Books That Bite, MoMA Opens The Surrealist Book on West 53rd Street
Lead glass, a dried seahorse and a nickel silver binding turn the Surrealist library into a haunted house for readers
Most books ask to be opened. The ones in a new show at the Museum of Modern Art would rather you kept your distance. One has a cover made of shattered lead glass. Another has a dried seahorse sealed into the back. A third wears a binding of nickel silver, like something meant to keep a secret in.
The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors opened to the public October 4 and runs through January 23, 2027, MoMA's press page for the show says. It is a quiet, strange show for a month when the city is thinking about masks and ghosts, and it fits the season better than most.
The Library of the Marvelous
The museum's introduction describes the book as "an enchanted portal to the unexpected, the irrational, and, what they called, the 'marvelous.'" The names are the ones you would hope for. André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Paul Éluard, Claude Cahun and Toyen all appear on MoMA's list of featured artists and writers.
The objects do the talking. MoMA singles out Giorgio de Chirico and Paul Éluard's Défense de savoir, published in 1928 and rebound in 1936 by Georges Hugnet and Louis Christy, with front and back covers of shattered lead glass. It highlights a copy of Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme and Poisson soluble, published in 1924 and rebound in 1931 in nickel silver for the collector René Gaffé, with annotations by Breton and a collage poem. And it points to Dalí and Hugnet's Onan from 1934, where the covers hold dye-colored sand on the front and a dried seahorse on the back, both between lead glass.
An enchanted portal to the unexpected, the irrational, and, what they called, the "marvelous."
That is the premise, and every object seems to push it harder than the last. The show also includes books that question what a book is, according to Siglio Press, along with maquettes and notebooks that reveal how they were made. That is the part worth lingering on, because it turns a case of rare objects into a workshop where you can see the hands.
The Women in the Margins
The show is not only a tour of famous men. Unica Zürn's Orakel und Spektakel, dated 1960, is built from ink, feathers, envelopes and pasted paper. Toyen and Jindřich Heisler's Z kasemat spánku, published in Prague in 1940, pairs eight gelatin silver prints of staged environments with poems. Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore's Aveux non avenus, or Canceled Confessions, came out in 1930 with ten gravure reproductions of photomontages. MoMA lists the copy on view as one of 25 press copies from a total edition of 500.
The publisher Siglio Press notes how the book was received at the time. Gallimard declined it, calling it an indeterminate genre, and critics largely ignored it or met it with hostility. Cahun later wrote that she had tried, through black humor and provocation, to shake contemporaries out of their blissful conformism and complacency. Toyen, for her part, hid the Jewish poet Jindřich Heisler in Prague for the whole of the Nazi occupation, Siglio notes, and the two made work together. Nearly a century on, the room reads as a late correction to a record that overlooked them.
A Gift on Fifty-Third Street
The featured books come from one gift. Every caption MoMA publishes for the featured works credits the Helen and Sam Zell gift. The exhibition was organized by Jodi Hauptman, the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, with Starr Figura, Kolleen Ku and Emma Kang of the same department. Lead funding comes from the Eyal and Marilyn Ofer Family Foundation, in honor of Sam Zell.
It is one of several fall shows at the museum. Time Out's guide to MoMA's fall season puts the Surrealist book beside Brancusi, which opens October 25, and Jakob Kudsk Steensen's immersive work on wetlands, opening October 12. It is a season that rewards a long evening.
How to See It
Go slowly. These are small objects that depend on close looking, and they reward the kind of patience a Friday night crowd rarely has. Look at the bindings first. The covers are where the jokes are. Then look at the pages. For another show about how an artist remakes a familiar image, Roy Lichtenstein's survey makes a good companion.
Surrealism always understood that the thing in your hands could be a threat. These books still bite. In a month of masks, that is an excellent reason to go.
