Join the Museum Book Club at OKCMOA and connect more with our special exhibitions through lively conversation.
Led by Museum educator Tori Waldron, each session features a specially selected book that complements the themes of our current exhibition. Enjoy refreshments—including a themed snack and a selection of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages—in the Museum Store before diving into a guided discussion that links literature to the art on view in our galleries.
Nadja
The Museum Book Club meeting will feature a guided discussion of Nadja by André Breton in the OKCMOA’s American Surrealism gallery on September 4 from 5:30 pm to 7 pm.
“In Paris, during the fall of 1926, André Breton met a young woman from the provinces who called herself Nadja because, she said, “in Russian it’s the beginning of the word for hope, and because it’s only the beginning.” Their love affair was brief, intense, and intensely self-conscious. They both talked exuberantly of the book that Breton would make out of their days and nights. And indeed a year later (after Nadja was institutionalized and Breton had moved on to other love affairs) he began to write Nadja—a book of memory and analysis taking its cue in part from Freud’s case studies, but also a book of ingeniously intercut images, drawing on Surrealist ideas to portray a soul whose very way of being approaches, in Breton’s words, “the extreme limit of the Surrealist aspiration.” (Nadja (New York Review Books: Classics): Breton, André, Polizzotti, Mark, Polizzotti, Mark: 9781681379364: Amazon.com: Books)
