Description

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Across more than 200 drawings, prints, photographs, books and magazines, ranging from the late Middle Ages to the heyday of Surrealism, this book follows the trail of the legendary and controversial show that Alfred H. Barr, founding director of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized in 1936, titled Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Barr's show imaginatively juxtaposed works by contemporary Dada and Surrealist artists and authors with works by their predecessors, such as Hieronymus Bosch, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, William Hogarth, Francisco de Goya, J.J. Grandville and others. Barr thus provided a family tree of Surrealism, just as Andr Breton himself had frequently done, establishing it as a fundamental tendency throughout the history of art. This beautiful volume will enchant fans of Dada and Surrealism, and of the longstanding tradition of the grotesque, the visionary and the bizarre.