"The human soul is international." (Bulletin international du surréalisme [Mezinárodní Buletin Surrealismu], Prague, April 1935)
Surrealism was an international political movement. Surrealists denounced European colonial policies, organized themselves against fascist movements, fought for the Spanish Republic, were persecuted, went into exile, fell in the war against the National Socialists.
They wrote poetry, deconstructed a supposedly rational language in a supposedly rational world, worked on paintings, collective drawings, took photographs and made collages. As a method that is often quite naturally linked to emancipatory concerns, surrealism was taken up again and again from the 1968s to the Black civil rights movement.
The exhibition at the Lenbachhaus sees itself as a bundling of attempts to revise a still narrow and politically trivialized surrealist canon and to answer the question anew: What is Surrealism?