The topicality of Surrealism today

Surrealism was an internationalist political movement. Surrealists denounced European colonial policies, they organized to resist against fascist governments and movements, they fought for the Spanish Republic, were persecuted, escaped into exile, died in the war against National Socialists. They wrote poetry, honed the deconstruction of an ostensibly rational language in an ostensibly rational world, they worked on paintings and collective drawings, they made photographs, and collages. As an allied method for emancipatory causes, Surrealism has been revisited in 1968, and by the Black Civil Rights Movement. The catalog accompanying the exhibition at the Lenbachhaus brings together central texts of political surrealism from the first manifestos to the present day in the form of a reader.