Abstract

Surrealism remains an object of fascination for scholars and the public alike, with ebbs and flows ranging from rejection and devaluation to moments of exciting rediscoveries and theorizations. Following a long period of scholarly disdain in the 1970s, the period of the mid-1980s to mid-1990s was one such moment of reevaluation. Until then a mostly literary movement invested in the production of obscure texts, surrealism was revisited as a dynamic art movement and gained a position in the narratives of modernist art. Parallel blockbuster exhibitions in London, Paris, and New York underscored the ongoing appeal of surrealist art for a contemporary public. Scholarly work of the last ten years shows that surrealism...