Document Type
Article
Department/Program
Modern Languages & Literatures
Journal Title
Journal of Surrealism and the Americas
Pub Date
2012
Publisher
Arizona State University
Volume
6
Issue
1
First Page
1
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Breton’s surrealist collection constitutes a twentieth-century cabinet of curiosity that like its baroque predecessors, sought to encompass the world within a contained and concentrated space. This essay argues what makes it a surrealist collection, lies in its ghostliness, its cultivation of a global aesthetic informed by a curiosity about psychological depth. This surrealist collecting sensibility persists in New World collections like the Menil Collection in Houston, which is similarly characterized by ghostliness. Surrealist collections have the potential to help contemporary museum viewers understand better the history of the current aesthetic produced by globalization.
Recommended Citation
Conley, Katharine, What Makes a Collection Surrealist: Twentieth-Century Cabinets of Curiosities in Paris and Houston (2012). Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, 6(1), 1-23.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/aspubs/25
