ART between the Wars Dadaism & Surrealism

Guernica, Picasso

Dadaism Dadaism (c. 1915-25) term: “Dada” suggests a regression to early childhood French --> a child’s wooden [hobby]horse first syllables spoken by children learning to talk context: aftermath of World War I challenges established values (moral & aesthetic) iconoclastic attitude toward tradition credo: “Everything the artist spits is art”

Dadaism Dadaism (cont.) aesthetic: a kind of “anti-art” exalts commonplace objects by taking them out of their usual context incorporates effects of randomness & chance playful & experimental doodling automatic writing techniques/materials: historically unacceptable

Dadaism Marcel Duchamp Fountain (1917) medium: ‘Ready-Made’ mass-produced object taken out of context deprived of original function displayed as an aesthetically significant structure a.k.a. --> “found object”

Dadaism Duchamp (cont.) L.H.O.O.Q. medium: “assisted ready-made” technique: retouched poster of Mona Lisa adds moustache & goatee pun: “LHOOQ” mildly obscene (French) --> “She’s got a hot ass”

Surrealism Surrealism (c. 1925-45) definition: 1924 “Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of the dream” definition: Breton’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930) “… a certain state of mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, height and depth, are no longer perceived as contradictory”

Surrealism context: political André Breton’s lecture (June 1934) anti-Fascist (re: Hitler & Mussolini) “role of fascism to re-establish for the time being the tottering supremacy of finance-capital” anti-bourgeois & critical of capitalist society “hypocrisy & cynicism have now lost all sense of proportion & are becoming more outrageous…” aim: “to detach the intellectual creator from illusions with which bourgeois society has sought to surround him”

Surrealism process: “automatism” definition: Breton intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought absence of all control exercised by the reason outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations “a monologue poured out as rapidly as possible, over which the subject's critical faculty has no control” distinguished by high degree of immediate absurdity

Surrealism context: Freudian psychology (c. 1895) preoccupied w/ Freud’s methods of investigation Freud’s concept of the unconscious: repository for traumatic repressed memories; source of anxiety-provoking drives socially or ethically unacceptable to the individual manifested in dreams relation to painting: “sublimation” energy invested in sexual impulses shifts to pursuit of socially valuable achievements

Ernst’s Eye of Silence (1943-44)

Surrealism Rene Magritte (1898-1967) nationality: Belgian training: academic (Brussels Academy) style: illusionistic; deliberate literalism subjects: revelation of the psyche surprising alterations of ordinary situations method: disjunction between context, size, or juxtaposition of objects

Magritte’s False Mirror (1926)

Surrealism Magritte (cont.) Time Transfixed (c. 1940) aim: to discredit ordinary reality means: absurdity of scene --> scale of objects symbols: explicitly male & female composition: dynamic color: limited range light/shadow: naturalistic brushwork: controlled reinforces banality

Surrealism Dalí (1904-89) training: Academy of Fine Arts (Madrid) mastered academic techniques expelled for indiscipline in 1923 style: illusionistic method: “paranoic-critical” “… to (simultaneously with automatism and other passive states) systematize confusion and thus to help to discredit completely the world of reality.”

Surrealism Dalí (cont.) The Persistence of Memory (1931) subject: landscape (Bay of Rosas) wordplay: montrer --> to show --> montre (watch) langue --> “tongue” --> langueur (languid) theme: Oedipal desires distorted fetal image of artist himself ants --> expression of anxieties

Surrealism Dalí (cont.) Premonition of Civil War (1936) political sympathies: fascination for Hitler relations w/ Surrealists strained c. 1934 break came when Dali supported Spanish dictator, Franco, in 1939

Surrealism Miró (1893-1983) Painting (1933) aim: unconscious mind technique: “automatism” freely drawing series of lines w/out considering what they might be or become consciously reworked forms: abstract; weightless spatial order: flattened landscape

Miro’s Carnival of the Harlequin (1925)

Exercises