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In the years following World War I, a small group of writers, painters, and filmmakers called the Surrealists set out to change the way we perceive the world. In Bizarre Lives, Ruth Brandon follows the lives and interactions of such firecracker minds as the movement’s improving “Pope,” Andre Breton, and the ambitious and manic Salvador Dali, as well as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and filmmaker Luis Bunuel. It charts their shifting allegiances, and their ties to muses and regulars like Gala Dali and Peggy Guggenheim. Ruth Brandon spins the many tales of Surrealism with wit, energy, and insight, bringing sharp analysis to an eccentric cast of characters whose struggles and achievements came to mirror and mark out the way the world altered linking the wars. “Fascinating, impassioned . . . admirable [for] the masterly storytelling, the richness of anecdotal thing, the keen reporting of intellectual enthusiasms and artistic collaborations, and the panorama of a spectacular cultural galaxy.” — The New York Times Book Review; “Superbly entertaining . . . A cousin to Malcolm Cowley’s ?migr?’s Return.” — Michael Dirda Washington Post Book World; “A lively and absorbing complement to [the Surrealists'] work.” — The New Yorker.Amazon.com Review
Playful, amusing, frivolous, and bizarre. As Ruth Brandon points out in the preface to her marvelous Bizarre Lives, surrealism has passed into everyday life as a byword for the weird. But, as this wonderfully exhaustive book point outs, the intellectual and political guide behind the movement was in fact vastly revolutionary. What Brandon proceeds to unfold is a kaleidoscopic cultural history of the movement, which by 1924 had self-consciously adopted the title “surrealism,” from its emergence in the center of the ashes of interwar Zurich dada to its enforced relocation to New York in the 1940s. Along the way Bizarre Lives deftly weaves a fascinating account of the cultural, artistic, political, personal, and sexual dynamics of the men and women who defined the movement from the 1920s onward.
The personal and artistic relations linking the usual suspects of Apollinaire, Picabia, Man Ray, Duchamp, Buñuel, and Dalí are all traced in extensive and vastly entertaining point. And at the book’s center lies the pompous, autocratic, charismatic map of André Breton and his creative but vastly volatile relations with the entire cast–from his feuds with Tristan Tzara to his ultimate disillusion with Dalí. Following Breton’s enigmatic career, the book moves perfectly linking the revolutionary aspirations of the movement and the common literary squabbles that often dull its radicalism. Brandon is particularly successful at uncovering the importance of the various women who had such a decisive impact upon the development of surrealism, as well as offering a range of salacious and often wonderfully incongruous encounters, such as the aged Erik Satie’s involvement in the creation of Marcel Duchamp’s The Gift. How bizarre. –Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk
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