Praise for Surrealism:
“Speaking of the Parisian surrealists that she and Franklin Rosemont met in Paris during their visit in 1965–66, Penelope describes them as ‘overflowing with poetry, beauty, humor, excitement and life.’ Every word applies to this book, a fascinating collection of essays, diary notes, and surrealist reflections. When writing about André Breton and his friends, or about the marvelous surrealist women artists Toyen, Mimi Parent, Leonora Carrington, or Jayne Cortez, Rosemont is not delivering dry abstractions, as so many academic ‘specialists,’ but telling us about warm and exciting human encounters, illuminated by the subversive spirit of Permanent Enchantment.”––Michael Löwy, author of Ecosocialism
“This compelling and well-drawn book lets us see the adventures, inspirations, and relationships that have shaped Penelope Rosemont’s art and rebellion.”––David Roediger, author of Class, Race, and Marxism
“Anyone seeking to understand contemporary surrealism or the history of surrealism in America and beyond should make their way at once to this book. Penelope Rosemont’s remarkable life and legendary body of work lies centrally at the crossroads of surrealism then and now. The broad sampling of essays included here offer a compelling entry point for curious readers and an essential compendium for surrealist practitioners.”––Abigail Susik, professor of art history, Willamette University
“Reading Rosemont is like being led by an enchanted guide through the wild fields of Surrealism. Around her neck must be a double lens made out of telescope and magnifying glass through which she studies this glowing, breathless landscape. Artist, historian, and social activist, Rosemont writes from the inside out. Like a rare, hybrid flower growing out of the earth, she complicates, expands, and opens the strange and beautiful meadow where Surrealism continues to live and thrive.”––Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Wild Milk
“In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Penelope Rosemont, long a keeper of surrealism’s revolutionary flame, shows how a penetrating look into the past can liberate the future. With humor and passion, Rosemont tells the story both of her own engagement with surrealism and of surrealism’s relevance to the struggle for social and psychic transformation. Whether addressed to feminism, anarchism, the black power movement, or visual art and poetry, Rosemont’s writing, like surrealism itself, sets fire to everything it touches.”––Andrew Joron, author of The Absolute Letter
“The looming centenary of Surrealism will be greeted by a boatload of publications, but few will be as heartfelt, spirited, and teeming with the atmosphere conjured by Penelope Rosemont. Her welcome memoir has a double virtue, as testament to the enduring radiance of Surrealism, and as a memento to the sixties, revealing a sweetly beating wonderment at the heart of that absurdly maligned decade.”––Jed Rasula, author of Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century
“Written with the quickness, candor, and delight of encounter, Penelope Rosemont’s Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields brings surrealism’s central figures, Leonora Carrington, Man Ray, Toyen, Andre Breton et al. into our field of experience, and out of the stasis of photography and film, where most of us have glimpsed them. Most thrilling, perhaps, is the ’60s mimeo-magazine-making coterie of Rosemont and her friends, seeking revolution, disorientation, anything but the banality of the American Midwestern plains. Quite naturally possessing what she calls ‘remnants of my healthy beatnik hedonism,’ Rosemont recreates the feverish antics and immediate reception her close-knit, sleep-deprived, beat-attired squad find in the established, mores-breaking Parisian and international surrealists. Revolution is here, between the covers. Anyone who opens this book is invited to the journey, the party, the radicalism that ‘must not be grim but a liberation, an increase of pleasure. Otherwise what is the point of it?’”––Gillian Conoley, author of A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems and translator of Thousand Times Broken: Three Books by Henri Michaux
“Penelope Rosemont recounts her chance encounters with surrealists in Paris, leading her to a lifelong adventure in surrealist praxes. These included (and still do!) sharing poetry, stories, art, and games of objective chance with kindred spirits around the globe, some of which she shares with us in these magical pages. As surrealists, we live our lives not as today’s external world demands but as our own inner dreams, desires, and imaginations lead. We demand nothing less than the impossible not in some distant utopian future but right here, right now.”––Gale Ahrens, author of Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality & Solidarity
Copyright © 2019 by Penelope Rosemont
All Rights Reserved.
Cover art: Leonora Carrington, Ikon (1988)
Copyright © 2019 Estate of Leonora Carrington/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rosemont, Penelope, author.
Title: Surrealism : inside the magnetic fields / Penelope Rosemont.
Description: San Francisco : City Lights Books, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “A series of personal and historical encounters with surrealism from one of its foremost practitioners in the United States”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019026917 (print) | LCCN 2019026918 (ebook) | ISBN 9780872867680 (paperback) | ISBN 9780872868267 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Rosemont, Penelope. | Surrealist artists—United States—Biography. | Women artists—United States—Biography. | Women authors, American—Biography. | Surrealism.
Classification: LCC NX512.R67 A2 2019 (print) | LCC NX512.R67 (ebook) | DDC 700/.41163—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026917
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026918
City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133
Contents
ONE The Magnetic Fields, Cinema, and the Penetrating Light of the Total Eclipse
TWO My Days in the Mimeo Revolution
THREE Paris Days – Winter to Spring
FOUR Chicago: Maxwell Street in the Sixties
FIVE Toyen and The Sleeping Girl 77
SIX The Hermetic Windows of Joseph Cornell
SEVEN Citizen Train Defends the Haymarket Anarchists
EIGHT Mary MacLane, A Daughter of Butte, MT
NINE Surrealist Encounters, Ted Joans, Jayne Cortez, Black Power