Surrealism. Le Grand Jeu

The year 2024 will mark one hundred years since the publication of the first Surrealist manifesto. In this context, the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts of Lausanne is mounting a show devoted to the role of play in this art movement. Initially present as an informal activity cementing Surrealist sociability, play crystalised the birth of a collective mindset that was defined by a reversal of traditional values, putting the old rules in the dock while devising new ways to make art.

The show borrows its title from a review that was published between 1928 and 1930 by a splinter group of French Surrealist artists who vehemently refused to rally to André Breton’s movement. This conflict is symptomatic of the movement, which fractured and reconfigured itself according to the passions, frictions and friendships of the moment, making everyone alternately an adherent or a rebel.

Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game) features twofold. The historical section is organised in three sequences focused on three games, chess, Tarot, and dice. Within each of these, the exhibition additionally develops concepts like esotericism and chance that imposed a structure on the movement. We are a far cry from any fixed categorisation. Above all, the show aims to point up the creative exaltation these artists harnessed in their work.

Although Surrealism proclaimed itself revolutionary, the movement did gradually spread throughout society, so much so that it became one of the rare artistic references shared by one and all. The dizzying images wrought by this liberation of the imagination continues to influence our way of seeing the body, language and objects in their infinite capacity to change. The show will also be the occasion for contemporary artists to carry on the vital impulse of this anarchic spirit, like a vast exquisite corpse.