The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 2 No. 2 (2008) - Table of Contents
“Surrealism and Photography: Introduction” by Wendy Grossman, p. i-iv.
“‘Surrealistic and disturbing’: Timothy O’Sullivan as Seen by Ansel Adams in the 1930s” by Britt Salvesen, p. 162-179.
“‘As if one’s eyelids had been cut away’: Frederick Sommer’s Arizona Landscapes” by Ian Walker, p. 180-208.
“Clarence John Laughlin, Regionalist Surrealist” by Lewis Kachur, p. 209-226.
“A Swimmer Between Two Worlds: Francesca Woodman’s Maps of Interior Space” by Katharine Conley, p. 227-252.
“Remembering Anne D’Harnoncourt” by Valery Oisteanu, p. 253.
“The 1930s: The Making of the ‘New Man’” by Julia Pine, p. 254-258.
“Beyond Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch” by Robert McNab, p. 259-262.
“Review of Kirby Olson, ‘Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America’” by Éva Forgács, p. 263-267.
“Review of Sally Price, 'Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly’” by Kate Duncan, p. 268-272.
The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 5 No. 1 (2011) - Table of Contents
“Women in the Surrealist Conversation: Introduction” by Katharine Conley, p. i-xiv.
“Temple of the Word: (Post-) Surrealist Women Artists’ Literary Production in America and Mexico” by Georgiana M.M. Colvile, p. 1-18.
“Leonora Carrngton, Mexico, and the Culture of Death” by Jonathan P. Eburne, p. 19-32.
“The Lost Secret: Frida Kahlo and the Surrealist Imaginary” by Alyce Mahon, p. 33-54.
“Art, Science and Exploration: Rereading the Work of Remedios Varo” by Natalya Frances Lusty, p. 55-76.
“Mary Low’s Feminist Reportage and the Politics of Surrealism” by Emily Robins Sharpe, p. 77-97.
“Waste Management: Hitler’s Bathtub” by Laurie Monahan, p. 98-119.
“Kay Sage’s ‘Your Move’ and/as Autobiography” by Elisabeth F. Sherman, p. 120-133.
“Dorothea Tanning and her Gothic Imagination” by Victoria Carruthers, p. 134-158.
“The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art” by Steven Harris, p. 159-161.
‘Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention’: The Jewish Museum, November 15, 2009 - March 14, 2010” by Lewis Kachur, p. 162-167.
“Review of Gail Levin, ‘Lee Krasner: A Biography’” by Sandra R. Zalman, p. 168-171.
The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 6 No. 1 (2012) - Table of Contents
“Notes for a Historiography of Surrealism in America, or the Reinterpretation of the Repressed” by Samantha Kavky, p. i-ix.
“What Makes a Collection Surrealist?: Twentieth-Century Cabinets of Curiosities in Paris and Houston” by Katharine Conley, p. 1-23.
“Dalí, Magritte, and Surrealism’s Legacy, New York c. 1965” by Sandra Zalman, p. 24-38.
“‘What Makes Indians Laugh’: Surrealism, Ritual, and Return in Steven Yazzie and Joseph Beuys” by Claudia Mesch, p. 39-60.
“Cracking up an Alligator: Ethnography, Juan Downey’s Videos, and Irony” by Hjorleifur Jonsson, p. 61-86.
“Review of Effie Rentzou, ‘Littérature Malgré Elle: Le Surréalisme et la Transformation du Littéraire’” by Pierre Taminiaux, p. 87-90.
“In Wonderland: the Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States” by Susan L. Aberth, p. 91-94.
“Fantasyland or Wackyland? Animation and Surrealism in 1930s America” by Jorgelina Orfila and Francisco Ortega Grimaldo, p. 1-19.
“El único punto de resistencia: Cultural, Linguistic and Medial Transgressions in the Surrealist Journal VVV” by Andrea Gremels, p. 20-41.
“Chicago Surrealism, Herbert Marcuse, and the Affirmation of the ‘Present and Future Viability of Surrealism’” by Abigail Susik, p. 42-62.
“Surrealist Associations and Mexico’s Precariat in Roberto Wong’s París D.F.” by Kevin M. Anzzolin, p. 63-80.
“Book Review: New Books on Dorothea Tanning” by Katharine Conley, p. 81-83.
“Exhibition Review: ‘Photography and the Surreal Imagination’” by Sandra Zalman, p. 84-89.
“Exhibition Review: ‘Monsters and Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s’” by Jonathan S. Wallis, p. 86-93
The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 1 No. 1 (2007) - Table of Contents
"Introduction to the Journal" by Samantha Kavky, Claudia Mesch, and Amy H. Winter, p. i-iii.
"Anti-Surrealist Cross-Word Puzzles: Breton, Dalí and Print in Wartime America" by Julia Pine, p. 1-29.
"William Carlos Williams’ A Novelette: an American Counterproposal to French Surrealism" by Céline Mansanti, p. 30-43
"The Vernacular as Vanguard: Alfred Barr, Salvador Dalí, and the U.S. Reception of Surrealism in the 1930s" by Sandra Zalman, p. 44-67
"Ben Cobb, Anarchy and Alchemy: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky" by David Church, p. 68-71
"Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted" by Marta Julia Clapp, p. 72-76
"Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and 'Poetic Politics'" by Terri J. Gordon, p. 77-80
"Dali and the Specter of Cinema" by Frédérique Camille Joseph-Lowery, p. 81-84
"Julia Kelly's Art, Ethnography and the Life of Objects: Paris, c. 1925-1935" by Susan Power, p. 85-90
"The Janus-faced Legacy of Joseph Beuys" by Tatjana Myoko von Prittwitz, p. 91-93
"A.J. Meek, Clarence John Laughlin: Prophet Without Honor" by Jeffrey Ian Ross, p. 94-98
While the earlier affiliation between Salvador Dalí and André Breton had been, for the most part, fruitful and amicable, by the early 1940s when both had relocated to America as exiles from the war in Europe, their relations had become decidedly acrimonious. This animus is graphically revealed in the textual record the two left behind, in the form of treatises, memoirs, popular articles, transcribed lectures and exegeses: documents which map Breton’s efforts to differentiate the Surrealist movement as defined by his own directive, from that of the “popular” variety of Surrealism associated almost exclusively with Dalí in the United States. Likewise, they trace Dalí’s riposte, manifest in an attempt to minimize Breton’s profile in and contribution to Surrealism before an American audience via a program of negation. These “crossed words” document a vicarious “conversation” between Dalí and Breton between 1939 and 1944, when the two increasingly employed various text media to situate themselves and each other in terms of Surrealism in the New World. While not addressing each other directly per se, the “paper trail” in question registers the other’s presence either by direct reference, or conspicuous by its absence, and creates a dialectic that underscores the differences between what the two clearly identified as “orthodox” Surrealism as defined by Breton and his Parisian circle between the wars, and what might be termed “Dalínian” or “commercial” Surrealism – not necessarily endorsed by Dalí, but primarily associated with the artist and his work in North America.
This paper works to characterize the relationship between Surrealism’s art, its critical reception and its popularity in American culture, a relationship often mediated by Salvador Dalí’s public embodiment of the movement. Alfred Barr’s 1936 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art introduced a broad view of Surrealism to a receptive American audience. While Surrealism’s investigation into the irrationality of everyday life resonated with the American public, it was Dalí who ensured that the movement stayed in the spotlight, designing among other things, department store windows, magazine covers, and several series of advertisements; by 1939, when Dalí and his dealer Julien Levy promoted a Surrealist Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, it made sense that the pavilion was located not in the Fine Arts section of the Fair, but in the Amusements Arena. The same year, despite, or perhaps, because of Dalí’s flamboyant articulation of the infiltration of market forces and mass media, he was also recognized as dramatizing the constraints of the circumscribed art world which had just begun to feel the influences of formalism. This paper argues that Dalí posed a challenge that placed Surrealism’s mediation between art and life at the center of the making of an American artistic culture.
