SURREALISM & ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

SURREALISM Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s after World War I.   André Breton was the one who started it It was after Cubism (around the 1920s). It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and also the one that put New York City at the center of the art world.

Surrealism became an international intellectual and political movement . Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past and had culminated in the horrors of World War I From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature film and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice. .  The characteristics of this style—a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological—came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modern period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality".

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONALISM The term "Abstract Expressionism" was first used in Germany in connection with Russian artist in 1919 Referenced German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic), Became more commonly associated with Post-WWII American Art. The term "Abstract Expressionism" was also hard to understand. Harold Rosenberg preferred the phrase "Action Painting" and an art critic Clement Greenberg preferred "American Type Painting".

There are two major groups within Abstract Expressionism, which was influenced by Surrealism and Cubism: Colour Field Painters: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still worked with simple, unified blocks of colour. Gestural Painters: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Hofmann used Surrealist techniques of automatic art. Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of large canvases, an "all-over" approach, in which the whole canvas is treated with equal importance (as opposed to the center being of more interest than the edges). The canvas as the arena became a credo of Action painting, while the integrity of the picture plane became a credo of the Color field painters.

Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 In Mexico As a child, Kahlo had suffered from polio and then survived a serious streetcar accident which people believe had a huge impact if the pain and questions of identity addressed in Frida Kahlo paintings. Kahlo's work remembered for its "pain and passion", and its intense, vibrant colors.

Her work has also been described as "surrealist", and in 1938 one surrealist described Kahlo as a "ribbon around a bomb" The major flaw with this theory, as she herself saw it, was that Frida Kahlo painted her own, personal reality. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits which often incorporate symbolic portrayals of physical and psychological wounds. She insisted, "I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality

JACKSON POLLOCK Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956), known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.

By defying the convention of painting on an upright surface, he added a new dimension by being able to view and apply paint to his canvases from all directions. Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related car accident. In December 1956, the year of his death, he was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, and a larger more comprehensive exhibition there in 1967.

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