Overview

Corpses mark surrealism's path through the twentieth century, providing material evidence of the violence in modern life. Though the shifting group of poets, artists, and critics who made up the surrealist movement were witness to total war, revolutionary violence, and mass killing, it was the tawdry reality of everyday crime that fascinated them. Jonathan P. Eburne shows us how this focus reveals the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the thought and artwork of the surrealists and establishes their movement as a useful platform for addressing the contemporary problem of violence, both individual and political.In a book strikingly illustrated with surrealist artworks and their sometimes gruesome source material, Eburne addresses key individual works by both better-known surrealist writers and artists (including Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Aime Cesaire, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dali) and lesser-known figures (such as Rene Crevel, Simone Breton, Leonora Carrington, Benjamin Peret, and Jules Monnerot). For Eburne ""the art of crime"" denotes an array of cultural production including sensationalist journalism, detective mysteries, police blotters, crime scene photos, and documents of medical and legal opinion as well as the roman noir, in particular the first crime novel of the American Chester Himes. The surrealists collected and scrutinized such materials, using them as the inspiration for the outpouring of political tracts, pamphlets, and artworks through which they sought to expose the forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the state, its courts, and respectable bourgeois values.Concluding with the surrealists' quarrel with the existentialists and their bitter condemnation of France's anticolonial wars, Surrealism and the Art of Crime establishes surrealism as a vital element in the intellectual, political, and artistic history of the twentieth century.

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9780801446740

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In Surrealism and the Art of Crime, Jonathan P. Eburne offers a revisionist analysis of surrealism and its impact from its origins to the 1950s. His focus on the artists' interest in criminal figures, faits divers, and political violence defines the often underappreciated subtlety of the relationship the surrealists forged between aesthetics and politics. Carolyn J. Dean, Brown University

In Surrealism and the Art of Crime, Jonathan P. Eburne offers a revisionist analysis of surrealism and its impact from its origins to the 1950s. His focus on the artists' interest in criminal figures, faits divers, and political violence defines the often underappreciated subtlety of the relationship the surrealists forged between aesthetics and politics. -Carolyn J. Dean, Brown University

Author Information

Jonathan P. Eburne is Josephine Berry Weiss Early Career Professor in the Humanities and Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at The Pennsylvania State University.

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