Exhibition

Surréalisme, pour ainsi dire... Le Surréalisme dans les collections du Musée

If, since the nineteenth century, photography has captivated countless authors, painters and writers alongside photographers and has fuelled various artistic movements, the avant-gardes having contributed to its autonomy, only few of these avant-gardes can boast of having made use of photography with the same consistency and the same variety as surrealism.

Solarized, cut out, photogrammed, burned, overprinted, subjected to the randomness of chance or conscientiously elaborated, not to mention borrowings from photographers outside the movement such as Eugène Atget and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, or those jealously collected postcards, photography took on the most unexpected forms with the surrealists. 

Exceptional users of photography like Paul Nougé, occasional practitioners such as Magritte and Fondane, intermittent practitioners like Mariën and Molinier, professional practitioners like Ubac, Man Ray and Lefrancq, all bear witness to a particular as well as intimate relationship to its use, photography often offering them a counter-point to other modes of expression – writing, assemblage, painting, collage or engraving – in a to and fro that enriched their practices. Surréalisme, pour ainsi dire... is a title that expresses both the precautions needed and the difficulties involved in defining a ‘labelled’ output, in tracing the boundaries of ‘surrealist photography’, since the author’s intention and subject are not always the most reliable criteria, any more than membership of one of the surrealist groups, which could vary in terms of duration and period.

The centenary of the publication of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, hailed by numerous exhibitions and events around the world, seemed to us to be the ideal opportunity to look at one of the major areas of the Museum’s collection, surrealist photography, by making a selection from it. In addition to works by the members of the Belgian groups (Brussels and Hainaut), we have included representatives of the Paris group, as well as a number of more isolated figures like Jindřich Štyrský, and the solitary Bourges artist, the curious Marcel Bascoulard, whom we did not want to forcibly assimilate with the surrealists but whose approach would not have left them indifferent if they had known him. Besides the acquisition of photographic prints, particular attention has been paid to publications, reviews, books and catalogues, which were the main means of disseminating surrealist photography when there was still no market for it.

The exhibition Surréalisme, pour ainsi dire... includes twelve sections, arbitrarily divided into themes named just as arbitrarily, departing from an alphabetical or chronological presentation.