Surrealism (eBook, EPUB)

A series of personal and historical encounters with surrealism from one of its foremost practitioners in the United States.

"Penelope Rosemont has given us, better than anyone else in the English language, a marvelous, meticulous exploration of the surrealist experience, in all its infinite variety."—Gerome Kamrowski, American Surrealist Painter

One of the hallmarks of Surrealism is the encounter, often by chance, with a key person, place, or object through a trajectory no one could have predicted. Penelope Rosemont draws on a lifetime of such experiences in her collection of essays, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields. From her youthful forays as a radical student in Chicago to her pivotal meeting with André Breton and the Surrealist Movement in Paris, Rosemont—one of the movement's leading exponents in the United States—documents her unending search for the Marvelous.

Surrealism finds her rubbing shoulders with some of the movement's most important visual artists, such as Man Ray, Leonora Carrington, Mimi Parent, and Toyen; discussing politics and spectacle with Guy Debord; and crossing paths with poet Ted Joans and outsider artist Lee Godie. The book also includes scholarly investigations into American radicals like George Francis Train and Mary MacLane, the myth of the Golden Goose, and Dada precursor Emmy Hennings.

Praise for Surrealism:

"Rosemont is not delivering dry abstractions, as so many academic 'specialists,' but telling us about warm and exciting human encounters, illuminated by the subversive spirit of Permanent Enchantment."—Michael Löwy, author of Ecosocialism

"This compelling and well-drawn book lets us see the adventures, inspirations, and relationships that have shaped Penelope Rosemont's art and rebellion."—David Roediger, author of Class, Race, and Marxism

"The broad sampling of essays included here offer a compelling entry point for curious readers and an essential compendium for surrealist practitioners."—Abigail Susik, professor of art history, Willamette University

"Rosemont's welcome memoir has a double virtue, as testament to the enduring radiance of Surrealism, and as a memento to the Sixties, revealing a sweetly beating wonderment at the heart of that absurdly maligned decade."—Jed Rasula, author of Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century

"Artist, historian, and social activist, Rosemont writes from the inside out. Like a rare, hybrid flower growing out of the earth, she complicates, expands, and opens the strange and beautiful meadow where Surrealism continues to live and thrive.”—Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Wild Milk

"In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Penelope Rosemont, long a keeper of surrealism's revolutionary flame, shows how a penetrating look into the past can liberate the future."—Andrew Joron, author of The Absolute Letter

"Rosemont recreates the feverish antics and immediate reception her close-knit, sleep-deprived, beat-attired squad find in the established, moray-breaking Parisian and international surrealists. Revolution is here, between the covers."—Gillian Conoley, author of A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems and translator of Thousand Times Broken: Three Books by Henri Michaux

A series of personal and historical encounters with surrealism from one of its foremost practitioners in the United States.

Preface

Introduction: The Magnetic Fields, Cinema, & the Penetrating Light of the Total Eclipse

1) My Days in the Mimeo Revolution

2) Paris Days

3) Chicago: Maxwell Street in the Sixties

4) Toyen and The Sleeping Girl

5) The Hermetic Windows of Joseph Cornell

6) Citizen Train Defends the Haymarket Anarchists

7) Mary Maclane, A Daughter of Butte, MT

8) Surrealist Encounters, Ted Joans, Jayne Cortez, Black Power

9) Unexpected Paths: Gustav Landauer

10) Mimi Parent & the Art of Luminous Laughter

11) The Life and Times of the Golden Goose

12) Nancy Cunard & Surrealism: Thinking Sympathetically Black

13) Lee Godie, Queen of the Outsiders

14) Dada: Emmy Hennings, Kandinsky, & the Theory of Relativity

15) Surrealism and Situationism: King Kong vs. Godzilla

16) Sex, the Sleeping Girl, and the Crisis of the Object: Toyen

17) Grant’s Tomb to the Emerald Tablet

18) Leonora Carrington in Chicago, and the Lion and the Unicorn in the Theater of Analogy

19) Restless, Reckless, Rendezvous of Women Surrealists

Works Cited

Bibliography of Penelope Rosemont

One of the very few Americans welcomed into the Surrealist Movement in Paris by André Breton himself, Penelope Rosemont is a poet, essayist, and visual artist. In the 1960s, in addition to being members of the Industrial Workers of the World and Students for a Democratic Society, she and her late husband Franklin Rosemont co-founded the Chicago Surrealist Group, which published the magazine Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion and the book imprint Black Swan Press. In the 1980s, she became one of the directors of Chicago’s historic left-wing press Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company. She has co-edited several surrealist publications, including Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination (City Lights 1982) and The Forecast is Hot! Tracts & Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States (Black Swan 1997), and is the editor of the landmark collection Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (Texas 1998). Her writings include two poetry collections Athanor (Black Swan 1971) and Beware of the Ice (Surrealist Editions 1992), the essay collection Surrealist Experiences (Black Swan 1999), and the memoir Dreams & Everyday Life (Charles Kerr 2008). She has participated in many international exhibitions of surrealism.