European avant-gardes 1900-1939
vendredi 15 février 2008
22:58
The Cubists would see it as the genre best suited to conveying the question of the representation of
space in painting. With his revolutionary Still Life with Chair Caning, as early as 1912, Picasso
brought into the picture a piece of oilcloth for the caning and a rope to give material presence to the
oval of the chair's frame. Components lifted from reality therefore sometimes replace
representation and they enter into dialogue with the painted parts. The object, or rather fragments
of real objects, invade the representation.
But the radical gesture was Duchamp's, transforming the manufactured everyday object into a work
of art by means of nothing more than the artist's declaration that it was one. The first ready-mades
date from 1913. Since that time, the object has left the picture frame and invaded the real world,
presenting itself as such on the stage of art. It would later be deployed in the most unlikely
appropriations and assemblages by the Surrealists, in the "accumulations", "compressions" and
various "traps" of the New Realists, in the installations of current new objective sculpture, and by
way of American Pop Art's simultaneous celebration and critique, which took the consumer society
and its objects as the main subject of its art. The object addresses 20th-century art, its status and its
boundaries, pushing them further and further.
What this dossier proposes is a perusal of the National Museum of Modern Art's collections
through one of the main artistic events of the last century: "the affirmation of the object".
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
If 19th-century Naturalism had been obsessed with the "reality of vision", Cubism did not aspire to
real vision, but to the artist's mental experience of the world. Thus a new "writing of the real"
(Kahnweiler) was developed, put into practice by Braque and Picasso first in the so-called Analytical
phase which is dominated by a "reality of conception", to which the representation of the world
submits.
On the basis of the papier collés (pasted-paper pictures) invented by Braque in the autumn of 1912
and continued by Picasso, another phase of Cubism began, the Synthetic phase, characterised by a
return to reality and another mode of expressing the real. There is a dialogue between the drawn
framework and the cut-outs from newspapers selected for their plastic or semantic aspects. The
object is conveyed through the breaking up of fragments derived from reality and in an interplay
with letters and drawings. Picasso then invented a language of signs recapitulating the object, hence
the term Synthetic. He would increasingly insist upon the ambiguity of the representation, the
trompe-l'oeil effect, by alternating three different techniques: painting, sculpture and collage.
THE REAL OBJECT SUBVERTED
From Duchamp to the Surrealists
With his Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), Picasso had already made great advances in the
process of desacralising the work of art through the insertion of components taken straight from
reality into the painting. The use of collage emphasised this challenge to the canonical
representation. The raw materials of reality broke into the representation, but these intrusions
formed a dialogue with the painted or drawn parts of the work and the Cubists used them for
plastic purposes. Marcel Duchamp went a step further in desacralising the work of art. This
desacralisation and its implicit relation to the object was to be redeployed in a new drama of the
object, the Surrealist object, on the search for the dream's irruption into reality.
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)
The Ready-mades
In 1913, Marcel Duchamp exhibited a "sculpture" titled Bicycle Wheel. Two everyday objects were
attached and stuck together by the artist: a bicycle wheel and a stool. Nothing here was the
handiwork of the artist, who produced a three-dimensional collage by assembling two ordinary
objects.
Duchamp had been a painter to begin with and rebelled against painters, whom he called
"turpentine addicts", and against "the retinal stupidity" connected with this art. He pronounced
himself closer to the style of Leonardo, and defined painting as a mental thing. His Nude Descending
a Staircase caused a sensation in New York and made him famous. Going beyond the nude, with it
he sought a method of reducing movement in space.
Porte-bouteilles (Bottle-Rack), 1914 (1964)
(Séchoir à bouteilles ou Hérisson, Bottle-Drier or Hedgehog)
Bottle-Rack in galvanised iron
64.2 x 42 cm (diam.)
In 1914, with his famous Porte-bouteilles, bought at a department store, the Bazar de l'Hôtel de
ville, Duchamp elaborated the concept of the ready-made: "an ordinary object elevated to the
dignity of the work of art by the mere decision of the artist" (Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme,
André Breton, 1938).
The hand of the artist no longer intervenes in the work. All skill and all aesthetic pleasure connected
with the perception of the work are made void. The creator's traces have disappeared and been
reduced to the mere choosing and titling of the object. The title which from the outset names the
object most baldly, Porte-bouteilles (Bottle-Rack), will assume increasing importance; later the
object would be rechristened Séchoir à bouteilles ou Hérisson (Bottle-Drier or Hedgehog).
Yet the choice of this object was not an insignificant one. Glasses and bottles had invaded Cubist
painting, from which Duchamp wished to escape since it was, in his words, like a "straitjacket".
Analytical Cubism's bottles and glasses broken down into countless transparent facets were
succeeded by the real object, opaque and made of iron, welcoming them with the prickliness of a
hedgehog.
Fontaine (Fountain), 1917/1964
Upturned urinal, porcelain
63 x 48 x 35 cm
In 1915 Duchamp left for the United States. Continuing with his ready-mades, he added inscriptions
to them, like the one on a snow shovel: In Advance of a Broken Arm. It is only verbal logic that,
through humour or puns, transforms the ordinary object into something else: a precipitation of the
likely future. Duchamp was to lay increasing stress on this verbal dimension which, by insinuation,
involved the mind of the viewer in the perception of the work. The delectation of the eye was
succeeded by that of the mind.
His best-known ready-made, the famous upturned urinal rechristened Fontaine, dates from 1917.
When it was submitted for exhibition at the Society of Independent Artists, in New York, under the
pseudonym R.Mutt, the jury to which he himself belonged rejected it, and the epic success of the
ready-mades got under way with this scandal.
The original ready-mades have disappeared and replicas remain which, as Duchamp put it, "convey
the same message as the original". In his view, aesthetic criteria alone are not enough to define
what art is and what it is not, and it will be the artist who calls into question the limits of art by
pushing them further and further. The disappearance of the utility of the object proclaimed by its
installation in a museum environment, and the new meaning conferred upon it by its title, would
henceforth suffice to qualify as a work of art what had not been so a priori.
Duchamp's radical and innovative approach laid the foundation for a great many interrogations of
the status of art in the twentieth century, and for a breakthrough of the object into the domain of
the plastic arts.
Surrealism and the Strangeness of the Object
In the view of André Breton: "Ready-mades and assisted ready-mades, objects chosen or composed
by Marcel Duchamp from 1914, are the first surrealist objects". Where the Dadaist spirit of revolt
and provocation had seen Duchamp as one of its most representative figures, the Surrealists too
acknowledged his paternity in terms of how they saw the object.
In fidelity to the principle of their aesthetic, which is illustrated by Lautréamont's words: "Beautiful
as the fortuitous meeting of an umbrella and a sewing-machine on a dissection table", the surrealist
object is the fruit of combining the most unlikely objects that have issued from the encounter of
two different realities on an inappropriate level. The sought-after effect is always surprise,
astonishment, the sense of strangeness like that provoked by the irruption of a dream into reality.
The association of objects made in the name of the free association of words or ideas which,
according to Freud, dominate unconscious activity and dream activity in particular.
Since the Surrealists were particularly interested in the object, the Dictionnaire abrégé du
Surréalisme offers a panoply of artistic objects: real and virtual objects, the mobile and the mute
object, the oneiric object, the phantom object, etc. What unites these different declensions of the
object is their unconscious and symbolic charge, the appeal to a surreality which the Surrealists
found more real than the real itself.
Man Ray (1890-1976)
A painter and photographer, Man Ray literally illustrated Lautréamont's clarion words from the
Chants de Maldoror - "Beautiful as the fortuitous meeting of an umbrella and a sewing-machine on a
dissection table" - by photographing the coming together of these objects. Man Ray was a
protagonist of the Dada movement, and his strange objects mark the shift in Dada's cherished
aesthetic of revolt against fine painting towards the poetic of the strange, the fantastic and the
dream, which is Surrealism's, to be made official by Breton in 1924 with his Surrealist Manifesto.
Objet à détruire (Object for Destruction), 1923
Metronome and collage
23.5 x 11.5 cm
Surrealist avant la lettre, the metronome that has ceased to mark time is one of Man Ray's "objets
empêchés" (impeded objects). Similarly as with Cadeau (Gift) (1921), an iron to whose base he had
affixed 14 nails which made it impossible to use, here the metronome is made silent and motionless,
and set off with the incongruous addition of an eye and a label which subvert the original object and
lead towards other spaces suggesting the overdetermined meanings of dream images.
Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966)
Table (The Table), 1933
Plaster
148.5 x 103 x 43 cm
Conceived as a piece of furniture, this sculpture, whose principle resides in the strange association
of objects, exerts a subtle sense of troubling strangeness upon the viewer. The partly veiled head of
a woman and her veil extended into the void suggest by metonymy a body absent from the scene of
the representation but potentially part of the table. The strange polyhedron, balanced unstably on
the edge of the table, in contrast with the figurative elements of the sculpture, adds to the mystery
of the composition. Here we can discern a quality of expectation and dread.
Joan Miró (1893-1983)
L’objet du couchant (Sleeping Object), 1935-36
Painted carob tree trunk with metal components,
64 x 44 x 26 cm
On a carob tree trunk painted red, Miró hung pieces of scrap iron found by chance on his walks.
These attracted him by some irresistible magnetic force. A metal spring, a chain and a gas burner
were meant to represent a bridal couple. When it was made this object was presumed to be a joke,
except by Breton, who was gripped by its magical quality and to whom the object was given.
Victor Brauner (1902-1966)
Loup-table (Wolf-Table), 1939-1947
Wood and parts of stuffed fox
54 x 57 x 28.50 cm
The table, whose connection with meals and life-giving nourishment makes it the most familiar and
reassuring of objects, is turned into its opposite by metamorphosis into an aggressive and
devouring animal. The word loup (wolf), contained in the title, conjures childhood tales and
fantasies of being swallowed up and eaten. However, there is a further unsettling of our vantage
point in the fact that what this peculiar assemblage shows us is a fox.
Max Ernst (1891-1976)
Loplop présente une jeune fille (Loplop introduces a young girl), 1930, 1936, 1966
Oil on wood, plaster and collage of objects
194 x 89 x 10 cm
Surrealist objects are not only presented as such by association with other objects. They can also
invade the two-dimensional space of the painting, as in this picture synthesising his work, which
Ernst returned to twice after long intervals.
The artist is identified with Loplop, the bird at the top, who presents his painting in an effect of
distancing which is disturbing both visually and mentally. Max Ernst had already produced pictures
in relief, but here it is painting itself which is called into question by the derisory quotation of the
picture within the picture.
The painting presented by Loplop is only a simulacrum of painting as emphasised by the painted
frame. Inside it is a rough surface, like the rest of the panel, in which real objects replace painted
objects. This is a crazy challenge to pictorial mimesis, to illusionism as a whole and to the work of
the painter, who is resolutely placed beyond the painting. Objects - a metal wheel, a stone in a net
and a horse's mane - impose their reality as objects without the ambiguity of being decorative. They
belong to the thematic repertoire of the artist, who thereby declares his creative output to be in the
realm of distanciation.
THE OBJECT IN SOCIETY
American Pop Art and New Realism
In the United States as well as in Europe, the 1960s opened in the realm of the object. What the
pop artists proposed was a return to the real, a reality that they identified with the consumer
society, mainly employing its media images simultaneously to decry it and proclaim it. For the
New Realists, who defined their art as a "new perceptual approach to reality", the object became
a fully-fledged protagonist in their means of expression.
American Pop Art
The object as a commodity promoted by the consumer society became established in the 1960s
with its language of advertising and its mass media. Already in the late 1950s, artists such as Robert
Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns had reacted against the final gasps of Abstract Expressionism,
finding sources of inspiration in the anti-academic spirit of Dada and in the figure of Duchamp.
These artists advocated a return to the real, and while Rauschenberg was integrating all kinds of
second-hand objects (newspapers, stools, beds, Coca-Cola bottles, etc) into his vast Combine
Paintings, Johns was making paintings of the American flag or of shooting targets, these being literal
paintings of the object in question.
In the way opened up by these two pioneers, artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine in
sculpture, and Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in painting, turned resolutely towards the
discredited world of commodities (hamburgers, detergent boxes, Coca-Cola bottles) and new forms
of popular culture: advertising, comic strips, film stars and famous politicians, with a vigour that was
simultaneously enthusiastic and critical.
Despite the elevation of such objects and images to the status of works of art, it was generally the
perverse workings of the consumer society that were revealed by these artists, with humour, irony
and unease. Warhol's Campbell's tomato juice packing cases are fake ready-mades, for they were
created by the artist, who had the advertising graphics printed on the crates. In the image of market
logic, these objects deceive the eye and the mind.
With the American pop artists the object was seldom presented as such. It was reproduced as
trompe-l'oeil or in some grotesque form through enlargements altering its meaning, by emphasising
the screenprint, sometimes seeming more real than reality itself, to the point of unreality and
unease.
Claes Oldenburg (1929)
His version of Pop Art, which is to say art aiming to be within reach of a mass audience, consists in
imitating everyday objects connected to the world of food or clothing: commodities that are bought
at street stalls or in downmarket shops. Oldenburg's replicas of these objects are enlarged, exposing
the materials of which they are made and exaggerating their colours. Giant lollipops, hamburgers,
caps and jackets produced in plaster and coarsely painted - drips and all - intrude upon the space
around them, blighting it with bad taste.
Pink Cap, 1961
Enamel paint on plastered muslin
86 x 97 x 21 cm
Pink Cap was shown as part of a group show together with other objects relating to clothing in New
York in 1961. It would subsequently be one of the objects in Oldenburg's shop, The Store, opened by
the artist at his studio in ironic imitation of places where such commodities are sold. The spectatorbuyer can then, without any mystery, enter the space of production of the work, made by an artistcraftsman working at the very point of sale.
The targets here are the art gallery circuit and museum valuation. There is something troubling
about these objects which can no longer be held and handled since they spread out in space. This is
the familiar being revealed as strange, assuming vast and enveloping proportions.
Andy Warhol (1930-1987)
Warhol started out as a commercial artist and he is the most representative figure of Pop Art. Both
his personality and his work have been a source of fascination. Although he seems the most
impersonal and most distant of the pop artists, his work plays upon ambiguity. It was the image of
the object that Warhol tackled.
By infinitely reproducing advertising and mass media images through the process of silkscreen
printing, Warhol took away their substance, casting it into the hectic domain of the multiple and the
banal, yet elevated to the status of a work of art. "I want to be a machine", he declared, legitimising
his mechanical process of reproducing the image, the echo of a soulless society which his work
represented and implicitly criticised. He made himself the representative of a capitalist society at its
peak which was nonetheless troubled by the image of death. Road accidents and electric chairs are
the other side of his art.
Electric Chair, 1967
Acrylic and lacquer applied to screen printing on canvas
137 x 185 cm
Warhol subjected the most varied of subjects to the same treatment assumed from a great distance.
Drawing always from the mass media repertoire, through the process of the mediatised image
which interposes itself between the viewer and reality, he showed the impossibility of reaching the
thing itself. Hence the absence of any affect in his works, which denounce the numbing of the
modern individual's reality by the society of the spectacle and the commodification of the world.
Thus, the electric chair which, with the Coca-Cola bottle, is one of the symbols of America, is
presented in terms of a cold and dehumanised image. This work belongs to the Disaster Series
(1963). The same violent subject is shown in different colours and, with this aspect of death, it
presents the other extreme of his art, in opposition to smiling faces.
Here the object is replaced by the serial image, its repetition cold and numbing.
The New Realists
On 27 October 1960, at the Paris home of Yves Klein, in Rue Campagne Première, the official birth of
New Realism took place, bringing together the following artists: Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond
Hains, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé, Jean Tinguely. Their
names would be joined by that of the critic who was to be their spokesperson: Pierre Restany. Their
declaration amounted to two sentences and announced their programme: "On Thursday 27 October
the New Realists became aware of their collective singularity. New Realism = a new perceptual
approach to reality".
To these first names would later be added those of César, Gérard Deschamps, Mimmo Rotella and
Niki de Saint Phalle. The following year, in a text titled 40° au-dessus de Dada (40° above Dada),
Restany situated this movement in a line from Dada and Duchamp.
While demonstrating very different approaches, these artists had a shared interest in the imagery of
mass culture and from it they appropriated objects. Raysse went so far as to say: "Prisunic stores are
the museums of modern art". But the expression "new perceptual approach to reality" distinguished
them from Pop Art and allowed each artist a great deal of freedom. The object as such became a full
protagonist in this art which consisted in its appropriation.
While Arman "accumulated" his objects in terms of a quantitative logic which obliterated their
singularity, Cesar made a fetish object of cars as sheet metal, "compressing" them to end up with
huge parallelepipeds which sat on the ground like polychrome sculptures. Spoerri's "trap-pictures"
captured moments of reality by taking the leftovers of a meal which he placed with their dish on the
vertical. Raysse developed assemblages in which the anonymous and stereotyped photographic
images of women played with the real object in an actual "objective poetry", while Tinguely's absurd
and complex machinery, aggregating noisy mechanical objects, set in motion infernal and
incoherent mechanisms in the image of our contemporary world.
Arman (1928)
To begin with Arman was an abstract painter, although he has always claimed that his art was a
development of painting. He abandoned this practice when he introduced everyday objects into his
work. His output is characterised by an ever-changing relationship to the object. Accumulated willynilly, or as refuse (the Dustbins series begun in 1959), broken up in the Rages series, burned in the
Combustions, becoming detached from a surface such as that of the painting which he called into
question, or assembled into huge sculptures, objects mark his work.
Home Sweet Home, 1960
Accumulation of gas masks in a box closed with Plexiglas
160 x 140.5 x 20 cm
In this work, Arman accumulates old objects that are identical, fixes them onto a two-dimensional
support and sets them in a box closed by a pane of glass, with the same meticulousness as an
entomologist collecting butterflies. But these are not insects. These are not commonplace objects.
They are gas masks, arranged differently according to each of the three versions that the artist will
give to the work.
The principle is that of the infinite profusion of the same, of the repetition that is apt to spill out of
the frame and suggest a sense of all-pervasiveness. The title, intimating the sweet domestic cosiness
of the collector engaged in his passionate hobby at home, is in tragically ironic contrast to an object
with strong connotations: gas masks, now generally linked in our consciousness to the horror of the
Nazi extermination camps. This object, symptomatic of the 20thcentury, is thoroughly restored to its
macabre aspect by its accumulation and enclosure in a literal context, the house-as-box, where
horror resides.
Martial Raysse (1936)
Martial Raysse often appears as the most prestigious representative of New Realism, to which he
belonged in the 1960s. In 1970 the artist was to call into question the ideology of the 1960s rupture
with a subtle return to traditional painting, in pastiche form, and by invoking a mysterious and
resolutely singular world of mythological references.
Soudain l’été dernier (Suddenly Last Summer), 1963
3-panel assemblage: photograph painted in acrylic and objects
100 x 225 cm
Out of this "picture with variable geometry", operating on discrepant planes and balancing finely
between the three registers of photography, painting and sculpture, the real object "suddenly"
erupts into the viewer's own space. A straw hat and a towel protrude beyond the painted surface, in
a moment of intrusion which recalls that of the title taken from Tennessee Williams. "Suddenly",
also like the photographic shutter release which has caught the pose of the young woman on the
beach, an anonymous and stereotyped figure from consumer images for sunscreen products or
seaside holidays. But on this enlarged photographic image, the painting and the retouching disclose
areas which seem to belong to traditional painting: the trompe-l'oeil of the arm, the green shadings
on the young woman's legs, the white of the painted sheet.
While celebrating a form of mass imagery, Martial Raysse transcends it with the abrupt irruption of
poetry into the here and now of the perception of the work, which does not remain fixed. The
photographic model comes out of the frame of the painting, and the real object comes out of the
frame of the representation to disturb our perception. Time too seems to be unhinged and suggest
several different temporalities simultaneously: the actuality of the photograph as a modern
technique of representation joins with the past tense of the pose, "last summer"; the references to
traditional painting are answered by the time-disjunction of something breaking in, and the
"suddenly" whose meaning here is overdetermined, by the shutter release, by the impression of the
image and the perception of the work.
STAGING THE OBJECT
Personal Mythologies
Concealed, painted, freighted with particular psychic resonances, the object was also to be
isolated and staged. In these cases, brought into the foreground, the object became a part of the
milieu that received it and exhibited it: the museum or the art gallery. Increasingly the work of art
is the expression of isolated contemporary projects which have their basis in a personal
mythology for which the artist alone has the key to interpretation.
Jean Michel Sanejouand made his first Charges-objets (object-weights) in 1963, works deriving from
his anti-paintings. The object is in opposition to painting and presides alone in space. Made up of
real objects incongruously assembled with other fragments of objects, these Charges-objets are
assembled in such a way that their meaning disappears along with their former use. They aspire to a
banality without any signification other than their being there, their problematic presence, their
non-sense. All the same, there is an ironic aspect that comes through in these objects weighted with
nothing.
For Joseph Beuys, who was close to the Fluxus group, the objects he exhibited (such as Fat Chair,
1964, or Infiltration Homogen for Grand Piano, 1966) are pieces taken from performances he did,
where the disguised object took up the whole of the stage. In the late 1960s, Jean-Pierre Raynaud
invented his Psycho-objets, while in the 1980s Bertrand Lavier showed his "fridges" and his painted
office furniture.
Joseph Beuys (1921-1986)
Beuys expanded the idea of art to reality as a whole. His ritual actions aimed to release the plurality
of the senses. Art would have a therapeutic virtue and the artist would be akin to a shaman. Objects
and materials linked to an entirely personal symbolism anchored in his biography were involved in
an art with social aims in a sick society.
Infiltration homogen für Konzertflügel (Infiltration Homogen for Grand Piano), 1966
Grand piano covered in felt and fabrics
100 x 152 x 240 cm
By associating a piano, a musical instrument and carrier of sound waves, with felt, a material
symbolic of life and survival for the artist, Beuys aimed to make this object an energy vector. The
piano's sound potential is filtered through the felt. The object is disguised and can be made out
behind the fabric which opens it to other sensory experiences. "The two crosses", said Beuys,
"signify the urgency of the danger that threatens if we remain silent [...]. Such an object is devised to
encourage debate and in no case as an anaesthetic product."
Thus the object becomes increasingly arrayed with symbolic resonances which the artist has to
explain since they are particular to him, as is also the case for Raynaud's Psycho-objects. The
flowerpot and the square white tile which recur in his work refer respectively to life and death in a
cold and increasingly aseptic world.
Bertrand Lavier (1949)
Bertrand Lavier's work has its place on the pathway that was opened up by Duchamp when he
questioned the boundary between art and non art with his ready-mades. This boundary has become
an ever finer one and Lavier challenges it with his ordinary objects from everyday life: "fridges" or
cupboards with plain, straight lines, impersonal pieces removed from their context and set up in the
museum. With his painted objects from the 1980s, Lavier resolves the dilemma between art and
non art. Acrylic paint applied in thick layers that parody Van Gogh's brushwork lifts these objects
above the mere status of ready-mades. As Jean-Hubert Martin stresses, the paint covers exactly
what it speaks of. The object sitting on the ground therefore addresses us with its very ambiguity: it
is simultaneously a painting and an object, therefore neither wholly one nor the other.
By employing the superimposition of one object upon another, as for example a refrigerator on a
safe, Brandt\Haffner, 1984, Lavier returns to notions of the sculpture and its plinth. Contrary to
appearances, Lavier claims to take his inspiration more from Brancusi than from Duchamp, and his
subtly organised installations exemplify an interrogation of sculpture itself, by means of the object.
Mademoiselle Gauducheau, 1981
Acrylic-painted metal cupboards
195 x 91.5 x 50 cm
The humorous title brings to mind a female figure in contrast with the object and its strictly
geometric form. This surrounds it with a mystery that is redoubled by the pictorial covering of its
surface. This metal office cupboard is a banal piece of furniture, completely covered in green acrylic
paint, a paint that adheres to the object like a thick elastic skin and gives it a waxy consistency.
While the object is insignificant, commonplace and pre-existing its appropriation by the artist, it is
the act of a painter which gives it the status of a work of art.
This hybrid piece was shown in the exhibition Cinq pièces faciles (Five Easy Pieces) at the Eric Fabre
Gallery, along with two other pieces of office furniture, a Westinghouse refrigerator and a Gabriel
Gaveau grand piano. In relation to the other objects in the series and in terms of its installation, as
well as the space of exhibition, through its imposing static presence it connects with the kind of
sculpture to which the artist lays claim.
Margherita LEONI-FIGINI
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works
• La Collection du Musée national d'art moderne, published by the Centre Georges Pompidou, 1986
• La Collection du Musée national d'art moderne, Acquisitions, 1986-1996, published by the Centre
Georges Pompidou, 1997
• L'ivresse du réel, edited collection, Carré d'art contemporain, Nîmes, 1993
• Denys Riout, Qu'est-ce que l'art moderne ?, Folio, Gallimard, 2000
• Catherine Millet, L'art contemporain en France, Flammarion, 1989
• Werner Spies, Picasso sculpteur, Centre Pompidou Editions, 2000
• Art moderne. La Collection du Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, sous la direction
de Brigitte Léal, 2007
• Art contemporain. La Collection du Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, sous la
direction de Sophie Duplaix, 2007
Links
Educational dossiers on the collections of the Musée national d'art moderne
• Pablo Picasso
• Surrealist Art
• Pop Art
• New Realism
Exhibition Itineraries
• The Surrealist Revolution
Pasted from <http://www.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ENS-Object-EN/ENS-objet-EN.htm>
Экзамен
mardi 13 mai 2008
08:22
Avant-gardes is an art movement of the first half of the XX century, appeared as something totally
different from classical Art, and is the result of many revolutionary changes taking place in society,
such as invention of electricity, cars, X-rays,etc. This is a new conception of perception of the world,
which was given by a group of "before-the-others" artists, creating a new artistic field. The origin of
the word can be linked with the notion of "vanguard" , a small troop of highly skilled soldiers,who
were supposed to explore the terrain ahead of a large advancing army. This concept is applied to the
work done by small group of intellectuals and artists as they open new pathways in art, then
followed by society.
The movement included such artists as
Constantin Brancusi, a romanian sculptor, whose sculptures blend simplicity and sophistication.
Amedeo Modigliani, an italian painter (and sculptor)
Pablo Picasso
Georges Braques
Marinetti
Marcel Duchamp
Kasimir Malevich
ДАДА
mardi 13 mai 2008
08:38
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in neutral Zürich, Switzerland, during World
War I and peaked from 1916 to 1920. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature
(poetry, art manifestoes, art theory), theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti war
politic through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Dada
activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals.
Passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture filled their publications. The movement influenced
later styles, Avant-garde and Downtown music movements, and groups including Surrealism,
Nouveau Réalisme, Pop Art and Fluxus.
Quotation
"Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a
prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for
anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism."
Marc Lowenthal, Translator's introduction to Francis Picabia's I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry,
Prose, And Provocation (MIT Press 2007)
Cover of the first edition of the publication Dada. Edited by Tristan Tzara. Zürich, 1917.
Contents
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1 Overview
2 History
2.1 Origin of the word Dada
2.2 Zürich
2.3 Berlin
2.4 Cologne
2.5 New York
2.6 Paris
2.7 The Netherlands
2.8 Georgia
3 Poetry; music and sound
4 Legacy
5 Early practitioners
6 See also
7 References
7.1 Footnotes
8 External links
Overview
Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The
beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I. For many participants, the
movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests which many
Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual
conformity — in art and more broadly in society — that corresponded to the war. [1]
Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch
in Germany, 1919, collage of pasted papers, 90x144 cm, Staatliche Museum, Berlin.
Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people
into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to
reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality. For example, George Grosz later recalled that his
Dadaist art was intended as a protest "against this world of mutual destruction".[2]
According to its proponents, Dada was not art — it was "anti-art" in the sense that Dadaists
protested against the contemporary academic and cultured values of art. For everything that art
stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with traditional
aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to
offend. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics the Dadaists hoped to destroy
traditional culture and aesthetics.
A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that "The Dada philosophy is the sickest,
most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Art
historians have described Dada as being, in large part, "in reaction to what many of these artists
saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."[3]
Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of
the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in
its path. [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization...In the end it became
nothing but an act of sacrilege."[3]
History
This section needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. See talk page for details.
Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2007)
Origin of the word Dada
The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain
that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the
words da, da, meaning yes, yes in the Romanian language (Engl. equivalent: yeah, yeah, as in a
sarcastic or facetious yeah, right). Still others believe that a group of artists assembled in Zürich in
1916, wanting a name for their new movement, chose it at random by stabbing a French-German
dictionary with a paper knife, and picking the name that the point landed upon. Dada in French is a
child's word for hobby-horse. In French the colloquialism, c'est mon dada, means it's my hobby.
It has also been suggested that the word "dada" was chosen randomly from the Larousse
dictionary.
According to the Dada ideal, the movement would not be called Dadaism, much less designated an
art-movement.
Zürich
In 1916, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Jean/Hans Arp, Marcel Janco, Richard
Huelsenbeck, Sophie Täuber; along with others discussed art and put on performances in the
Cabaret Voltaire expressing their disgust with the war and the interests that inspired it. By some
accounts Dada coalesced on October 6 at the cabaret.
At the first public soiree at the cabaret on July 14, 1916, Ball recited the first manifesto (see text).
Tzara, in 1918, wrote a Dada manifesto considered one of the most important of the Dada writings.
Other manifestos followed.
Marcel Janco recalled,
We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would
begin again after the "tabula rasa". At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking
common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short,
the whole prevailing order.
A single issue of Cabaret Voltaire was the first publication to come out of the movement.
After the cabaret closed down, activities moved to a new gallery, and Ball left Europe. Tzara began
a relentless campaign to spread Dada ideas. He bombarded French and Italian artists and writers
with letters, and soon emerged as the Dada leader and master strategist. The Cabaret Voltaire has
by now re-opened, and is still in the same place at the Spiegelgasse 1 in the Niederdorf.
Zürich Dada, with Tzara at the helm, published the art and literature review Dada beginning in July
1917, with five editions from Zürich and the final two from Paris.
When World War I ended in 1918, most of the Zürich Dadaists returned to their home countries,
and some began Dada activities in other cities.
Berlin
The groups in Germany were not as strongly anti-art as other groups. Their activity and art was
more political and social, with corrosive manifestos and propaganda, biting satire, large public
demonstrations and overt political activities. It has been suggested that this is at least partially due
to Berlin's proximity to the front, and that for an opposite effect, New York's geographic distance
from the war spawned its more theoretically-driven, less political nature.
In February 1918, Richard Huelsenbeck gave his first Dada speech in Berlin, and produced a Dada
manifesto later in the year. Hannah Höch and George Grosz used Dada to express post-World War I
communist sympathies. Grosz, together with John Heartfield, developed the technique of
photomontage during this period. The artists published a series of short-lived political journals, and
held the International Dada Fair in 1920.
The Berlin group saw much in-fighting; Kurt Schwitters and others were excluded from the group.
Schwitters moved to Hanover where he developed his individual type of Dada, which he dubbed
Merz.
The Berlin group published periodicals such as Club Dada, Der Dada, Everyman His Own Football ,
and Dada Almanach.
Cologne
In Cologne (Köln), Max Ernst, Johannes Theodor Baargeld and Arp launched a controversial Dada
exhibition in 1920 which focused on nonsense and anti-bourgeois sentiments. Cologne's Early
Spring Exhibition was set up in a pub, and required that participants walk past urinals while being
read lewd poetry by a woman in a communion dress. The police closed the exhibition on grounds of
obscenity, but it was re-opened when the charges were dropped.[4]
New York
Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.
Like Zürich, New York was a refuge for writers and artists from World War I. Soon after arriving
from France in 1915, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia met American artist Man Ray. By 1916
the three of them became the center of radical anti-art activities in the United States. American
Beatrice Wood, who had been studying in France, soon joined them. Much of their activity
centered in Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, 291, and the home of Walter and Louise Arensberg.
The New Yorkers, though not particularly organized, called their activities Dada, but they did not
issue manifestos. They issued challenges to art and culture through publications such as The Blind
Man, Rongwrong, and New York Dada in which they criticized the traditionalist basis for museum
art. New York Dada lacked the disillusionment of European Dada and was instead driven by a sense
of irony and humor. In his book Adventures in the arts: informal chapters on painters, vaudeville
and poets Marsden Hartley included an essay on "The Importance of Being 'Dada'".
During this time Duchamp began exhibiting "readymades" (found objects) such as a bottle rack, and
got involved with the Society of Independent Artists. In 1917 he submitted the now famous
Fountain, a urinal signed R. Mutt, to the Society of Independent Artists show only to have the piece
rejected. First an object of scorn within the arts community, the Fountain has since become almost
canonized by some. The committee presiding over Britain's prestigious Turner Prize in 2004, for
example, called it "the most influential work of modern art."[5] In an attempt to "pay homage to
the spirit of Dada" a performance artist named Pierre Pinoncelli made a crack in The Fountain with
a hammer in January 2006; he also urinated on it in 1993.
Picabia's travels tied New York, Zürich and Paris groups together during the Dadaist period. For
seven years he also published the Dada periodical 391 in Barcelona, New York City, Zürich, and
Paris from 1917 through 1924.
By 1921, most of the original players moved to Paris where Dada experienced its last major
incarnation (see Neo-Dada for later activity).
Paris
The French avant-garde kept abreast of Dada activities in Zürich with regular communications from
Tristan Tzara (whose pseudonym means "sad in country," a name chosen to protest the treatment
of Jews in his native Romania), who exchanged letters, poems, and magazines with Guillaume
Apollinaire, André Breton, Max Jacob, and other French writers, critics and artists.
Paris had arguably been the classical music capital of the world since the advent of musical
Impressionism in the late 19th century. One of its practitioners, Erik Satie, collaborated with Picasso
and Cocteau in a mad, scandalous ballet called Parade. First performed by the Ballet Russes in
1917, it succeeded in creating a scandal but in a different way than Stravinsky's Le Sacre du
Printemps had done almost 5 years earlier. This was a ballet that was clearly parodying itself,
something traditional ballet patrons would obviously have serious issues with.
Dada in Paris surged in 1920 when many of the originators converged there. Inspired by Tzara, Paris
Dada soon issued manifestos, organized demonstrations, staged performances and produced a
number of journals (the final two editions of Dada, Le Cannibale, and Littérature featured Dada in
several editions.)
The first introduction of Dada artwork to the Parisian public was at the Salon des Indépendants in
1921. Jean Crotti exhibited works associated with Dada including a work entitled, Explicatif bearing
the word Tabu.
The Netherlands
In The Netherlands the Dada movement centered mainly around Theo van Doesburg, most well
known for establishing the De Stijl movement and magazine of the same name. Van Doesburg
mainly focused on poetry, and included poems from many well-known Dada writers in De Stijl such
as Hugo Ball, Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters. Van Doesburg became a friend of Schwitters, and
together they organized the so-called Dutch Dada campaign in 1923, where Van Doesburg
promoted a leaflet about Dada (entitled What is Dada?), Schwitters read his poems, Vilmos Huszàr
demonstrated a mechanical dancing doll and Van Doesburg's wife, Nelly, played avant-garde
compositions on piano.
Van Doesburg wrote Dada poetry himself in De Stijl, although under a pseudonym, I.K. Bonset,
which was only revealed after his death in 1931. 'Together' with I.K. Bonset, he also published a
short-lived Dutch Dada magazine called Mécano.
Georgia
Although Dada itself was unknown in Georgia until at least 1920, from 1917-1921 a group of poets
called themselves "41st Degree" (referring both to the latitude of Tbilisi, Georgia and to the
temperature of a high fever) organized along Dadaist lines. The most important figure in this group
was Iliazd, whose radical typographical designs visually echo the publications of the Dadaists. After
his flight to Paris in 1921, he collaborated with Dadaists on publications and events.
Poetry; music and sound
Dada was not confined to the visual and literary arts; its influence reached into sound and music.
Kurt Schwitters developed what he called sound poems and composers such as Erwin Schulhoff,
Hans Heusser and Albert Savinio wrote Dada music, while members of Les Six collaborated with
members of the Dada movement and had their works performed at Dada gatherings. The above
mentioned Erik Satie dabbled with Dadaist ideas throughout his career although he is primarily
associated with musical Impressionism.
In the very first Dada publication, Hugo Ball describes a "balalaika orchestra playing delightful folksongs." African music and jazz was common at Dada gatherings, signaling a return to nature and
naive primitivism.
Legacy
The Janco Dada Museum, named after Marcel Janco, in Ein Hod, Israel
See also: Postmodernism#Notable philosophical contributors
While broad, the movement was unstable. By 1924 in Paris, Dada was melding into surrealism, and
artists had gone on to other ideas and movements, including surrealism, social realism and other
forms of modernism. Some theorists argue that Dada was actually the beginning of postmodern
art.[6]
By the dawn of World War II, many of the European Dadaists had fled or emigrated to the United
States. Some died in death camps under Hitler, who persecuted the kind of "Degenerate art" that
Dada represented. The movement became less active as post-World War II optimism led to new
movements in art and literature.
Dada is a named influence and reference of various anti-art and political and cultural movements
including the Situationists and culture jamming groups like the Cacophony Society.
At the same time that the Zürich Dadaists made noise and spectacle at the Cabaret Voltaire,
Vladimir Lenin wrote his revolutionary plans for Russia in a nearby apartment. He was
unappreciative of the artistic revolutionary activity near him. Tom Stoppard used this coincidence
as a premise for his play Travesties (1974), which includes Tzara, Lenin, and James Joyce as
characters.
The Cabaret Voltaire fell into disrepair until it was occupied from January to March, 2002, by a
group proclaiming themselves neo-Dadaists, led by Mark Divo.[7] The group included Jan Thieler,
Ingo Giezendanner, Aiana Calugar, Lennie Lee and Dan Jones. After their eviction the space became
a museum dedicated to the history of Dada. The work of Lennie Lee and Dan Jones remained on
the walls of the museum.
Several notable retrospectives have examined the influence of Dada upon art and society. In 1967,
a large Dada retrospective was held in Paris, France. In 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New
York City held a Dada exhibition in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Early practitioners
For a more complete list of Dadaists, see List of Dadaists.
Guillaume Apollinaire — France
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Hans Arp — Switzerland, France and Germany

Hugo Ball — Switzerland

Johannes Baader — Germany

John Heartfield — Germany

Arthur Cravan — United States

Jean Crotti — France

Theo van Doesburg — The Netherlands

Marcel Duchamp — France and United States

George Grosz — Germany

Max Ernst — Germany

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven — United States, Germany

Hannah Höch — Germany

Marsden Hartley — United States

Raoul Hausmann — Germany

Emmy Hennings — Switzerland

Richard Huelsenbeck — Switzerland and Germany

Marcel Iancu — Switzerland (born in Romania)

Clément Pansaers — Belgium

Francis Picabia — Switzerland, United States and France

Man Ray — United States and France

Hans Richter — Germany, Switzerland and United States

Kurt Schwitters — Germany

Sophie Taeuber-Arp — Switzerland

Tristan Tzara — Switzerland and France (born in Romania)

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Beatrice Wood — United States and France
Ilia Zdanevich (Iliazd) — Georgia and France
Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada>
Футуризм
mardi 13 mai 2008
08:39
Futurism was an art movement that originated in Italy at the beginning of the 20th century.
Although a nascent Futurism can be seen surfacing throughout the very early years of the
twentieth century, the 1907 essay Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Sketch of a New
Aesthetic of Music) by the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni is sometimes claimed as its true
starting point. Futurism was a largely Italian and Russian movement, although it also had adherents
in other countries, England for example.
The Futurists explored every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music,
architecture and even gastronomy. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the first among
them to produce a manifesto of their artistic philosophy in his Manifesto of (1909), first released in
Milan and published in the French paper Le Figaro (February 20). Marinetti summed up the major
principles of the Futurists, including a passionate loathing of ideas from the past, especially political
and artistic traditions. He and others also espoused a love of speed, technology, and violence.
Futurists dubbed the love of the past passéisme. The car, the plane, the industrial town were all
legendary for the Futurists, because they represented the technological triumph of people over
nature. Few futurist works came into existence because of the repression of Russia at that time, so
these manifestos still remain on paper.
Contents
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1 Futurist Painting and Sculpture in Italy 1910-1914
2 Cubo-Futurism
3 Futurism in Music
4 Futurism in Literature
5 Futurism in the 1920s and 1930s
6 The legacy of Futurism
7 Prominent Futurist artists
8 References
9 See also
10 Further reading
11 External links
[edit] Futurist Painting and Sculpture in Italy 1910-1914
Marinetti's impassioned polemic immediately attracted the support of the young Milanese painters
- Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Luigi Russolo - who wanted to extend Marinetti's ideas to the
visual arts. (Russolo was also a composer, and introduced Futurist ideas into his compositions). The
painters Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini met Marinetti in 1910 and together with Boccioni, Carrà
and Russolo issued the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters. It was couched in the violent and
declamatory language of Marinetti's founding manifesto, opening with the words,[1]
“
The cry of rebellion which we utter associates our ideals with those of the
Futurist poets. These ideas were not invented by some aesthetic clique. They
are an expression of a violent desire, which burns in the veins of every creative
”
artist today. ... We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and
snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of
museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old
statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden
and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything
which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.
They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality, "however daring, however
violent", bore proudly "the smear of madness", dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against
harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and gloried in
science. Their manifesto did not contain a positive artistic programme, which they attempted to
create in their subsequent Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting. The Technical Manifesto
committed them to a "universal dynamism", which was to be directly represented in painting.
Objects in reality were not separate from one another or from their surroundings: "The sixteen
people around you in a rolling motor bus are in turn and at the same time one, ten four three; they
are motionless and they change places. ... The motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes,
and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with it." [2]
The Futurist painters were slow to develop a distinctive style and subject matter. In 1910 and 1911
they used the technique of divisionism, breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots
and stripes, which had been originally created by Seurat. Severini, who lived in Paris, was the first
to come into contact with Cubism and following a visit to Paris in 1911 the Futurist painters
adopted the methods of the Cubists. Cubism offered them a means of analysing energy in paintings
and expressing dynamism.
Carlo Carrà, Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910-1911)
Umberto Boccioni, The City Rises (1910)
They often painted modern urban scenes. Carrà's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910-11) is a large
canvas representing events that the artist had himself been involved in in 1904. The action of a
police attack and riot is rendered energetically with diagonals and broken planes. His Leaving the
Theatre (1910-11) uses a divisionist technique to render isolated and faceless figures trudging
home at night under street lights.
Boccioni's The City Rises (1910) represents scenes of construction and manual labour with a huge,
rearing red horse in the centre foreground, which workmen struggle to control. His States of Mind,
in three large panels, The Farewell, Those who Go, and Those Who Stay, "made his first great
statement of Futurist painting, bringing his interests in Bergson, Cubism and the individual's
complex experience of the modern world together in what has been described as one of the 'minor
masterpieces' of early twentieth century painting." [3] The work attempts to convey feelings and
sensations experienced in time, using new means of expression, including "lines of force", which
were intended to convey the directional tendencies of objects through space, "simultaneity", which
combined memories, present impressions and anticipation of future events, and "emotional
ambience" in which the artist seeks by intuition to link sympathies between the exterior scene and
interior emotion.[4]
Boccioni's intentions in art were strongly influenced by the ideas of Bergson, including the idea of
intuition, which Bergson defined as a simple, indivisible experience of sympathy through which one
is moved into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique and ineffable within it. The
Futurists aimed through their art thus to enable the viewer to apprehend the inner being of what
they depicted. Boccioni developed these ideas at length in his book, Pittura scultura Futuriste:
Dinamismo plastico (Futurist Painting Sculpture: Plastic Dynamism) (1914).[5]
Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) exemplifies the Futurists' insistence that the
perceived world is in constant movement. The painting depicts a dog whose legs, tail and leash and the feet of the person walking it - have been multiplied to a blur of movement. It illustrates the
precepts of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting that, "On account of the persistency of an
image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like
rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their
movements are triangular." [6] His Rhythm of the Bow (1912) similarly depicts the movements of a
violinist's hand and instrument, rendered in rapid strokes within a triangular frame.
The adoption of Cubism determined the style of much subsequent Futurist painting, which Boccioni
and Severini in particular continued to render in the broken colors and short brush-strokes of
divisionism. But Futurist painting differed in both subject matter and treatment from the quiet and
static Cubism of Picasso, Braque and Gris. Although there were Futurist portraits (e.g. Carrà's
Woman with Absinthe (1911), Severini's Self-Portrait (1912), and Boccioni's Matter (1912)), it was
the urban scene and vehicles in motion that typified Futurist painting - e.g. Severini's Dynamic
Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin (1912) and Russolo's Automobile at Speed (1913)
Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)
In 1912 and 1913, Boccioni turned to sculpture to translate into three dimensions his Futurist ideas.
In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) he attempted to realise the relationship between the
object and its environment, which was central to his theory of "dynamism". The sculpture
represents a striding figure, cast in bronze posthumously and exhibited in the Tate Gallery. He
explored the theme further in Synthesis of Human Dynamism (1912), Speeding Muscles (1913) and
Spiral Expansion of Speeding Muscles (1913). His ideas on sculpture were published in the Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture[7] In 1915 Balla also turned to sculpture making abstract
"reconstructions", which were created out of various materials, were apparently moveable and
even made noises. He said that, after making twenty pictures in which he had studied the velocity
of automobiles, he understood that "the single plane of the canvas did not permit the suggestion of
the dynamic volume of speed in depth ... I felt the need to construct the first dynamic plastic
complex with iron wires, cardboard planes, cloth and tissue paper, etc." [8]
In 1914, personal quarrels and artistic differences between the Milan group, around Marinetti,
Boccioni, and Balla, and the Florence group, around Carrà, Ardengo Soffici (1879-1964) and
Giovanni Papini (1881-1956), created a rift in Italian Futurism. The Florence group resented the
dominance of Marinetti and Boccioni, whom they accused of trying to establish "an immobile
church with an infallible creed", and each group dismissed the other as passéiste.
Futurism had from the outset admired violence and was intensely patriotic. The Futurist Manifesto
had declared, "We will glorify war - the world's only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive
gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman." [9] Although it
owed much of its character and some of its ideas to radical political movements, it was not much
involved in politics until the autumn of 1913.[10] Then, fearing the re-election of Giolitti, Marinetti
published a political manifesto. In 1914 the Futurists began to campaign actively against Austria
and Italian neutrality. In September, Boccioni, seated in the balcony of the Teatro dal Verme in
Milan, tore up an Austrian flag and threw it into the audience, while Marinetti waved an Italian flag.
The outbreak of war disguised the fact that Italian Futurism had come to an end. The Florence
group had formally acknowledged their withdrawal from the movement by the end of 1914.
Boccioni produced only one war picture and was killed in 1916. Severini painted some significant
war pictures in 1915 (e.g. War, Armored Train, and Red Cross Train), but in Paris turned towards
Cubism and post-war was associated with the Return to Order.
After the war, Marinetti attempted to revive the movement in il secondo Futurismo.
[edit] Cubo-Futurism
Image from an Agitprop poster by Mayakovsky.
Main articles: Russian Futurism and Cubo-Futurism
Cubo-Futurism was the main school of Russian Futurism which imbued influence of Cubism and
developed in Russia in 1913.
Like their Italian predecessors, the Russian Futurists — Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksey Kruchenykh,
Vladimir Mayakovsky, David Burlyuk — were fascinated with dynamism, speed, and restlessness of
modern urban life. They purposely sought to arouse controversy and to attract publicity by
repudiating static art of the past. The likes of Pushkin and Dostoevsky, according to them, should
have been "heaved overboard from the steamship of modernity". They acknowledged no
authorities whatsoever; even Marinetti, principles of whose manifesto they adopted earlier —
when he arrived to Russia on a proselytizing visit in 1914 — was obstructed by most Russian
Futurists who now did not profess to owe anything to him.
In contrast to Marinetti's circle, Russian Futurism was a literary rather than artistic movement.
Although many leading poets (Mayakovsky, Burlyuk) dabbled in painting, their interests were
primarily literary. On the other hand, such well-established artists as Mikhail Larionov, Natalia
Goncharova, and Kazimir Malevich found inspiration in the refreshing imagery of Futurist poems
and experimented with versification themselves. The poets and painters attempted to collaborate
on such innovative productions as the Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, with texts by
Kruchenykh and sets contributed by Malevich.
The movement began to waste away after the revolution of 1917. Many prominent members of
the Russian Futurism emigrated abroad. Artists like Mayakovsky and Malevich become the
prominent members of the Soviet establishment and Agitprop of the 1920s. Others like Khlebnikov
were persecuted for their beliefs.
[edit] Futurism in Music
One of the many 20th century classical movements in music was one which involved homage to,
inclusion of, or imitation of machines. Closely identified with the central Italian Futurist movement
were brother composers Luigi Russolo and Antonio Russolo, who used instruments known as
"intonarumori", which were essentially sound boxes used to create music out of noise. Luigi
Russolo's futurist manifesto, The Art of Noises, is considered to be one of the most important and
influential texts in 20th century musical aesthetics. Other examples of futurist music include Arthur
Honegger's Pacific 231, which imitates the sound of a steam locomotive, Prokofiev's "The Steel
Step", and the experiments of Edgard Varèse. Most notably, however, might be composer George
Antheil. Embraced by dadists, futurists, and modernists alike, he was championed as the musical
face of the radical movements of the 1920s. The culmination of his machine obsession, as seen in
previous works such as "Airplane Sonata" and "Death of the Machines", was manifest in the 30 min.
Ballet mécanique. Originally accompanied by an experimental film by Fernand Leger but scratched
due to the length of the score being twice that of the film, the autograph score calls for a daring
and bold percussion ensemble, consisting of 3 xylophones, 4 bass drums, a tam-tam, three airplane
propellers (one large wood, one small wood, one metal), seven electric bells, a siren, 2 "live
pianists", and 16 synchronized player pianos. At the time it was written however, synchronizing 16
player pianos was impossible and was performed in a reduced form (in 1999 the piece was fully
realized to a great success). Antheil's piece was a first for music in synchronizing machines with
human players, and in exploiting the various differences between the technical competence of
humans and machines (that is to say, what machines can play vs. what people can't, and vice
versa); this ideology can be seen reflected in even modern day music where the philosophy that
man and machine need each other to create the best music has led to the incorporation of
software into live performances. Antheil himself described his piece as a "solid shaft of steel."
[edit] Futurism in Literature
Main article: Futurism (literature)
Futurism as a literary movement made its official debut with F.T. Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism
(1909), as it delineated the various ideals Futurist poetry should strive for. Poetry, the predominate
medium of Futurist literature, can be characterized by its unexpected combinations of images and
hyper-conciseness (not to be confused with the actual length of the poem). Theater also has an
important place within the Futurist universe. Works in this genre have scenes that are few
sentences long, have an emphasis on nonsensical humor, and attempt to discredit the deep rooted
traditions via parody and other devaluation techniques. The longer forms of literature, such as the
novel, had no place in the Futurist aesthetic of speed and compression.
[edit] Futurism in the 1920s and 1930s
Many Italian Futurists instinctively supported the rise of Fascism in Italy in the hope of modernizing
the society and the economy of a country that was still torn between unfulfilled industrial
revolution in the North and the rural, archaic South. Marinetti founded the Partito Politico Futurista
(Futurist Political Party) in early 1918, which only a year later was absorbed into Benito Mussolini's
Fasci di combattimento, making Marinetti one of the first supporters and members of the National
Fascist Party. However, he opposed Fascism's later canonical exultation of existing institutions,
calling them "reactionary", and, after walking out of the 1920 Fascist party congress in disgust,
withdrew from politics for three years. Nevertheless, he stayed a notable force in developing the
party thought throughout the regime. Some Futurists' aestheticization of violence and glorification
of modern warfare as the ultimate artistic expression and their intense nationalism also induced
them to embrace Fascism. Many Futurists became associated with the regime in the 1920s, which
gave them both official recognition and the ability to carry out important works, especially in
architecture.
Throughout the Fascist regime Marinetti sought to make Futurism the official state art of Italy but
failed to do so. Mussolini was personally uninterested in art and chose to give patronage to
numerous styles and movements in order to keep artists loyal to the regime. Opening the
exhibition of Novecento art in 1923 he said, "I declare that it is far from my idea to encourage
anything like a state art. Art belongs to the domain of the individual. The state has only one duty:
not to undermine art, to provide humane conditions for artists, to encourage them from the artistic
and national point of view."[11] Mussolini's mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, who was as able a
cultural entrepreneur as Marinetti, successfully promoted the rival Novecento group, and even
persuaded Marinetti to sit on its board. Although in the early years of Italian Fascism modern art
was tolerated and even embraced, towards the end of the 1930s, right-wing Fascists introduced the
concept of "degenerate art" from Germany to Italy and condemned Futurism.
Marinetti made numerous moves to ingratiate himself with the regime, becoming less radical and
avant garde with each. He moved from Milan to Rome to be nearer the centre of things. He
became an academician despite his condemnation of academies, married despite his
condemnation of marriage, promoted religious art after the Lateran Treaty of 1929 and even
reconciled himself to the Catholic church, declaring that Jesus was a Futurist.
Some leftists that came to Futurism in the earlier years continued to oppose Marinetti's artistic and
political direction of Futurism. Leftists continued to be associated with Futurism right up until 1924,
when the socialists, communists, anarchists and anti-Fascists finally walked out of the Milan
Congress,[12], and the anti-Fascist voices in Futurism were not completely silenced until the
annexation of Ethiopia and the Italo-German Pact of Steel in 1939.[13]
Aeropainting (aeropittura) was a major expression of Futurism in the thirties and early forties. The
technology and excitement of flight, directly experienced by most aeropainters,[14] offered
aeroplanes and aerial landscape as new subject matter. But aeropainting was varied in subject
matter and treatment, including realism (especially in works of propaganda), abstraction,
dynamism, quiet Umbrian landscapes,[15] portraits of Mussolini (e.g. Dottori's Portrait of il Duce),
devotional religious paintings and decorative art.
Aeropainting was launched in a manifesto of 1929, Perspectives of Flight, signed by Benedetta,
Depero, Dottori, Fillia, Marinetti, Prampolini, Somenzi and Tato. The artists stated that "The
changing perspectives of flight constitute an absolutely new reality that has nothing in common
with the reality traditionally constituted by a terrestrial perspective" and that "Painting from this
new reality requires a profound contempt for detail and a need to synthesise and transfigure
everything." Crispolti identifies three main "positions" in aeropainting: "a vision of cosmic
projection, at its most typical in Prampolini's 'cosmic idealism' ... ; a 'reverie' of aerial fantasies
sometimes verging on fairy-tale (for example in Dottori ...); and a kind of aeronautical
documentarism that comes dizzyingly close to direct celebration of machinery (particularly in Crali,
but also in Tato and Ambrosi)." [16] Eventually there were over a hundred aeropainters. The most
able were Balla, Depero, Prampolini, Dottori and Crali.[17]
Fortunato Depero was the co-author with Balla of The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe,
(1915) a radical manifesto for the revolution of everyday life. He practised painting, design,
sculpture, graphic art, illustration, interior design, stage design and ceramics.[18] The decorative
element comes to the fore in Depero's later painting, e.g. Train Born from the Sun (1924). He
applied this approach in theatre design and commercial art - e.g. his unrealised designs for
Stravinsky's Chant du Rossignol, (1916) his large tapestry, The Court of the Big Doll (1920) and his
many posters.
Enrico Prampolini pursued a programme of abstract and quasi-abstract painting, combined with a
career in stage design. His Spatial-Landscape Construction (1919) is quasi-abstract with large flat
areas in bold colours, predominantly red, orange, blue and dark green. His Simultaneous Landscape
(1922) is totally abstract, with flat colours and no attempt to create perspective. In his Umbrian
Landscape (1929), produced in the year of the Aeropainting Manifesto, Prampolini returns to
figuration, representing the hills of Umbria. But by 1931 he had adopted "cosmic idealism", a
biomorphic abstractionism quite different from the works of the previous decade, for example in
Pilot of the Infinite (1931) and Biological Apparition (1940).
Gerardo Dottori made a specifically Futurist contribution to landscape painting, which he
frequently shows from an aerial viewpoint. Some of his landscapes appear to be more conventional
than Futurist, e.g. his Hillside Landscape (1925). Others are dramatic and lyrical, e.g. The Miracle of
Light (1931-2), which employs his characteristic high viewpoint over a schematised landscape with
patches of brilliant colour and a non-naturalistic perspective reminiscent of pre-Renaissance
painting; over the whole are three rainbows, in non-naturalistic colour. More typically Futurist is his
major work, the Velocity Triptych of 1925.
Dottori was one of the principal exponents of Futurist sacred art. His painting of St. Francis Dying at
Porziuncola has a strong landscape element and a mystical intent conveyed by distortion, dramatic
light and colour.
Mural painting was embraced by the Futurists in the Manifesto of Mural Plasticism at a time when
the revival of fresco painting was being debated in Italy.[19] Dottori carried out many mural
commissions including the Altro Mondo in Perugia (1927-8) and the hydroport at Ostia (1928).[20]
Tullio Crali, a self-taught painter, was a late adherent to Futurism, not joining until 1929. He is
noted for his realistic aeropaintings, which combine "speed, aerial mechanisation and the
mechanics of aerial warfare".[21] His earliest aeropaintings represent military planes, Aerial
Squadron and Aerial Duel (both 1929), in appearance little different from works by Prampolini or
other Futurist painters. In the 1930s, his paintings became realistic, intending to communicate the
experience of flight to the viewer.[22]. His best-known work, Nose Dive on the City (1939), shows
an aerial dive from the pilot's point of view, the buildings below drawn in dizzying perspective.
Futurism expanded to encompass other artistic domains and ultimately included painting,
sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, theatre design, textiles,
drama, literature, music and architecture. In architecture, it was characterized by a distinctive
thrust towards rationalism and modernism through the use of advanced building materials. In Italy,
futurist architects were often at odds with the fascist state's tendency towards Roman
imperial/classical aesthetic patterns. However several interesting futurist buildings were built in the
years 1920–1940, including many public buildings: stations, maritime resorts, post offices, etc. See,
for example, Trento's railway station built by Angiolo Mazzoni.
[edit] The legacy of Futurism
The cover of the last edition of BLAST, journal of the British Vorticist movement, a movement
heavily influenced by futurism.
Futurism influenced many other twentieth century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism,
Constructivism, Surrealism and Dada. Futurism as a coherent and organized artistic movement is
now regarded as extinct, having died out in 1944 with the death of its leader Marinetti, and
Futurism was, like science fiction, in part overtaken by 'the future'.
Nonetheless the ideals of futurism remain as significant components of modern Western culture;
the emphasis on youth, speed, power and technology finding expression in much of modern
commercial cinema and culture. Ridley Scott consciously evoked the designs of Sant'Elia in Blade
Runner. Echoes of Marinetti's thought, especially his "dreamt-of metallization of the human body",
are still strongly prevalent in Japanese culture, and surface in manga/anime and the works of artists
such as Shinya Tsukamoto, director of the "Tetsuo" (lit. "Ironman") films. Futurism has produced
several reactions, including the literary genre of cyberpunk — in which technology was often
treated with a critical eye — whilst artists who came to prominence during the first flush of the
Internet, such as Stelarc and Mariko Mori, produce work which comments on futurist ideals.
A revival of sorts of the Futurist movement began in 1988 with the creation of the Neo-Futurist
style of theatre in Chicago, which utilizes Futurism's focus on speed and brevity to create a new
form of immediate theatre. Currently, there are active Neo-Futurist troupes in Chicago and New
York.
Another revival in the San Francisco area, perhaps best described as Post-Futurist, centers around
the band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, who took their name from a (possibly fictitious) Futurist
press organization (described by founder John Kane as "the fastest museum alive") dating back to
1916. SGM's lyrics and (very in-depth) liner notes routinely quote and reference Marinetti and The
Futurist Manifesto, and juxtapose them with opposing views such as those presented in Industrial
Society and Its Future (also known as the Unabomber Manifesto, attributed to Theodore
Kaczynski).
[edit] Prominent Futurist artists
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Giacomo Balla, painter
Benedetta
Umberto Boccioni , painter, sculptor
Anton Giulio Bragaglia
David Burliuk, painter
Vladimir Burliuk, painter
Mario Carli
Carlo Carrà, painter
Sebastiano Carta
Ambrogio Casati, painter
Primo Conti, artist
Tullio Crali
Giulio d'Anna
Fortunato Depero, painter
Nicolay Diugheroff
Gerardo Dottori, painter, poet and art critic
Fillia (Luigi Colombo), painter and writer
Luciano Folgore
Corrado Govoni
Gian Pietro Lucini
Antonio Marasco
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, poet
Vladimir Mayakovsky, poet
Angiolo Mazzoni, architect
Mario Menin, painter
Sante Monachesi
Aldo Palazzeschi, writer
Giovanni Papini, writer
Enrico Prampolini, painter, sculptor and stage director
Francesco Pratella, composer
Ugo Pozzo
Pippo Rizzo
Luigi Russolo, painter, musician & custom-made instrument builder
Antonio Sant'Elia, architect
Hugo Scheiber
Emilio Settimelli, writer and journalist
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Gino Severini, painter
Mario Sironi, painter
Ardengo Soffici, painter and writer
Tato (Guilielmo Sansoni), painter and photographer
Ernesto Thayaht, sculptor, painter and fashion designer (born Ernesto Michaelles)
Luigi De Giudici, painter
Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_%28art%29>
Супрематизм
mardi 13 mai 2008
08:40
Suprematism is an art movement focused on fundamental geometric forms (in particular the square
and circle) which formed in Russia in 1915-1916.
When Kasimir Malevich originated Suprematism in 1915 he was an established painter having
exhibited in the Donkey's Tail and the Der Blaue Reiter ( The Blue Rider) exhibitions of 1912 with
cubo-futurist works. The proliferation of new artistic forms in painting, poetry and theatre as well as
a revival of interest in the traditional folk art of Russia were a rich environment in which a Modernist
culture was being born.
In his book The Non-Objective World, which was published abroad as a Bauhaus Book in 1927,
Malevich described the inspiration which brought about the powerful image of the black square on
a white ground:
'I felt only night within me and it was then that I conceived the new art, which I called
Suprematism'.
Malevich also ascribed the birth of Suprematism to Victory Over the Sun, Kruchenykh's Futurist
opera production for which he designed the sets and costumes in 1913. One of the drawings for the
backcloth shows a black square divided diagonally into a black and a white triangle. Because of the
simplicity of these basic forms they were able to signify a new beginning.
He created a Suprematist 'grammar' based on fundamental geometric forms; in particular, the
square and the circle. In the 0.10 Exhibition in 1915, Malevich exhibited his early experiments in
Suprematist painting. The centerpiece of his show was the Black square on white, placed in what is
called the red/beautiful corner in Russian Orthodox tradition ; the place of the main icon in a house.
Another important influence on Malevich were the ideas of Russian mystic-mathematician P. D.
Ouspensky who wrote of
'a fourth dimension beyond the three to which our ordinary senses have access', (Gooding, 2001).
1916 Suprematism (Supremus No. 58) Museum of Art, Kasimir Malevich
Some of the titles to paintings in 1915 express the concept of a non-euclidian geometry which
imagined forms in movement, or through time; titles such as: Two dimensional painted masses in
the state of movement. These give some indications towards an understanding of the Suprematic
compositions produced between 1915 and 1918.
The Supremus group which, in addition to Malevich included Aleksandra Ekster, Olga Rozanova,
Nadezhda Udaltsova, Anna Kagan, Ivan Kliun, Liubov Popova, Nikolai Suetin, Ilya Chashnik, Lazar
Khidekel, Nina Genke-Meller, Ivan Puni and Ksenia Boguslavskaya met from 1915 onwards to discuss
the philosophy of Suprematism and its development into other areas of intellectual life. There was
some crossover with Constructivism, with Suprematists such as Popova and especially El Lissitzky
working on propaganda and industrial design. Lissitzky spread Suprematist ideas abroad in the early
1920s. In addition, Nikolai Suetin used Suprematist motifs on works at the St Petersburg Lomonosov
Porcelain Factory, where Malevich and Chashnik were also employed, with Malevich designing a
Suprematist teapot. The Suprematists also made architectural models in the 1920s, which offered a
different conception of socialist buildings to those developed in Constructivist architecture.
This development in artistic expression came about when Russia was in a revolutionary state, when
ideas were in ferment and the old order was being swept away. As the new order became
established, and Stalinism took hold from 1924 on, the state began limiting the freedom of artists.
Self-Portrait (Detail). Malevich, 1933)
From the late 1920s the Russian avant-garde experienced direct and harsh criticism from the
authorities and in 1934 the doctrine of Socialist Realism became official policy, and prohibited
abstraction and divergence of artistic expression. Malevich nevertheless retained his main
conception. In his self-portrait of 1933 he represented himself in a traditional way — the only way
permitted by Stalinist cultural policy — but signed the picture with a tiny black-over-white square.
Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprematism>
Сюрреализм
mardi 13 mai 2008
08:42
Surrealism[1] is a cultural movement that began in the early-1920s, and is best known for the
visual artworks and writings of the group members. The works feature the element of surprise,
unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however many Surrealist artists and writers regard
their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost with the works being
an artifact, and leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a
revolutionary movement. From the Dada activities of World War I Surrealism was formed with the
most important center of the movement in Paris and from the 1920s spreading around the globe,
eventually affecting films such as Angel's Egg and El Topo, amongst others.
Contents
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1 Founding of the movement
1.1 Surrealist Manifesto
1.2 La Révolution surréaliste
1.3 Bureau of Surrealist Research
2 Expansion
2.1 Writing continues
2.2 Films by Surrealists
2.3 Music by Surrealists
3 Surrealism and international politics
3.1 Internal politics
4 Golden age
4.1 World War II and the Post War period
5 Post Breton Surrealism
6 Impact of Surrealism
6.1 Surrealist groups
6.2 Surrealism and theatre
6.3 Surrealism and film
6.4 Surrealism and comedy
7 Criticism of Surrealism
7.1 Feminist
7.2 Freudian
7.3 Situationist
8 Timeline of Membership
9 See also
10 References
11 External links
11.1 André Breton writings
11.2 Overview websites
11.3 Surrealism and politics
[edit] Founding of the movement
World War I scattered the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and while away from
Paris many involved themselves in the Dada movement believing that excessive rational thought
and bourgeois values had brought the terrifying conflict upon the world. The Dadaists protested
with anti-rational anti-art gatherings, performances, writing and art works. After the war when they
returned to Paris the Dada activities continued.
During the war Surrealism's soon-to-be leader André Breton, who had trained in medicine and
psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used the psychoanalytic methods of Sigmund
Freud with soldiers who were shell-shocked. He also met the young writer Jacques Vaché and felt
that he was the spiritual son of writer and 'pataphysician Alfred Jarry, and he came to admire the
young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote,
"In literature, I am successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau,
with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most."[2]
Back in Paris, Breton joined in the Dada activities and also started the literary journal Littérature
along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. They began experimenting with automatic writing—
spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the "automatic" writings,
as well as accounts of dreams, in Littérature. Breton and Soupault delved deeper into automatism
and wrote The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Magnétiques) in 1919. They continued the automatic
writing, gathering more artists and writers into the group, and coming to believe that automatism
was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada attack on prevailing values. In addition to
Breton, Aragon and Soupault the original Surrealists included Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René
Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise, Marcel Noll, Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac,
Simone Breton, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris,
Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp,
Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy.[3]
Cover of the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, December 1924.
As they developed their philosophy they felt that while Dada rejected categories and labels,
Surrealism would advocate the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and
important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination
according to the Hegelian Dialectic. They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such
theorists as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse.
Freud's work with free association, dream analysis and the hidden unconscious was of the utmost
importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. However, they
embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness or darkness of the mind.
(Later the idiosyncratic Salvador Dalí explained it as: "There is only one difference between a
madman and me. I am not mad."[4])
The group aimed to revolutionize human experience, including its personal, cultural, social, and
political aspects, by freeing people from what they saw as false rationality, and restrictive customs
and structures. Breton proclaimed, the true aim of Surrealism is "long live the social revolution, and
it alone!" To this goal, at various times surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism.
In 1924 they declared their intents and philosophy with the issuance of the first Surrealist
Manifesto. That same year they established the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and began
publishing the journal La Révolution surréaliste.
[edit] Surrealist Manifesto
Main article: Surrealist Manifesto
Breton wrote the manifesto of 1924 (another was issued in 1929) that defines the purposes of the
group and includes citations of the influences on Surrealism, examples of Surrealist works and
discussion of Surrealist automatism. He defined Surrealism as:
Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either
verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of
thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral
preoccupation.
Encyclopedia: Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality
of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the
disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and
to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.
[edit] La Révolution surréaliste
Main article: La Révolution surréaliste
Shortly after releasing the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, the Surrealists published the inaugural
issue of La Révolution surréaliste and publication continued into 1929. Pierre Naville and Benjamin
Péret were the initial directors of the publication and modeled the format of the journal on the
conservative scientific review La Nature. The format was deceiving, and to the Surrealists' delight
La Révolution surréaliste was consistently scandalous and revolutionary. The journal focused on
writing with most pages densely packed with columns of text, but also included reproductions of
art, among them works by Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, André Masson and Man Ray.
[edit] Bureau of Surrealist Research
Main article: Bureau of Surrealist Research
The Bureau of Surrealist Research (Centrale Surréaliste) was the Paris office where the Surrealist
writers and artists gathered to meet, hold discussions, and conduct interviews with the goal of
investigating speech under trance.
[edit] Expansion
André Masson. Automatic Drawing. 1924. Ink on paper, 23.5 x 20.6 cm. Museum of Modern Art,
New York.
The movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists
played collaborative drawing games and discussed the theories of Surrealism. The Surrealists
developed techniques such as automatic drawing. (See Surrealist techniques and games.)
Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they
appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by
the discovery of such techniques as frottage, and decalcomania.
Soon more visual artists joined Surrealism including Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Enrico Donati,
Alberto Giacometti, Valentine Hugo, Méret Oppenheim, Toyen, Grégoire Michonze, and Luis
Buñuel. Though Breton admired Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and courted them to join the
movement, they remained peripheral.[5]
More writers also joined, including former Dada leader Tristan Tzara, René Char, Georges Sadoul,
André Thirion and Maurice Heine.
In 1925 an autonomous Surrealist group formed in Brussels becoming official in 1926. The group
included the musician, poet and artist E.L.T. Mesens, painter and writer René Magritte, Paul Nougé,
Marcel Lecomte, Camille Goemans, and André Souris. In 1927 they were joined by the writer Louis
Scutenaire. They corresponded regularly with the Paris group, and in 1927 both Goemans and
Magritte moved to Paris and frequented Breton’s circle.[3]
The artists, with their roots in Dada and Cubism, the abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky and
Expressionism, and Post-Impressionism, also reached to older "bloodlines" such as Hieronymus
Bosch, and the so-called primitive and naive arts.
André Masson's automatic drawings of 1923, are often used as the point of the acceptance of
visual arts and the break from Dada, since they reflect the influence of the idea of the unconscious
mind. Another example is Alberto Giacometti's 1925 Torso, which marked his movement to
simplified forms and inspiration from preclassical sculpture.
However, a striking example of the line used to divide Dada and Surrealism among art experts is the
pairing of 1925's Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person (Von minimax
dadamax selbst konstruiertes maschinchen)[6] with The Kiss (Le Baiser)[7] from 1927 by Ernst. The
first is generally held to have a distance, and erotic subtext, whereas the second presents an erotic
act openly and directly. In the second the influence of Miró and the drawing style of Picasso is
visible with the use of fluid curving and intersecting lines and colour, where as the first takes a
directness that would later be influential in movements such as Pop art.
Giorgio de Chirico The Red Tower (La Tour Rouge) 1913
Giorgio de Chirico, and his previous development of Metaphysical art, was one of the important
joining figures between the philosophical and visual aspects of Surrealism. Between 1911 and 1917,
he adopted an unornamented depictional style whose surface would be adopted by others later.
The Red Tower (La tour rouge) from 1913 shows the stark colour contrasts and illustrative style
later adopted by Surrealist painters. His 1914 The Nostalgia of the Poet (La Nostalgie du poete)[8]
has the figure turned away from the viewer, and the juxtaposition of a bust with glasses and a fish
as a relief defies conventional explanation. He was also a writer, and his novel Hebdomeros
presents a series of dreamscapes with an unusual use of punctuation, syntax and grammar
designed to create a particular atmosphere and frame around its images. His images, including set
designs for the Ballets Russes, would create a decorative form of visual Surrealism, and he would
be an influence on the two artists who would be even more closely associated with Surrealism in
the public mind: Salvador Dalí and Magritte. He would, however, leave the Surrealist group in 1928.
In 1924, Miro and Masson applied Surrealism theory to painting explicitly leading to the La Peinture
Surrealiste exhibition.
Breton published Surrealism and Painting in 1928 which summarized the movement to that point,
though he continued to update the work until the 1960s.
Major exhibitions in the 1920s
1925 - La Peinture Surrealiste - The first ever Surrealist exhibition at Gallerie Pierre in
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Paris. Displayed works by Masson, Man Ray, Klee, Miró, and others. The show confirmed that
Surrealism had a component in the visual arts (though it had been initially debated whether
this was possible), techniques from Dada, such as photomontage were used.
Galerie Surréaliste opened on March 26, 1926 with an exhibition by Man Ray.
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[edit] Writing continues
René Magritte "This is not a pipe." The Treachery Of Images 1928-9
The first Surrealist work, according to leader Breton, was Magnetic Fields (Les Champs
Magnétiques) (may-june 1919). Littérature contained automatist works and accounts of dreams.
The magazine and the portfolio both showed their disdain for literal meanings given to objects and
focused rather on the undertones, the poetic undercurrents present. Not only did they give
emphasis to the poetic undercurrents, but also to the connotations and the overtones which "exist
in ambiguous relationships to the visual images."
Because Surrealist writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize their thoughts and the images they
present, some people find much of their work difficult to parse. This notion however is a superficial
comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton's initial emphasis on automatic writing as the main
route toward a higher reality. But — as in Breton's case itself — much of what is presented as
purely automatic is actually edited and very "thought out". Breton himself later admitted that
automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and other elements were introduced, especially
as the growing involvement of visual artists in the movement forced the issue, since automatic
painting required a rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus such elements as collage were
introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling juxtapositions as revealed in Pierre Reverdy's
poetry. And — as in Magritte's case (where there is no obvious recourse to either automatic
techniques or collage) the very notion of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation in and of
itself. Surrealism was meant to be always in flux — to be more modern than modern — and so it
was natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new challenges arose.
Surrealists revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym "Le Comte de
Lautréamont" and for the line "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing
machine and an umbrella", and Arthur Rimbaud, two late 19th century writers believed to be the
precursors of Surrealism.
Examples of Surrealist literature are Crevel's Mr. Knife Miss Fork (1931), Aragon's Irene's Cunt
(1927), Breton's Sur la route de San Romano (1948), Peret's Death to the Pigs (1929), and Artaud's
Le Pese-Nerfs (1926).
La Révolution surréaliste continued publication into 1929 with most pages densely packed with
columns of text, but also included reproductions of art, among them works by de Chirico, Ernst,
Masson and Man Ray. Other works included books, poems, pamphlets, automatic texts and
theoretical tracts.
[edit] Films by Surrealists
Still from the opening of Un chien andalou by Luis Buñuel and Dalí.
Main article: List of surrealist films
Early films by Surrealists include:
Entr'acte by René Clair (1924)

La Coquille et le clergyman by Germaine Dulac, screenplay by Antonin Artaud (1928)

Un chien andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí (1929)

L'Étoile de mer by Man Ray (1928)

L'Âge d'Or by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí (1930)

Le sang d'un poète by Jean Cocteau (1930)

[edit] Music by Surrealists
Main article: Surrealist music
In the 1920s several composers were influenced by Surrealism, or by individuals in the Surrealist
movement. Among them were Bohuslav Martinů, André Souris, and Edgard Varèse, who stated
that his work Arcana was drawn from a dream sequence.[citation needed] Souris in particular was
associated with the movement: he had a long relationship with Magritte, and worked on Paul
Nouge's publication Adieu Marie.
Germaine Tailleferre of the French group Les Six wrote several works which could be considered to
be inspired by Surrealism[citation needed], including the 1948 Ballet Paris-Magie (scenario by Lise
Deharme), the Operas La Petite Sirène (book by Philippe Soupault) and Le Maître (book by Eugène
Ionesco).[citation needed] Tailleferre also wrote popular songs to texts by Claude Marci, the wife of
Henri Jeanson, whose portrait had been painted by Magritte in the 1930s.
Even though Breton by 1946 responded rather negatively to the subject of music with his essay
Silence is Golden, later Surrealists have been interested in—and found parallels to—Surrealism in
the improvisation of jazz and the blues. Surrealists such as Paul Garon have written articles and fulllength books on the subject. Jazz and blues musicians have occasionally reciprocated this interest.
For example, the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition included performances by Honeyboy Edwards.
[edit] Surrealism and international politics
Surrealism as a political force developed unevenly around the world, in some places more emphasis
was on artistic practices, in other places political and in other places still, Surrealist praxis looked to
supersize both the arts and politics. During the 1930s the Surrealist idea spread from Europe to
North America, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and throughout Asia. As both an
artistic idea and as an ideology of political change.
Politically, Surrealism was ultra-leftist, communist, or anarchist. The split from Dada has been
characterised as a split between anarchists and communists, with the Surrealists as communist.
Breton and his comrades supported Leon Trotsky and his International Left Opposition for a while,
though there was an openness to anarchism that manifested more fully after World War II. Some
Surrealists, such as Benjamin Peret, Mary Low, and Juan Breá, aligned with forms of left
communism. Dalí supported capitalism and the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco but cannot
be said to represent a trend in Surrealism in this respect; in fact he was considered, by Breton and
his associates, to have betrayed and left Surrealism. Péret, Low, and Breá joined the POUM during
the Spanish Civil War.
Breton’s followers, along with the Communist Party, were working for the "liberation of man."
However, Breton’s group refused to prioritize the proletarian struggle over radical creation such
that their struggles with the Party made the late 1920s a turbulent time for both. Many individuals
closely associated with Breton, notably Louis Aragon, left his group to work more closely with the
Communists.
Surrealists have often sought to link their efforts with political ideals and activities. In the
Declaration of January 27, 1925,[9] for example, members of the Paris-based Bureau of Surrealist
Research (including André Breton, Louis Aragon, and, Antonin Artaud, as well as some two dozen
others) declared their affinity for revolutionary politics. While this was initially a somewhat vague
formulation, by the 1930s many Surrealists had strongly identified themselves with communism.
The foremost document of this tendency within Surrealism is the Manifesto for a Free
Revolutionary Art,[10] published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera, but actually coauthored by Breton and Leon Trotsky.[11]
However, in 1933 the Surrealists’ assertion that a 'proletarian literature' within a capitalist society
was impossible led to their break with the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires,
and the expulsion of Breton, Éluard and Crevel from the Communist Party.[3]
In 1925, the Paris Surrealist group and the extreme left of the French Communist Party came
together to support Abd-el-Krim, leader of the Rif uprising against French colonialism in Morocco.
In an open letter to writer and French ambassador to Japan, Paul Claudel, the Paris group
announced:
"We Surrealists pronounced ourselves in favour of changing the imperialist war, in its
chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the disposal
of the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and defined our attitude towards
the colonial problem, and hence towards the colour question."
The anticolonial revolutionary and proletarian politics of "Murderous Humanitarianism" (1932)
which was drafted mainly by Rene Crevel, signed by André Breton, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Peret,
Yves Tanguy, and the Martiniquan Surrealists Pierre Yoyotte and J.M. Monnerot perhaps makes it
the original document of what is later called 'black Surrealism',[12] although it is the contact
between Aimé Césaire and Breton in the 1940s in Martinique that really lead to the communication
of what is known as 'black Surrealism'.
Anticolonial revolutionary writers in the Négritude movement of Martinique, a French colony at the
time, took up Surrealism as a revolutionary method - a critique of European culture and a radical
subjective. This linked with other Surrealists and was very important for the subsequent
development of Surrealism as a revolutionary praxis. The journal Tropiques, featuring the work of
Cesaire along with René Ménil, Lucie Thésée, Aristide Maugée and others, was first published in
1940.[13]
It is interesting to note that when in 1938 André Breton traveled with his wife the painter
Jacqueline Lamba to Mexico to meet Trotsky; staying as the guest of Diego Rivera's former wife
Guadalupe Marin; he met Frida Kahlo and saw her paintings for the first time. Breton declared
Kahlo to be an "innate" Surrealist painter.[14]
[edit] Internal politics
In 1929 the satellite group around the journal Le Grand Jeu, including Roger Gilbert-Lecomte,
Maurice Henry and the Czech painter Josef Sima, was ostracized. Also in February, Breton asked
Surrealists to assess their "degree of moral competence", and theoretical refinements included in
the second manifeste du surréalisme excluded anyone reluctant to commit to collective action:
Leiris, Limbour, Morise, Baron, Queneau, Prévert, Desnos, Masson and Boiffard. They moved to the
periodical Documents, edited by Georges Bataille, whose anti-idealist materialism produced a
hybrid Surrealism exposed the base instincts of humans.[3][15]
Other members were ousted over the years for a variety of infractions, both political and personal,
and others left of to pursue creativity of their own style.
[edit] Golden age
Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory. 1931.
Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A
Surrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International
Surrealist Exhibition was a high water mark of the period and became the model for international
exhibitions.
Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dalí joined the
group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and
1935.
Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping
ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was
beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.
1931 marked a year when several Surrealist painters produced works which marked turning points
in their stylistic evolution: Magritte's Voice of Space (La Voix des airs)[1] is an example of this
process, where three large spheres representing bells hang above a landscape. Another Surrealist
landscape from this same year is Yves Tanguy's Promontory Palace (Palais promontoire), with its
molten forms and liquid shapes. Liquid shapes became the trademark of Dalí, particularly in his The
Persistence of Memory, which features the image of watches that sag as if they are melting.
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".
From 1936 through 1938 Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford and Roberto Matta joined the
group. Paalen contributed Fumage and Onslow Ford Coulage as new pictorial automatic
techniques.
Long after personal, political and professional tensions fragmented the Surrealist group, Magritte
and Dalí continued to define a visual program in the arts. This program reached beyond painting, to
encompass photography as well, as can be seen from a Man Ray self portrait, whose use of
assemblage influenced Robert Rauschenberg's collage boxes.
Max Ernst, L'Ange du Foyeur ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme. 1937. Oil on canvas, 114 x 146 cm.
Private collection.
During the 1930s Peggy Guggenheim, an important American art collector, married Max Ernst and
began promoting work by other Surrealists such as Tanguy and the British artist John Tunnard.
Major exhibitions in the 1930s
1936 - London International Surrealist Exhibition is organised in London by the art

historian Herbert Read, with an introduction by André Breton.
1936 - Museum of Modern Art in New York shows the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada

and Surrealism.
1938 - A new International Surrealist Exhibition was held at the Beaux-arts Gallery,

Paris, with more than 60 artists from different countries, and showed around 300 paintings,
objects, collages, photographs and installations. The Surrealists wanted to create an
exhibition which in itself would be a creative act and called on Marcel Duchamp to do so. At
the exhibition's entrance he placed Salvador Dalí's Rainy Taxi (an old taxi rigged to produce a
steady drizzle of water down the inside of the windows, and a shark-headed creature in the
driver's seat and a blond mannequin crawling with live snails in the back) greeted the patrons
who were in full evening dress. Surrealist Street filled one side of the lobby with mannequins
dressed by various Surrealists. He designed the main hall to seem like subterranean cave with
1,200 coal bags suspended from the ceiling over a coal brazier with a single light bulb which
provided the only lighting,[2] so patrons were given flashlights with which to view the art.
The floor was carpeted with dead leaves, ferns and grasses and the aroma of roasting coffee
filled the air. Much to the Surrealists' satisfaction the exhibition scandalized the viewers.[5]
[edit] World War II and the Post War period
Yves Tanguy Indefinite Divisibility 1942
World War II created havoc not only for the general population of Europe but especially for the
European artists and writers that opposed Fascism, and Nazism. Many important artists fled to
North America, and relative safety in the United States. The art community in New York City in
particular was already grappling with Surrealist ideas and several artists like Arshile Gorky, Jackson
Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Roberto Matta, converged closely with the surrealist artists
themselves, albeit with some suspicion and reservations. Ideas concerning the unconscious and
dream imagery were quickly embraced. By the Second World War, the taste of the American avantgarde swung decisively towards Abstract Expressionism with the support of key taste makers,
including Peggy Guggenheim, Leo Steinberg and Clement Greenberg. However, it should not be
easily forgotten that Abstract Expressionism itself grew directly out of the meeting of American
(particularly New York) artists with European Surrealists self-exiled during WWII. In particular,
Arshile Gorky and Wolfgang Paalen influenced the development of this American art form, which,
as Surrealism did, celebrated the instantaneous human act as the well-spring of creativity. The early
work of many Abstract Expressionists reveals a tight bond between the more superficial aspects of
both movements, and the emergence (at a later date) of aspects of Dadaistic humor in such artists
as Rauschenberg sheds an even starker light upon the connection. Up until the emergence of Pop
Art, Surrealism can be seen to have been the single most important influence on the sudden
growth in American arts, and even in Pop, some of the humor manifested in Surrealism can be
found, often turned to a cultural criticism.
The Second World War overshadowed, for a time, almost all intellectual and artistic production. In
1940 Yves Tanguy married American Surrealist painter Kay Sage. In 1941, Breton went to the
United States, where he co-founded the short-lived magazine VVV with Max Ernst, Marcel
Duchamp, and the American artist David Hare. However, it was the American poet, Charles Henri
Ford, and his magazine View which offered Breton a channel for promoting Surrealism in the
United States. The View special issue on Duchamp was crucial for the public understanding of
Surrealism in America. It stressed his connections to Surrealist methods, offered interpretations of
his work by Breton, as well as Breton's view that Duchamp represented the bridge between early
modern movements, such as Futurism and Cubism, to Surrealism. Wolfgang Paalen left the group in
1942 due to political/philosophical differences with Breton, founding his journal Dyn.
Though the war proved disruptive for Surrealism, the works continued. Many Surrealist artists
continued to explore their vocabularies, including Magritte. Many members of the Surrealist
movement continued to correspond and meet. While Dalí may have been excommunicated by
Breton, he neither abandoned his themes from the 1930s, including references to the "persistence
of time" in a later painting, nor did he become a depictive pompier. His classic period did not
represent so sharp a break with the past as some descriptions of his work might portray, and some,
such as Thirion, argued that there were works of his after this period that continued to have some
relevance for the movement.
During the 1940s Surrealism's influence was also felt in England and America. Mark Rothko took an
interest in biomorphic figures, and in England Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Paul
Nash used or experimented with Surrealist techniques. However, Conroy Maddox, one of the first
British Surrealists whose work in this genre dated from 1935, remained within the movement, and
organized an exhibition of current Surrealist work in 1978 in response to an earlier show which
infuriated him because it did not properly represent Surrealism. Maddox's exhibition, titled
Surrealism Unlimited, was held in Paris and attracted international attention. He held his last oneman show in 2002, and died three years later. Magritte's work became more realistic in its
depiction of actual objects, while maintaining the element of juxtaposition, such as in 1951's
Personal Values (Les Valeurs Personneles)[3] and 1954's Empire of Light (L’Empire des lumières).[4]
Magritte continued to produce works which have entered artistic vocabulary, such as Castle in the
Pyrenees (La Chateau des Pyrenees),[5] which refers back to Voix from 1931, in its suspension over
a landscape.
Other figures from the Surrealist movement were expelled. Several of these artists, like Roberto
Matta (by his own description) "remained close to Surrealism."[5]
Many new artists explicitly took up the Surrealist banner for themselves. Dorothea Tanning and
Louise Bourgeois continued to work, for example, with Tanning's Rainy Day Canape from 1970.
Duchamp continued to produce sculpture in secret including an installation with the realistic
depiction of a woman viewable only through a peephole.
Breton continued to write and espouse the importance of liberating of the human mind, as with the
publication The Tower of Light in 1952. Breton's return to France after the War, began a new phase
of Surrealist activity in Paris, and his critiques of rationalism and dualism found a new audience.
Breton insisted that Surrealism was an ongoing revolt against the reduction of humanity to market
relationships, religious gestures and misery and to espouse the importance of liberating of the
human mind.
Major exhibitions of the 1940s, '50s and '60s
1942 - First Papers of Surrealism - New York - The Surrealists again called on

Duchamp to design an exhibition. This time he wove a 3-dimensional web of string
throughout the rooms of the space, in some cases making it almost impossible to see the
works.[6] He made a secret arrangement with an associate's son to bring his friends to the
opening of the show, so that when the finely dressed patrons arrived they found a dozen
children in athletic clothes kicking and passing balls, and skipping rope. His design for the
show's catalog included "found", rather than posed, photographs of the artists.[5]
1947 - International Surrealist Exhibition - Paris

1959 - International Surrealist Exhibition - Paris

1960 - Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters' Domain - New York

[edit] Post Breton Surrealism
Roberto Matta. Elle Loge La Folie, oil on canvas, 1970.
There is no clear consensus about the end, or if there was an end, to the Surrealist movement.
Some art historians suggest that WWII effectively disbanded the movement. However, art historian
Sarane Alexandrian (1970) states, "the death of André Breton in 1966 marked the end of Surrealism
as an organized movement." There have also been attempts to tie the obituary of the movement to
the 1989 death of Salvador Dalí[citation needed].
In the 1960s, the artists and writers grouped around the Situationist International were closely
associated with Surrealism. While Guy Debord was critical of and distanced himself from
Surrealism, others, such as Asger Jorn, were explicitly using Surrealist techniques and methods. The
events of May 1968 in France included a number of Surrealist ideas, and among the slogans the
students spray-painted on the walls of the Sorbonne were familiar Surrealist ones. Joan Miró would
commemorate this in a painting titled May 1968. There were also groups who associated with both
currents and were more atttached to Surrealism, such as the Revolutionary Surrealist Group.
In Europe and all over the world since the 1960s, artists have combined Surrealism with what is
believed to be a classical 16th century technique called mischtechnik, a kind of mix of egg tempera
and oil paint rediscovered by Ernst Fuchs, a contemporary of Dalí, and now practiced and taught by
many followers, including Robert Venosa and Chris Mars. The former curator of the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, Michael Bell, has called this style "veristic Surrealism," which depicts with
meticulous clarity and great detail a world analogous to the dream world. Other tempera artists,
such as Robert Vickrey, regularly depict Surreal imagery.
During the 1980s, behind the Iron Curtain, Surrealism again entered into politics with an
underground artistic opposition movement known as the Orange Alternative. The Orange
Alternative was created in 1981 by Waldemar Fydrych (alias 'Major'), a graduate of history and art
history at the University of Wrocław. They used Surrealist symbolism and terminology in their large
scale happenings organized in the major Polish cities during the Jaruzelski regime, and painted
Surrealist graffiti on spots covering up anti-regime slogans. Major himself was the author of a
"Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism". In this manifesto, he stated that the socialist (communist)
system had become so Surrealistic that it could be seen as an expression of art itself.
Surrealistic art also remains popular with museum patrons. The Guggenheim Museum in New York
City held an exhibit, Two Private Eyes, in 1999, and in 2001 Tate Modern held an exhibition of
Surrealist art that attracted over 170,000 visitors. In 2002 the Met in New York City held a show,
Desire Unbound, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris a show called La Révolution surréaliste.
[edit] Impact of Surrealism
While Surrealism is typically associated with the arts, it has been said to transcend them;
Surrealism has had an impact in many other fields. In this sense, Surrealism does not specifically
refer only to self-identified "Surrealists", or those sanctioned by Breton, rather, it refers to a range
of creative acts of revolt and efforts to liberate imagination.
In addition to Surrealist ideas that are grounded in the ideas of Hegel, Marx and Freud, Surrealism
is seen by its advocates as being inherently dynamic and as dialectical in its thought. Surrealists
have also drawn on sources as seemingly diverse as Clark Ashton Smith, Montague Summers,
Horace Walpole, Fantomas, The Residents, Bugs Bunny, comic strips, the obscure poet Samuel
Greenberg and the hobo writer and humourist T-Bone Slim. One might say that Surrealist strands
may be found in movements such as Free Jazz (Don Cherry, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor etc.) and even in
the daily lives of people in confrontation with limiting social conditions. Thought of as the effort of
humanity to liberate imagination as an act of insurrection against society, Surrealism finds
precedents in the alchemists, possibly Dante, Hieronymus Bosch, Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier,
Comte de Lautreamont and Arthur Rimbaud.
Surrealists believe that non-Western cultures also provide a continued source of inspiration for
Surrealist activity because some may strike up a better balance between instrumental reason and
imagination in flight than Western culture. Surrealism has had an identifiable impact on radical and
revolutionary politics, both directly — as in some Surrealists joining or allying themselves with
radical political groups, movements and parties — and indirectly — through the way in which
Surrealists' emphasize the intimate link between freeing imagination and the mind, and liberation
from repressive and archaic social structures. This was especially visible in the New Left of the
1960s and 1970s and the French revolt of May 1968, whose slogan "All power to the imagination"
rose directly from French Surrealist thought and practice.
Many significant literary movements in the later half of the 20th century were directly or indirectly
influenced by Surrealism. This period is known as the Postmodern era; though there's no widely
agreed upon central definition of Postmodernism, many themes and techniques commonly
identified as Postmodern are nearly identical to Surrealism. Perhaps the writers within the
Postmodern era who have the most in common with Surrealism are the playwrights of Theatre of
the Absurd. Though not an organized movement, these playwrights were grouped together based
on some similarities of theme and technique; these similarities can perhaps be traced to influence
from the Surrealists. Eugene Ionesco in particular was fond of Surrealism, claiming at one point that
Breton was one of the most important thinkers in history. Samuel Beckett was also fond of
Surrealists, even translating much of the poetry into English; he may have had closer ties had the
Surrealists not been critical of Beckett's mentor and friend James Joyce. Many writers from and
associated with the Beat Generation were influenced greatly by Surrealists. Philip Lamantia and Ted
Joans are often categorized as both Beat and Surrealist writers. Many other Beat writers claimed
Surrealism as a significant influence. A few examples include Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, and
Allen Ginsberg. In popular culture much of the stream of consciousness song writing of the young
Bob Dylan, c. 1960s and including some of Dylan's more recent writing as well, (c. mid - 1980s2006) clearly have Surrealist connections and undertones. Magic Realism, a popular technique
among novelists of the latter half of the 20th century especially among Latin American writers, has
some obvious similarities to Surrealism with its juxtaposition of the normal and the dream-like. The
prominence of Magic Realism in Latin American literature is often credited in some part to the
direct influence of Surrealism on Latin American artists (Frida Kahlo, for example).
[edit] Surrealist groups
Please help improve this section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion.
For further information, see Category:Surrealist groups
Surrealist individuals and groups have attempted to carry on with Surrealism after the death of
Andre Breton in 1966. The original Paris Surrealist Group was disbanded by member Jean Schuster
in 1969.
[edit] Surrealism and theatre
Surrealist theater depicts the subconscious experience, moody tone and disjointed structure,
sometimes imposing a unifying idea.[16]
Antonin Artaud, one of the original Surrealists, rejected Western theatre as a perversion of the
original intent of theatre, which he felt should be a religious and mystical experience. He thought
that rational discourse comprised "falsehood and illusion," which embodied the worst of discourse.
Endeavouring to create a new theatrical form that would be immediate and direct, linking the
unconscious minds of performers and spectators, a sort of ritual event,[17] Artaud created the
Theatre of Cruelty where emotions, feelings, and the metaphysical were expressed not through
text or dialogue but physically, creating a mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely related
to the world of dreams.[18]
These sentiments also led to the Theatre of the Absurd whose inspiration came, in part, from silent
film and comedy, as well as the tradition of verbal nonsense in early sound film (Laurel and Hardy,
W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers).
[edit] Surrealism and film
See also, List of surrealist films.
Please help improve this section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for
expansion.
[edit] Surrealism and comedy
Main article: Surrealist humor
[edit] Criticism of Surrealism
[edit] Feminist
Feminists have in the past critiqued the Surrealist movement, claiming that it is fundamentally a
male movement and a male fellowship, despite the occasional few celebrated woman Surrealist
painters and poets. They believe that it adopts typical male attitudes toward women, such as
worshipping them symbolically through stereotypes and sexist norms. Women are often made to
represent higher values and transformed into objects of desire and of mystery.[19]
One of the pioneers in feminist critique of Surrealism was Xavière Gauthier. Her book Surréalisme
et sexualité (1971) inspired further important scholarship related to the marginalization of women
in relation to "the avant-garde." However these criticisms are perhaps more so of other avantgarde movements like Situationism, where women had a much more subordinate role to the men.
Also, despite the theoretical objectification, Surrealism as a living praxis allowed room for women
artists and painters in particular to work and produce work on their own terms.
[edit] Freudian
Freud initiated the psychoanalytic critique of Surrealism with his remark that what interested him
most about the Surrealists was not their unconscious but their conscious. His meaning was that the
manifestations of and experiments with psychic automatism highlighted by Surrealists as the
liberation of the unconscious were highly structured by ego activity, similar to the activities of the
dream censorship in dreams, and that therefore it was in principle a mistake to regard Surrealist
poems and other art works as direct manifestations of the unconscious, when they were indeed
highly shaped and processed by the ego. In this view, the Surrealists may have been producing
great works, but they were products of the conscious, not the unconscious mind, and they
deceived themselves with regard to what they were doing with the unconscious. In psychoanalysis
proper, the unconscious does not just express itself automatically but can only be uncovered
through the analysis of resistance and transference in the psychoanalytic process.[citation needed]
[edit] Situationist
While some individuals and groups on the core and fringes of the Situationist International were
Surrealists themselves, others were very critical of the movement, or indeed what remained of the
movement in the late 1950s and '60s. The Situationist International could therefore be seen as a
break and continuation of the Surrealist praxis.[citation needed]
[edit] Timeline of Membership
Year
Membership
1919
Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault started Littérature, began an
association with Dada.
1922
Breton appropriated the term "Surrealism" as a group -- which now included Paul
Éluard, Benjamin Péret, Man Ray, Jacques Baron, René Crevel, Robert Desnos,
Georges Limbour, Roger Vitrac, and Joseph Delteil -- organized under Breton and
pulled away from the influence of Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists. Marcel Duchamp
frequently associated with this group but never officially joined.
1924
The year the first Surrealist Manifesto was published, members also included
Antonin Artaud, Andre Masson, Raymond Queneau, Joan Miró, Max Morise, Pierre
Naville, Mathias Lübeck, Jacques-André Boiffard and Georges Malkine. Giorgio de
Chirico briefly associated with the group but never joined.
1925
Jacques Prévert, Yves Tanguy, Pierre Brasseur, Marcel Duhamel, and Michel Leiris
joined the group.
1926
Rene Magritte, E. L. T. Mesens, and others started a Surrealist group in Belgium.
Pablo Picasso associated with the Surrealists but never officially joined.
1927
Soupault, Artaud, and Vitrac were kicked out of the group.
1929
For various reasons, including the political direction Breton was taking Surrealism,
several members -- Prévert, Baron, Desnos, Leiris, Limbour, Masson, Queneau,
Morise, Boiffard -- broke with the group and organized under Georges Bataille.
However, several new members joined: Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Alberto
Giacometti, René Char, and Lee Miller. Breton also reconciled with Tzara. When the
second Surrealist Manifesto was published, it was signed by Aragon, Ernst, Buñuel,
Char, Crevel, Dali, Eluard, Ernst, Péret, Tanguy, Tzara, Maxime Alexandre, Joe
Bousquet, Camille Goemans, Paul Nougé, Francis Ponge, Marco Ristitch, Georges
Sadoul, André Thirion, and Albert Valentin. Federico García Lorca was friends with
Dalí and Buñuel and is often called a Surrealist though he never officially joined the
group; he broke contact with Dalí and Buñuel in 1929 when he interpreted their
film, Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog), as an attack on him.
1932
Aragon and Sadoul left the Surrealists because of the conflict between Communism
and Surrealism and their dedication to the Communist party. Meret Oppenheim,
Victor Brauner, Roger Caillois, Georges Hugnet, Jehan Mayoux, Henri Pastoureau,
Guy Rosey, Claude Cahun and J. M. Monnerot joined the group.
1934
Óscar Domínguez, Dora Maar, Richard Oelze, Giséle Prassinos, Kurt Seligmann, and
Brion Gysin joined the group.
1935
Wolfgang Paalen, Pierre Mabille, and Jacques-B. Brunius joined the group. Hans
Bellmer's work was published in Minotaure. Brion Gysin was expelled.
1936
Joseph Cornell debuted Rose Hobart. Though Cornell was influenced by the
Surrealists and friendly with many of them, he never officially joined the group.
Dalí's negative criticism of Rose Hobart further inspired Cornell to distance himself.
1937
Kay Sage met Tanguy, and Leonora Carrington met Ernst. Also, Remedios Varo
settled in Paris with Peret.
1938
Breton had a falling out with Eluard but reconciled with Masson. Also, Breton met
Frida Kahlo in Mexico; she is often called a Surrealist though she never officially
joined. Roberto Matta, Gordon Onslow Ford and Bellmer joined the group.
1939
Dali was kicked out of the group for multiple reasons including his apparent support
of Francisco Franco, his commercialism, and his abrasive personality. Breton
referred to him from that point on as "Avida Dollars", and the group essentially
referred to him as if he were dead. Caillois and Hugnet also left the group.
1940
Wifredo Lam joined the group.
1941
Breton met Aimé Césaire in Martinique.
1942
Breton, Duchamp, Ernst, Calas, and Carrington gained a following in New York with
the publication of VVV. Newer members included Dorothea Tanning, Enrico Donati,
Charles Duits, David Hare, Robert Lebel, Isabelle and Patrick Waldberg. Other artists
directly influenced by the Surrealists in New York include Robert Motherwell,
William Baziotes, Alexander Calder, and Frederick Kiesler.
1943
The View published the poetry of 15-year-old Philip Lamantia who later became
acquainted with Breton and others in New York.
1944
Breton and Matta met with Arshile Gorky. Seligman left the group.
1948
Matta, blamed for Gorky's suicide, was kicked out of the group.
1951
In what was called "The Carrouges affair", Michel Carrouges, a writer associated
with the Surrealists, was found to be a practicing Catholic and was expelled.
Maurice Henry, Jacques Hérold, Marcel Jean, Robert Lebel, Patrick Waldberg, and
Henri Pastoureau were also expelled.
1954
Ernst received the Grand Prix of the Venice Biennale and was subsequently expelled
from the group.
1959
Jean Benoît and Mimi Parent joined the group.
1960
Ted Joans met Breton in Paris.
[edit] See also
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Art periods
Western painting
Chicago Surrealist Group
Peggy Guggenheim
Fantastic art
Impossible object
Neosurrealism
Magic realism
Social criticism
Simulated reality
Visionary art
Bodley Gallery
Techniques and humor
Surreal humour

Surrealist techniques

Surrealist publications
Acéphale, a surrealist review created by Georges Bataille, published from 1936 to

1939
Documents, a surrealist journal edited by Georges Bataille from 1929 to 1930

Minotaure, a primarily surrealist-oriented publication founded by Albert Skira,

published in Paris from 1933 to 1939
La Révolution surréaliste, a seminal Surrealist publication founded by André Breton,

published in Paris from 1924 to 1929
View, an American art magazine, primarily covering avant-garde and surrealist art,

published from 1940 to 1947
VVV, a New York journal published by emigré European surrealists from 1942

through 1944
Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism>
Cubism
mardi 13 mai 2008
10:22
Cubism was a 20th century art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that
revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and
literature. The first branch of cubism, known as Analytic Cubism, was both radical and influential as
a short but highly significant art movement between 1908 and 1911 in France. In its second phase,
Synthetic Cubism, the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist
movement gained popularity.
In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—
instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of
viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly
random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes
interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct
characteristics.
Contents
[hide]
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1 Conception and origins
2 Analytic Cubism
3 Synthetic Cubism
4 Cubism and its ideologies
5 Cubism in other fields
6 Cubism today
7 References
8 Further reading
9 See also
10 External links
[edit] Conception and origins
Pablo Picasso, Le guitariste, 1910
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the European cultural elite were discovering African,
Micronesian and Native American art for the first time. Artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse,
and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those
foreign cultures. Around 1904, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when both
artists had recently acquired an interest in African sculpture. They became friendly rivals and
competed with each other throughout their careers, perhaps leading to Picasso entering a new
period in his work by 1907, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian and African art. Picasso's
paintings of 1907 have been characterized as Protocubism, as notably seen in Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon, the antecedent of Cubism.
Some believe that the roots of cubism are to be found in the two distinct tendencies of Paul
Cézanne's later work: firstly to break the painted surface into small multifaceted areas of paint,
thereby emphasizing the plural viewpoint given by binocular vision, and secondly his interest in the
simplification of natural forms into cylinders, spheres, and cones.
However, the cubists explored this concept further than Cézanne; they represented all the surfaces
of depicted objects in a single picture plane, as if the objects had had all their faces visible at the
same time. This new kind of depiction revolutionized the way in which objects could be visualized in
painting and art.
The invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then residents of
Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the movement's main innovators. A later active participant
was the Spaniard Juan Gris. After meeting in 1907 Braque and Picasso in particular began working
on the development of Cubism. Picasso was initially the force and influence that persuaded Braque
by 1908 to move away from Fauvism. The two artists began working closely together in late 1908 early 1909 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The movement spread quickly throughout
Paris and Europe.
French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term "cubism", or "bizarre cubiques", in 1908 after
seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly
gained wide use although the two creators did not initially adopt it. Art historian Ernst Gombrich
described cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading
of the picture - that of a man-made construction, a coloured canvas."[1]
Juan Gris, Portrait of Picasso, 1912, oil on canvas
Cubism was taken up by many artists in Montparnasse and promoted by art dealer Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler, becoming popular so quickly that by 1911 critics were referring to a "cubist school" of
artists. However, many of the artists who thought of themselves as cubists went in directions quite
different from Braque and Picasso. The Puteaux Group was a significant offshoot of the Cubist
movement; it included Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, his brothers
Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Villon, and Fernand Léger, and Francis Picabia. Other
important artists associated with cubism include: Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Marie Laurencin,
Diego Rivera, Marie Vorobieff, Louis Marcoussis, Jeanne Rij-Rousseau, Roger de La Fresnaye, Henri
Le Fauconnier, František Kupka, Amédée Ozenfant, Patrick Henry Bruce among others. Section d'Or
is another name for a related group of many of the same artists associated with cubism and
orphism.
In 1913 the United States was exposed to cubism and modern European art when Jacques Villon
exhibited seven important and large drypoints at the famous Armory Show in New York City. Braque
and Picasso themselves went through several distinct phases before 1920, and some of these works
had been seen in New York prior to the Armory Show, at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery. Czech artists
who realized the epochal significance of cubism of Picasso and Braque attempted to extract its
components for their own work in all branches of artistic creativity - especially painting and
architecture. This developed into so-called Czech Cubism which was an avant-garde art movement
of Czech proponents of cubism active mostly in Prague from 1910 to 1914.
[edit] Analytic Cubism
Analytic Cubism is one of the two major branches of the artistic movement of Cubism and was
developed between 1908 and 1912. In contrast to Synthetic cubism, Analytic cubists "analyzed"
natural forms and reduced the forms into basic geometric parts on the two-dimensional picture
plane. Colour was almost non-existent except for the use of a monochromatic scheme that often
included grey, blue and ochre. Instead of an emphasis on colour, Analytic cubists focused on forms
like the cylinder, sphere and the cone to represent the natural world. During this movement, the
works produced by Picasso and Braque shared stylistic similarities.
Both painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque moved toward abstraction, leaving only enough
signs of the real world to supply a tension between the reality outside the painting and the
complicated meditations on visual language within the frame, exemplified through their paintings
Ma Jolie (1911), by Picasso and The Portuguese (1911), by Braque.
In Paris in 1907 there was a major museum retrospective exhibition of the work of Paul Cezanne
shortly after his death. The exhibition was enormously influential in establishing Cezanne as an
important painter whose ideas were particularly resonant especially to young artists in Paris. Both
Picasso and Braque found the inspiration for Cubism from Paul Cezanne, who said to observe and
learn to see and treat nature as if it were composed of basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders,
and cones. Picasso was the main analytic cubist, but Braque was also prominent, having abandoned
Fauvism to work with Picasso in developing the Cubist lexicon.
Juan Gris, Still Life with Fruit Dish and Mandolin, 1919, oil on canvas
[edit] Synthetic Cubism
Synthetic Cubism was the second main branch of Cubism developed by Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris
and others between 1912 and 1919. It was seen as the first time that collage had been made as a
fine art work.
The first work of this new style was Pablo Picasso's Still Life with Chair-caning (1911–1912), which
includes oil cloth pasted on the canvas. At the upper left are the letters "JOU", which appear in
many cubist paintings and may refer to a newspaper titled "Le Journal". Newspaper clippings were a
common inclusion in this style of cubism, whereby physical pieces of newspaper, sheet music, or the
like were included in the collages. JOU may also at the same time be a pun on the French words jeu
(game) or jouer (to play). Picasso and Braque had a constant friendly competition with each other
and including the letters in their works may have been an extension of their game.
Whereas analytic cubism was an analysis of the subjects (pulling them apart into planes), synthetic
cubism is more of a pushing of several objects together. Picasso, through this movement, was the
first to use text in his artwork (to flatten the space), and the use of mixed media—using more than
one type of medium in the same piece. Opposed to analytic cubism, synthetic cubism has fewer
planar shifts (or schematism), and less shading, creating flatter space.
Another technique used was called papier collé, or stuck paper, which Braque used in his collage
Fruit Dish and Glass (1913).
[edit] Cubism and its ideologies
Paris before World War I was a ferment of politics. New anarcho-syndicalist trade unions and
women's rights movements were especially new and vigorous. There were strong movements
around patriotic nationalism. Cubism was a particularly varied art movement in its political
affiliations, with some sections being broadly anarchist or leftist, while others were strongly aligned
with nationalist sentiment.
[edit] Cubism in other fields
Cubist villa in Prague, Czech Republic
The written works of Gertrude Stein employ repetition and repetitive phrases as building blocks in
both passages and whole chapters. Most of Stein's important works utilize this technique, including
the novel The Makings of Americans (1906–08) Not only were they the first important patrons of
Cubism, Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo were also important influences on Cubism as well.
Picasso in turn was an important influence on Stein's writing.
The poets generally associated with Cubism are Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Jean
Cocteau, Max Jacob, André Salmon and Pierre Reverdy. As American poet Kenneth Rexroth explains,
Cubism in poetry "is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a
new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. This is quite different from the
free association of the Surrealists and the combination of unconscious utterance and political
nihilism of Dada."[2] Nonetheless, the Cubist poets' influence on both Cubism and the later
movements of Dada and Surrealism was profound; Louis Aragon, founding member of Surrealism,
said that for Breton, Soupault, Éluard and himself, Reverdy was "our immediate elder, the
exemplary poet."[3] Though not as well remembered as the Cubist painters, these poets continue to
influence and inspire; American poets John Ashbery and Ron Padgett have recently produced new
translations of Reverdy's work.
Cubist House of the Black Madonna, Prague, Czech Republic, 1912
Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is also said to demonstrate how cubism's
multiple perspectives can be translated into poetry.[4]
The composer Edgard Varèse was heavily influenced by Cubist writing and art.[citation needed]
[edit] Cubism today
Far from being an art movement confined to the annals of art history, Cubism and its legacy
continue to inform the work of many contemporary artists. Not only is cubist imagery regularly used
commercially but significant numbers of contemporary artists continue to draw upon it both
stylistically and perhaps more importantly, theoretically. The latter contains the clue as to the
reason for cubism's enduring fascination for artists. As an essentially representational school of
painting, having to come to grips with the rising importance of photography as an increasingly viable
method of image making, cubism attempts to take representational imagery beyond the
mechanically photographic and to move beyond the bounds of traditional single point perspective
perceived, as though, by a totally immobile viewer. The questions and theories which arose during
the initial appearance of cubism in the early 20th century are, for many representational artists, as
current today as when first proposed.
Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubism>