MoMA’s next Surrealism show is small enough to hold in your hands. The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors opens Oct. 4 and treats the book not as a container for art but as an art object in its own right.
Rare volumes by figures including André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Claude Cahun, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Toyen and Unica Zürn. There are unusual papers, collages, photographs, altered bindings, maquettes and sketchbooks. Some objects move so far from conventional publishing that they begin to behave like sculpture.
That was part of the point for the Surrealists. Books offered a collaborative form in which writers and artists could disturb the normal hierarchy between word and image. A page could be cut, folded, pasted over, pierced or made from an unexpected material. Reading became a physical act as well as an intellectual one.
MoMA follows that experimentation from the movement’s formative years in the 1920s through the 1930s and ’40s and into books made in the 1950s and ’60s. Rather than treating Surrealism as a style recognizable from dreamlike paintings, the show looks at a medium that helped the movement circulate its ideas.
Books were particularly suited to a movement fascinated by chance, the unconscious and unexpected combinations. They could travel in a way a painting could not, pass from hand to hand and create sequences that changed as a reader turned pages. They were also natural sites for collaboration among poets, artists, photographers and designers.
A major reason for the exhibition is a gift from the Helen and Sam Zell Collection. MoMA says the group includes rare artists’ books, special editions, unique maquettes and sketchbooks, many being presented at the museum for the first time. One example associated with the show is a 1960 book by Unica Zürn containing ink, pencil, pasted paper, dried plant material, feathers, envelopes, a playing card and thread.
That material list explains the exhibition better than the usual phrase “artists’ books.” These are not simply beautifully illustrated publications. The structure of the book is itself being manipulated. Binding, paper, sequence and scale become artistic decisions.
Jodi Hauptman and Starr Figura organized the show, with Kolleen Ku and Emma Kang. MoMA is also publishing a 272-page catalogue with 325 illustrations, extending the exhibition’s central joke in a productive direction: a show about radical books becomes another book.
MoMA’s history is often told through paintings, sculpture, architecture and design. Here, modernism becomes something portable. Surrealism did not live only on gallery walls. It also moved through objects people could open, close, carry and alter.
Member previews run Oct. 1 through 3. The Surrealist Book opens to the public Oct. 4 on MoMA’s third floor and continues through Jan. 23, 2027.
