Julia Drost Book order

A hundred years ago, the Surrealist experimented with strategics of archiving as an avant-garde gesture. In 1924 they founded the Bureau of Surrealist Research in Paris in order to preserve and study dreams of all kinds and integrate them into creative processes. This Surrealist "bureau-archive" operated with collected fantasies, desires, nightmares, and cravings. The publication Archive of Dreams follows the same principle by exploring individual and collective dreams, ancient myths, and avant-garde visions. It is published in conjunction with the first exhibition from the collection of the Archiv der Avantgarden - Egidio Marzona (ADA) in the Staatliehe Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD). The archive's holdings from the twentieth century shed light on the working methods of the artistic avant-gardes and their global networks. In Archive of Dreams the borders between visible reality and unconscious processes blur, as do the lines between the past, the present, and potential futures.

This volume brings the complex networks that fostered and sustained surrealism in North America into academic focus. Who — among collectors, critics, dealers, galleries, and other kinds of mediating agents — supported the artists in the surrealist orbit, in what ways, and why? What more can be learned about highprofile collectors such as the de Menils in Houston or Peggy Guggenheim in New York? Compared to their peers in Europe, did artists in the United States use similarly spectacular strategies of publicity and mediation? In what networks did the commercial galleries operate, locally and internationally, and how did they dialogue with museums? This book offers an innovative and lasting contribution to research and scholarship on the history of art in America, while focusing specifically on the expansion and reception of surrealism in the United States.