In Montparnasse

May 6, 2019
Roe (In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art) traces the birth and evolution of Surrealism in this colorful but overly detailed account, revealing how a group of disgruntled Paris artisans created a new movement and turned the art world on its head. Infuriated by the massive destruction of WWI, artists including Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Man Ray exploded the boundaries of society and art when they moved to the low-rent, gritty district of Montparnasse, “lifting things out of their habitual contexts... to endow them with new, startling implications.” Throughout, Roe describes pivotal artistic moments: Gertrude Stein attending the revolutionary premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Duchamp adapting a urinal into ready-made art, Cocteau transforming a bar into an avant-garde hangout, Man Ray developing images with three-dimensional qualities called rayographs, René Magritte turning a painting of a pipe into a work of art, and, finally, the showing of Salvador Dali’s Lobster Telephone in 1936. Roe is an elegant writer, but the narrative can become confusing as she jumps back and forth between artists within chapters. Nevertheless, this entertaining, fast-paced history will thrill Francophones and art historians alike.

June 1, 2019
The legacy of surrealism continues to affect how viewers see art. Biographer and art historian Roe (In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse, and Modernism in Paris, 1900-1910, 2014, etc.) follows her account of the titans of modernism by documenting the lives and works of artists and writers who invented, promoted, and reimagined the anarchic movement they called surrealism. Their goal was to produce art that "extended beyond the limits of realism" by juxtaposing elements of the real world in new and shocking ways, illuminated the workings of the unconscious, and aimed, explicitly, "to jar the relationship between artist and viewer." The Parisian neighborhood of Montparnasse thronged with surrealists: the imperious André Breton, the "Pope of Surrealism," whose strident manifestos laid out the principles of the movement; poets Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard; German artist Max Ernst, creator of shocking collages--one featuring "part of a hand emerging through a trap door, the index finger pierced with a steel implement"; the flamboyant poet, filmmaker, artist, and opium addict Jean Cocteau; the young Salvador Dalí, enthusiastically celebrating his own inner world; Marcel Duchamp, who famously submitted a urinal as a sculpture to a major exhibition and eventually gave up art for chess; photographer Man Ray; and scores of other men and their many idealized, exploited, and betrayed lovers, wives, and mistresses. Surrealists treated women badly, Roe concedes, explaining their misogyny as consistent with the times. Surrealist artists, she adds, "were baffled by women and wanted in their work to dissect and inspect the female." As noisy revolutionaries, they exhibited "myriad contradictions": for example, managing to be "both trenchantly anti-establishment and sartorially dapper." Drawing largely on memoirs, biographies, and histories of the period, Roe reprises events and personalities that readers may find familiar from works such as Ruth Brandon's Surreal Lives (1999) and Desmond Morris' The Lives of the Surrealists (2018). Nevertheless, she renders with deftness and precision the strange and disturbing works surrealists produced by tapping into their emotions of "terror, horror, disgust, or fear." A thorough, well-informed survey of an art revolution.

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July 1, 2019

From about 1911 onward, notes Roe (In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art), the artistic center of Paris had begun to shift from Montmartre to the galleries, studios, and cafés of Montparnasse. In this lively and colorful new book (released in the UK in 2018), the author takes readers there, to experience the emergence of the surrealist movement in not only art (Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio di Chirico) but also literature and poetry (André Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire), theater (Jean Cocteau), music (Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky), and dance (Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes). It was a wild and crazy time in the arts, with some wild and crazy personalities. It was also a dark time: the looming war, artists' poverty as well as success, vicious feuds among artists, and the thoughtless, often cruel, treatment of their wives, girlfriends, and models. VERDICT Of the many books published on surrealism, Roe's has a breadth of coverage and vivacity of observation that make it special. Art lovers will find much to appreciate and ponder, and Francophiles will enjoy this distinctive "tour."--Marcia G. Welsh, Dartmouth Coll. Lib., Hanover, NH

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2019
The Tate's online glossary defines surrealism as A twentieth-century literary, philosophical and artistic movement that explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the poetic and the revolutionary. Roe continues her study of art movements in twentieth-century Paris, following In Montmartre (2015), focusing here on surrealist artists and the colorful Paris neighborhood in which they lived and worked. She writes that the lure of the decadent, the uncensored expression of chaotic, disruptive, erotic drives and the power of the unconscious to direct the artist's work . . . all these things together added up to what the artists in this book understood by surrealism. Among those artists are Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Joan Mir� as well as Jean Cocteau, Andr� Breton, Erik Satie, Tristan Tzara, and many others. Combining art history with biography, she paints a colorful portrait of this sometimes bizarre, often unsettling, but always fascinating milieu and its denizens. The substantial bibliography is a welcome feature for anyone interested in a movement whose effects can still be felt in today's art world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)