The emergence of commercial art galleries in the 18th century—themselves satellites of those secular temples of Beaux Arts, the museums—coincides with the democratic establishment of modern art in Western culture. Yet it is only in the previous century that the gallery space has been disrobed of its assumed neutrality, or decorative function, to be exhibited as a social and aesthetic signifier. This discovering can be understood as an introspective repercussion of the Futurists’ expansion of artistic creativity, freed from the formal confines of the art-object, into the multi-dimensionality of the lived event, a practice furthered by dada during WWI. The centrifugal spilling of art out of its frame onto the walls of the exhibition space can be accredited to the Russian Constructivists and de Stijl artists who applied to interior architecture the geometric principles and primary colors they used in their paintings. Following these new practices it would be almost two decades before French artists explored the aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, potential of the exhibition space.

This attention to contextuality may be traced from Marx and Engel’s foregrounding of the role of cultural (political, economic) ideologies and circumstances in the construction of human interactions and the maintenance of power to the post-structuralists’ exposition of the inherent tropism of discourses. In the aesthetic realm the analysis of displays, or vehicles of representation, has more recently preoccupied art historians—in particular those associated with Visual Culture (the latest offshoot of Cultural Studies)—as many new publications attest. Lewis Kachur’s Displaying the Marvelous (MIT Press, 2001), which purports to view exhibitions sites as "cultural artifact(s)" and indicators of "the dynamics of the art world system," contributes with clarity to this field of investigation.

Kachur’s research is dedicated to three Surrealist exhibitions: the Paris Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme of 1938, and its two New York sequels, the Dream of Venus pavilion at the World’s Fair in 1939 and the First Papers of Surrealism in 1942. It is through the limited scope of these displays that the author presents the characteristics of late Surrealism—a phase he justly regards as neglected in the literature on that movement— and of the works of their perpetrators, Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali, imperiously instigated by André Breton. Kachur justifies this approach by identifying the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme as an event that for the first time "deliberately sought to embody Surrealists principles in [an] installation" in an "attempt to inscribe [its] style in terms of display"—"a curiously delayed development"—unlike a number of previous Surrealist exhibitions in Europe and Alfred Barr’s Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art the previous year. The three installations discussed are described in detail: at the Exposition, the hall of mannequins each dressed by one of the participating artists, Duchamp’s 1200 Coal Sacks hanging from the ceiling of the main room, and Dali’s delirious Rainy Taxi with its foliage, snails and constant internal rain, devised under Duchamp’s direction in his capacity of "Générateur-Arbitre" (Planner-Referee); at the First Papers, Duchamp’s omnivorous web of string covering ceilings, zigzagging across the space, and surrounding the artworks; and Dali’s populist adaptation of some features of the Exposition for his Dream of Venus pavilion at the New York World’s Fair.

In his preface, Kachur announces the premise of his research whose "focus is more on the case study than theory" and its object, "the physical and practical realm of exhibition design." Henceforth such topics as the fetishization of women by Surrealist artists are tersely treated with a footnote that directs the reader to a biographical reference (in this case Robert J. Belton’s The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art); and statements such as "the disfiguration of Surrealist exhibition space, like the practice of automatism, contributed to the rise of abstraction in American painting of the 1940s" are not substantiated. The installation artist Maureen Connor’s name, cited for her work Love Site ("which included a simulated double bed in the context of a history of postwar modes of seduction") is misspelled twice. Nonetheless, the author’s meticulous understanding of the social composition of the artworld of this period allows him to advance cogent thoughts on its intricacies and aesthetic legacy. Kachur argues for a revision of Duchamp’s oeuvre that encompasses the artist’s involvement with late Surrealism against an official exegesis centered on his earlier avatar as the French offspring of dada; he stresses Duchamp’s contribution in broadening the role of the artist to include that of art consultant, designer, and impresario—the latter function Dali would exploit to utmost crassness —and insists on the importance of Surrealism’s visibility in cementing "Duchamp’s critical apotheosis." To explain the collaboration between writers and artists in the development of a movement that had originally existed mostly in literary form, Kachur coins the term "deskilling." It is this deskilling of art "accompanying the adaptation of the Duchampian readymade" that "enabled men and a few women of letters [to] increasingly dabble in object-making." This unraveling supplanted "art training" denounced as "an impediment to the pure play of free association and the unconscious." The author also addresses the topic of the intertwining of art and commerce whose origin he locates in the post-WWI era and surveys the Surrealists’ expatriate life in New York during WWII.

The title of the book is derived from an aphorism from André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto written in 1924: "The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is always beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful." These interchangeable terms in the Bretonian lexicon fittingly apply to Jane Wilcox’s felicitous book design. Visual continuity is established with playful devices: silhouetted, tiny individual photographs of the protagonists are incrementally positioned from one page to the other in the manner of flip-books; the drawing of a loose line in the margins of the chapter on the First Paper of Surrealism that echoes the Mile of String ends up as the extension of an unraveling ball of string held by the performance artist Mierle Ukeles in a photograph depicting her walking away in a Philadelphia street—the last image of the book; the calligraphy of the initial letters of each chapter is taken from the Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, published by the Galerie Beaux-Arts in conjunction with the Exposition; and a discrete palette of fonts is printed on paper alternatively white and cream (every 8 pages). Although her name is mentioned in the acknowledgements, Wilcox’s contribution is credited solely on the flap of the cover, wryly called "dust jacket"—like gallery installations, the most perishable element of a work.

Despite a resolutely uncritical stance, Mr. Kachur is intent on rehabilitating late Surrealism (disavowing such criticisms, then contemporary, as "one more revolution that fades into that which it wished to overturn") and claiming for Duchamp ("the ‘inventor’ of the disorienting, obstructionist mise-en-scène") and Dali (the master of "automatic confusion" and "reversal of the senses") the titular honor of vanguards of the genre of art installation. If revolutions take longer to crystallize, one should not despair and forsake their possibility. After all, thirty years of social status quo preceded the events of May 1968.

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