This book explores the evolution of surrealism, from its roots in art history to the birth of the movement in the 1920s. Published to coincide with the exhibition of the same name at the Fundacion Juan March in Madrid (Oct 2013 - Jan 2014), Surrealist Before Surrealism brings together more than 200 drawings, prints, photographs, books and magazines, ranging from the late Middle Ages through to the Surrealist movement. The show follows the path set out by the legendary exhibition "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism", organized 75 years ago by the founding Director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Alfred H. Barr, in which he provided a genealogy of Surrealism by juxtaposing, for the first time, the work of contemporary artists with that of Hieronymus Bosch, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, William Hogarth, Francisco de Goya and Grandville among others. Undoubtedly, the artistic sensibility of the Surrealist artists, as well as their preferred working methods, led them to fix their collective gaze upon the long tradition of the art of subjectivity, from the late medieval era, to the Mannerist and Baroque periods, through to modernity.
