Hans Bellmer, Bruno Botella, Claude Cahun, Alfred Courmes, Arthur Cravan, Guillaume Dégé, André Derain, Monsu Desiderio, Oscar Dominguez, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Léonor Fini, Aline Gagnaire, René Magritte, Marcel Moore, Man Ray, Bona de Mandiargues, André Masson, Joan Miró, Max Morise, Francis Picabia, Janine Queneau, Raymond Queneau, Valentin Ranger, Hugues Reip, Bernard Réquichot, Mathieu Rosianu, Emile Savitry, Lou Tchimoukow, Sarah Tritz, Clovis Trouille, Jacques Vaché, La bibliothèque surréaliste de Simone Collinet, Diego Bianchi, Katinka Bock, Mélissa Boucher Morales, Santiago de Paoli, Francisco Tropa, Prinz Gholam, Franz Erhard Walther, Miriam Cahn Transform the world, change life: a surrealist library

“We spend all our lives here doing surrealism” Simone Collinet, letter to Denise Levy, April 18th, 1924

“Transform the world, said Marx. Change life, said Rimbaud. For us, these two imperatives are one in the same”.

“Transform the world, said Marx. Change life, said Rimbaud. For us, these two imperatives are one in the same”. Of these two ambitions of the surrealist programme, which Breton evoked in 1935, only the second may have been realised. Yet, even if these were not achieved, or were only partially so, these two imperatives maintain and convey to us the vitality of a shared belief: the belief that language is capable of acting upon things – what one might call its performativity.

Pamphlets, appeals, addresses, posters, manifestos, letters, poetry and essays: surrealism is an active library, striving to engage with the clamour and chaos of the world. Open to all the winds of a life which one wishes to be denser and more intense – “a poetic life”, wrote Aragon in Le Paysan de Paris, “a real life”, declared Breton in the opening of the Manifesto.

One hundred years after the publication of this foundational text, this exhibition seeks to unpack the Surrealist library, bringing it into dialogue with visual works of the past and present, which share a commitment to the performativity of forms to impact sensibility and reinvent our presence in the world.

Both at the origin and the heart of this project, there is a real library, that of Simone Collinet, to whom this exhibition pays tribute. Born Simone Kahn in 1897, she married André Breton from 1921 to 1929, was a far-left political activist in the 1930s alongside Michel Collinet, whom she married in 1939, as well as a gallerist in Saint-Germain-des-Prés from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. Simone Collinet embodies and traverses the great surrealist adventure in its three main aspects: poetic, political, and visual.

This exhibition aims to retrace and revive this adventure by bringing together three types of works: a collection of artworks and documents from Surrealism and its surroundings (its ancestry, margins, and various branches); works by contemporary artists that echo surrealism; and a production of various ephemera to be collected and taken away, including pamphlets, flyers and leaflets, which reawaken the surrealist corpus and project.

The show unfolds through a journey designed around five spaces, leading us from the public to the intimate, from the exterior to the interior, from lightness to obscurity: on the ground floor we find, La Rue and La Galerie; and on the upper floor, La Bibliothèque, Le Musée and Le Cabinet.

Emmanuel Tibloux

Save the date

A study and activation day will be held on Saturday 7 December 2024.

More information to follow.

Emmanuel Tibloux

Emmanuel Tibloux has been the Director of the École nationale supérieure des Arts décoratifs since 2018. Prior to this, he was a teacher and researcher in literature at the University of Rennes 2, Director of the Institut Français in Bilbao, and Director of the art schools in Valence, Saint-Etienne, and Lyon. He also served as President of the National Association of Higher Art Schools (ANdEA) from 2009 to 2017. In conjunction with or alongside his professional activities, he has curated several exhibitions and organized in-person and conferences, while also maintaining an active editorial and publishing career.
He co-founded the journal Initiales at the Beaux-Arts de Lyon in 2013 and the journal DECOR at the École des Arts Décoratifs in 2021. Additionally, he co-directs the "Icônes" collection at Les Pérégrines publishing house. Tibloux is also the author of several critical texts, particularly concerning Georges Bataille and the 20th-century avant-gardes, as well as a novel, Le Déclin de la beauté, published under the pseudonym Virgile Tavernier. He frequently contributes to the press with op-eds, articles, and interviews on art, design, culture, and education.