The Stamp of Fantasy “The Visual Inventiveness of Photographic Postcards”

At the start of the 20th century, long before the triumphal march of the illustrated press, photography in the form of postcards was all the rage. This volume presents the extraordinary inventiveness in postcard production that unites elements of popular culture with photographic images. At the center of attention is the intense interaction between the so-called “fantasy” postcards and the avant-garde art of the 1920s and 1930s, the Dadaists and Surrealists. Paul Eluard, André Breton and Salvador Dalí were enthusiastic collectors of fantasy postcards and Hannah Höch, Herbert Bayer, Man Ray and many others used them as material for their work.
Most of the postcards presented in The Stamp of Fantasy are from the collections owned by Peter Weiss and Gérard Lévy.