3502 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089

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Tuesday, March 7, 6-7:30pm, SOS 250

Work-in-Progress: Surrealism Writes the News

Susan Laxton, Associate Professor, Department of the History of Art, University of California, Riverside

In 1931, assessing the field-defining exhibition Fotomontage, mounted at Berlin’s Kunstgewerbemuseum, critic Curt Glaser observed that in France “the concept [of photomontage] is virtually unknown.” While the statement was far too broad to be accurate, certainly surrealism, the most prominent literary, artistic, and philosophical avant-garde operating in Paris at the time, came late to the medium. Yet at around 1930, a sudden and concerted effort to develop an “official” photomontage technique rose within the surrealist movement, and by March of 1931, a set of 33 highly illusionistic, collaborative photomontages appeared at the hands of André Breton, Paul Eluard and Suzanne Muzard. For surrealism, a movement already committed to an aesthetics of juxtaposition in text and image, the weekly magazine VU functioned as a virtual site of encounter that affirmed the group’s central formal model even as it offered a field of historical representation from which they could carve their specialized version of lived reality, writing the world as surrealist experience.

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  • James Kwon
  • Randy Vazquez

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