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"It is through the strength of images that . . . real revolutions could well happen," wrote Surrealism founder André Breton in 1925. Breton’s hypothesis was arguably proved right, for, love them or hate them, there is no denying that the Surrealists revolutionized the way we look at and represent the world, in particular through still and moving pictures. For the ambitious show "La subversion des images: Surréalisme, photographie, film," curators Quentin Bajac and Clément Chéroux assembled more than 400 creations by what they termed the "first generation" of the movement, drawing from the Centre Pompidous own very rich holdings as well as from other institutions and private collections in 13 countries. The breadth of their borrowings and the exhibition’s title — taken from an extraordinary series of photographs (realized in 1929-30 but not published till 1968) by the Brussels-based poet and theorist Paul Nougé — reflected their goal: to present an overview of the subject extending far beyond the obvious names (Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray) and venues: the cafés of Montparnasse.

Laid out around a central oval intended to represent an eye, the exhibition was organized thematically: group action, theatricality, automatic writing, the compulsive act of looking, and so on. The show was not concerned with antecedents, wider context, subsequent influence, or legacy; rather, it aimed at a (sometimes overly) thorough survey of the ways in which Surrealists used film and photography and of what these two mediums brought to the movement as a whole. The organizers covered all the well-known technical innovations, including solarization (introducing a flash of light during printing); inversion (printing the slightly misaligned negative and positive together); "burning" (applying heat to distort the negative); photograms and rayographs (laying objects directly onto photosensitive paper, the photographic equivalent of automatic writing); and the Dada-pioneered photomontages. But they also showed how and where Surrealist photographs appeared: as collectors’ sets; as illustrations of books like Breton’s novel Nadja; in such magazines as La révolution surréaliste, Minotaure, and Discontinuité; in manifestos and monographs; in sculptures like Man Rays Indestructible Object, 1923/1933; and in advertising. These exhibits were particularly enlightening, since context is crucial to the impact of the works. A 1912 Eugène Atget shot of a crowd watching a solar eclipse, for instance — strange enough in itself — became positively sinister when published on the cover of La révolution surréaliste with the caption "The latest conversions"; conversely, Man Ray’s famous glass Larmes, circa 1933, seemed distinctly diminished when advertising Cosmecil waterproof mascara.

Those seduced by the stunningly beautiful 1929 Man Ray portrait of Lee Miller that was used to promote the show might have been disappointed if they were expecting to see work entirely of this caliber, for the pieces on display were a mixed bag. True to their scholarly goals, the curators selected works to illustrate their themes, whatever their aesthetic quality. So the section on group action contained endless examples of the Surrealists’ photo-booth frolics — informative, certainly, but squinting at these tiny relics in very dim light seemed less useful than contemplating their reproductions in the handsome catalogue. Likewise, some of the photomontages and collages were far more accomplished than others. Still, floating in the sea of material was plenty to fascinate. To give just a taste, among the photographs were Hans Bellmers disturbingly deformed dollies; Claude Cahuns unflinching self-portraits; Dora Maars topsy-turvy montages and teratoid close-ups; the very varied work of photographers appropriated by the Surrealists, such as Atget’s revelations of the disconcerting in the everyday and Brassaï’s exposures of the beauty in banality; Rogi André’s phantasmagorical nude lady aquarium swimmer (a decade before the prim Esther Williams!); and Lee Miller’s "exploding hand." Just as eye-opening were the films (what a pity the otherwise comprehensive catalogue did not include a dvd supplement), including lesbian strap-on pornography from Man Ray, undulating octopuses from Jean Painlev, trays of eyeballs from Henri Storck, a man walking his flat iron by the Seine from Roger Livet, and a flock of flying hats from Hans Richter. Many of the pieces had never been exhibited before, and the encounters produced were multiple, rich, and eminently fortuitous — in the popular positive sense of the word. For unlike Lautréamont’s accidental meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table, nothing in this exhibition was left to chance; the curators’ dissection of their subject was as splendidly rational as were the Surrealists’ conscious attempts to generate irrationality.

"La Subversion des Images" originally appeared in the March issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2010 Table of Contents.