Dark Window Press acaba de publicar el libro de Desmond Morris 69 surrealists. La promoción reza así:
“Many books have been written about the art of
the surrealists, but in this volume Desmond Morris focuses instead on the
artists themselves and the way they behaved. What were their backgrounds, their
personalities, their weaknesses and their strengths? How did their conduct
their sexual and social lives? These are the questions that this book sets out
to investigate in a series of sixty-five short biographical sketches. Some of
the artists were out-and-out surrealists throughout their entire adult lives.
Others had an intense surrealist phase but at other times were also involved in
different art forms. Some were viewed as surrealists, but not by themselves. In
addition to the 69 discussed here, 31 others - the main characters central to
the movement - will be dealt with in a later volume to be published by Thames
& Hudson.
Desmond Morris has lived a double life. In
public he is known as a zoologist and student of human behaviour who has
written more than 60 books and made over 500 television programmes. In private,
however, he has been a lifelong surrealist artist, making his first surrealist
works as a teenager during World War II. In the seventy years since then he has
completed over 2700 paintings and has held 55 solo exhibitions in eight
countries, the first in 1948 and the last in 2016. He is now one of the few
survivors of the so-called «heroic» period of the surrealist movement that came
to an end in 1951, just as he was starting out. He knew many of the surrealist
artists personally and became fascinated by their remarkably varied lifestyles
- some wild and abandoned, others quiet and restrained. He has never written
about them before, preferring to keep his writing activities separate from his
surrealist involvements, but he felt that it was time to make an exception to
this rule, hence the present volume”.
