dada and surrealism - book - 1977 - A Cavalier History of Surrealism

A Cavalier History of Surrealism
Raoul Vaneigem (J-F Dupris)
translated by Donald Nicholson Smith
AK Press
1977 (eng translation: 1999)
131 pages

Raoul Vaneigem is perhaps the second best known member of the Situationist International, a small group of French (for the most part) radical philosophers and artists who, along with a number of student leaders such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, were at the centre of the May ‘68 uprisings in that country.  Vaneigem is the author of The Revolution of Everyday Life, which, along with The Society of the Spectacle, is one of the major texts of the SI.

A Cavalier History of Surrealism is not so much a history, as it is a critique of the Surrealist movement. While it does move through discussions of the different phases that the Surrealist movement had taken in its thirty years, Vaneigem criticizes the movement as being inferior to its immediate historical predecessor, Dada. Vaneigem is especially critical of the Surrealist turn towards Communism which went as far as involving an official affiliation with the Communist Party that attempted to mandate Surrealist activities, and also a later turn towards mysticism/occultism. Surrealism is so often identified by artists, critics, and art historians as Dada all grown up that it is exciting for someone like me (who’s far more enthusiastic about the Dada movement) to see a well known revolutionary theorist praise the earlier art movement above the latter.

I should note that Vaneigem's SI Comrade Guy Debord was critical of both Surrealism and Dada. Debord saw both groups as characterized by a failure to give their artistic revolutions any relevance to life as it was actually lived by people.
(available to read online here)