Stephanie Weber

On exhibition in Lenbachhaus, Munich (But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism and Anti-fascism)

17 March 2025

“If someone tells us that our era has other worries on its mind than to write poems, we respond “So do we!”

This typically ambiguous statement by the surrealist poetry and Trotskyist resistance group La Main à plume, penned 1941 in German-occupied Paris is representative for a dialectic within the movement of surrealism that seems worth revisiting today. I will present the thoughts underlying an exhibition currently on view at Lenbachhaus in Munich (But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism and Anti-fascism) which seeks to re-establish the historical context of the surrealist movement without, however, rendering the exhibited art works more readily readable or superimposing the socio-political context onto them. There are different concepts of „reality“, and „realism“ at play here which I would like to discuss. This is intended to help us move towards more nuanced readings on how the practice of art and that of politics might relate.  

Required reading:

La Main à plume (Coll.), État de présence (State of Presence), 1941 

English translation p. 513; German translation (in the German pdf), S. 520. In the original French, p. 174

Paul Westheim, Verlogener Realismus, 1938, pp. 157-160 (German), English translation pp. 504-506

Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism), 1950

English translation pp. 539-541; German translation (German pdf) S. 548-551. In the original French pp. 241-247

Stephanie Weber is the curator of Contemporary Art at the Lenbachhaus in Munich. She studied Art History, Romance philology and Cultural Studies in Münster and Bordeaux, and Museum Studies at the École du Louvre in Paris. Over the last few years, she has focused on the 1960s and 1970s and the intersection of making and meaning, or the political dimension of artistic process.