Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School

In this detailed account of what was happening within Surrealism during the crucial years 1938-1947, Martica Sawin documents the cultural transfer that took place when the greater part of the prewar Surrealist group was transplanted to the Western Hemisphere. Sawin's year-by-year narrative pieces together when and how the refugees arrived and their various points of contact with the future abstract expressionists. It documents conclusively the roots of the New York Scool - a hybrid of startling vigour that brought world attention to the new American art for the first time - the evolution of the artworks involved, and the last brilliant flowering of Surrealist art.

Interwoven with the text are 250 photographs of people, places and artworks. Sawin details the lives and work of such key figures as Tanguy, Matta, Ernst, Masson, Breton and others, tracing events that culminated in a new mode of painting that emerged in New York by the mid-1940s particularly in the work of those artists who were in closest contact with the Surrealist emigres, painters such as Gorky, Motherwell and Pollock. An epilogue takes up the postwar fate of both the European refugees and the American artists, the well-known success stories as well as the tragic suicides.