An absorbing group biography revealing how exiles from war-torn France brought surrealism to America, sparking the movement that became abstract expressionism.

Sensing the emerging disaster that was about to consume Europe, surrealists began to arrive in New York from Paris even before the outbreak of World War II. This engaging group biography tells their story and that of the artistic exchange between the Old World and the New. It takes as its focus the legendary Atelier 17 print studio, relocated from Paris to New York, where avant-garde artists could experiment and where abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock encountered surrealism in action for the very first time.

In 1957, in a catalog essay at a show at the Whitney Museum, New York, the American artist Robert Motherwell made an unexpected claim that abstract expressionism was neither new nor native. It had been born, he declared, of a brief liaison between America and France, an assertion that verged on the controversial. This was at the Whitney, no less, the lion’s den of American art. Motherwell’s remark is the launchpad of this book, which features André Breton, André Masson, Louise Bourgeois, Max Ernst, and other emigrants, including Stanley William Hayter, the founder of Atelier 17. Their work would have a profound influence on some of the key figures in the rise of abstract expressionism, including Mark Rothko, Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and Pollock―and vice versa.

52 color and 41 black-and-white illustrations