MoMA’s exhibition “The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors” opens on October 4, and includes works by still far-too-little-known women like Cahun, as well as Unica Zürn (much, much loved by siglio) and Toyen whose work will blow your mind too (I’m assuming and hoping that Toyen’s collaborations with Jindřich Heisler, the Jewish-poet she sheltered and hid for the entirety of the Nazi occupation of Prague will be on display too. Check out Lucy Ives’s essay on Toyen—an excellent primer, prompted by a massive retrospective that, of course, did not travel to the U.S.)

I don’t know yet exactly how Aveux non Avenus by Claude Cahun (and Marcel Moore) will be displayed, but finally there’s a chance to see it (albeit through/beneath glass). This is the original French edition of Cahun’s artist’s book which Susan de Muth translated and siglio published last year: Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals).

Éditions du Carrefour published Aveux non Avenus in 1930, after rejections elsewhere. Cahun was originally invited to write a confessional memoir by Adrienne Monnier (the partner of publisher/bookseller Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare & Co.) who ran the publishing house and bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres. But Cahun did not present Monnier with anything resembling the kind of memoir she was expecting. In the wake of this rejection, Cahun approached the famed publisher Gallimard who declined to publish a book belonging to “an indeterminate genre” (which was a probably a bewildering and infuriating excuse given their roster of authors included many avant-garde writers). Then Éditions du Carrefour took it on, published it as proto-artist’s book, in a beautiful edition of 500 with the photocollages made by Cahun and Marcel Moore. But it was greeted mostly with silence or opprobrium from literary critics, as an “undesirable Cassandra” wrote Cahun wrote in a 1950 letter to Paul Levy. “In vain … I tried—through black humor, provocation, challenge—to shake my contemporaries out of their blissful conformism and complacency.”

In any case, the MoMA exhibition will no doubt be a thrill, with a chance to see not only books that challenge the notion and structure of “the book,” informed by Surrealist subversions, but also maquettes, notebooks, and other evidence of the processes in their creation. It ends January 23, 2027.

—LP, publisher