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