Surrealism was born in Paris in 1924, with André Breton’s Manifesto. It defined itself as “pure psychic automatism”: writing, painting and assembling without the control of reason, to reach what dreams, chance and desire know better than we do.
Around Breton, André Masson invented automatic drawing, Hans Bellmer took apart and reassembled his doll, Jacques Hérold crystallised bodies and Leonor Fini painted her sphinxes. After the war the movement dispersed and lived on: Ljuba, Jean-Claude Silbermann and Jean Benoît in Paris, Jan Švankmajer and Milan Nápravník in Prague, Édouard Jaguer and the review Phases.
The gallery champions this long history, from the pioneers to their heirs, with a particular fondness for those whom official history has left aside. Here, it is the page that looks at you.
Exquisite corpse machine
The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.
After the game invented by the Surrealists in 1925: each player writes a fragment of a sentence without seeing the others’.
The artists
Endre Bálint
Maurice Baskine
Hans Bellmer
Robert Benayoun
Jean Benoît
Guido Biasi
André Breton
Max Bucaille
Adrien Dax
Irena Dedicova
Gabriel Der Kevorkian
Mr. Djub
Lou Dubois
Erro
Anne Ethuin
Leonor Fini
Henri Goetz
Jacques Hérold
Yoshiko Hirasawa
Édouard Jaguer
Jacques Lacomblez
Jacques Le Maréchal
Ljuba
Ghérasim Luca
Émile Malespine
Georges Malkine
André Masson
Mayo
Pierre Molinier
Milan Nápravník
Mimi Parent
Jules Perahim
Manou Pouderoux
Mario Prassinos
Gaston Puel
Maurice Rapin
Endre Rozsda
Fabian Sanchez
Jean-Claude Silbermann
Ugo Sterpini
Max Walter Svanberg
Jan Švankmajer
Claude Tarnaud
Virginia Tentindo
Jean Terrossian
Václav Tikal
Suzanne Van Damme
Philip West
Ludwig Zeller