Join us for a special private tour of the recently opened exhibition The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors, led by Jodi Hauptman, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, and Starr Figura, Senior Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, MoMA. Don’t miss this opportunity to view these precious and uniquely surreal objects up close with the exhibition’s curators before the museum opens to the public.

Speaker bios:

Jodi Hauptman is The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints. Her many exhibitions include Cézanne Drawing (2021), Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented (2020), Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty (2016), Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (2014), and Georges Seurat: The Drawings (2007). Her publications have been recognized by the Association of American Publishers, the Dedalus Foundation, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Hauptman has lectured widely on modern and contemporary art and has contributed essays to exhibition catalogues, edited volumes, and scholarly journals, on such subjects as Sophie Taueber-Arp, Medardo Rosso, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, and Léopold Survage. An advocate for collaborations between curators and conservators, Hauptman received the College Art Association/American Institute for Conservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation (2019). She holds an AB from Princeton University and a PhD from Yale University.

Starr Figura is Senior Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints and a specialist in modern and contemporary prints. Among the many exhibitions she has organized over the years are Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde (2020), Gauguin: Metamorphoses (2014), German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse (2011), and Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings (2007). Part of the team that reinstalled the Museum’s expanded, reimagined, and cross-media collection galleries in 2019, she is closely involved in the ongoing program of their frequent reinstallation. Prior to joining the Museum in 1993, Starr worked in the Print Room at the New York Public Library and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She holds an MA in art history from Columbia University, and a BA in art history from Bryn Mawr College.

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The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors
October 4, 2026 – January 23, 2027
Exhibition Details:

A book bound with shards of shattered glass. A manifesto enshrined in polished metal. Love poems seamlessly merging with solarized photographs. For artists and writers of the Surrealist movement, the book was a perfect vehicle for subversive experimentation and the promotion of Surrealism’s revolutionary tenets. Working collaboratively to unlock the unconscious, they transformed the bound volume into a provocative new art form, an enchanted portal to the unexpected, the irrational, and the marvelous.

The Surrealist Book features the work of Surrealism’s most fascinating figures, including André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Claude Cahun, Paul Éluard, Toyen, Max Ernst, and Unica Zürn. It traces the myriad roles of Surrealist books from their foundational impact in the 1920s, through their convention-defying influence in the 1930s and ’40s, to the persistent presence of a Surrealist sensibility in volumes produced well into the 1950s and ’60s.

The exhibition showcases a transformative gift of rare artists’ books from the Helen and Sam Zell Collection, presented for the first time at MoMA. This trove of exquisite objects includes special editions printed on unusual papers or enhanced with supplementary materials, unique maquettes and singular sketchbooks filled with collages and fantastical drawings, sculptural bindings that turn books into hybrid, interactive artworks, and much more. Whether sparking disquiet or delight, books, the Surrealists insisted, “are doors.” Whoever “opens them is immediately thrown into a higher realm.”

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This event is open to members of The Drawing Foundation. Log in to your membership account to register or sign up to become a member today.

This event is organized by The Drawing Foundation in partnership with MoMA as part of On Drawings 2026.

Image: Unica Zürn (1916-1970), artist and author. Orakel und Spektakel, IV. Buch: Anagramme und Zeichnungen (Oracle and Spectacle, Book IV: Anagrams and Drawings). 1960. (detail) Book with ink, colored ink, pencil, torn-and-pasted paper, dried plant material, feathers, envelopes, playing card, and embroidery-thread winder with thread; pamphlet binding with red paper wrapper with cut-and-pasted paper and drawing in ink on torn-and-pasted papers. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Helen and Sam Zell
Photo by Ben Blackwell © Verlag Brinkmann & Bose, Berlin, Germany