26 Mayıs 2012 Cumartesi

~KINETIC ART~

My brief summary of kinetic art:  Kinetic art is art that contains moving parts or depends on motion for its effect. The moving parts are generally powered by wind, a motor or the observer. Kinetic art encompasses a wide variety of overlapping techniques and styles.




Kinetic art: Term applied to art that moves or appears to move (from the Greek kinesis, ‘movement’). In its broadest sense the term can encompass a great deal of phenomena, including cinematic motion pictures, happenings, and the animated clockwork figures found on clock towers in many cities of Europe. More usually, however, it is applied to sculptures such as Calder's mobiles that are moved either by air currents or by some artificial means—usually electronic or magnetic. In addition to works employing actual movement, there is another type of Kinetic art that produces an illusion of movement when the spectator moves relative to it (and Op art paintings are sometimes included within the field of Kinetic art because they appear to flicker).

The idea of moving sculpture had been proposed by the Futurists as early as 1909, and the term ‘kinetic’ was first used in connection with the visual arts by Gabo and Pevsner in their Realistic Manifesto in 1920. Gabo produced an electrically driven oscillating wire construction in this year, and at the same time Marcel Duchamp was experimenting with Rotative Plaques that incorporated movement. Various other works over the next three decades made experiments in the same vein, for example Moholy-Nagy's Light-Space-Modulator (1922–30, Busch-Reisinger Mus., Harvard Univ.), one of a series of constructions he made using reflecting metals, transparent plastics, and sometimes mechanical devices to produce real movement. However, for many years Calder was the only leading figure who was associated specifically with moving sculpture (and many people regarded him as eccentric), and it was not until the 1950s that the phrase ‘Kinetic art’ became a recognized part of critical vocabulary; the exhibition ‘Le Mouvement’ at the Denise René Gallery, Paris, in 1955 was a key event in establishing it as a distinct genre. The artists represented included Agam, Bury, Calder, Duchamp, Tinguely, and Vasarely. See also Canova.

IAN CHILVERS. "Kinetic art." The Oxford Dictionary of Art. 2004. Retrieved June 06, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O2-Kineticart.html

Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder, by Carl Van Vechten, 1947
Alexander Calder, by Carl Van Vechten, 1947
Born July 22, 1898
Lawnton, Pennsylvania, US
Died November 11, 1976 (aged 78)
New York City
Nationality United States
Field Sculpture
Training Stevens Institute of Technology, Art Students League of New York
Awards Presidential Medal of Freedom

Alexander Calder: (July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing abstract sculptures he called "mobiles". In addition to mobile and "stabile" sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry, jewelry and household objects.

~MINIMAL ART~

My brief summary of minimal art: Minimal art describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella. It is rooted in the reductive aspects of Modernism, and is often interpreted as a reaction against Abstract expressionism and a bridge to Postminimal art practices.



 Minimal art: A type of abstract art, particularly sculpture, characterized by extreme simplicity of form and a deliberate lack of expressive content; it emerged as a trend in the late 1950s and flourished particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. (The term was evidently first used in print by the British philosopher Richard Wollheim in an article entitled ‘Minimal Art’ in Arts Magazine in January 1965, although the American writer Barbara Rose is sometimes credited with coining it; the term ‘Minimalism’ had been used by David Burliuk as early as 1929, but with a vaguer meaning, referring to ‘the minimum of operating means’ in John Graham's paintings.) There are numerous precedents for the stark simplicity of Minimal art. In 1777, for example, the poet Goethe designed an Altar of Good Fortune for his garden in Weimar consisting of two utterly pure geometrical stone shapes—a sphere surmounting a cube; and in 1883 the journalist Alphonse Allais (1855–1905) created a burlesque version of minimalism when he exhibited in Paris a plain sheet of white paper with the title First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls in the Snow (he also produced all-black and all-red pictures with similar comic titles: Negroes Fighting in a Cave at Night and Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes by the Red Sea). Such byways aside, the roots of Minimal art can be traced to the stark geometric abstractions of Malevich and the ready-mades of Duchamp in the second decade of the century, and after this the idea of extreme reductivism occurred in various aspects of avant-garde art—certain sculptures of Brancusi, for example, the Spatialism of Lucio Fontana, and the monochromatic canvases of Yves Klein. As a movement, however, Minimal art developed mainly in the USA rather than Europe and its impersonality is seen as a reaction against the emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism. Leading sculptors of the movement include Carl Andre, Don Judd, and Tony Smith; leading painters (for whom the immediate precedents were Albers and Reinhardt) include Frank Stella (in his early work), and Hard-Edge abstractionists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland.

According to The Tate Gallery: An Illustrated Companion (1979), ‘The theory of minimalism is that without the diverting presence of “composition”, and by the use of plain, often industrial materials arranged in geometrical or highly simplified configurations we may experience all the more strongly the pure qualities of colour, form, space and materials'. Minimal art has close links with Conceptual art (Minimalist sculpture often has a strong element of theoretical demonstration about it, with the artist leaving the fabrication of the design to industrial specialists), and there are sometimes affinities with other contemporaneous movements such as Land art. There is even a kinship with Pop art in a shared preference for slick, impersonal surfaces (some Minimal artists, however, have used ‘natural’ products such as logs rather than machine-finished products). Like Pop art, Minimal art proved a commercial success for many of its leading practitioners, and it generated a huge amount of critical commentary; sometimes it seemed that the less there was to see in a work, the more verbiage it attracted.

IAN CHILVERS. "Minimal art." A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art. 1999. Retrieved June 06, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O5-Minimalart.html

TONY SMITH


Born September 23, 1912
South Orange, New Jersey
Died December 26, 1980 (aged 68)
Nationality American
Field Sculpture, Visual arts
Movement Minimalist

Tony Smith: (September 23, 1912 – December 26, 1980) was an American sculptor, visual artist, architectural designer, and a noted theorist on art. He is often cited as a pioneering figure in American Minimalist sculpture.


~HARD-EDGE~

My brief summary of hard-edge: Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.









Hard-Edge: A type of abstract painting in which forms, although not necessarily geometrical, have sharp contours and are executed in flat colours. It was one of the types of painting that developed as a reaction against the spontaneity and painterly handling of Abstract Expressionism. The term was coined by the American critic Jules Langsner in 1958 and was popularized by Lawrence Alloway, who in 1966 wrote that it was meant ‘to refer to the new development that combined economy of form and neatness of surface with fullness of colour, without continually raising memories of earlier geometric art'. Major exponents of Hard-Edge Painting have included Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland. The four West Coast painters to whom Langsner originally applied the term were Karl Benjamin (1925– ), Lorser Feitelson (1898–1978), Frederick Hammersley (1919– ), and John McLaughlin (1898–1976); they preferred the term ‘Abstract Classicism'.

IAN CHILVERS. "Hard-Edge Painting." A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art. 1999. Encyclopedia.com. (June 6, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O5-HardEdgePainting.html

Theo van Doesburg

Theo van Doesburg as Sergeant Küpper. c 1915.
Birth name Christian Emil Marie Küpper
Born 30 August 1883
Utrecht, Netherlands
Died 7 April 1931 (aged 47)
Davos, Switzerland
Nationality Dutch
Field painting, architecture, poetry
Movement Neo-Plasticism, Elementarism, Concrete art, Dadaism

Theo van Doesburg: (30 August 1883 – 7 March 1931) was a Dutch artist, who practised painting, writing, poetry and architecture. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl


~POP ART~

My brief summary of pop art: Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc. In Pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.





Pop art: A movement based on the imagery of consumerism and popular culture, flourishing from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, chiefly in the USA and Britain. The term was coined c. 1955 by the British critic Lawrence Alloway (‘I don't know precisely when it was first used', he later recalled, but ‘sometime between the winter of 1954–5 and 1957 the phrase gained currency in conversation'; the first appearance in print recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is of September 1957). Initially Alloway used the term (and also the expression ‘Pop culture') to refer to ‘the products of the mass media', rather than to ‘works of art that draw upon popular culture', but by the early 1960s the phrase was being used as a label for such art. Comic books, advertisements, packaging, and images from television and the cinema were all part of the iconography of the movement, and it was a feature of Pop art in both the USA and Britain that it rejected any distinction between good and bad taste: ‘there was some tension between two aims: that of breaking down the distinction between high art and popular culture and that of using elements of popular culture in order to comment critically on modern society’ ( Jonathan Law, ed., European Culture: A Contemporary Companion, 1993).

In the USA Pop art was initially regarded as a reaction from Abstract Expressionism because its exponents brought back figural imagery and made use of impersonal handling. It was seen as a descendant of Dada (in fact Pop art is sometimes called Neo-Dada) because it debunked the seriousness of the art world and embraced the use or reproduction of commonplace subjects (comic strips, soup tins, highway signs) in a manner that had affinities with Duchamp's ready-mades. The most immediate inspiration, however, was the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, both of whom began to make an impact on the New York art scene in the mid-1950s. They opened a wide new range of subject-matter with Johns's paintings of flags, targets, and numbers and his sculptures of objects such as beer cans and Rauschenberg's collages and combine paintings with Coca-Cola bottles, stuffed birds, and photographs from magazines and newspapers. While often using similar subject-matter, Pop artists generally favoured commercial techniques in preference to the painterly manner of Johns and Rauschenberg. Examples are Andy Warhol's silkscreens of soup-tins, heads of Marilyn Monroe, and so on, Roy Lichtenstein's paintings in the manner of comic strips, Mel Ramos's brash pin-ups, and James Rosenquist's billboard-type pictures. Claes Oldenburg, whose subjects include ice-cream cones and hamburgers, has been the major Pop art sculptor.

John Wilmerding (American Art, 1976) writes that Pop art ‘cannot be separated from the culmination of affluence and prosperity during the post-World-War-II era. America had become a ravenously consuming society, packaging art as well as other products, indulging in commercial manipulation, and celebrating exhibitionism, self-promotion, and instant success … Pop's mass-media orientation may further be related to the acceleration of uniformity in most aspects of national life, whether restaurants or regional dialects. Shared by all Americans were the principal preoccupations of Pop art—sex, the automobile, and food. These became almost interchangeable, as Americans increasingly blurred distinctions between bathroom, highway, supermarket, and kitchen.’

In Britain, too, Pop art revelled in a new glossy prosperity following years of post-war austerity. British Pop was nurtured by the Independent Group and the work that is often cited as the first fully-fledged Pop art image (though some of Paolozzi's collages might also claim this title) was produced under its auspices— Richard Hamilton's collage Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? ( Kunsthalle, Tübingen, 1956). However, British art first made a major impact at the Young Contemporaries exhibition in 1961 (at about the same time that American art became a force). The artists in this exhibition included Derek Boshier, David Hockney, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, and Peter Phillips, who had all been students at the Royal College of Art. In the same year the BBC screened Ken Russell's film ‘Pop Goes the Easel', in which Peter Blake was one of the featured artists. Other British exponents of Pop include the sculptor Clive Barker (1940– ), whose works are sometimes chromium-plated, the painter Gerald Laing (1936– ), best known for pictures of cars, and the painter, printmaker, and sculptor Colin Self (1941– ). Although there are exceptions (notably the erotic sculptures of Allen Jones), British Pop was generally less brash than American, expressing a more romantic view of the subject-matter in a way that can now strike a note of nostalgia. However, much of the imagery in British Pop came directly from the USA, expressing what Edward Lucie-Smith describes as ‘an uninhibited romantic hymn to a civilization half-real and half-imagined, a wonderland of pin-ups and pinball machines'.

Richard Hamilton defined Pop art as ‘popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business', and it was certainly a success on a material level, getting through to the public in a way that few modern movements do and attracting big-money collectors. However, it was scorned by many critics. Harold Rosenberg, for example, described Pop as being ‘Like a joke without humour, told over and over again until it begins to sound like a threat … Advertising art which advertises itself as art that hates advertising.’

Although mainly associated with Britain and the USA, Pop art has also had adherents elsewhere, including Valerio Adami in Italy and Erró, an Icelandic artist working in Paris. There are links with other movements, too, such as Nouveau Réalisme in France. Some Pop artists have continued working with Pop imagery long after the movement's heyday was over, Allen Jones in Britain being a leading example.

IAN CHILVERS. "Pop art." A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art. 1999. Retrieved June 06, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O5-Popart.html

Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton, 1992
Born 24 February 1922
Pimlico, London, England
Died 13 September 2011 (aged 89)
Nationality British
Field Collage, painting, graphics
Training Royal Academy
Slade School of Art
University College, London
Movement Pop Art
Works Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?

Richard William Hamilton: (24 February 1922 – 13 September 2011) was a British painter and collage artist. His 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, is considered by critics and historians to be one of the early works of pop art.


~POST-PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION~

My brief summary of post-painterly abstraction: Post-painterly abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg had perceived that there was a new movement in painting that derived from the abstract expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s but "favored openness or clarity" as opposed to the dense painterly surfaces of that painting style.
As painting continued to move in different directions, initially away from abstract expressionism, powered by the spirit of innovation of the time, the term "post-painterly abstraction", which had obtained some currency in the 1960s, was gradually supplanted by minimalism, hard-edge painting, lyrical abstraction, and color field painting.



Post-Painterly Abstraction: A term coined by the critic Clement Greenberg to characterize a broad trend in American painting, beginning in the 1950s, in which abstract painters reacted in various ways against the gestural ‘painterly’ qualities of Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg used the term as the title of an exhibition he organized at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964. He took the word ‘painterly’ (in German ‘malerisch') from the great Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), who had discussed it in his book Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915), translated as Principles of Art History (1932). By it he understood ‘the blurred, broken, loose definition of colour and contour'; Post-Painterly Abstractionists, in contrast, moved towards ‘physical openness of design, or toward linear clarity, or toward both'. The characterization was never a very exact one, but essentially it described a rejection of expressive brushwork in favour of broad areas of unmodulated colour. The term thus embraces more precisely defined types of abstract art including Colour Field Painting and Hard-Edge Painting. Among the leading figures of the trend are Helen Frankenthaler, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella.

An alternative term that was used for a while but did not catch on in the same way is New Abstraction. It comes from the title of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1963. Several of the artists who featured in Greenberg's exhibition had earlier appeared in this one.

IAN CHILVERS. "Post-Painterly Abstraction." A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art. 1999. Retrieved June 06, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O5-PostPainterlyAbstraction.html

Morris Louis Bernstein


Birth name Baltimore, Maryland
Born November 28, 1912
Died September 7, 1962 (aged 49)
Washington, DC.
Nationality American
Field Painting
Training Maryland Institute College of Art
Movement Color Field painting, Abstract Expressionism, Post-painterly abstraction, Washington Color School
Works in museums:
Influenced by Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock




Morris Louis: (born Morris Louis Bernstein, 28 November 1912 – 7 September 1962) was an American painter. During the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting. Living in Washington, DC. Louis, along with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters formed an art movement that is known today as the Washington Color School.









~ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM~

My brief summary of abstract expressionism: Abstract expressionism was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world. The movement's name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, nihilistic.


 Abstract Expressionism: The dominant movement in American painting in the late 1940s and the 1950s, characterized by a desire to convey powerful emotions through the sensuous qualities of paint, often on canvases of huge size. It was the first major development in American art to achieve international status and influence, and it is often reckoned the most significant art movement anywhere since the Second World War. The tremendous vitality it brought to the American art scene helped New York to replace Paris as the world capital of contemporary art, and to many Americans the heyday of the movement has already acquired a kind of legendary status as a golden age.

The phrase ‘Abstract Expressionism’ had originally been used in 1919 to describe certain paintings by Kandinsky, and it was used in the same way by Alfred H. Barr in 1929. In the context of modern American painting it was first used by the New Yorker art critic Robert Coates (1897–1973) in 1946 and it had become part of the standard critical vocabulary by the early 1950s. The painters embraced by the term worked mainly in New York and there were various ties of friendship and loose groupings among them, but they shared a similarity of outlook rather than of style—an outlook characterized by a spirit of revolt against tradition and a belief in spontaneous freedom of expression. The stylistic roots of Abstract Expressionism are complex, but despite its name it owed more to Surrealism—with its stress on automatism and intuition—than to Expressionism. A direct source of inspiration came from the European Surrealists who took refuge in the USA during the Second World War. The most important in this context was Matta, who promoted what Meyer Schapiro called the ‘idea of the canvas as a field of prodigious excitement, unloosed energies’. The war also brought Peggy Guggenheim back to America, and during its brief lifetime (1942–7) her Art of This Century gallery was the main showcase for Abstract Expressionism during its formative period.

David Anfam (Abstract Expressionism, 1990) writes that ‘Pollock, de Kooning, Still, Rothko, Newman, Kline, Philip Guston, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell and Adolph Gottlieb are by consensus prime members of the Abstract Expressionist canon.’ Among the secondary figures were William Baziotes, James Brooks, Lee Krasner, Richard Pousette-Dart, Theodorus Stamos, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Hans Hofmann and Ad Reinhardt were major figures, but not central to the movement. The work of these artists varied greatly and was sometimes neither abstract ( de Kooning) nor Expressionist ( Rothko). Attempts have been made to arrange them into stylistic groupings (see ABSTRACT IMAGISTS), but these are of doubtful use as they require so many qualifications. Their work varied from the explosive energy of Pollock's Action Painting to the serene contemplativeness of Rothko's Colour Field Painting. Even within these two polarities, however, there are certain qualities that are basic to most Abstract Expressionist painting: the preference for working on a huge scale; the emphasis placed on surface qualities so that the flatness of the canvas is stressed; the adoption of an all-over type of treatment, in which the whole area of the picture is regarded as equally important; the glorification of the act of painting itself; the conviction that abstract painting could convey significant meaning and should not be viewed in formalist terms alone; and a belief in the absolute individuality of the artist (for which reason most of the Abstract Expressionists disliked being labelled with an ‘ism’, preferring New York School as a group designation).

Almost without exception, the artists who created Abstract Expressionism were born between 1900 and 1915 most of them struggled during their early careers, which coincided with the Depression. Apart from Motherwell, the major figures began as representational painters, but generally moved towards abstraction in the late 1930s or early 1940s. The idea that these artists were beginning to create a new movement took shape in about 1943, and in 1945 Peggy Guggenheim mounted an exhibition called ‘A Problem for Critics’, almost as a challenge for someone to come up with a name for this movement. By 1948, when de Kooning had his first one-man show and Pollock first exhibited his drip paintings, it was approaching maturity. Initially the new way of painting was found perplexing or outlandish by many people, but during the 1950s the movement became an enormous critical and financial success, helped by the support of the influential writers Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. It had passed its peak by 1960, but several of the major figures continued productively after this and a younger generation of artists carried on the Abstract Expressionist torch. By 1960, also, reaction against the movement was under way, in the shape principally of Pop art and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Sculptors as well as painters were influenced by Abstract Expressionism, the leading figures including Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton, and Theodore Roszak. The immense significance of the movement in American culture was summed up by Maurice Tuchman when he wrote in 1971: ‘Virtually every important American artist to have emerged in the last fifteen years looks to … abstract expressionism as the point of departure, in the same way that most European artists of the 1920s and 1930s referred in their work to the inventions of cubism’ (The New York School, 1971, revised edn. of the catalogue of an exhibition held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1965). Since then Abstract Expressionism has continued to be influential, notably as one of the sources of Neo-Expressionism, and Robert Hughes considers that the success of the movement has ‘encouraged a phony grandiloquence, a confusion of pretentious size with scale, that has plagued American painting ever since’.

IAN CHILVERS. "Abstract Expressionism." A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art. 1999. Retrieved June 06, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O5-AbstractExpressionism.html


Jackson Pollock

Photographer Hans Namuth extensively documented Pollock's unique painting techniques.
Birth name Paul Jackson Pollock
Born January 28, 1912
Cody, Wyoming, U.S.
Died August 11, 1956 (aged 44)
Springs, New York, U.S.
Nationality American
Field Painter
Training Art Students League of New York
Movement Abstract expressionism
Patrons Peggy Guggenheim
Influenced by Thomas Hart Benton, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró
Influenced Helen Frankenthaler

Paul Jackson Pollock: (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956), known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his uniquely defined style of drip painting.
During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.
Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related car accident. In December 1956, the year of his death, he was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, and a larger more comprehensive exhibition there in 1967. More recently, in 1998 and 1999, his work was honored with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in London.
In 2000, Pollock was the subject of an Academy Award–winning film Pollock directed by and starring Ed Harris.


6 Mayıs 2012 Pazar

~SURREALISM~

My brief summary of surrealism: Surrealism movement began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks. Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.
Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.





Surrealism: Movement in art and literature flourishing in the 1920s and 1930s, characterized by a fascination with the bizarre, the incongruous, and the irrational. It was closely related to Dada, its principal source; several artists figured successively in both movements, each of which was conceived as a revolutionary mode of thought and action—a way of life rather than a set of stylistic attitudes. Both were strongly anti-rationalist and much concerned with creating effects that were disturbing or shocking, but whereas Dada was essentially nihilist, Surrealism was positive in spirit.

Surrealism originated in France. Its founder and chief spokesman was the writer André Breton, who officially launched the movement with his first Manifeste du surréalisme, published in 1924. In this long and difficult document he defined Surrealism as: ‘purely psychic automatism through which we undertake to express, in words, writing, or any other activity, the actual functioning of thought, thoughts dictated apart from any control by reason and any moral or aesthetic consideration. Surrealism rests upon belief in the higher reality of specific forms of associations, previously neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams, and in the disinterested play of thinking.’ He said its purpose was ‘to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality'. Within this general aim it embraced a large number of different and not altogether coherent doctrines and techniques, characteristically aimed at breaching the dominance of reason and conscious control by methods designed to release primitive urges and imagery. Breton and other members of the movement drew liberally on Freud's theories concerning the unconscious and its relation to dreams.

Breton's first manifesto dealt primarily with Surrealism in literature, but he soon extended his theoretical concerns to the visual arts. The way in which Surrealist artists set about exploration of submerged impulses and imagery varied greatly (in spite of Breton's demands there was little doctrinal unity, and defections, expulsions, and personal attacks are a feature of the history of the movement). Broadly speaking, however, there were three contrasting approaches. Some artists, for example Ernst and Masson, cultivated various types of automatism in an effort to eliminate conscious control. At the other extreme, Dalí, Magritte, and others painted in a scrupulously detailed manner to give an hallucinatory sense of reality to scenes that make no rational sense. Finally, in Surrealist objects, as well as in some paintings, the startling juxtaposition of unrelated items was used to create a sense not so much of unreality as of a fantastic but compelling reality outside the everyday world. The text quoted to justify this search for the unexpected combination of incompatibles was a sentence from the 19th-century poet Lautréamont, whom the Surrealists regarded as one of their precursors: ‘Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.’

Paris remained the centre of Surrealism until the Second World War, when the emigration of many European artists to the USA made New York the new hub of its activity. However, it became the most widely disseminated and controversial aesthetic movement of the 1920s and 1930s, spread partly by a number of prestigious journals (beginning with La Révolution surréaliste in 1924) and partly by a series of major international exhibitions. The first of these was held at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, in 1931, and two of the most famous were held in 1936: the ‘International Surrealist Exhibition’ at the New Burlington Galleries, London, and ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The movement did not take root in Germany ( Ernst, the major German Surrealist, lived mostly in France and the USA), but it flourished vigorously in Belgium—in the work particularly of Magritte, the most inspired of all Surrealist painters, and Delvaux, the most long-lived upholder of the tradition. Many artists who were not in sympathy with the political aims of Surrealism (for a time it was associated with the French Communist Party), and who were never formal members of the movement, nevertheless found its liberating effects on the imagination bracing and were influenced by its imagery. In Britain, Henry Moore and Paul Nash were among the major artists who went through a Surrealist phase, and Herbert Read was the most distinguished critic who gave the movement his support. The English Surrealist Group was founded in 1936, but it was social rather than revolutionary in its aims.

By the end of the Second World War, Surrealism had more or less broken up as a coherent movement (an exhibition at the Galerie Maeght, Paris, in 1947, organized by Breton and Marcel Duchamp, was the last major show staged by original members). However, although it had spent its main force, the spirit of Surrealism lived on. With its stress on the marvellous and the poetic, Surrealism offered an alternative approach to the formalism of Cubism and various types of abstract art, and its methods and techniques continued to influence artists in many countries. It was, for example, a fundamental source for Abstract Expressionism. A good many individual Surrealists, too, remained devoted to its ideals long after its heyday was past and new groups emerged, for example in Chicago and Prague. Among the artists who have most unwaveringly kept the spirit of Surrealism alive is Conroy Maddox, who in 1978 said ‘No other movement has had more to say about the human condition, or has so determinedly put liberty, both poetic and political, above all else'.

Surrealism. (2012, June 2). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:53, June 6, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Surrealism&oldid=495565549

Max Ernst

Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in 1948
Born April 2, 1891
Brühl, Germany
Died April 1, 1976 (aged 84)
Paris, France
Nationality German
Field painting, sculpture, poetry
Movement Dada, Surrealism

Max Ernst: (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.