Oliver Shell

Art history is one of those subjects that I don't read as often as I'd like, so when I get a book that brackets art with World War II, probably my favorite reading subject, it's something of a must read. Considering that Surrealism grew out of the trauma of World War I, one can imagine the impending crisis of another general war in Europe would concentrate the minds of the practitioners, and they responded by filling their art with images of the monstrous, with the Minotaur being something of a particular totem of war and conflict. As for the artists, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Andre Masson receive particular attention, and I found the coverage of Masson to be most interesting, since I didn't know a great deal about his life history; he had a unusually ghastly experience as an infantryman in the Great War. Apart from that, I'd note that the reader with some familiarity with the movement and the period will get the most out of this work.… (mais)