Frida Kahlo self-portrait sells for $54.7 million, sets new record for women artists


Frida Kahlo’s 1940 self-portrait “El sueno (La cama)” sold for $54.66 million in New York on Thursday, Sotheby’s said, setting a record for the most expensive painting by a woman.


Issued on: 21/11/2025
By: FRANCE 24

Auction house Sotheby's says Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's "El Sueno (La cama)" has sold for $54.6 million, a new record for a woman's painting. © Charly Triballeau, AFP

A self-portrait by legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold for $54.66 million in New York on Thursday, setting a new record for the price of a painting by a woman, the auction house Sotheby's said.

The sale of Kahlo's 1940 artwork, titled "El sueno (la cama)" – which translates to "The dream (The bed)" – breaks the previous record in this category, set by American artist Georgia O'Keeffe, whose 1932 painting "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1," sold for $44.4 million in 2014.

Kahlo's painting is "the most valuable work by a woman artist ever sold at auction," Sotheby's said in a post on X.

The auction house said Kahlo's work was "painted in 1940 during a pivotal decade in her career, marked by her turbulent relationship with Diego Rivera".


Kahlo's self-portrait went on the auction block at Sotheby's with an estimated price ranging from $40 million to $60 million.

The buyer's name was not disclosed.

The artwork depicts the artist sleeping in a bed that appears to float among clouds in the sky, laying beneath a skeleton with legs that are wrapped with sticks of dynamite.

This painting is a "very personal" image, in which Kahlo "merges folkloric motifs from Mexican culture with European surrealism", Anna Di Stasi, head of Latin American art at Sotheby's, told AFP.

The Mexican artist, who passed away in 1954 at age of 47, "did not completely agree" with her work being associated with the surrealist movement, Di Stasi said.

However, "given this magnificent iconography, it seems entirely appropriate to include it" in this movement.

The record-setting sale came two nights the New York auction house reeled in another record sale, with a painting by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt fetching $236.4 million on the block – the second most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.

Klimt's "Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer," which he painted between 1914 and 1916, depicts the daughter of his main patron dressed in a white imperial Chinese dress, standing before a blue tapestry with Asian-inspired motifs.

The most expensive painting ever sold at auction remains the "Salvator Mundi," attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, which was bought for $450 million in 2017.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

A Klimt portrait is now the second most expensive artwork ever auctioned

A rare full-length portrait by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt sold for $236.4 million in New York on Tuesday, becoming the second most expensive artwork ever auctioned. The fiercely contested sale underscores surging demand for museum-calibre pieces as Sotheby’s prepares to offer a major Frida Kahlo work later this week.


Issued on: 19/11/2025 - By: FRANCE 24

Gustav Klimt's “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” exhibited by Sotheby's in New York on November 8, 2025. © Charly Triballeau, AFP

A portrait by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt fetched $236.4 million in New York on Tuesday, becoming the second most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.

Six bidders battled for 20 minutes over the “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer,” which Klimt painted between 1914 and 1916.

The piece depicts the daughter of Klimt's main patron dressed in a white imperial Chinese dress, standing before a blue tapestry with Asian-inspired motifs.

Sotheby's, which managed the sale, did not disclose the identity of the buyer.

The most expensive painting ever sold at auction remains the “Salvator Mundi,” attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, which was bought for $450 million in 2017.

“Full-length society portraits of this impressive scale and from Klimt's pinnacle period (1912–17) are exceptionally rare; the majority in major museum collections,” Sotheby's said of Tuesday's sale.

READ MORELost Claudel sculpture found in Paris flat fetches $3 million at auction

“The painting offered this evening was one of only two such commissioned portraits remaining in private hands,” it added.

For Klimt, the past auction record for his work was held by "Lady with a Fan", which sold for 85.3 million pounds ($108.8 million) in London in 2023.

On Thursday, a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo has a strong chance of setting a record for a female artist when it goes on sale, also at Sotheby's in New York.

Kahlo painting likely to break record for most expensive work by any female

© France 24
01:22

Estimated at $40 to $60 million, the 1940 piece called "The Dream (The Bed)" shows the Mexican painter sleeping in a bed overshadowed by a large skeleton.

The most expensive painting by a female artist sold to date is a 1932 work by American Georgia O’Keeffe, which fetched $44.4 million in 2014.

The record for Frida Kahlo is another 1949 self-portrait, "Diego and I", which sold for $34.4 million in New York.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, star of '8½' and 'The Leopard,' dies aged 87

She has been a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Women's Rights since 1999

Copyright Credit: ArchivoCameraphoto Epoche/Cannes Film Festival

By Rita Konya
Published on 24/09/2025  

EURONEWS

The acclaimed Italian actress, Claudia Cardinale, famous for her roles in The Leopard and 8½, has died at the age of 87.

Her agent Laurent Savry told French news agency AFP that she passed away on Tuesday at her home in Nemours in France, surrounded by her children.

Cardinale starred in more than 100 films and made-for-television productions, but was best known for her role in Federico Fellini’s 8½, in which she co-starred with Marcello Mastroianni in 1963.

She also won praise for her role as Angelica Sedara in Luchino Visconti’s award-winning screen adaptation of the historical novel The Leopard, and as a reformed sex worker in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West in 1968.

"She leaves us the legacy of a free and inspired woman, both as a woman and as an artist," Savry said, as quoted by Italian media.

Federico Fellini and Claudia Cardinale in Rome, 27 May 1964 AP Photo/Giulio Broglio

She was born Claude Joséphine Rose Cardin in La Goulette in Tunisia, to a Sicilian father and a French mother on 15 April 1938.

At age 17, Cardinale won a beauty contest in 1957, in which she was named the most beautiful Italian woman in Tunis. The contest brought her to the Venice Film Festival, which helped launch her movie career.

Before entering the competition, Cardinale had expected to become a school teacher.

Claudia Cardinale at a press conference in Rome, 9 July 1965 AP Photo/Mario Torrisi

Along with Brigitte Bardot, she became an iconic film star of the 1960s European cinema.

Alain Delon with his daughter Anouchka and Claudia Cardinale in Cannes, 14 May 2010 AP Photo/Joel Ryan

In 1962, she starred alongside Jean-Paul Belmondo in Cartouche, and then went on to star in three of the decade's greatest films: Luchino Visconti's The Leopard, Federico Fellini's 8½, and The Pink Panther.

In 1968, she played Jill McBain in Sergio Leone's monumental spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West, and in 1982 she was Klaus Kinski's partner in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

Claudia Cardinale as special guest at the Budapest Classic Film Marathon - 6 September 2018. MTI/Illyés Tibor

Cardinale was a liberal with strong political convictions and a major advocate for women's and LGBTQ+ rights.

She has been a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Women's Rights since 1999 and a Knight of the French Legion of Honour since 2008.

She had two children, one with Cristaldi and a second with her later companion, Italian director Pasquale Squitieri.

Sixties screen siren Claudia Cardinale dies aged 87

Paris (AFP) – Sixties screen siren Claudia Cardinale, who died on Tuesday aged 87, entranced audiences across the globe with the sultry gaze that made her the muse of Luchino Visconti and Federico Fellini.


Issued on: 23/09/2025 - FRANCE24

Her decades-long career has seen her star in 175 films and both the Venice and Berlin festivals awarded her honorary prizes © Frederick M. Brown / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File

With her fierce beauty and husky voice, Cardinale not only captivated Italy's greatest filmmakers, she played opposite most of the leading men of the time, from Burt Lancaster to Alain Delon and Henry Fonda.

She died at Nemours near Paris, in the presence of her children, her agent told AFP, adding that the date and place of her burial had not yet been fixed.

"She leaves us the legacy of a free and inspired woman both as a woman and as an artiste," Laurent Savry said in a message.

Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli called her "one of the greatest Italian actresses of all time" and said Cardinale embodied "Italian grace".

Cardinale's fairytale career began as a nightmare.

She was raped in her teens by a film producer and became pregnant. With few options open at the time, she made the tough decision to bring up her son Patrick and try "to earn a living and her independence" from cinema, even though she never wanted to be in films.

"I did it for him, for Patrick, the child I wanted to keep despite the circumstances and the enormous scandal," she told French daily Le Monde in 2017.

"I was very young, shy, prudish, almost wild. And without the slightest wish to expose myself on the film sets."
Reluctant actress

Born in La Goulette, near Tunis, on 15 April 1938, to Sicilian parents, Cardinale's life had already been turned upside down at at the age of 16 when she was picked out of a crowd to win a beauty contest.

Cardinale was born in Tunis to Sicilian parents © - / AFP/File

Crowned "The most beautiful Italian woman in Tunis", the prize was a trip to the Venice film festival where she immediately turned heads and reluctantly, turned her back on her plans to become a teacher.

"All the directors and producers wanted me to make films, and I said, 'No, I don't want to!' she said.

It was her father who eventually convinced her to "give this cinema thing a go".

As she started to land small film roles, she was raped. A mentor convinced her to secretly give birth in London and entrust the child to her family.

Patrick would officially be her younger brother until she revealed the truth seven years later.

"I was forced to accept this lie to avoid a scandal and protect my career," she said.
'Fairytale'

From then there was no looking back, as she became swept up into the golden age of Italian cinema, even though she knew "not a word" of the language, speaking only French, Arabic and her parents' Sicilian dialect.

At 20 "I became the heroine of a fairytale, the symbol of a country whose language I barely spoke," she wrote in her 2005 autobiography "My Stars."

Her voice had to be dubbed in Italian until she starred in Fellini's Oscar-winning "8 1/2" in 1963, when the star director insisted she use her own voice.

Cardinale had a huge hit in Hollywood with 'The Pink Panther' © STF / AFP/File

That year, aged 25, Cardinale filmed both Visconti's epic period drama "The Leopard" and Fellini's surrealist hit "8 1/2" at the same time.

"Visconti wanted me brunette with long hair. Fellini wanted me blonde," she said.

Critics called her the "embodiment of postwar European glamour", and she was was packaged as such, both on screen and off.

"It's almost like she had sexiness thrust upon her," Britain's The Guardian wrote in 2013.

Embraced by Hollywood, where she refused to settle, Cardinale had a huge hit with Blake Edwards' "The Pink Panther" with Peter Sellers, then Henry Hathaway's "Circus World" with Rita Hayworth and John Wayne.

"The best compliment I ever got was from actor David Niven while filming 'The Pink Panther'," Cardinale recalled.

He said: "Claudia, along with spaghetti, you're Italy's greatest invention."

Refusing to have cosmetic surgery, she went on to perform into her 80s, including in "La Strana Coppia", a female version of Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple" at the Teatro Augusteo in Naples.
'Only love'

Although desired by many, she said her "only love" was the blue-eye Neapolitan director Pasquale Squitieri, father to her daughter Claudia with whom she worked on a series of films over four decades until his death in 2017.

Her decades-long career has seen her star in 175 films and both the Venice and Berlin festivals awarded her honorary prizes.

Cardinale and Queen Elizabeth II at a premiere © - / CENTRAL PRESS/AFP/File

In 2017 she featured on the official poster of the Cannes film festival amid an outcry that her thighs had been airbrushed to make the seem thinner.

A staunch defender of women's rights, she was named UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 2000 in recognition of her commitment to the cause of women and girls.

"I've had a of luck. This job has given me a multitude of lives, and the possibility of putting my fame at the service of many causes," she said.

© 2025 AFP

The Naked Ape at 50: ‘Its central claim has surely stood the test of time ‘

In October 1967, Desmond Morris published his landmark study of human behaviour and evolution. Here four experts assess what he got right – and wrong


Robin Dunbar, Angela Saini, Ben Garrod, Adam Rutherford

Sun 24 Sep 2017 
THE GUARDIAN


Robin Dunbar: ‘He gave us a picture of who we really are’

Professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford


We were all gearing up for the summer of love when, in 1967, Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape took us by storm. Its pitch was that humans really were just apes, and much of our behaviour could be understood in terms of animal behaviour and its evolution. Yes, we were naked and bipedal, but beneath the veneer of culture lurked an ancestral avatar. With his zoologist’s training (he had had a distinguished career studying the behaviour of fishes and birds at Oxford University as part of the leading international group in this field), he gave us a picture of who we really are. In the laid-back, blue-smoke atmosphere of the hippy era, the book struck a chord with the wider public – if for no other reason than that, in the decade of free love, it asserted that humans had the largest penis for body size of all the primates.


The early 1960s had seen the first field studies of monkeys and apes, and a corresponding interest in human evolution and the biology of contemporary hunter-gatherers. Morris latched on to the fact that the sexual division of labour (the men away hunting, the women at home gathering) necessitated some mechanism to ensure the sexual loyalty of one’s mate – this was the era of free love, after all. He suggested that becoming naked and developing new erogenous zones (notably, ear lobes and breasts), not to mention face-to-face copulation (all but unknown among animals), helped to maintain the couple’s loyalty to each other.

Morris’s central claim, that much of our behaviour can be understood in the context of animal behaviour, has surely stood the test of time, even if some of the details haven’t. Our hairlessness (at around 2m years ago) long predates the rise of pair bonds (a mere 200,000 years ago). It owes its origins to the capacity to sweat copiously (another uniquely human trait) in order to allow us to travel longer distances across sunny savannahs. But he is probably still right that those bits of human behaviour that enhance sexual experience function to promote pair bonds – even if pair bonds are not lifelong in the way that many then assumed. Humans are unusual in the attention they pay to other people’s eyes – for almost all other animals, staring is a threat (as, of course, it can also be for us under certain circumstances).


I can’t honestly say if the book influenced my decision to study the behaviour of wild monkeys and, later, human ethology. Having been immersed in the same ethological tradition out of which Morris had come, viewing humans this way was no controversial claim. Older zoologists, however, were a great deal more sceptical, often viewing the book as facile. What it might well have done for me was to create an environment in which the funding agencies were more willing to fund the kinds of fieldwork on animals and humans that I later did.
Angela Saini: ‘His arrogance has done untold damage’

Science journalist, broadcaster and author

From the moment The Naked Ape was published, female scientists and feminists rolled their eyes. For good reason. Desmond Morris credited hunting by males (and only males) as the one thing that drove up human intelligence and social cooperation. In a 1976 paper, American anthropologists Adrienne Zihlman and Nancy Tanner laughed at his implication that females had “little or no part in the evolutionary saga except to bear the next generation of hunters”.

His problem with women ran through every chapter. Let’s start with what females were doing while males were evolving. Morris answered: “The females found themselves almost perpetually confined to the home base.” But by his own admission, hunters would sometimes be away for weeks at a time chasing a kill. So how exactly were the womenfolk managing to feed their families in the interim?

His deliberate choice to ignore hunter-gatherers – the only people on Earth who live anything like the way our distant ancestors might have – blinded him to the fact that women are rarely housebound. We know, for example, that women gathering plants, roots and tubers and killing small animals tend to bring back more reliable calories than men do. What’s more, in many hunter-gather communities, including the Nanadukan Agta of the Philippines and the aboriginal Martu of Western Australia, women hunt. Martu women do it for sport.

An early paperback edition of The Naked Ape.

What about the rest of us, who no longer hunt and gather, but live in towns and cities? “Work has replaced hunting… It is a predominantly male pursuit,” he wrote. Oh, Desmond, seriously? Anthropologists are fairly unanimous that in our distant past, men and women shared almost all work, including sourcing food and setting up shelter. That’s the harsh reality of subsistence living. Throughout history, there have always been working women.


His consistent failure to understand the impact of patriarchy and female repression bordered on the bizarre. He claimed that humans developed the loving pair bond to assure males their partners wouldn’t stray while they were off hunting. Females evolved to be faithful. But a few pages later he mentioned chastity belts and female genital mutilation as means of forcibly keeping women virginal.

“A case has been recorded of a male boring holes in his mate’s labia and then padlocking her genitals after each copulation,” he wrote, with the pathological detachment of a scientist observing flies in a jar. He never asked himself the obvious question: If women evolved to be faithful to one man, why did men resort to such brutal measures?

On other points of fact, time has simply proven him wrong. “Clearly, the naked ape is the sexiest primate alive,” he stated. Nope. That honour goes to the bonobo. Which incidentally happens to be a female-dominated species.

For 50 years, Morris’s arrogance (large chunks of his slim list of references were to his own work) has done untold damage to people’s understanding of our evolutionary past. We might forgive him for being a man of his time. But as a scientist, for choosing to overlook evidence right in front of his eyes, The Naked Ape still deserves as little respect as he showed half the human species.

Angela Saini’s latest book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story, is published by Fourth Estate
Ben Garrod: ‘He made me stop dead in my tracks’

Broadcaster, primatologist and teaching fellow at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge

Like many zoologists, biologists and naturalists before me, I was drawn to the thrill of exploration and tracking animals. But as a 12-year-old living in a seaside town in Norfolk, there wasn’t much to explore and limited species to stalk. Instead, my quarry was old books about nature, anthropology and evolution, and my territory was the dusty shelves of old bookshops. I still vividly remember chancing upon a slim volume one winter weekend. I slid the book from the shelf, mainly prompted by the title. I was fascinated by apes, and the word “naked” had a definite (if slightly intangible) appeal to my 12-year-old self.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite so slowly. Partly because I needed a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to help me comprehend each paragraph. I didn’t want to miss a beat in what became an intoxicating series of revelations about not only my species but apparently about me, too. I’d never experienced a book that reached out to the reader in such a way and even now, this still holds true for The Naked Ape in that you can’t help but examine where (or even if) you fit in with Morris’s observations.


I brushed over the sections covering the evolutionary achievements of the penis, the covert mission of breasts and the untold benefits of being naked, but stopped dead in my tracks when I read how, despite our few millennia as a species relishing in the glow of civilisation, our long lineage from our great ape precursors and hominid ancestors had left its indelible mark not only on our anatomy but upon our behaviour, also.

This idea that we are simply the by-product of millions of years of evolutionary tinkering and are not alone as the pinnacle of some benevolent creation was such a revelation that when the book was released it shocked many. Yes, this had been written before but never quite so eloquently and never in a way that was aimed at a non-expert audience. At long last, they were being invited to share in some of the biggest, best-kept secrets of our somewhat extended family.

As a scientist, there’s a lot more I could say… of course, some of its ideas are now dated and wrong but it was 50 years ago and science does move inexorably onwards. The thing about reading The Naked Ape is that it can do one of two things. It can either set light to the kindling of an inquiring mind, or – if it causes your eye to twitch in consternation at, for example, outdated views on the sexes – make you take stock of what you actually know. It sends you on an academic exercise, sieving through persuasive argument in order to pick out the tantalising glimmer of empirical evidence. I’ve gone from one to the other. I fondly still have my copy tucked between a book on baboons and a treatise on skeletal pathology.

The Naked Ape is like an old friend I’ve grown up with, realised that they’re not quite as perfect as I once thought – but have decided that they’re still cool enough to hang out with anyway.
Adam Rutherford: ‘Did anyone take this seriously in the 60s?’

Author and presenter of Radio 4’s Inside Science

I spent rather too much time in the last couple of weeks arguing with men about breasts. I forget how it began, but there was a phenomenal volume of Twitter correspondence asserting one of two statements as scientific fact: the first was that the permanently visible breasts in female humans (compared to all other apes, whose breasts only enlarge during lactation or estrus) are signals to attract males. The second was that the primary function of breasts is to attract males.

The latter seems trivial to dispel: a baby that starves to death is a greater evolutionary pressure than whether an adult male is turned on – breasts exist to feed babies. The first argument is trickier to contest. In nature, there are wondrous variants of what we call “secondary sexual traits” – those bodily parts or behaviours evolved to aid mate choice – the peacock’s tail, the bowerbird’s bower, lekking stags. For humans, it might seem obvious that breasts fall into that category, and in my online debates, in all cases, the evidence presented found its evolutionary origins in The Naked Ape: “The enlarged female breasts are usually thought of primarily as maternal rather than sexual developments, but there seems to be little evidence for this.”


The question of why we are different to other apes is valid. Aside from the definitional function of mammary glands in mammals, the reasons for our morphological differences are certainly worthy of study. Morris goes on: “The answer stands out as clearly as the female bosom itself. The protuberant, hemispherical breasts of the female must surely be copies of the fleshy buttocks, and the sharply defined red lips around the mouth must be copies of the red labia.”

Did anyone take this seriously in the 1960s? To me, this is little more than salacious guesswork, erotic fantasy science. And this is the fundamental problem with The Naked Ape: it is a book full of exciting ideas that have little scientific validity. The attractiveness of an idea in science has no bearing on its veracity. Sometimes they are presented as “common sense” arguments – it’s obvious, innit? But common sense is the opposite of science – our senses deceive us all the time, our profoundly limited experience skewers us with bias. In the case of the attractiveness function of breasts, this idea is almost entirely untested. The data simply does not exist. Maybe visible breasts are a secondary sexual trait in humans. It would be unusual, as in nature most of these types of traits are on males, and not all cultures regard breasts as erotic. Did boobs replace bums as a sexual signal when we became upright? I don’t know, but the point is that no one does. We could test this today with genetics, by establishing genes involved in breast development and searching the genome for the signatures of selection. But this has not been done.

In my experience, much of the academic field that The Naked Ape is emblematic of – evolutionary psychology – falls victim to similar scientific crimes. We call it “adaptationism”, or “panglossianism”, after Dr Pangloss from Voltaire’s Candide. An eternal optimist, he suggested there was a reason for everything, and everything had a reason. Hence our noses had evolved to balance spectacles on; we have two legs because that suits the dimensions of a tailored trouser. For Morris, and millions of men on the internet, breasts are attractive, therefore their purpose is to attract.

There is plenty to like about this book. Its descriptions of the physiology on show during various human activities are accurate, detailed and genial. To position us as animals and under the auspices of natural selection is happily Darwinian. The Naked Ape was colossally successful – 20m copies have been sold, which is an astonishing number for a book ostensibly about human evolution. Supporters have argued that its real value is in popularising science. The problem is, and has always been, that it is not science. It is a book of just so stories.

Adam Rutherford’s latest book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson
Desmond Morris: life and work


1928
Born in the village of Purton, near Swindon.


1941


Attends boarding school in Wiltshire. Growing up during the second world war, he later claims that he pursued surrealism and zoology as a retreat from the human race. He tells the Bookseller in 2013: “If you are at all sensitive as a child and you see adults killing one another – and not in a criminal way, but an accepted way – that is a strange learning process. I thought, ‘This is the species I belong to?’”

1948
Following national service, enrols as an undergraduate in zoology at Birmingham university.

1950
Exhibits his surrealist art work with Joan Miró in London.

1954
Publishes his doctoral thesis, entitled The Reproductive Behaviour of the Ten-Spined Stickleback.

1956
Is appointed head of the Granada TV and film unit at the Zoological Society, making programmes including Zoo Time for ITV; David Attenborough presented the rival show Zoo Quest for the BBC. Presents approximately 500 episodes of the show.

1957
Organises a exhibition called Paintings by Chimpanzees at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

1959
Becomes the Zoological Society’s curator of mammals.

1966
Writes The Naked Ape over four weeks. “People think I deliberately wrote it to make a shocking bestseller, but it wasn’t like that,” he tells the Guardian in 2007.

1967
Appointed director of the ICA, where he encountered figures such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Salvador DalÍ, Pablo Picasso and Barbara Hepworth. Supervises the institute’s move to the Mall. The first edition of The Naked Ape is published on 12 October and is serialised in the Daily Mirror.

1968
Following the success of The Naked Ape, he leaves his ICA post and moves to Malta with his wife.

1973
Returns to the UK to take up a research fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford.

1977
Publishes his book Manwatching, which developed the concept of “body language”. It is one of more than 40 books Morris has written, including The Human Zoo, Intimate Behaviour, Babywatching, Dogwatching and Christmas Watching.


1978
Is elected vice-chairman of Oxford United football club.

1986
Begins work on The Animals Roadshow, co-presented with Sarah Kennedy.

2016
An updated edition of his 1981 book, The Soccer Tribe, is published with a foreword by José Mourinho.

2017
The BBC makes a documentary about his artistic career entitled The Secret Surrealist. The Express describes his artwork as “very obviously zoological… full of fantastical life forms resembling cells and gene maps and creatures of the deep, yet also possessing the friendly charm of The Clangers”.
Ian Tucker

Desmond Morris at his home in Oxford in 2007. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

This is the archive of The Observer up until 21/04/2025. The Observer is now owned and operated by Tortoise Media.

The Naked Ape pdf by Morris, Desmond

Internet Archive

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Culture

All-female exhibition aims to restore women’s voices in art history

Poitiers – French artist Eugénie Dubreuil has collected more than 500 works by female artists, beginning in 1999. Last year she donated her collection to the Sainte-Croix Museum in Poitiers, which is now putting them on display in an exhibition that aims to restore the forgotten voices of women in art.


02:59
The "La Musée" exhibition at the Sainte-Croix Museum in Poitiers, western France.
© Ville de Poitiers

By :Isabelle Martinetti
Issued on: 08/03/2025 -
RFI

"Women artists have long been marginalised in art history courses and by museums and galleries," Manon Lecaplainn, director of the Sainte-Croix Museum, told RFI. "For decades, art history has been written without women. Why should our exclusively female exhibition be shocking?"

"Our aim is not to exclude men from art history," she explains. "The goal is to make people think."


Eugénie Dubreuil en mariée (1990) by Danièle Lazard. © Musées de Poitiers, Ch. Vignaud

The Sainte-Croix Museum has been known in France for its proactive policy of promoting women artists since the 1980s.

In this new exhibition, Lecaplain and her co-curator Camille Belvèze are showcasing nearly 300 works from the 18th century to the present day, divided into three sections: the collection of Eugénie Dubreuil, the hierarchy of genres in art history, and the social role of the museum.


Spotlight on Africa: celebrating female empowerment for Women's History Month

This exhibition is the first step in a five-year project to promote Dubreuil's collection – entitled La Musée – and relies on a financial grant of €150,000.

"Why not an initiative like this on a larger scale in France, Europe, the world?" asks Dubreuil.

The "La Musée" exhibition showcases 300 works by female artists, thank to a donation made by Eugénie Dubreuil in 2024. © Ville de Poitiers

► La Musée runs until 18 May, 2025 at the Sainte-Croix Museum in Poitiers.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for SURREALIST WOMEN

Notes on Fighting Trumpism

To mobilize the abandoned working class, we need to revive the idea of solidarity.

By Robin D.G. Kelley

November 18, 2024

Source: Boston Review


I am baffled, as I was in 2016, as to why so many liberals are still shocked by Trump’s victory—and why, in their efforts to dissect what happened, they can’t get beyond their incredulity that so many people would blindly back a venal, mendacious fascist peddling racism, misogyny, xenophobia, ableism, and so forth, while cloaking his anti-labor, anti-earth, pro-corporate agenda behind a veil of white nationalism and authoritarian promises that “Trump will fix it.”

We don’t need to waste time trying to parse the differences between the last three elections. In all three, he won—and lost—with historic vote tallies. The message has been clear since 2016, when Trump, despite losing the popular vote to Hilary Clinton, still won the electoral college with nearly sixty-three million votes, just three million fewer than what Obama got in 2012. Trump lost in 2020, but received seventy-four million votes, the second-largest total in U.S. history. For an incumbent presiding disastrously over the start of the Covid pandemic, that astounding number of votes should have told us something. And if we were honest, we would acknowledge that Joe Biden owes most of his victory to the uprisings against police violence that momentarily shifted public opinion toward greater awareness of racial injustice and delivered Democrats an unearned historic turnout. Even though the Biden campaign aggressively distanced itself from Black Lives Matter and demands to defund the police, it benefited from the sentiment that racial injustice ought to be addressed and liberals were best suited to address it.

I’m less interested in conducting a postmortem of this election than trying to understand how to build a movement.

Yet in all three elections, white men and women still overwhelmingly went for Trump. (Despite the hope that this time, the issue of abortion would drive a majority of white women to vote for Harris, 53 percent of them voted for Trump, only 2 percent down from 2020.) The vaunted demographic shift in the 2024 electorate wasn’t all that significant. True, Trump attracted more Black men this time, but about 77 percent of Black men voted for Harris, so the shocking headline, “Why did Black men vote for Trump?” is misdirected. Yes, Latino support for Trump increased, but that demographic needs to be disaggregated; it is an extremely diverse population with different political histories, national origins, and the like. And we should not be shocked that many working-class men, especially working-class men of color, did not vote for Harris. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is right to point to the condescension of the Democrats for implying that sexism alone explains why a small portion of Black men and Latinos flipped toward Trump, when homelessness, hunger, rent, personal debt, and overall insecurity are on the rise. The Democrats, she explained on Democracy Now, failed “to capture what is actually happening on the ground—that is measured not just by the historic low unemployment that Biden and Harris have talked about or by the historic low rates of poverty.”

The Democratic Party lost—again—because it turned its back on working people, choosing instead to pivot to the right: recruiting Liz and Dick Cheney, quoting former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, and boasting of how many Republican endorsements Harris had rather than about her plans to lift thirty-eight million Americans out of poverty. The campaign touted the strength of the economy under Biden, but failed to address the fact that the benefits did not seem to trickle down to large swaths of the working class. Instead, millions of workers improved their situation the old-fashioned way: through strikes and collective bargaining. The UAW, UPS, longshore and warehouse workers, health care workers, machinists at Boeing, baristas at Starbucks, and others won significant gains. For some, Biden’s public support for unions secured his place as the most pro-labor president since F.D.R. Perhaps, but the bar isn’t that high. He campaigned on raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15.00, but, once taking office, quietly tabled the issue in a compromise with Republicans, choosing instead to issue an executive order raising the wage for federal contractors.

It is true that the Uncommitted movement, and the antiwar protest vote more broadly, lacked the raw numbers to change the election’s outcome. But it is not an exaggeration to argue that the Biden-Harris administration’s unqualified support for Israel cost the Democrats the election as much as did their abandonment of the working class. In fact, the two issues are related. The administration could have used the $18 billion in military aid it gave to Israel for its Gaza operations during its first year alone and redirected it toward the needs of struggling working people. $18 billion is about one quarter of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual budget and 16 percent of the budget for the federal Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program. They could have cut even more from the military budget, which for fiscal year 2024 stood at slightly more than $824 billion. Moreover, tens of thousands of Palestinian lives would have been spared, much of Gaza’s land and infrastructure would have been spared irreversible damage, and the escalation of regional war in Lebanon and Iran would not have happened—the consequences of which remain to be seen for the federal budget.

Workers improved their situation the old-fashioned way: through strikes and collective bargaining.

Of course, detractors will say that the Israel lobby, especially AIPAC, would not allow it. But the Democrats’ fealty to Israel is not a product of fear, nor is it simply a matter of cold electoral calculus. It is an orientation grounded in ideology. Only ideology can explain why the Biden-Harris administration did not direct UN representative Linda Thomas-Greenfield to stop providing cover for Israel’s criminal slaughter and support the Security Council’s resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. And only ideology can explain why the administration and Congress has not abided by its own laws—notably the Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits the use of U.S. weapons in occupied territories and the transfer of weapons or aid to a country “which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights”—and stopped propping up Israel’s military.

While candidate Trump had encouraged Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza, don’t be surprised if President Trump “negotiates” a swift ceasefire agreement. (Reagan pulled a similar stunt when he secured the return of U.S. hostages from Iran on the same day he was sworn into office.) Such a deal would prove Trump’s campaign mantra that only he can fix it, strengthen his ties with his ruling-class friends in the Gulf countries, and permit the Likud Party and its rabid settler supporters to annex Gaza, in whole or in part, and continue its illegal population transfer under the guise of “reconstruction.” After all, the Biden-Harris administration and the Democrats have already done all the work of “finishing the job.” Gaza is virtually uninhabitable. Once we factor in disease, starvation, inadequate medical care for the wounded, and the numbers under the rubble, the actual death toll will be many times higher than the official count. And with nearly three-quarters of the casualties women and children, the U.S.-Israel alliance will have succeeded, long before Trump takes power, in temporarily neutralizing what Israeli politicians call the Palestinian “demographic threat.”

The 2024 election indicates a rightward shift across the county. We see it in the Senate races, right-wing control of state legislatures (though here, gerrymandering played a major role), and in some of the successful state ballot measures, with the exception of abortion. But part of this shift can be explained by voter suppression, a general opposition to incumbents, and working-class disaffection expressed in low turnout. I also contend that one of the main reasons why such a large proportion of the working class voted for Trump has to do with what we old Marxists call class consciousness. Marx made a distinction between a class “in itself” and a class “for itself.” The former signals status, one’s relationship to means—of production, of survival, of living. The latter signals solidarity—to think like a class, to recognize that all working people, regardless of color, gender, ability, nationality, citizenship status, religion, are your comrades. When the idea of solidarity has been under relentless assault for decades, it is impossible for the class to recognize its shared interests or stand up for others with whom they may not have identical interests.

The Democratic Party lost—again—because it turned its back on working people.

So I’m less interested in conducting a postmortem of this election and tweaking the Democrats’ tactics than trying to understand how to build a movement—not in reaction to Trump, but toward workers’ power, a just economy, reproductive justice, queer and trans liberation, and ending racism and patriarchy and war—in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Haiti, and elsewhere, in our streets masquerading as a war on crime, on our borders masquerading as security, and on the earth driven by the five centuries of colonial and capitalist extraction. We have to revive the idea of solidarity, and this requires a revived class politics: not a politics that evades the racism and misogyny that pervades American life but one that confronts it directly. It is a mistake to think that white working-class support for Trump is reducible to racism and misogyny or “false consciousness” substituting for the injuries of class. As I wrote back in 2016, we cannot afford to dismiss


the white working class’s very real economic grievances. It is not a matter of disaffection versus  racism or sexism versus  fear. Rather, racism, class anxieties, and prevailing gender ideologies operate together, inseparably. . . . White working-class men understand their plight through a racial and gendered lens. For women and people of color to hold positions of privilege or power over  them is simply unnatural and can only be explained by an act of unfairness—for example, affirmative action.”

There have always been efforts to build worker solidarity, in culture and in practice. We see it in some elements of the labor movement, such as UNITE-HERE, progressive elements in SEIU, National Nurses United, United All Workers for Democracy, Southern Worker Power, Black Workers for Justice, and Change to Win. Leading these efforts has been the tenacious but much embattled Working Families Party (WFP) and its sister organization, Working Families Power. Their most recent survey found that growing working-class support for Trump and the MAGA Republicans does not mean working people are more conservative than wealthier Americans. Instead, it concluded, working people are “uniformly to the left of the middle and upper classes” when it comes to economic policies promoting fairness, equity, and distribution. On other issues such as immigration, education, and crime and policing, their findings are mixed and, not surprisingly, differentiated by race, gender, and political orientation. Most importantly, the WFP understands that the chief source of disaffection has been the neoliberal assault on labor and the severe weakening of workers’ political and economic power. Over the last five decades we’ve witnessed massive social disinvestment: the erosion of the welfare state, living-wage jobs, collective bargaining rights, union membership, government investment in education, accessible and affordable housing, health care, and food, and basic democracy. In some states, Emergency Financial Managers have replaced elected governments, overseeing the privatization of public assets, corporate tax abatements, and cuts in employee pension funds in order to “balance” city budgets. At the same time, we have seen an exponential growth in income inequality, corporate profits, prisons, and well-funded conservative think tanks and lobbying groups whose dominance in the legislative arena has significantly weakened union rights, environmental and consumer protection, occupational safety, and the social safety net.

And the neoliberal assault is also ideological; it is an attack on the very concept of solidarity, of labor as a community with shared interests. David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, David McNally, Nancy Fraser, Wendy Brown and many others have all compellingly articulated this challenge. In response to the 1970s strike wave and the global slump that opened the door for the neoliberal turn, the Thatcherite mantra that “there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women” took hold. For decades unions have been disparaged as the real enemy of progress, their opponents insisting that they take dues from hardworking Americans, pay union bosses bloated salaries, kill jobs with their demand for high wages, and undermine businesses and government budgets with excessive pension packages. Remember Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign talking points: workers are the “takers,” capitalists are the “makers” who should decide what to pay workers. Neoliberal ideology insists that any attempt to promote equality, tolerance, and inclusion is a form of coercion over the individual and undermines freedom and choice. Such regulatory or redistributive actions, especially on the part of government, would amount to social engineering and therefore threaten liberty, competition, and natural market forces.

The idea of solidarity has been under relentless assault for decades.

Generations have grown up learning that the world is a market, and we are individual entrepreneurs. Any aid or support from the state makes us dependent and unworthy. Personal responsibility and family values replace the very idea of the “social,” that is to say, a nation obligated to provide for those in need. Life is governed by market principles: the idea that if we make the right investment, become more responsible for ourselves, and enhance our productivity—if we build up our human capital—we can become more competitive and, possibly, become a billionaire. Mix neoliberal logic with (white) populism and Christian nationalism and you get what Wendy Brown calls “authoritarian freedom”: a freedom that posits exclusion, patriarchy, tradition, and nepotism as legitimate challenges to those dangerous, destabilizing demands of inclusion, autonomy, equal rights, secularism, and the very principle of equality. Such a toxic blend did not come out of nowhere, she insists: it was born out of the stagnation of the entire working class under neoliberal policies.

That diagnosis points toward an obvious cure. If we are going to ever defeat Trumpism, modern fascism, and wage a viable challenge to gendered racial capitalism, we must revive the old IWW slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Putting that into practice means thinking beyond nation, organizing to resist mass deportation rather than vote for the party promoting it. It means seeing every racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic act, every brutal beating and killing of unarmed Black people by police, every denial of healthcare for the most vulnerable, as an attack on the class. It means standing up for struggling workers around the world, from Palestine to the Congo to Haiti. It means fighting for the social wage, not just higher pay and better working conditions but a reinvestment in public institutions—hospitals, housing, education, tuition-free college, libraries, parks. It means worker power and worker democracy. And if history is any guide, this cannot be accomplished through the Democratic Party. Trying to move the Democrats to the left has never worked. We need to build up independent, class-conscious, multiracial organizations such as the Working Families Party, the Poor People’s Campaign, and their allies, not simply to enter the electoral arena but to effectively exercise the power to dispel ruling class lies about how our economy and society actually work. The only way out of this mess is learning to think like a class. It’s all of us or none.

Robin D. G. Kelley is Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA and a contributing editor at Boston Review. His many books include Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.  Kelley has described himself as a Marxist surrealist feminist.

Labor’s Resurgence Can Continue Despite Trump

By Chris Bohner, Eric Blanc 

November 19, 2024

Source: Jacobin

Image by Kire1975, public domain

Does Trump’s reelection mean that the US labor resurgence is over? Not necessarily.

It’s true that the new administration is preparing major attacks against workers and the labor movement. And many union leaders will assume that the most we can hope for over the next four years is to survive through purely defensive struggles.

But unions are actually still well-positioned to continue their organizing and bargaining momentum. Here are seven positive factors that should ward off despair — and that should encourage unions to invest more, not less, in organizing the unorganized:

1. The economic forces fueling Trumpism also favor labor’s continued resurgence. After the pandemic laid bare the fundamental unfairness of our economic system, workers responded with a burst of union organizing and the most significant strike activity in decades. The same underlying economic forces — chronic economic insecurity and inequality — helped propel Trumpism to a narrow victory in the 2024 elections. But Trump’s actual policies will inevitably exacerbate economic inequality, undermining the Republican Party’s hollow populist rhetoric.

Stepping into the breach of Trump’s fake populism, unions remain workers’ best tool to provide a real solution to economic insecurity. And projected low unemployment will continue to provide a fertile economic environment for new organizing. As long as we remain in a tight labor market, employers will have less power to threaten employees who dare to unionize their workplaces and workers will have more bargaining leverage against employers, increasing the chances of successful — and headline-grabbing — strikes.

2. Unions can still grow under Republican administrations. It’s certainly true that the organizing terrain will be significantly harder under Trump and a hostile National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). But it’s still possible to fight and win even in these conditions.

It’s worth remembering that US labor’s current uptick began with the statewide teachers’ strikes that swept across red states in 2018 during Trump’s first term. And NLRB data show that putting major resources toward new organizing can go a long way in counterbalancing the negative impact of an adverse political context.

Unions organized significantly more workers under George W. Bush’s administration than under Barack Obama. Why? The main reason is that the labor movement in the early 2000s was still in the midst of a relatively well-resourced push to organize the unorganized, whereas by the time Obama took office, labor had mostly thrown in the towel on external organizing, hoping instead to be saved from above by lobbying establishment Democrats to pass national labor law reform. Labor can grow over the coming years if it starts putting serious resources toward this goal.

3. Labor has huge financial assets at its disposal. According to the latest data from the Department of Labor, unions hold $42 billion in financial assets and only $6.4 billion in debt. These assets — the vast majority of which are liquid assets — can help defend against the coming political attack and be deployed in aggressive organizing drives and strikes. Unions have the financial cushion to go on the offensive while simultaneously defending themselves from regulatory and legislative attacks.

4. Unions remain popular and trusted. According to a September 2024 Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest support since the 1950s — even 49 percent of Republicans these days support unions. Overall, Americans trust organized labor far more than the president, Congress, big business, and the media.

When workers have the opportunity to vote for a union at their workplace, unions win 77 percent of those elections. The American public also supports strikes. According to a poll by YouGov in August, 55 percent of Americans believe that going on strike is an effective strategy for workers to get what they want from management, compared to 23 percent who say no. Similarly, 50 percent of Americans believe it is unacceptable to scab, while only 26 percent say it is acceptable. Strong public support for labor continues to provide fertile ground for a union advance.

5. Organized labor is reforming. The bad news: most union officials remain risk-averse and their failure to seriously pivot toward organizing new members — despite exceptionally favorable conditions since 2020 — helped pave the way for Trump’s inroads among working people. The good news: the “troublemakers” wing of the labor movement is larger than ever, as seen in the dramatic growth of Labor Notes, the election of militants to head a growing number of local and national unions, and the emergence of much-needed rank-and-file reform movements in unions like the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Most notably, a reformed United Auto Workers (UAW) led by Shawn Fain is going full steam ahead with its push to organize the auto industry across the South — an effort that will soon get a big boost when unionized Volkswagen workers finalize their first contract. Rank-and-file activists across the country can continue to point to the UAW, as well as other fighting unions, as an example that their unions should be emulating.

6. Young worker activism is not going away. Most of the labor upsurge since 2020 has been driven forward by Gen Z and millennial workers radicalized by economic inequality, Bernie Sanders, and racial justice struggles. And contrary to what some have suggested, the 2024 election did not register a major shift to the Right among young people, but rather a sharp drop in young Democratic turnout.

7. The (latent) power of unions to disrupt the political and economic system is high. Despite declines in union membership and density (the percentage of the workforce in a union), union members still have significant representation in critical sectors of the economy.

Labor’s existing power provides a base for beating back the worst of Trump’s attacks and expanding union representation to nonunion workers in the semiorganized sectors. In addition, coordinated strikes or labor unrest in any of these sectors would significantly disrupt the functioning of the economy or public services, providing a potent tool for workers and unions. While logistically and legally difficult, workers and their unions have the power to shut down critical sectors of the economy if they so choose — an approach that could repolarize the country around class lines instead of Republican-fueled scapegoating.

8. Republicans may overplay their hand, creating new openings for labor. A scorched-earth legislative, regulatory, and judicial attack on labor law may create unintended opportunities. For example, if the Supreme Court follows Elon Musk’s bidding by throwing out the National Labor Relations Act — the primary law governing private sector organizing — states would have the power to enact union-friendly labor laws and legal restrictions on strikes and boycotts could be loosened. As Jennifer Abruzzo, the NLRB’s general counsel, told Bloomberg, if the federal government steps away from protecting the right to organize, “I think workers are going to take matters into their own hands.”

Conclusion

Labor’s decades-long tendency to defensively hunker down is one of the major factors that has led our movement — and the country — into crisis. Turning things around will depend on pivoting to a new approach.

The strongest case for labor to scale up ambitious organizing efforts and disruptive strike action is not just that it’s possible, but that it’s necessary. Without increased initiatives to expand our base and to polarize the country around our issues, union density is sure to keep dropping. Organized labor’s last islands of strength — from K-12 public education and the federal government to UPS and Midwest auto — will become extremely vulnerable to attack. And unions will be forced to fight entirely on the political terrain chosen by Republicans, who will paint them as a narrow interest group of privileged employees beholden to “union bosses,” Democratic leaders, and “woke” ideology.

Sometimes going on the offense is also the best form of defense. The best way to expose Trump’s faux populism is by waging large-scale workplace battles that force all politicians to show which side they’re on.

Nobody has a crystal ball about what lays ahead, nor should anybody underestimate the importance of defending our movement — and all working people — against Trump’s looming attacks. But it’s not factually or tactically justified to dismiss the potential for labor advance over the next four years.

Conditions overall remain favorable for labor growth, despite Trump’s reelection. Political contexts matter, but so do factors like the economy, high public support for unions, labor’s deep financial pockets, the growth of union reform efforts, labor’s continued disruptive capacity, and the spread of young worker activism. Rebuilding a powerful labor movement remains our best bet to defeat Trumpism, reverse rampant inequalities, and transform American politics. Now is not the time for retreat.


Chris Bohner is a union researcher and activist.

 

Surrealist Manifesto

2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the formal announcement of surrealism in the Surrealist Manifesto written by French poet, André Breton. It gathers strength today as it combines with anarchism to shout: ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION!

by David Tighe

Fifth Estate # 415, Summer 2024

a review of
Surrealism and the Anarchist Imagination by Ron Sakolsky. Eberhardt Press, 2023

“Contrary to prevalent misdefinitions, surrealism is not an aesthetic doctrine, nor a philosophical system, nor a mere literary or artistic school. It is an unrelenting revolt against a civilization that reduces all human aspirations to market values, religious impostures, universal boredom, and misery.”

—Franklin Rosemont, André Breton and the First Principles of Surrealism

Surrealism and the Anarchist Imagination is Ron Sakolsky’s most recent book in a string of texts exploring different aspects of the fertile crossroads of surrealism and anarchism. It contains fifteen pieces, ranging from poems and collective manifestos to longer essays.

These pieces argue passionately that it is precisely at the crossroads of these two currents that surrealists and anarchists are at our rebellious best. For that insight alone it is a very valuable book. Early on, the surrealists described themselves as “specialists in revolt”, and it is the spirit of total refusal that has kept surrealism a vital force for more than 100 years. The surrealist slogan, “All Power to the Imagination,” rang out in Paris during the revolutionary events of May 1968 and is still ringing today.

Throughout the book Sakolsky gives examples of the intersecting of anarchist and surrealist currents. From the anarchist/feminist/surrealist publication The Debutante to the visual art of Maurice Spira; from anarchist involvement in indigenous land defence to Hakim Bey’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, which was influenced by and critical of surrealism.

In Undoing Reality, Sakolsky examines the surrealist concept of miserabilism and his related concept of mutual acquiescence. It is crucial for us to reject miserabilism: “a way of life rooted in the rigid assumptions of a status quo finality that constitutes ‘reality.'” Sakolsky points to John Clark (and his surrealist alter-ego Max Cafard) as seeking “to subvert such realist thinking by examining the miserabilist basis of the ubiquitous popular culture meme of ‘It is what it is!'”

Clark argues, “From the viewpoint of dialectical thinking, the crucial challenge is to see the ways in which things are not what they are. It always is what it isn’t and isn’t what it is. Getting trapped in the world of ‘it is what it is’—what I call Isisism—is the royal road to delusion, disaster, and domination. The right road to illumination and liberation is what I call Isisntism.”The essay ponders the “question of why we are willing to surrender our individual and collective autonomy to the repressive demands of ‘reality’.” Equally important, it examines what tools anarchism and surrealism can provide us to resist and overturn this “absence of the will to revolt.”

Free Jazz: Imagining the Sound of Surrealist Revolution is the longest essay in the book and a tour de force of radical scholarship. It provides all the facts that you need, but suffused with rebellious energy. Surrealists value free jazz because “as a musical form of insurrection, free jazz improvisation is a convivial creative practice that fully embodies the surrealist search for a revolution of the mind (which pointedly includes a critique of the dreariness of the commonsensical in favor of an explosion of the insurgent imagination) and is emblematic of the flowering of its libertarian aspirations for society as a whole.”

Sakolsky points to these aspirations as having a “particularly powerful resonance with the Black Liberation movement.” Archie Shepp is an example given of a free jazz musician dedicated to Black Liberation who also had a strong connection to surrealism, but he isn’t the only one. There is a long list of prominent figures within free jazz who have had short or long term connections with surrealism.

Joseph Jarman and Henry Threadgill were participants in the 1976 International Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago and both composed pieces specially for the exhibition. Doug Ewart’s Sun Song Ensemble performed there as well. Pianist Cecil Taylor was in attendance at the exhibition and also contributed to Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, the international journal of the Chicago Surrealist Group. William Parker, who played with Taylor for more than a decade, is quoted in the piece as saying, “black surrealism is a vision that has come to me most of my life.” Sakolsky invokes the potent mixture of radical political vision and the visionary power of the human imagination present in free jazz. “In combination, these improvisational acts can provide the sparks that ignite the powder keg of surrealist revolution.”

Opening the Floodgates of the Utopian Imagination: Charles Fourier and the Surrealist Quest for an Emancipatory Mythology is another of the long essays in the book. It discusses the work of 19th century Utopian Socialist Charles Fourier who has been a figure of fascination for surrealists and anarchists alike. Sakolsky explores the history of surrealist engagement with Fourier starting at the very beginning of the Paris Surrealist group in the 1920s.

Fourier’s refusal to be limited by political realism infuriated his later critics Marx and Engels but has endeared him to anti-authoritarians. Fourier dreamed so wildly that he imagined the political equality of women and coined the term feminism. He imagined a world of passional attraction and refused to be limited by the tyranny of what is (deemed) possible.

The essay also discusses the rejection by progressive movements of mythology, which French philosopher George Bataille saw as one of the factors that led to the spread of fascism. The lack of any emancipatory myth left a vacuum for the fascist nightmare. Recent translations into English of Bataille’s journal Aciphale, as well as public lectures that he gave around the same time, have provided more detail of his thoughts on this subject. Sakolsky argues that Fourier could provide at least parts of an emancipatory myth for anarchists and surrealists. It is very heady stuff and a fascinating discussion.

The third long essay in the book is Chance Encounters at the Crossroads of Anarchy and Surrealism: A Personal Remembrance of Peter Lamborn Wilson A.K.A. Hakim Bey. It is a remembrance of Sakolsky’s 35 year long friendship with Wilson. As the title implies, it provides details about Wilson’s engagement with and critique of surrealism, and how Wilson’s critiques encouraged Sakolsky’s own explorations of the crossroads of surrealism and anarchy.

It is a touching tribute to Wilson, a long-time anarchist comrade of Sakolsky’s, not to mention prolific author and contributor to Fifth Estate.

The shorter pieces in the book have a lot to offer too. A Spark in Search of a Powder Keg: An International Surrealist Declaration is a strong reminder that the surrealist movement is vibrant, not a dead historical art avant garde. It provides a glimpse of the internationalism of surrealism. There are signatories from the US and Canada, Central and South America, North Africa and the Middle East, Australia, and all over Europe. It highlights the surrealist spirit of total refusal in opposition to Canadian pipeline projects and the violence of the police. The declaration is a strong voice for solidarity with Indigenous land defence and radical environmentalism.

It is well known that André Breton and many of the French surrealists had an interest in and affinity with West Coast Indigenous art. The declaration states: “as surrealists we honor our historical affinity with the Kwakwaka’wakw Peace Dance headdress that for so long had occupied a place of reverence in Breton’s study during his lifetime before being ceremoniously returned to Alert Bay on Cormorant Island by his daughter, Aube Elleouet, in keeping with her father’s wishes.”

The authors also draw connections to outrage and resistance in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis which occurred during the period that signatures were being gathered for the declaration. A postscript points out that it “was only fitting that in solidarity with the uprisings about police brutality kicked off by George Floyd’s execution/lynching at the hands of the police, anti-racism protesters in the United States would take direct action by beheading or bringing down statues of Christopher Columbus, genocidal symbol of the colonial expropriation of Native American lands.”

Uncovering the Surrealist Roots of Détournement is an excellent short examination of what the Situationists termed detournement, the subversive appropriation of popular imagery, usually a comic combined with radical text, and its roots in surrealist practice. The piece is accompanied by an example of contemporary anarcho-surrealist detournement, a collaboration between Sakolsky and John Richardson. The same image and 20 others, along with an introduction by Sakolsky can be found in their recently co-authored book Surrealist Détournement, published by Dark Windows Press.

Surrealism and the Anarchist Imagination benefits from a beautiful printing job by Eberhardt press and full color art throughout by Rikki Ducornet, Maurice Spira, Zigzag, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sheila Knopper and many others, which contributes greatly to the effect of the book. Surrealist visual art is a powerful aid to help fire the anarchist imagination.

David Tighe is an anarchist, mail artist, and zine maker living in Alberta, Canada.

Newsletter | vol. 32 | no. 4 | 15 October 2024 André Breton: the deluxe edition of Magic Art Dear Eugene In celebration of the centenary of the publication of the First Manifesto of Surrealism on 15th October 1924, we are delighted to announce the deluxe edition of André Breton's Magic Art is now available to pre-order.     Inspired by the work of the surrealist bookbinder Paul Bonet (left, Second Manifeste du surréalisme, 1930), our full morocco deluxe is signed by André Breton's daughter, Aube Elléouët Breton. It is limited to 88 copies and is presented in a silk box, with a supplementary volume, Magic Art Redux.   PRE-ORDER DISCOUNT We have just a few weeks left of the special pre-order price for the standard hardback issue, and with advance sales over the last few weeks the edition is currently 30% sold. Full detail can be found below. SHIPPING DATES Standard Hardback Edition: 04 November 2024 Special limited 'Jappard' Edition: 02 January 2025 Deluxe signed 'Enigma' Edition: late January 2025   Click here for further details LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for SURREALISM