On the occasion of the exhibition at Palazzo Reale, Milan, dedicated to Max Ernst (4 October 2022-26 February 2023), Electra proposes in a renewed graphic layout, the exemplary anthology La donna, la libertà, l’amore. Un’antologia del surrealismo by Paola Dècina Lombardi, edited by Oscar Mondadori in 2008 and no longer available.

The volume completes Surrealismo 1919-1969. Ribellione e immaginazione (Surrealism 1919-1969. Rebellion and Imagination) by the same author and represents an important contribution to the knowledge of the artistic and literary movement that marked the 20th century.

Whether represented as flower or fruit, baby or femme fatale, witch or fairy, the feminine figure, object of desire and almost cannibalist possession, dominates the imaginary and poetry of the surrealists. Amidst romantic love of courtly ancestry and the spirit of foliage a wide space is found for eros, humour and play, the suffering of abandonment and disenchantment.

And even the questions and discussions about love and sexuality, perversions and libertinage, the couple relationship and eros that would lead in the 1940s to Breton theorisation of amour fou. From Breton, Eluard, Prévert and Queneau to Ungaretti, Delfini and Schwarz, Lorca and Nezval, Césaire and Senghor, Magritte and Man Ray, from Leonora Carrington and Claude Cahun to Joyce Mansour and Pénelope Rosemont, this collection offers a wide international selection of verses, inquiries, poetic proses and texts most of which unpublished in Italy.

In appendix to the volume, the chronology from 1919 to 1969 of the Surrealist movement and a bio-bibliographical apparatus.

On the cover Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst in a photograph by Lee Miller (1937).