Surrealism in Belgium: 1924 - 2004 (Mercatorfonds)

The activities of the Surrealists in Belgium were always different from those of their exact contemporaries in the Paris group. In their own ways Paul Nougé, René Magritte, Marcel Mariën and their associates in Brussels and Hainaut were all engaged in the questioning of images, language, meaning and sounds, which they regarded with extreme distrust. For them the only acceptable purpose of creativity was to change the world. Their continuing work and thought has had lasting influence on new generations of artists. It is an important characteristic of the Belgian surrealist movement that it never published a birth or a death certificate. In this book Xavier Canonne convincingly demonstrates that, in Nougé’s words, ‘the experiment continues’.