"Surrealism is dead, long live Surrealism!"
George Melly, preface to exhibition catalogue The Enchanted Domain, 1967.
Lot 175: the John Lyle Archive. Letters received, drafts of letters sent, letters indeed sent that have somehow made their way back to their sender; article drafts, BBC radio transcripts, press clippings. Insurance forms for the transporting and exhibiting of borrowed artworks, published and unpublished manuscripts and drafts of artworks shown and unshown; an incomplete run of the journal TRANSFORMAcTION (1967–1979), and examples of other publications, like Blue Food(1970–?). Bank documents, documents of incorporation with the Inland Revenue for the association EXETER FESTIVAL OF MODERN ARTS LIMITED., letters to and from MPs; successful and unsuccessful applications for funding to Arts Council England. Invoices for morning coffee, paid speaker fees, ticket and event season pass sales and their refund, unpaid phone bills, and orders for vernissage finger food—including such delicacies as sardine-stuffed boiled eggs.
The core of the month-long Exeter Festival of Modern Arts was an exhibition held both at Exeter’s anthropological institution, The Royal Albert Memorial Museum, and the town’s exhibition space, The Exeter Gallery: it was titled The Enchanted Domain. It featured around a hundred now much-lauded works from early surrealist and surrealist-adjacent artists, including Dorothea Tanning’s Eine kleine nachtmusik (1943; now held at the Tate Modern), a Marcel Duchamp Boîte-en-valise (1935–1941; now held at MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, etc.), and André Breton's Je vois - j'imagine. Poème-objet. (1935; Centre Pompidou), Man Ray’s Seguidilla (1919; Smithsonian), René Magritte's Le Viol (1945; Centre Pompidou), Francis Picabia's La ville de New York apercu à travers le Corps (1913), Leonora Carrington's Amor che move il Sole et l’altre Stelle (1946), Giorgio de Chirico's La Melancolie du Depart (1916/17; Tate Modern), Pablo Picasso's Tête (1913/14; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art,), “among others,” or, “et al.” The total exhibition insurance value of the works was £149,062 in April, 1967; according to the Bank of England inflation calculator this amounts to £2,397,856.15 in October, 2025. As such, the festival in Exeter stood as the most extensive exhibition of surrealist artwork in England since the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London, held between 11th June and 4th July, 1936; the showing that first announced the arrival of Surrealism in Britain.
Lot 175: the John Lyle Archive is an archive that carries its decades heavily, from its stranding in a barn in the South West of England, and then, since 2016, chopped into small lots and sold, or unsold and kept in the storage locker of www.chiswickauctions.co.uk. Delivered to Paris in a small piece of baby blue luggage in January 2025, spread across the walls of Goswell Road is an unsold section of the archive, Lot 175. Curated here for your ophthalmic consumption, it is Lot 175 that you will shortly find yourself engulfed in.
"Surrealism is dead, long live death."
J. N. Watts, visitor book to exhibition The Enchanted Domain, 1967.
SURREALISM IS DEAD, LONG LIVE DEATH! comprises, together, a viewing window out upon the decaying and ragged ends of artistic and literary modernism previously passed over by art historians; a world already long dead, that passed as this ephemera bears witness, not with a bang, but a whimper.
— Extract of the exhibition text by Andrew Hodgson
Bio: Andrew Hodgson (b.1988, Hull, UK) is a writer, researcher and curator based at Université Paris Cité, Paris, France.
