1. ART between the Wars
Dadaism & Surrealism

2. Guernica, Picasso

3. 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”

4. 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

5. 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”

6. 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”

7. 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”

8. 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”

9. 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

10. 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

11. Ernst’s Eye of Silence (1943-44)

12. 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

13. Magritte’s False Mirror (1926)

14. 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

15. 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.”

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. Miro’s Carnival of the Harlequin (1925)

20. Exercises