19th International Surrealist Exhibition
Saint-Cirq-Lapopie (Lot), France, July 6 – Sept. 7, 2024

Surrealism was born in France in the wake of the First World War. An artistic, poetic, and philosophical investigation of the unconscious and the irrational, it aims to free the mind from convention and moral constraint in the pursuit of revolutionizing human experience. Contrary to popular opinion, the movement has never been part of the avant-garde. Far from an aesthetic of the bizarre, with which it is often conflated, Surrealism remains today what it was at its inception: a way of life.

In their search for alternative forms of perception and creativity, Surrealists have always privileged dreams and oneiric images, taking a lively interest in Indigenous cultures, Spiritualist art, and the symbolism developed by traditional sciences, such as Alchemy. Their approach soon spread beyond France to the rest of Europe, to North and South America, then to Asia, Africa, and Australia. Through an international network of creative and intellectual exchange, surviving war, repression, and exile, Surrealism was adopted far away from its birthplace in response to very different political conjunctures and cultural moments.

October 2024 will mark the centenary of the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by the movement’s founder, André Breton. Throughout the year, events around the world are commemorating historical Surrealism’s aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions, showcasing the “best of” Surrealism in museum collections, as well as contemporary art loosely inspired by Surrealist ideas and practices.

The 19th International Surrealist Exhibition, Marvelous Utopia, stands apart from the rest in celebrating the persistence and currency of Surrealism, decades after Breton’s death in 1966. Put on this summer in the south of France by the Paris Surrealist Group, the show brings together some 100 artworks, among them paintings dating back to the movement’s beginnings in the 1920s and new pieces created especially for the occasion. To highlight at once Surrealism’s history and continued vitality worldwide, it features not only Surrealists who had been part of the Paris Group in Breton’s lifetime, such as Hans Bellmer, Unica Zürn, Mimi Parent, and Jean Benoît, but also contemporary sculptors, painters, collagists, and musicians active in France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Sweden, Ireland, the UK, the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentine. Bearing witness to the past – to the first, second, and even third generation of Surrealists – as well as to Surrealism’s presence in France and abroad, the constellation on view includes likewise tribal art and pieces by Outsider creators, whose imaginative worlds have enriched the Surrealist vision from the 1940s onwards. Last but not least are installations by the group’s para-Surrealist collaborators: magic plants and the remarkable, steampunk-style “liquid mirror,” among others. Each contribution offers a unique window on another reality. And each window is an invitation to search within ourselves for that je ne sais quoi of the open horizon, of unfettered desire, beyond the given, the predictable, and the prescribed.

The first such event organized by Surrealists on French soil since 1965, the exhibition is an invitation on a poetic and initiatory voyage across a “utopian archipelago” of five “isles”: Dreams, Revolt, Metamorphoses, Love, and Abundance. This trajectory illustrates Surrealism’s fundamental preoccupations since its founding, uniting both its utopian aim, as expressed in Breton’s famous formula, “to transform the world, change life, and remake from scratch human understanding,” and its quest for “the marvelous” which, as Surrealists understand it, is “always beautiful, any kind of marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful” (Manifesto). The marvelous is the lifeblood of utopian social dreams, without which they are bone-dry blueprints.

Visitors to the show start their journey with reveries, nocturnal dreams, and visions. These sources of myth and utopian imaginaries navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of personal fantasies and rational designs for the ideal society, and reveal dreamlife to be the springboard of individual and collective revolt against a dystopian reality. From there, we explore the metamorphoses of spirit and matter, before honoring the subversive power of love and desire. The final island is a visual ode to natural abundance, in need of protection from a capitalist economy caught in the vicious cycle of unbridled resource extraction, incessant waste, and recycling to the point of absurdity.

In choosing the theme of utopia – a term coined in 1516 by the Renaissance humanist Thomas More and whose literal meaning is both “no-place” and “good place” – coupled with the marvelous, French Surrealism today continues to champion the emancipatory value of the imagination unchained from the culture industry and the art-market standardization of taste. The exhibition’s curators were responding at the same time to the concerns of the Paris Group that inspired its 1965 exhibition, “L’Écart absolu.” The Surrealists’ tutelary at the time was the utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772–1837); the scope of his vision of a harmonious future for humanity had been rediscovered by the them from 1944 onwards: by Breton during his exile in New York, then through the work of Simone Debout-Oleszkiewicz in the 1950s and 60s. Fourier remains a major reference for the group, which has conceived Marvelous Utopia as an extension and exploration, sixty years on, of Surrealist utopian desire. The works on display serve as glimpses of a possible society finally enabling the fulfilment of human desires in all spheres of spiritual and social life: sexuality, economics, politics, knowledge, myth, and imagination. These visions appear obliquely, by way of dreams, the unconscious, “free-floating” attention, poetic analogy, and the collective practices of Surrealist games and automatic writing. In the words of Eugenio Castro, the founder of the Madrid Surrealist Group (1959-2024), to whom the show is dedicated, “Utopia is not – or not necessarily – an inaccessible or a nonexistent place; utopia is a place waiting to be reached, to be found, and to which forms of life predispose themselves because they embody it.”

The present-day Paris Surrealist Group is a continuation of the Surrealist Group founded by Breton in 1922, two years before the publication of the first Manifesto of Surrealism. The Group’s dissolution by Jean Schuster and those close to him in 1969 was not accepted by some of its members, not least Michel Zimbacca, who had joined it in 1949, Jean-Louis Bédouin, Joyce Mansour, Marianne van Hirtum, and Jorge Camacho. Gathering around Vincent Bounoure, they were keen to continue the Surrealist adventure. In the years that followed, they were joined by poets, artists, theorists, and critics from new generations, organizing group exhibitions and publishing reviews, among many other activities. Currently, the group has some dozen members, several of whom live outside Paris, and who are passionate about the movement’s past, helping to preserve the memory of their predecessors by writing books, making documentary films, taking part in conferences, etc. But we decided to mark this centenary year by manifesting our collective activity to a wider public through a major exhibition to demonstrate the international vitality of Surrealism in 2024. To this end, we issued a call for participation to fellow Surrealists around the world – that is, to those who define themselves as such and appreciate the stakes. The response exceeded our expectations.

It is no accident that “Marvelous Utopia” is set far from the French capital and against the backdrop of the fairytale-like Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, the first to be officially named France’s “most beautiful village,” and about which Breton once remarked, “I have stopped wishing myself elsewhere.” Held at two clifftop sites overlooking a meander of the river Lot – the Maison Émile Joseph-Rignault and the Maison André Breton – the latter originally a medieval mariners’ inn, purchased by Breton in a run-down condition in 1950 and recently renovated – the show runs from July 6 to September 7, 2024. A bilingual catalogue is available for purchase at the Halle Saint-Pierre bookstore in Paris or by directly from the publisher, the Centre International du Surréalisme et de la Citoyenneté Mondiale (ciscm.fr).

S. D. Chrostowska, exhibition curator along with Joël Gayraud and Guy Girard

Image credit:
Guy Girard, La canicule des sirènes, 1997, oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm