Dictionnaire de l’objet surréaliste

Everyone has already seen Buste de femme rétrospectif de Salvador Dalí, a bare breasted woman, with her head covered with a Parisian baker’s “baguette”. Or Bellmer’s disarticulated dolls, be it Man Ray’s l’Indestructible Object, a metronome, its arm with an eye. The productivity of the Surrealists (the term is to be interpreted in a wide sense, and includes the creators of the post WW II period) seems to have been unlimited in the field of objects. This exhibition -open until 3 March 2014 - proves it at the Centre Pompidou. The choice was to accompany it with a real dictionary. The terms mixed, combine key-words such as automatism, disquieting strangeness, anteater and biographies. Next to the stars, it is pleasant to (re) discover Alphonse Benquet, the inventor of the oval wheel, Jacqueline Lamba, André Breton’s first wife or Marcel Jean, the creator of the Chronogrammes.

• Dictionnaire de l’objet surréaliste directed by Didier Ottinger, Centre Pompidou/Gallimard, 2013, 336 p., €39.90 (in French).