trotsky, while the latter was in Mexico; a correspondent and translator of William Carlos Williams; a research assistant for Margaret Mead; a contributor to the American surrealist magazine View, but also to Artforum; a regular columnist for The Village Voice in the 1960s; a beloved art history professor at Fairleigh Dickinson in New Jersey from 1963 to 1975 and begrudging visiting...