SPRING 2025 CATALOGUE

Dear book lovers,

the cover of our Spring 2025 Preview shows a painting by Max Ernst from 1937: The Fireside Angel (The Triumph of Surrealism). The artist later wrote about the name that it was “naturally an ironic title for a kind of clumsy oaf that destroys and annihilates everything in its path.” Even after around ninety years, The Fireside Angel is still an extremely effective image for the threat danger, and adversity that sweep across the earth.

In our program, the image stands for the current preoccupation in many places with Surrealism, the central art movement of the twentieth century, whose 100th birthday we are celebrating with an array of impressive books.

The Lenbachhaus in Munich, for example, is showing work and writings from that era that identify Surrealism as the controversial, internationally networked and eminently political movement that its representatives understood it to be.

We present this catalogue to you, along with our other unique and wonderful books for this winter and the coming spring. We can hopefully learn from their stories and images in order to overcome the enormous challenges of the present. “The human soul is international,” says the International Surrealist Bulletin, written in Prague in April 1935.

With hope and best wishes to all friends of images and international souls,

Nicola von Velsen and the Hatje Cantz team