Another surrealism existed: There were not only European men in the movement that changed the 20th century On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist manifesto, an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris proposes a new reading that broadens the role of women and non-Western voices Europe had collapsed and a group of twenty-somethings — traumatized by World War I and alarmed by the potential for destruction that supposed “progress” implied — wanted to rebuild it. They proposed another way of seeing supposed reality, convinced that there was a truth hidden beneath the surface of the visible world. “An absolute reality, a surreality,” wrote André Breton, the movement’s leader and main theorist.
Breton — who studied medicine and psychiatry, although he never completed his studies — sought to “express the real functioning of thought” and prioritize “the omnipotence of the dream.” A century after the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto (1924), the Centre Pompidou in Paris is proposing a new interpretation of this avant-garde movement, which alternated Marx’s desire to “change the world” with Rimbaud’s desire to “change life.” At the beginning of this ambitious exhibition — which opened this past week and will be open to the public until January 2025 — is Breton’s handwritten manifesto, bought from his heirs in 2019 by the National Library of France.
It is now on loan to the Centre Pompidou. Some sentences — writ.