Georges Bataille, 1897-1962
27 May - 21 Dec 2015
From Acéphale to Grand Transparent: Surrealism and modern myth
Curator : Mnam/Cci / Didier Ottinger
The creation of a modern myth was an integral part of the Surrealist project, put at the heart of its agenda in the Thirties by the thinking of the ethnologists who made up most of the editorial committee of the journal Documents, founded by Georges Bataille in 1929. And it was Bataille’s idea to reinvent the social rituals that Marcel Mauss and his disciples had seen as ensuring the cohesion of primitive societies. Founded in 1933, the journal Minotaure brought together the two tendencies of the Surrealist movement represented by André Breton and Bataille. In 1937, Bataille and André Masson created Acéphale, the first Surrealist myth, promulgated through a journal that was twinned with a “secret society” bound together by a “sacrificial” rite. Surrealism’s American exile during the Second World War saw the movement’s public conversion to myth. The exhibition Breton organised in New York in 1942 was subtitled: “On the Survival of Certain Myths and on Some Other Myths in Growth or Formation”. “Le surréalisme en 1947”, the exhibition that marked Breton’s reappearance on the Paris scene, was entirely devoted to the question of myth, and at the heart of the exhibition designed by Marcel Duchamp was Le Grand Transparent, a monumental figure sculpted by Jacques Hérold.
Didier Ottinger
Curator : Mnam/Cci / Didier Ottinger
The creation of a modern myth was an integral part of the Surrealist project, put at the heart of its agenda in the Thirties by the thinking of the ethnologists who made up most of the editorial committee of the journal Documents, founded by Georges Bataille in 1929. And it was Bataille’s idea to reinvent the social rituals that Marcel Mauss and his disciples had seen as ensuring the cohesion of primitive societies. Founded in 1933, the journal Minotaure brought together the two tendencies of the Surrealist movement represented by André Breton and Bataille. In 1937, Bataille and André Masson created Acéphale, the first Surrealist myth, promulgated through a journal that was twinned with a “secret society” bound together by a “sacrificial” rite. Surrealism’s American exile during the Second World War saw the movement’s public conversion to myth. The exhibition Breton organised in New York in 1942 was subtitled: “On the Survival of Certain Myths and on Some Other Myths in Growth or Formation”. “Le surréalisme en 1947”, the exhibition that marked Breton’s reappearance on the Paris scene, was entirely devoted to the question of myth, and at the heart of the exhibition designed by Marcel Duchamp was Le Grand Transparent, a monumental figure sculpted by Jacques Hérold.
Didier Ottinger