The “first extensive exhibition devoted to Surrealism from a transnational and transhistorical view,” according to the show’s architects — Stephanie D’Alessandro, Curator of Modern Art at the Met and Matthew Gale, Senior Curator at Large at Tate Modern — Surrealism Beyond Borders is nothing if not ambitious. The curators want to redraw our conceptual map of the movement, acknowledging the foundational role played by Breton and the Parisian clique but reimagining them as a node in a network that spans the globe. Nodding to postcolonial studies and, implicitly, the many reckonings of our time, they want to “challenge the hierarchies of cultural dominance” (race, gender, class, etc.) “that were — despite the radicalism of Surrealism — among its determining conditions.” By decentering Paris in favor of a counterhistory of “rhizomatic connectivity” that emphasizes “adjacency and exchange, in contrast to a hierarchical structure,” they hope to “rebalance the power relationships” of past histories of the movement.

Deleuzean dog-whistle duly noted. Behind the academic bric-a-brac that mars the curators’ otherwise perspicuous catalogue essays — an overfondness for the pet word “adjacency,” a weakness for jargon (“We have been especially careful … to avoid othering works of art”), the critical-theory tic of “interrogating” this and “inscribing” that (or, better yet, “reinscribing” it) — lies a laudable and long overdue impulse: decolonizing art-historical narratives about the movement. “We aim to change the equation of Surrealism with Paris and the related idea that Parisian Surrealism was then spread around the world,” they declare, in their introduction to the catalogue. In large part, the exhibition does just that.

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