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In the end a lot of Surrealism suffers from the scripting of manifest content with latent meaning: the artist encodes,...

As Emmanuel Di Donna says in his introduction to this splendid display of vintage portrait photographs by the indisputably great Man Ray, these works do indeed capture “the essence of Parisian life between 1921 and 1939.” How not already to love the verb “capture”?

SURREALIST SABOTAGE AND THE WAR ON WORK. BY ABIGAIL SUSIK. (Manchester University, 2021. 296 pages.)IN A PANTOMIMED SCENE from Charlie Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923), the bon vivant Pierre Revel visits an upscale restaurant’s kitchen to vet the preparation of his meal. Holding an aging pheasant carcass to his nostrils, a chef affirms its quality for the “delighted gourmet,” who, in turn, luxuriates in “the spoiled meat odor as greedily as if it came from a cluster of lilies of the valley.”This campy vignette opens Ilya Ehrenbourg’s essay “The Surrealists,” translated from ...

Underlying the Surrealist leader’s preoccupation with dreams and the unconscious was a very practical desire to change the world. Who’s to say he didn’t succeed?