24 JUNE 2002: THE
SURREALISTS’ ‘SPIRITUAL HUNTING’

“These were artists with
no special regard for art itself. Why bother making art

when you could find it hidden
in reality, lurking in flea markets or greasy

cafés or sex shops?
The surrealists were intrepid urban explorers, whose trips

to musty arcades or to eccentric
man-made landscapes such as the Parc des

Buttes-Chaumont in Paris
were defined as ‘spiritual hunting’.”

— Peter Conrad, in The Observer,
June 9 from a review of

History of the Surrealist
Movement by Gérard Durozoi

(University of Chicago Press

£60, pp816)