the work depicts a man standing in front of a mirror, but whereas the book on the mantelpiece is...
TRANSCRIPT
The work depicts a man standing in front of a mirror, but whereas the book on the mantelpiece is reflected correctly, the man can see only the back of his head.
The book on the mantel is a well-worn copy of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Poe was one of Magritte's favorite authors and he made other references to the author and his work.
Surrealism - 1924
• A movement in art and writing that is based on the strange things that happen in dreams.
• Surrealists juxtapose, or place side by side, unrelated objects. These images seem both real AND unreal (=sur-real).
• Surrealist artists believed that rather than depicting the world literally, they were interested in how the mind works.
• They believed art could achieve the same effect as a dream.
WHY Surrealism in 1924?
What was happening in the world around this time?
•World War I (1914-1918)
•Sigmund Freud
Physically and psychologically,
WWI destroyed Western civilization
Countries Involved: Australia Austria Belgium Bulgaria Canada France Germany Great Britain Greece India IraqItaly Japan Montenegro New Zealand Poland Portugal Rhodesia Romania Russia Serbia South Africa Turkey United States
“The logic, science and technology that many thought would bring a better world had gone horribly wrong.
Instead of a better world, the advancements of the 19th century had produced such high tech weapons as machine guns, long-range artillery, tanks, submarines, fighter planes and mustard gas.” (source: Janson)
Staggering destruction and loss of lifeTOTAL WWI CASUALTIES: 11,016,000
Sigmund
Freud (1856-1939)
•The father of psychoanalysis
•In 1900, Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, and introduced the wider public to the notion of the unconscious mind
•He said “Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.”
Andre Breton Poet
“Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of the dream”
‘My wife with shoulders of champagneAnd of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the iceMy wife with wrists of matchesMy wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts’
SurrealOdd
Illogical
Irrational
Exciting
Surrealist artists create paintings inspired by real images but they change different elements to create a new painting with the same or completely new meaning.
•Reaction to chaos of WWI
•Influence of Freud: Dreams and subconscious
•Impossible scale/size/proportion
•Reversal of natural laws
•Double images
•Juxtaposition
Characteristics of Surrealism
Where?France, Germany, Catalunya, Belgium
ArtistsMax Ernst Salvador Dali Joan Miro Man RayRene Magritte
Salvador Dali (Spanish, 1904–1989)
“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”
Salvador DaliPersistence of Memory 1931
• Dali himself stated that the inspiration for The Persistence of Memory was cheese melting under the sun.
• The sequence of melting clocks in a disjointed landscape is the depiction of a dream that Dali had experienced, the figure in the middle of the painting being the face of the dreamer himself.
• The general interpretation is that the painting, which portrays many melting watches, is a rejection of time as a solid and deterministic influence
Salvador DaliPersistence of Memory 1931
Salvador Dali Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach
At one glance the spectator sees a desolate beach; at another a face; at another a footed dish filled with pears; and again a profile of a dog. These images are fragmented further: the dog's collar becomes a bridge, his head a hill. The instability of appearances fascinated Dali who sought to evoke the world of the unconscious by creating these "multi-valent" images. The meticulously rendered objects and fragments make the metamorphoses and unexpected juxtapositions of the objects even more startling.
Rene Magritte (Belgian) 1898- 1967
“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.”
One of Magritte's most common artistic devices was the use of objects to hide what lies behind them.
For example, in The Son of Man (1964) an apple hides the face of a man wearing a bowler hat.
One theme Magritte uses is that of placing objects together in an unusual context. Unlike other surrealist artists, who mixed dreamlike images with abstract shapes, Magritte’s works included normal images, placed in surreal situations.
In The Human Condition, Magritte’s technique of cover-up appears in the form a painting within a painting.Magritte had this to say of his 1933 work:
In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape.
Rene Magritte Time Transfixed
"I decided to paint the image of a locomotive . . . In order for its mystery to be evoked, another immediately familiar image without mystery—the image of a dining room fireplace—was joined." It is in the surprising juxtaposition and scale shift of these common and unrelated images that their mystery and magic arises.
The artist transformed the pipe of a coal-burning stove into a charging locomotive, situating the train in a fireplace vent so that it appears to be emerging from a railway tunnel. The tiny engine races out into the stillness of a sparsely furnished dining room, its smoke neatly floating up the chimney, suggesting in turn the smoke of coal in the stove.
René Magritte - Les valeurs personnelles (Personal Values) 1952
René MagritteLa Chambre d'écoute (The Listening Room)1952 (impossible scale)
“Carte Blanche,” Rene Magritte
Rene Magritte Carte Blanche
Surrealist art, based on images from the world of dreams and the subconscious.
The typical Surrealist device of juxtaposing common objects (placing next to each other) in unexpected contexts appealed to the Belgian painter René Magritte.
Rene Magritte- (Reversal of Natural Laws)
Joan Miro, Dutch Interior II, 1928Jan Steen, Children Teaching a Cat to Dance, 1660
Both paintings feature a musician, surrounded by one or more listeners, a cat and a dog. In the Dutch interiors, the scenes undergo a complete metamorphosis, as Miró captures these figures in his own surreal fantasy world.
For your project….You will be using 1-3 magazine images and collage as a starting point to develop a surrealist painting.
You must use color mixing, tints, shades, and other painting techniques.
You must be telling a story through pictures, everything cannot just be RANDOM. Be thoughtful, weird, and creative.
Ideas for your Surrealist Collage and Painting
a) change the normal scale of objects(ex: a car the size of a living room or bugs the size of people)
b) turn the accepted order of things upside down (ex: dogs walking people instead of people walking dogs)
c) mix internal and external space(ex: trees growing in a kitchen, seeing the inside and outside
of an object at the same time)
d) transform one object into another(ex: a car turning into a fish, an animal turning into a person)
Student Example- Alicia
Student Example- Carolyn
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Student Example- Christina
Student Example- Alicia
Student Example- Noshin
Student Example- Lisa
Student Example- Renee
Student Example- Stephanie
What is your idea? Start with a well thought-out creative idea. Throwing two random things together doesn’t necessarily qualify as surreal.
Use QUALITY photographic images from magazines- not cartoons or illustrations.
Use only 2-3 magazine images, the rest will be drawn and painted
Avoid images from popular culture such as famous people, name brands and retail products that will distract the viewer.
Cut and glue carefully so all images have smooth edges and there is no visible glue.
Consider background, middle ground and foreground= SPACE