Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and documents

by Dawn Ades (Editor), Simon Baker (Editor), Fiona Bradley (Contributor)

Undercover Surrealism is the first major survey of DOCUMENTS, the radical surrealist magazine published in France in 1929 and 1930, and edited by the avant-garde philosopher and novelist Georges Bataille. DOCUMENTS combined an eclectic mixture of art, archaeology, ethnography and popular culture, drawing in many of the greatest writers, poets and artists of the time, including Carl Einstein, Robert Desnos, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and Andre Masson. With essays by leading authorities on Bataille and surrealism, and new translations of original articles. Undercover surrealism reflects both the subversive energy and the violent confrontations of imagery and ideas found in DOCUMENTS. It offers fresh insight into the cultural and intellectual climate of Paris in the late 1920s.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Essays

271 pages, Paperback

First published August 16, 2005

Reviews

[Egor xS · Rating 2 out of 5]

This exhibition catalogue has great reproductions and some primary texts translated, yet how come it never discloses more about the history of the journal or why and how it flopped?

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Documents" was the great writer and the thinker of the Underworld Georges Bataille's great journal that lasted for a year or so. Put together in the late 20's, the journal was probably the first time that a group of artists thought about Africian Tribal art or old civilizations and what it meant to Contemporary Art and practices.

With Bataille you got the feeling that he had sort of X-Ray eyes at looking at contemporary culture and had an understanding what lurks underneath that skin. Strongly erotic impulses are measured along with the 'waste' of previous cultures and civilizations. A beautifully (if one can call it that) document of a time when artists explored their regions and matched it up with something from the past.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is quite a helpful overview of a significant, often-overlooked element of Surrealism: Georges Bataille and his circle around the journal Documents. Originally produced as a catalog for an art exhibit in London, Undercover Surrealism is an important and timely study, helping present a less monolithic rendering of Surrealism than is often readily available.

[Luke Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful Bataille-lia. Still highly theoretical but balances the background of the journal DOCUMENTS itself. the journal was trying to explore surrealist art in photography, sculpture, numismatology (study of coins), and painting as a way of unpacking the “Hellenic ideal” that has taken hold of the way our civilization discusses beauty.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

great visual history of Bataille's documents!

[Rachel Fatoorachi-Shprintzen · Rating 3 out of 5]

such a beautiful and compelling work