Dada and Surrealism

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Dada and Surrealism

• Surrealism was an artists movement inspired by
  the Dada movement.

• Meret Oppenheim
• Oppenheim's best known piece is Object (Le
  Dejeuner en fourrure) (1936). The sculpture
  consists of a teacup, saucer and spoon that the
  artist covered with fur from a Chinese gazelle.
  It is displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in
  New York.
• This became the symbol of Surrealism.
• Her originality and audacity established her as a
  leading figure in the surrealist movement.

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Introduction

• The movement known as Dada was born in Zurich,
  Switzerland and was primarily created as a
  backlash to the traditional views of culture,
  art, and literature.
• The first group of Dadaists sought to eliminate
  all forms of reason and logic due to the
  atrocities caused by World War I. 
• Art created during the Dada movement was to be
  interpreted freely by the viewer and was not
  based on the formal standards shown by earlier
  traditional artists.
• The Dada movement was spread throughout Zurich,
  Berlin, New York, Paris, and the Netherlands and
  varied by form such as poetry, art, literature,
  and music.

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Dada

• The complex nature of the Dada movement began as
  a negative response to society and, in turn,
  radically altered twentieth-century art.  The
  movement criticized conventional ideas of the use
  of mediums by utilizing prefabricated supplies,
  altering them slightly in order to obtain a
  different view of the piece.
• Marcel Duchamps readymade, Fountain, a porcelain
  urinal in which the artist wrote R. Mutt on and
  submitted it to the Society of Independent 
  Artists Exhibit in 1917.
• The purpose of the Dada movement was viewed
  negatively and was not intended to be creative
  it is intended to cast discredit on creative
  activity(Frey 12).
• He proclaimed, the creative act could be reduced
  to the choice of the mind rather than the act of
  the hand. In other words, the viewer is involved
  in the creative act of interpretation a long with
  the artist.

Marcel Duchamp Fountain, 1916-17
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Jean Arp

• Collage was another technique used by artists
  Hannah Hoch, Kurt Schwitters, and Jean Arp during
  the Dada movement.
• Jean Arps Collage Arranged According to the
  Laws of Chance, completed in 1916, displays a
  random pattern of squares depicting the notion of
  escaping the rational world.
• Arps collages differ greatly from the academic
  realm of art because of the way in which he
  created them. He did not use a formula he just
  drop his collage pieces and let them fall into
  place by chance. He declared that these works,
  like nature, were ordered according to the laws
  of chance.

Jean Arps Collage Arranged According to the Laws
of Chance, completed in 1916
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Surrealism

• Surrealism, in turn, was a positive movement
  which at first was solely focused around
  automatic writing, expressing the thought and
  subconscious of the artist.
• Surrealism was founded by Andre Breton in the
  1920s and stretched the human imagination
  revealing through artistic imagery a world of
  fantasy and dreams, not reality.
• Both Dada and Surrealism share the same purpose
  to explore avant-garde methods of creativity
  while rejecting the traditional standards of art.

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• The art of the Surrealist movement was centered
  around the irrational and the subconscious, both
  depicting dream-like images.
• When the Surrealist movement began in 1919 the
  main aspect of creativity was applied through
  automatic writing, which allowed irrational
  thoughts to be written through lack of reason and
  logic.
• The way in which art was later depicted changed
  when artists began to document dreams through
  imagery in paintings.
• The Surrealist approach to art depicts the
  artists inner thoughts and subconscious,
  digressing from the negatively charged Dada
  movement.
• Art critics have described surrealism as a
  search for the bizarre and marvelous(Matthews
  139) because of the whimsical and dream-like
  images found in paintings of this movement.

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Overview2 Forms of Surrealism

• 1.) Improvised Art - without conscious control.
• Artist Examples
• Joan Miro The Joy of Painting
• Max Ernst Mother of Madness
• 2.) Realistic Techniques with dream-like scenes
• Artist Examples
• Salvador Dali Painting Paranoia
• Renee Magritte Dream Visions
• Giorgio de Chirico Metaphysical Painter
• Frida Kahlo Wore her heart on her canvas.

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Joan MiroThe Joy of Painting

• Miro use the automatic style of painting.
• Painted squiggles in a tranclike state working
  spontaneously. What really counts is to strip
  the soul naked. Prudence throuwn to the wind,
  nothing held back.
• Invented unique biomorphic signs for natural
  objects (sun, moon, and animals) simplified into
  shorthand pictograms of geometric shapes and
  amoeba-like blobs a mixture of fact and
  fantasy.

Biography Gallery
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Joan Miro
Dutch Interior II
Cosmic Ladder
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Joan Miro

• Joan Miro's painting Carnival of Harlequin,
  completed in 1924, displays a scene of brightly
  colored organic forms and shapes in a humorous
  manner.
• The creatures or figures in Miro's paintings
  appear almost as if they are cartoons, taking up
  the entire canvas so that the viewer doesn't
  focus on merely one aspect of the scene.
• Some of the shapes appear to be floating in the
  top corners of the canvas while others, such as
  the one on the left side, use ladders to climb up
  through the work. The figures in Miro's Carnival
  of Harlequin are "lively, remarkably vivid, and
  even the his inanimate objects have an eager
  vitality"(Arnason 295).

Carnival of Harlequin, completed in 1924
11
Max ErnstMother of Madness

• Experienced hallucinations as a child with a
  fever from measles. He found he could induce
  similar near-psychotic episodes (and adapt them
  in art) by staring fixedly until his mind
  wandered into some psychic netherworld.
• Ernst had been a member of the Dadaists before
  joining the Surrealist Group. Many of his early
  works deliberately played with chance.

Biography Gallery
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Max Ernstcollage, frottage and grattage
techniques

• One of the methods he used to stimulate his
  imagination was collage. He would bring together
  illustrations and photographs from widely
  different sources and stick them together to
  create strange new relationships. (see Celebes)
• Invented fonttage a new method for generating
  surprising imagery. This is rubbings from
  textured surfaces and embellished to produce
  fantastic, sometimes monstrous imagery.
• Grattage scrapping into thick paint

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Max ErnstEarly works

• Max Ernsts painting Celebes, which was completed
  in 1919, depicts an ambiguous creature that
  somewhat resembles an elephant. This painting is
  an example of the whimsical and bizarre imagery
  used during the Dada and Surrealism Movement.
• In the bottom right corner of the painting, a
  headless body is beckoning the creature towards
  its direction, making the image disturbing as
  well as humorous. The main focus of Celebes is a
  fantastical creature whose body resembles a
  boiler.

Max Ernst, Celebes, 1921
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Salvador DaliSpanish, 1904 - 1989

• Based his technique on critical paranoia and
  explored his own neuroses. He was terrified of
  insects, of crossing streets, of trains, boats
  and airplanes, of taking the Metro even of
  buying shoes because he couldnt bear to expose
  his feet in public. He laughed hysterically and
  uncontrollably and carried a piece of driftwood
  at all times to ward off evil spirits.

Biography
Gallery
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Salvador DaliPainting Paranoia

• With so rich a lode of irrational fears fueling
  his art, Dali placed a canvas at his bed and
  recorded what he called hand-painted dream
  photographs when he awoke.
• Instead of inventing new forms to symbolize the
  unconscious, he represented his hallucinations
  with meticulous realism.
• His recurrent nightmare of a rotting corps often
  appeared in his work.

Biography
Gallery, Gallery 2
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Salvador Dali

• Dali is fascinated by the idea of multiple
  images the way the same image can take on quite
  different meanings. In this painting the lake,
  with the strange splash at one end, can also be
  read as a fish on a table. In real life our own
  experiences constantly invest objects with double
  meanings such as a bunch of flowers meaning I
  love you, or Im sorry.
• Dali tells us that his parents visited this lake
  after the death of their first child, who was
  also named Salvador. Dali was haunted by this
  dead brother he never knew. The telephone might
  be a symbol of trying to contact someone on the
  other side, someone who is absent.
• Dali painted this work in 1938 on the eve of
  World War Two. He has suggested the telephone
  relates to the negotiations in September 1938,
  between Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime
  Minster, and Adolph Hitler.
• In both the personal context of his dead brother
  and the international political situation, the
  telephone speaks of a lack of connection and of
  ultimate death. The fish floundering on the table
  ready to be cooked might represent the countries
  Hitler was about to march into and conquer.

• Mountain Lake, 1938

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The Persistence of Memory

• The Persistence of Memory, shows limp watches
  and a strange lump of indefinable flesh. Although
  metallic, the watches appear to be decomposing. A
  fly and cluster of jewel-like ants swarm over
  them.
• Breton said, With the coming of Dali, it is
  perhaps the first time that the mental windows
  have been opened really wide so that one can feel
  oneself gliding up toward the wild skys trap.
• Can you find the self portrait in this painting?

The Persistence of Memory
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Dalis self portraits (early works)

• Self Portrait with neck of Raphael, 1921

• In both of these self portraits we see a sense of
  narcissism

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Self Portrait with Fried Bacon, 1941

• Dali painted this self-portrait during his
  eight-year-exile in the United States, where he
  had fled from the Spanish civil war. The,
  sometimes, childlike enthusiasm and the drive of
  the American society appealed to Dali and he had
  a most productive period there. Under this
  influence he appeared to reverse his
  "paranoid-critical" method. Now he painted more
  from the inside out, as his comment on his
  self-portrait indicates. Dali himself styles his
  self-portrait as "an anti-psychological
  self-portrait, instead of painting the soul, or
  the inner of oneself, to paint solely the
  appearance, the cover, my soul's glove. This
  glove of my soul can be eaten and is even a
  little sharp, like highbred game therefor ants
  appear together with the fried bacon. As the most
  generous of all painters I continuously offer
  myself as food and thus give our era the most
  delicious delicacies

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The Christ of St. John of the Cross. 1951. Oil on
canvas. 205 x 116 cm. St Mungo Museum of
Religious Life and Art, Glasgow, USA. 
Portrait of Frau Isabel Styler-Tas (Melencolia).
1945. Oil on canvas. 65.5 x 86 cm. Staatliche
Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz Neue
Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.
Fifty Abstract Paintings Which as Seen from Two
Yards Change into Three Lenins Masquerading as
Chinese and as Seen from Six Yards Appear as the
Head of a Royal Bengal Tiger. 1963. Oil on
canvas. 200 x 229
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The Surrealists wanted to create strange images
in order to startle viewers into new ways of
thinking about the world. They saw beauty in the
most bizarre, unexpected combinations of things
such as a lobster and a telephone.
Salvador DALÍ Lobster telephone
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Rene Magritte Pronounced Mah GREET

• Gallery Biography

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Renee MagreetDream Visions

• (1898-1967) Dream Visions
• Painted disturbing, illogical images with
  startling clarity.
• Began as a commercial artist he used this
  mastery of realism to defy logic.
• He placed everyday objects in incongruous
  settings and transformed them into electric
  shocks. Juxtaposed familiar sights in unnatural
  contexts.

The False Mirror
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• Belgian painter Rene Magritte specialized in
  paintings of strange, imaginary scenes, often
  involving men in bowler hats. This one has
  hundreds of them hovering in the air above an
  ordinarylooking street.

Gonconda. 1953. Oil on canvas. 81 x 100 cm. The
Menil Collection, Houston, TX, USA.
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Magrittes self portrait

• The painting of a man in a gray overcoat and
  derby hat whose face is almost entirely hidden by
  a big green apple is one of the best-known works
  of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, 1898-1967.
  It is also the closest he was willing to come to
  answer a request for a self portrait. That tells
  us how little this marvelous artist cared for
  publicity and self-promotion, even though he was
  delighted to sell his work widely.
• If this painting looks familiar to us, it is
  because Magrittes work has so strongly
  influenced not only other artists but also a
  great many people who did want to do publicity
  and promotion, advertising, design and films,
  during much of the last century.

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• Despite the strangeness of the scene, Magritte
  painted it in a very lifelike way. It is only
  the combination of things that makes it look
  absurd. Magritte loved painting ordinary things
  in ordinary situations. He said he wanted to play
  with the viewers expectations in order to
  challenge the real world.

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René Magritte. The Red Model. 1934. Oil on
canvas. 183 x 136 cm. Museum Boymans-van
Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
La Durée poignardée. 1938. Oil on canvas. 146 x
97 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL,
USA.
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Giorgio De Chirico Pronounced - KEY ree coh

• Italian, 1888 1978

• Hailed by the Surrealists as their precursor,
  Italian painter, was painting nightmare fantasies
  fifteen years before Surrealism existed.

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Giorgio De Chirico Metaphysical Painter

• Drawing on irrational childhood fears, De Chirico
  is known for his eerie cityscapes with empty
  arcades, raking light, and ominous shadows.
• The skewed perspective and nearly deserted
  squares inhabited by tiny, depersonalized figures
  project menace. In fact, with these paintings as
  his best evidence, De Chirico was exempted from
  military service as mentally unstable. On an
  early self-portrait he inscribed, What shall I
  love if not the enigma?

The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street
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• Immediately prior to World War I, the
  Greco-Italian painter, Giorgio de Chirico created
  enigmatic paintings in which he used a
  traditional style to describe not the external
  world, but haunting dreamscapes infused with
  illogical images, bizarre spatial constructions,
  and a pervasive melancholic mood.
• He was greatly inspired by the writings of
  Friedrich Nietzsche, who believed hidden
  realities were seen in such strange
  juxtapositions as the long shadows cast by the
  setting sun into large open city squares and onto
  public monuments.
• De Chirico called his art "metaphysical," and
  with it hoped to destabilize the meaning of
  everyday objects by making them symbols of fear,
  alienation, and uncertainty. His paintings were
  highly influential for the Surrealists a decade
  later in their effort to create art from the
  unconscious.
• Andromache refers to the beautiful and loyal wife
  of Hector, the Trojan warrior slain by Achilles
  in the Iliad. Here Andromache stands, reduced to
  simple ovoids, alone in a quiet, almost airless
  Italian piazza, her mood reflected in the dark
  shadows stretching across the square. The
  buildings, equally simplified, frame the image,
  lending it an almost stage-like quality.

Andromache, 1916Oil on panel. 8 x 5 3/4 in.
(20.3 x 14.6 cm)Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Paul
Schectman, Class of 1935. 76.90
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• Ten years before publication of the Manifesto of
  Surrealism, the Italian artist DeChirco was
  extending the traditions of realism in painting
  to describe dream worlds that contained aspects
  of his own life in scenes of melancholy and
  foreboding. He said he wished to combine in a
  single composition, scenes of contemporary life
  and visions of antiquity, producing a highly
  troubling dream of reality.
• In this painting the antique world is represented
  by a broken sculpture and the historic buildings
  and city square whilst the contemporary is shown
  by the train steaming across the horizon and the
  bunch of bananas in the foreground. Trains for De
  Chirco evoked sadness of goodbyes and nostalgia
  for what was left behind, seeing them as almost
  magical in the way they transported loved ones or
  ourselves from one place to another. The
  liveliness of the train and the ripe bananas is
  contrasted with the cold, lifelessness of the
  shadowy buildings, made more sinister by the
  tilted perspective and geometric precision of the
  shadows. The two arches look like blind eyes. The
  female bust plays across these two extremes the
  voluptuous body contrasted with its broken form
  and being made of cold, hard marble.

The Uncertainty of the Poet. 1913
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• Giorgio de Chirico. Piazza d'Italia. 1913. Oil on
  canvas. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada.

• Giorgio de Chirico. The Disquieting Muses. 1918.
  Oil on canvas. Private collection.

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De Chirico self portrait
34
Frida KahloPronounced FREE-da KAH lo

• Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907 July 13, 1954) was a
  Mexican painter.
• In 1925, a trolley car collided with a bus Kahlo
  was riding an iron handrail impaled her, broke
  her spine, and exited through her lower body. She
  survived her injuries and eventually regained her
  ability to walk, but she would have relapses of
  extreme pain which would plague her for life.
• After the accident, Kahlo turned her attention
  from a medical career to painting.

Gallery Biography
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Frida KahloWore her heart on her canvas.

• Drawing on her personal experiences, her works
  are often shocking in their stark portrayal of
  pain and the harsh lives of women. Fifty-five of
  her 143 paintings are self-portraits that
  incorporate personal symbolism complete with
  graphic anatomical references.
• She was also influenced by indigenous Mexican
  culture, aspects of which she portrayed in bright
  colors, with a mixture of realism and symbolism.

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• In constant pain due to an earlier accident while
  riding a bus it collided with a trolley
  resulting in 32 operations in 26 years on her
  back and leg her leg was later amputated and
  she
• The bulk of her 200 paintings were fantasized
  self-portraits, dealing with subjects seldom
  tested in Western art childbirth, miscarriage,
  abortion.
• She delighted in role-playing and wore colorful
  Mexican costumes, basing her painting style on
  indigenous folk art and Roman Catholic devotional
  images.

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• Twice she married Diego Rivers (dee-A-go
  Riv-ERR-a) a famous Mexican Muralist. She had a
  constant obsession with him.
• Because of her injuries and her husbands many
  affairs, Kahlos paintings tell the story of her
  physical and emotional pain.

The Two Fridas. 1939. Oil on canvas. 170 x 170
cm. Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico
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• At her first one woman show, Kahlos doctor said
  she was too ill to attend, so she had herself
  carried in on a stretcher as part of the exhibit.
  Kahlo died soon after. When they pushed her body
  into the oven to be cremated, the intense heat
  snapped her corpse up to a sitting position. Her
  hair blazed in a ring of fire around her head.
  She looked painter David Siqueiros said, as if
  she were smiling in the center of a sunflower.

Frida Kahlo. The Dream. 1940. Oil on canvas. 74 x
98.5 cm  Private collection.
Frida Kahlo. Without Hope. 1945. Oil on canvas
mounted on Masonite. 28 x 36 cm. Dolores Olmedo
Foundation, Mexico City, Mexico.
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• Frida disagreed with being labeled a surrealist
  because she said, I never painted dreams. I
  painted my own reality.

Frida Kahlo. The Dream. 1940. Oil on canvas. 74 x
98.5 cm  Private collection.
40

• Her work is a rare blend of true emotion,
  heartbreak, love, and life, as well as death.
  Most of her paintings were self-portraits. She
  said, "I paint self-portraits because I am the
  person I know best. I paint my own reality. The
  only thing I know is that I paint because I need
  to, and I paint whatever passes through my head
  without any other considerations."
• Her paintings are very open and honest. They
  reflect her emotions, the events in her life,
  changes in her feelings---whether good or bad.
  She recorded her life in paint. Her imagery and
  style were very original, dramatic, and
  courageous.
• Her husband, the famous Mexican muralist Diego
  Rivera, said "Frida is the only example in the
  history of art of an artist who tore open her
  chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of
  her feelings. The only woman who has expressed in
  her work an art of the feelings, functions, and
  creative power of woman."

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Surrealism Study Guide

• Word Bank
• Dadaism Improvised Art
• Diego Rivera Jean Arp
• Sigmund Feud De Chirico
• Dream Analysis Renee Magritte
• Frida Kahlo Marcel Duchamp
• Max Ernst Surrealism
• Joan Miro Salvador Dali
• Meret Oppenheim
• Fill in the blank for questions 1 12 using the
  words from the list above.
• __________________________ painted squiggles in a
  trancelike state. Invented unique signs for
  natural objects that were simplified into
  shorthand pictograms of geometric and biomorphic
  shapes.
• _________________________first experienced
  hallucinations as a child during a fever from
  measles. He later learned to use hallucinations
  to produce art. He invented frottage.
• _________________________ based his technique on
  critical paranoia and painted his own neuroses
  inspired from his dreams. Instead of inventing
  new forms to symbolize the unconscious mind, he
  represented his hallucinations with meticulous
  realism.

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• __________________________ began as a commercial
  artist who used mastery of realism to defy logic
  by placing everyday objects in incongruous
  settings. Often painted men in bowler hats.
• _______________________ was the precursor to
  Surrealism, he painted nightmare fantasies with
  eerie cityscapes with empty arcades, raking light
  and ominous shadow. Thought of himself as the
  metaphysical painter.
• _______________________ is a female surrealist
  artists whose art became a recognized by many as
  the symbol of Surrealism.
• _______________________ said, I never paint
  dreams. I painted my own reality.
• _______________________ is a negative art
  movement that came before Surrealism and got its
  name from a nonsense world after WWI. The artists
  protested the madness of war, by producing
  spur-of-the-moment art that shocked and awakened
  imagination and intended to cast discredit on
  creative activity. This movement lasted a few
  short years.
• _______________________ is a positive art
  movement that followed Dadaism. It flourished in
  Europe and America during the 1920 - 30s. The
  artists believed in a higher degree of reality
  painting beneath the realistic surface of life.
  
• _______________________ is a philosopher who
  inspired Surrealism.

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• _______________________ is one of two represented
  forms of Surrealism. Artists practiced
  spur-of-the-moment art, distancing themselves as
  much as possible from conscious control.
• _______________________ represented a style of
  Surrealism where artist juxtaposed (placed next
  to each other) incongruous (unrelated) objects
  using realistic techniques turning inward to
  paint dreams, memories and / or feelings.
• _______________________ He was a Mexican muralist
  who was married to Frieda Kahlo.
• _______________________ created collages out of
  random and chance arrangements of paper.
• _______________________ created a readymade,
  titled Fountain, which was an urinal with the
  signature, R. Mutt.

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• Answer in complete sentences.
• 13. Describe what Frida Kahlo painted and why.
• 14. Compare and Contrast the two styles of
  Surrealism.
• 15. How and shy did Surrealism became an art
  movement?