Writing in the years after the first world war, French writer and poet André Breton lamented that under “the pretence of civilisation and progress,” European culture had “managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy”. The first surrealist manifesto Breton co-wrote in 1924 called on writers and artists to explore all that fell beyond rational and the conscious thought: dreams, hallucinations, unedited streams of thought and childlike wonder.
Honouring that manifesto, 2024 has been designated the centenary of surrealism. Anniversaries are just the kind of bourgeois convention that would have got Breton’s dander up (it rose easily). Nevertheless, homage is being paid. West Yorkshire joins the celebration with two exhibitions taking appropriately irreverent and sideways views: The Traumatic Surreal in Leeds and Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes in Wakefield.
