Book Description
The only biography of avant-garde Surrealist artist, filmmaker and theorist Antonin Artaud is now re-published in a new, expanded and updated edition. Spanning his involvement with the Surrealist movement, the seminal Theatre of Cruelty and his 9-year asylum incarceration, this is the definitive biography on this legendary figure of 20th century culture.Stephen Barber is a noted cultural historian and the leading authority on Artaud. Previous publications include: The Burning World (Edmund White biography), Caligula and Artaud: The Screaming Body (Creation).
Blows and Bombs: Antonin Artaud: The Biography FROM THE PUBLISHER
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) remains a massively inspirational figure, worldwide, in contemporary art, film, writing and ditigal media. In this biography Stephen Barber tracks Artaud's extraordinary and compelling life, from his volatile alliance with the Surrealist movement in the 1920s, to his legendary Theatre of Cruelty of the 1930s, to his nine-year asylum incarceration and his final period of drug-ravaged freedom in 1940s Paris. Blows and Bombs provides a vivid, potent portrait of Artaud's extreme and provocative life.
Artaud's creative influence has been seminal, from the Beat movement to Punk, from the revolutionary theatre movements of the 1960s to contemporary digital media theory. This first-ever biography locates the vital source of that influence. Artaud's wild life was full of conflict, desperation and fury. Many of its crucial aspects have been totally unknown, notably Artaud's apocalyptic journey to the Aran Islands in 1937, from which he returned to France in a straitjacket, and his agonizing electroshock-treatments of the mid-1940s: Blows and Bombs illuminates all of these critical moments in Artaud's life for the first time.
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