ART between the Wars

Dadaism & Surrealism

Guernica, Picasso

Dadaism: Anti Art 1915-25

• regression (baby talk)

• context: aftermath of World War I• challenged established values (moral & aesthetic)• credo: “Everything the artist spits is art”

• randomness & chance • playful & experimental• techniques/materials: historically unacceptable

Dadaism

Marcel DuchampFountain (1917)

medium: ‘Ready-Made’

Mass produced object (found object) taken out of context

Surrealism 1925-45

“the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of the dream”-Breton’s Second Manifesto

of Surrealism

Ernst’s The Eye of Silence

Political & Scientific Context

Time Transfixed, Magritte

•Anti fascist & antibourgeois

•Freud’s psychology of the unconscious

•Automatism

•Juxtaposition of objects

Magritte’s False Mirror (1926)

Surrealism

• Salvador Dalí – The Persistence of Memory

(1931)• wordplay:

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

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

• theme: Oedipal desires– distorted fetal image

of artist himself– ants --> expression of

anxieties

Miro’s Carnival of the Harlequin (1925)

Exercises