Les Catalogues d’expositions surréalistes à Paris, 1924–1939 by Colette Leinman (review)

The topic of this book is certainly original. Although the art exhibitions that the surrealist group organized and curated, from its inception in 1924 to the final major surrealist international exhibition in 1959, have increasingly attracted scholarly attention and generated a series of fascinating articles and books, the catalogues of these exhibitions are usually seen as secondary material. The ambition of this study is to fill the gap by performing a thorough exploration of the historical evolution of what is, in fact, a distinct genre — namely, the exhibition catalogue — from its origins to the beginning of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on its surrealist iteration as a radical rupture of the established codes of that genre. By limiting the timeframe to the period between 1924 and 1939, and the geographical scope to Paris, Colette Leinman indeed creates a manageable corpus that offers, in consecutive snapshots, a radiography of the practice and theory of the surrealist movement. The goal is to show that the surrealist exhibition catalogue is a serious, collective endeavour that at any given moment reflects the group’s theoretical and aesthetic experimentations, thus breaking the stereotype of the surrealist catalogue as a merely ludic and whimsical object. While the book provides a lot of useful information and data — especially in its first chapter, which reconstructs the history of the exhibition catalogue from 1673 to the late nineteenth century, and in its very substantial 104-page annexe, which not only supplies lists of surrealist catalogues, but also several full transcriptions of certain of them — it fails to convey the richness, the originality, and even the scope of these objects. Leinman adopts the perspective of rhetorical and discursive analysis, interspersed with elements drawn from a sociological approach, in order to arrive at the conclusion that the surrealist catalogues function as manifestoes that galvanized the group, often around a ‘rhétorique de Terreur’ (p. 93). However, this approach has led to an organization of the book that makes it very difficult to understand the contents, context, tone, and originality of each catalogue to anyone who is not thoroughly familiar with the history of the surrealist movement. The constant classification of the catalogues following different criteria obscures the objects themselves, and creates confusion without giving a concrete image of each catalogue. For instance, in Chapter 2, following a list of catalogues accompanying exhibitions during the period in question, the catalogues are discussed according to their material presentation, types of illustrations, author (collective or individual), and quotation strategy. The result is that the author only ever provides glimpses, and never a complete view, of each catalogue. Furthermore, the vital connection between the books or pamphlets and the three-dimensional exhibitions they accompanied is completely lost. Leinman’s book is valuable for the documentation it provides, but it fails to do justice to one of the most significant productions of the surrealist imagination.