Main entry:

Hopkins, David, 1955- author.

Title & Author:

Dark toys : surrealism and the culture of childhood / David Hopkins.

Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, 2021.
©2021

Description:

viii, 342 pages, 64 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
The surrealist toy -- Illustration and vulgarity -- Nostalgia and perversity: rereading Bellmer and Cornell -- "The Play of Children and the Odour of Cedarwood": childhood, primitivism, and the Ludic, 1942-1943 -- The pop toy: materials and historicity -- Surrealism and counterculture: the liberated child from Fourier to Oz -- Dark toys: late surrealism and late twentieth-century childhood -- Coda: the toy's disappearance.

Summary:

We all have memories of the object-world of childhood. For many of us, playthings and images from those days continue to resonate. Rereading a swathe of modern and contemporary artistic production through the lens of its engagement with childhood, this book blends in-depth art historical analysis with sustained theoretical exploration of topics such as surrealist temporality, toys, play, nostalgia, memory, and 20th-century constructions of the child. The result is an entirely new approach to the surrealist tradition via its engagement with "childish things." Providing what the author describes as a "long history of surrealism," this book plots a trajectory from surrealism itself to the art of the 1980s and 1990s, through to the present day. It addresses a range of figures from Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer, Joseph Cornell, and Helen Levitt, at one end of the spectrum, to Louise Bourgeois, Eduardo Paolozzi, Claes Oldenburg, Susan Hiller, Martin Sharp, Helen Chadwick, Mike Kelley, and Jeff Koons, at the other.

ISBN:

9780300225747 (hardcover)
0300225741 (hardcover)

Subject:

Surrealism.
Children in art.
Toys in art.
Surréalisme.
Enfants dans l'art.
Jouets dans l'art.
Surrealist.

Added entries:

Surrealism and the culture of childhood

Holdings:

Location: Library main 309699
Call No.: BIB 254895
Status: Available