About the lecture

When surrealism took Paris by storm in 2024, with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism and of the first issue of the journal La Révolution surréaliste, the movement was almost exclusively French, and almost exclusively literary. In the intervening one hundred years, surrealism spread to other countries in Europe, including Greece, and in other continents, from Japan to Egypt and from Mexico to Australia, got grounded in art, and became extremely influential for artists, writers, and thinkers everywhere in the world, even now. The 2022 Venice Biennale, which took its name “The Milk of Dreams” from the work of surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington, as well as the recent, blockbuster exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and The Tate Modern in London “Surrealism Beyond Borders” (2022) and at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, “Surrealism” (2024), show that surrealism is still not only relevant, but uniquely appealing to a contemporary public. What is the cause of this tremendous success of surrealism, the longest-lasting of all historical avant-garde movements? Why did surrealism have such a wide dissemination? Why does surrealism still captures our imagination? Starting with these questions, the presentation will focus on a view of surrealism as a programmatically universalist and global movement, with special reference and attention to the history and heritage of Greek surrealism.

The lecture will be in Greek.

About the speaker

Effie Rentzou is Professor of French Literature at Princeton University. Her research and teaching focus on modernism and the avant-garde, with a special interest in surrealism, on politics and culture, on poetics, and the interaction of text and image. Her publications include Littérature malgré elle: Le surréalisme et la transformation du littéraire (2010), Concepts of the World: The French Avant-Garde and the Idea of the International, 1910-1940 (2022), the edited volume 1913: The Year of French Modernism (2020), and many articles and book chapters on surrealism, the avant-garde, and poetry. In addition to her contributions to exhibition catalogues for the Metropolitan Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Guggenheim, and the Musée de l’art Moderne de Strasbourg, she is co-curating the exhibition “Objets en question: Archéologie, ethnologie, avant-garde” which will open in February 2025 at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. She is currently working on a book manuscript with the provisional title The Original Antifa: Surrealism Against Fascism. She is one of the founding members of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS) and she served as its president in 2021-2023.