ART between the Wars

Dadaism & Surrealism

Guernica, Picasso

Dadaism

• Dadaism (c. 1915-25)– term: “Dada”

• suggests a regression to early childhood

– French --> a child’s wooden [hobby]horse

– first syllables spoken by children learning to talk

– context: aftermath of World War I

• challenges established values (moral & aesthetic)

• iconoclastic attitude toward tradition

– credo: “Everything the artist spits is art”

Dadaism

• Dadaism (cont.)– aesthetic: a kind of “anti-art”

• exalts commonplace objects by taking them out of their usual context

• incorporates effects of randomness & chance

• playful & experimental

– doodling

– automatic writing

– techniques/materials: historically unacceptable

Dadaism

• Marcel Duchamp– Fountain (1917)

• medium: ‘Ready-Made’ – mass-produced object– taken out of context– deprived of original

function– displayed as an

aesthetically significant structure

– a.k.a. --> “found object”

Dadaism

• Duchamp (cont.)– L.H.O.O.Q.

• medium: “assisted ready-made”

• technique: – retouched poster of

Mona Lisa– adds moustache &

goatee• pun: “LHOOQ”

– mildly obscene (French) --> “She’s got a hot ass”

Surrealism

• Surrealism (c. 1925-45)– definition: 1924

• “Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of the dream”

– definition: Breton’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930)

• “… a certain state of mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, height and depth, are no longer perceived as contradictory”

Surrealism

• context: political– André Breton’s lecture (June 1934)

• anti-Fascist (re: Hitler & Mussolini)– “role of fascism to re-establish for the time being

the tottering supremacy of finance-capital”• anti-bourgeois & critical of capitalist society

– “hypocrisy & cynicism have now lost all sense of proportion & are becoming more outrageous…”

• aim: “to detach the intellectual creator from illusions with which bourgeois society has

sought to surround him”

Surrealism

• process: “automatism”– definition: Breton

• intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought

• absence of all control exercised by the reason • outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations• “a monologue poured out as rapidly as possible,

over which the subject's critical faculty has no control”

• distinguished by high degree of immediate absurdity

Surrealism

• context: Freudian psychology (c. 1895)– preoccupied w/ Freud’s methods of investigation– Freud’s concept of the unconscious:

• repository for traumatic repressed memories; • source of anxiety-provoking drives socially or

ethically unacceptable to the individual• manifested in dreams

– relation to painting: “sublimation” • energy invested in sexual impulses shifts to pursuit

of socially valuable achievements

Ernst’s Eye of Silence (1943-44)

Surrealism

• Rene Magritte (1898-1967)– nationality: Belgian

– training: academic (Brussels Academy)

– style: illusionistic; deliberate literalism

– subjects:

• revelation of the psyche

• surprising alterations of ordinary situations

– method: disjunction between context, size, or juxtaposition of objects

Magritte’s False Mirror (1926)

Surrealism

• Magritte (cont.)– Time Transfixed (c. 1940)

• aim: to discredit ordinary reality

• means: absurdity of scene --> scale of objects

• symbols: explicitly male & female

• composition: dynamic• color: limited range• light/shadow: naturalistic• brushwork: controlled

– reinforces banality

Surrealism

• Dalí (1904-89)– training: Academy of Fine Arts

(Madrid)• mastered academic

techniques• expelled for indiscipline

in 1923– style: illusionistic– method: “paranoic-critical”

• “… to (simultaneously with automatism and other passive states) systematize confusion and thus to help to discredit completely the world of reality.”

Surrealism

• Dalí (cont.)– The Persistence of Memory

(1931)• subject: landscape (Bay of

Rosas)• wordplay:

– montrer --> to show --> montre (watch)

– langue --> “tongue” --> langueur (languid)

• theme: Oedipal desires– distorted fetal image of artist

himself– ants --> expression of

anxieties

Surrealism

• Dalí (cont.)– Premonition of Civil War

(1936)

• political sympathies:

– fascination for Hitler

– relations w/ Surrealists strained c. 1934

– break came when Dali supported Spanish dictator, Franco, in 1939

Surrealism

• Miró (1893-1983)– Painting (1933)

• aim: unconscious mind

• technique: “automatism”

– freely drawing series of lines w/out considering what they might be or become

– consciously reworked

• forms: abstract; weightless

• spatial order: flattened landscape

Miro’s Carnival of the Harlequin (1925)

Exercises