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Surrealist Painting
Although the Metaphysical movement had declined by the 1920s, the
advent of Surrealism rekindled interest in this type of painting. The
Metaphysical School has been described as the precursor of Surrealism.
However, the rational control that governed Metaphysical invention is
absent from Surrealism, which sought to convey its message to the
subconscious, exploiting involuntary psychic connections of ideas for
self-expression. The immediate predecessor to Surrealism in art was,
in fact,
Dada. Developing from this movement. Surrealism absorbed
certain
Dadaist principles: in particular, its concepts of complete
freedom and of the total interdependence of art and life. However,
Surrealism put a positive and constructive emphasis on these
motivations, in contrast with
Dadaism's nihilistic attitude.
Surrealism became politically involved with Marxism and, in 1930, the
name of its official mouthpiece was changed from La revolution
surrealiste to Le surrealisme ait service de la revolution.
The movement's official date of birth was in 1924, when
Andre Breton's literary manifesto appeared, in which he
explained the theory of "automatism" - acts of spontaneous creation,
on which the Surrealist theories were based. Two years later,
Breton
wrote another article devoted mainly to Surrealist painting. When the
German
Max Ernst (1891-1976), the Frenchman
Andre Masson, and the
Spaniard
Joan Miro met at Kahnweiler's gallery in Paris in 1923, a
certain common direction was agreed upon, although it is difficult to
identify a specific Surrealist style since each artist developed his own interpretation of Surrealism. The
influence of Freud's psychoanalytical theories is discernible in all
Surrealist painters' work. His theories identified the psychological
processes of the unconscious, stressed the significance of dreams, and
gave meaning to apparently incongruous thought-associations and
seemingly illogical free associative ideas.
Max Ernst's famous
definition of beauty echoes this Freudian influence: "As beautiful as
the chance encounter of a sewing machine with an umbrella on a
dissection table", suggesting that by matching incompatible realities,
new and intriguing aesthetic meanings would be revealed.
Ernst was a highly imaginative painter, endowing dreams and tricks
of the mind with a convincing and coherent figurative appearance. His
Elephant Celebes (1921) and Oedipus Rex (1922) are
considered a Surrealist masterpieces even though they were painted
before the movement was founded. From 1929 onwards, the eccentric
artist
Salvador Dali (1904-89) employed a visionary and hallucinatory
technique in his paranoiac and psychopathological paintings, seeking
to call reality into question and to be rid of any rational
foundation. The Belgian artist
Rene Magritte (1898-1967) was the extraordinary creator of paintings with strong conceptual
tensions, which emphasized contradictions and double meanings,
confounding the observer's expectations and challenging perceptions.
Surrealism occupied centre stage in the panorama of interwar European
culture, partly due to the high quality of Surrealist paintings, and
partly because of its ability to encompass artistic, social, and
political issues. Although Paris remained the hub of their activity,
talented Surrealist artists such as
Arshile Gorky,
Roberto Matta, and
Wifredo Lam were also based in the US.
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Surrealism
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between
World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier
Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art
that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism's emphasis was not on
negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a
reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by
the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the
past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According
to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic
André
Breton, who published “The Surrealist Manifesto” in 1924, Surrealism
was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of
experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be
joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud,
Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped
realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters
alike.
In the poetry of
Breton, Paul Éluard, Pierre Reverdy, and others,
Surrealism manifested itself in a juxtaposition of words that was
startling because it was determined not by logical but by
psychological—that is, unconscious—thought processes. Its major
achievements, however, were in the field of painting. Surrealist
painting was influenced not only by
Dadaism but also by the fantastic
and grotesque images of such earlier painters as
Hieronymus Bosch and
Francisco de Goya and of closer contemporaries such as
Odilon Redon,
Giorgio de Chirico, and
Marc Chagall. The practice of Surrealist art
strongly emphasized methodological research and experimentation,
stressing the work of art as a means for prompting personal psychic
investigation and revelation.
Breton, however, demanded firm doctrinal
allegiance. Thus, although the Surrealists held a group show in Paris
in 1925, the history of the movement is full of expulsions,
defections, and personal attacks.
The major Surrealist painters were
Jean Arp,
Max Ernst,
Andre Masson,
Rene Magritte,
Yves Tanguy,
Salvador
Dali,
Pierre Roy,
Paul Delvaux,
and
Joan Miro. The work of these artists is too diverse to be
summarized categorically as the Surrealist approach in the visual
arts. Each artist sought his own means of self-exploration. Some
single-mindedly pursued a spontaneous revelation of the unconscious,
freed from the controls of the conscious mind; others, notably
Miro,
used Surrealism as a liberating starting point for an exploration of
personal fantasies, conscious or unconscious, often through formal
means of great beauty. A range of possibilities falling between the
two extremes can be distinguished. At one pole, exemplified at its
purest by the works of
Arp, the viewer is confronted with images,
usually biomorphic, that are suggestive but indefinite. As the
viewer's mind works with the provocative image, unconscious
associations are liberated, and the creative imagination asserts
itself in a totally open-ended investigative process. To a greater or
lesser extent,
Ernst,
Masson, and
Miro also followed this approach,
variously called organic, emblematic, or absolute Surrealism. At the
other pole the viewer is confronted by a world that is completely
defined and minutely depicted but that makes no rational sense: fully
recognizable, realistically painted images are removed from their
normal contexts and reassembled within an ambiguous, paradoxical, or
shocking framework. The work aims to provoke a sympathetic response in
the viewer, forcing him to acknowledge the inherent “sense” of the
irrational and
logically inexplicable. The most direct form of this
approach was taken by
Magritte in simple but powerful paintings such
as that portraying a normal table setting that includes a plate
holding a slice of ham, from the centre of which stares a human eye.
Dali,
Roy, and
Delvaux rendered similar but more complex alien
worlds that resemble compelling dreamlike scenes.
A number of specific techniques were devised by the Surrealists to
evoke psychic responses. Among these were frottage (rubbing with
graphite over wood or other grained substances) and grattage (scraping
the canvas)—both developed by
Ernst to produce partial images, which
were to be completed in the mind of the viewer; automatic drawing, a
spontaneous, uncensored recording of chaotic images that “erupt” into
the consciousness of the artist; and found objects.
With its emphasis on content and free form, Surrealism provided a
major alternative to the contemporary, highly formalistic
Cubist
movement and was largely responsible for perpetuating in modern
painting the traditional emphasis on content.
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Automatism
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Technique first used by Surrealist painters and poets to express the
creative force of the unconscious in art.
In the 1920s the Surrealist poets
André
Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert
Desnos, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault tried writing in a
hypnotic or trance like state, recording their train of mental
associations without censorship or attempts at formal exposition.
These poets were influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic theory and
believed that the symbols and images thus produced, though appearing
strange or incongruous to the conscious mind, actually constituted a
record of a person's unconscious psychic forces and hence possessed an
innate artistic significance. Little of lasting value remains from the
Surrealists' attempts at “automatic” writing, however.
Automatism was a more productive vehicle for the Surrealist painters.
Andre Masson,
Arshile Gorky,
and
Max Ernst,
in particular, experimented with fantastic or erotic images that were
spontaneously recorded in a kind of visual free association, without
the artist's conscious censorship; the images were then either left as
originally conceived or were consciously elaborated upon by the
artist. Related to automatic drawing are the techniques
Ernst
devised to involve chance in the creation of a picture. Among them
were “frottage,” placing canvas or paper over different materials such
as wood and rubbing it with graphite to make an impression of the
grain; “grattage,” scratching the painted surface of the canvas with
pointed tools to make it more tactile; and “decalcomania,” pressing
liquid paint between two canvases and then pulling the canvases apart
to produce ridges and bubbles of pigment. The chance forms created by
these techniques were then allowed to stand as incomplete, suggestive
images, or they were completed by the artist according to his
instinctive response to them.
Between 1946 and 1951 a group of Canadian painters—including Paul-Emile
Borduas, Albert Dumouchel, Jean Paul Mousseau, and
Jean-Paul Riopelle—known as Les Automatistes, practiced
automatism. From about 1950 a group of artists in the United States
called Action painters adopted automatic methods, some under the
direct influence of
Masson,
Gorky, and
Ernst, all
of whom had moved to the United States to escape World War II. Seeking
abstract pictorial equivalents for states of mind, painters
Jackson
Pollock,
Willem de Kooning,
Franz Kline,
Jack
Tworkov, and
Bradley Walker Tomlin variously experimented
with chance drippings of paint on the canvas and free, spontaneous
brushstrokes. This approach was seen as a means to strip away artifice
and unlock basic creative instincts deep within the artist's
personality. Automatism has since become a part of the technical
repertoire of modern painting, though its prominence declined with
that of Action painting itself.
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Paul-Emile
Borduas
(1905-1960)
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Nature's Parachutes
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The
Climb
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Frottage
[from Fr. frotter: ‘to rub’].
Technique of reproducing a texture or relief design by
laying paper over it and rubbing it with some drawing medium,
for example pencil or crayon.
Max Ernst and other
Surrealist
artists incorporated such rubbings into their paintings by
means of collage. It is also a popular method of making
rubbings of medieval church brasses and other ancient
monuments and inscriptions.
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Veristic
Surrealism
The second tendency of Surrealist painting, sometimes called Veristic
Surrealism, was to depict with meticulous clarity and often in great
detail a world analogous to the dream world. Before responding to the
Metaphysical painting of
de Chirico and being brought into the
Surrealist Movement in 1929,
Salvador Dali had admired the command of
detail in artists such as Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891) and the
Pre-Raphaelites; his physical technique continued to reflect this
admiration.
Dali's importance for Surrealism was that he invented his
own 'psycho technique', a method he called 'critical paranoia'. He
deliberately cultivated delusions similar to those of paranoiacs in the
cause of wresting hallucinatory images from his conscious mind.
Dali's
images - his bent watches, his figures, half human, half chest of drawers
- have made him the most famous of all Surrealist painters. But when he
changed to a more academic style in 1937
Breton expelled him from the
Movement.
The Surrealist paintings of
Rene Magritte combine convincing
descriptions of people and objects in bizarre juxtapositions with a
competent but pedestrian physical painting technique. The results
question everyday reality, stand it on its head and present a new surreality. These odd juxtapositions were explored by the English
painter Edward Wadsworth, who used tempera to achieve a dreamlike
clarity in his work. Surrealists approved of desire in its attack on
reason and the Veristic Surrealism of
Paul Delvaux , in which
women appear in the cool surroundings of noble architecture and exude an
hallucinatory eroticism.
Veristic Surrealism subdivides into a second main type in the work of
Yves Tanguy. The dreamlike visions that
Tanguy produced from the
unconscious layers of the mind contain meticulously described yet
imaginary objects. There are no bizarre juxtapositions. His is a self
consistent world that convinces on its own terms as in a dream. In the
work of the Veristic Surrealists, the surface of the painting tends to
be flat and glossy: the viewer is reminded as little as possible that
the illusion is composed of paint and the hallucinatory effect is
thereby enhanced.
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MetamorphismTerm applied to the process by which one shape is
transformed into another, especially in Surrealism and other
tendencies in 20th-century art. The concept of metamorphosis,
encompassing literary sources from Ovid through Dante
Alighieri to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was revived in the
early 19th century. For the ancient Greeks, as outlined by
Ovid, it concerned the miraculous process of the
transformation from the world of nature to another sphere of
existence; in Goethe’s reformulation of metamorphosis in terms
of the evolution of organic life (1790), however, it means a
law of formation. Being based on the principles of ‘polarity’
and ‘enhancement’, it rules the transformation of nature and
defines art as an enhanced ‘second nature’.
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Decalcomania
Technique for generating images used, for example, by the
Surrealist artist
Oscar Dominguez: paint is applied to a piece
of paper that is then either folded, creating a mirrored
pattern, or pressed against another sheet . The resulting image can then be
elaborated, as in a blot drawing. It is a popular technique
with young school children.
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Oscar Dominguez
Decalcomania
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Devetsil
Czech avant-garde group of architects, painters, sculptors,
collagists, photographers, film makers, designers and writers,
active 1920s–30s. Its name is a composite of the words ‘nine’
and ‘forces’. The group’s leader, KAREL TEIGE, advocated a
reconciliation between utilitarianism and lyrical
subjectivity: ‘Constructivism and Poetism’. Devetsil’s
architects, including JAROMÍR KREJCAR and KAREL HONZÍK,
invested the geometry of architecture with an element of
poetry, while painters and photographers such as
Toyen and
Jindrich Styrsky moved towards
Surrealism, and when the group
dissolved many of its members, including Teige, joined the
Czech Surrealist group.
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Blue Four
[Blauen Vier].
Name applied to a group of German painters, founded at the
Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, on 31 March 1924. The group
consisted of
Vasily Kandinsky,
Paul Klee,
Alexei Jawlensky and
Lyonel Feininger, who were formerly associated with the BLAUE
REITER group. The idea for founding the Blue Four came from
Galka Scheyer, a former pupil of
Jawlensky, who sought to make
the work and ideas of these artists better known in the USA
through exhibitions, lectures and sales. While the Blue Four
was not an official association, its name was chosen to give
American audiences an idea about the type of artists involved
and also to allude to the artists’ previous association with
the Blaue Reiter group. In May 1924 Scheyer travelled to New
York, where the first Blue Four exhibition took place at the
Charles Daniel Gallery (Feb–March 1925). Scheyer then moved to
California, where the first of many Blue Four exhibitions in
the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas took place at the
Oakland Museum in autumn 1925. Further exhibitions, often with
lectures by Scheyer, were held in Portland, OR (1927),
Seattle, WA (1926, 1936), Spokane, WA (1927), Mexico City
(1931) and in Chicago, IL (1932), as well as at the Ferdinand
Möller Gallery in Berlin (1929).
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Block group
[Pol. Blok].
Polish avant-garde group active in Warsaw between 1924 and
1926. Group members included Henryk Berlewi, J. Golus, W.
Kajruksztis, Katarzyna Kobro, K. Krynski, Maria Nicz-Borowiak
(1896–1944), Aleksander Rafalowski (1894–1981), Henryk
Stazewski, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Mieczyslaw Szczuka, M. Szulc,
Teresa Zarnower (d after 1945). Most members of the
group had already exhibited together in some of the numerous
exhibitions of the avant-garde in Poland in the early 1920s.
They shared an enthusiasm for Soviet Constructivism, but there
were already significant divisions within the group when it
was formally founded in early 1924, holding its first official
exhibition in the showroom of the car manufacturer Laurent-Clément
in Warsaw in March of that year. The first issue of the
group’s own magazine, Blok, appeared at the same time.
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Henryk Berlewi
(1894-1967)
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Chonon i Lea, 1921
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Szklarz, 1921
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Kapists [Capists;
Pol. Kapisci, from ‘Komitet Paryski’: Parisian Committee].
Polish group of painters. In 1924 a number of students of
Józef Pankiewicz at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków formed
a committee, whose aim was to organize a study trip to Paris.
Jan Cybis (1897–1972), Hanna Rudzka-Cybisowa (1897–1988),
Zygmunt Waliszewski, Artur Nacht-Samborski, Piotr Potworowski
and Józef Czapski were among the painters who therefore
founded the Paris branch of the Kraków Academy from 1924 to
1930. They gained fame after two successful exhibitions at the
Galerie Zak in Paris (1930) and the Galerie Moos in Geneva
(1931). Most of the artists returned to Poland in 1931, where
they were still known as the Kapists. They were a loose
association, and, although they had no clearly defined
programme, they were principally influenced by the work of
Pierre Bonnard. The members were Post-Impressionist painters
representing the trend known as Polish Colourism, and they
stressed the importance of good craftsmanship in painting.
Generally their work is associated with a particular
sensitivity to colour, its harmony and contrasts. Forms were
built with colour, and the use of perspective and chiaroscuro
was limited, as in Rudzka-Cybisowa’s Still-life with
Armchair (c. 1956; Poznan, N. Mus.). They painted
from nature but did not imitate it, and their compositions
were sometimes close to abstraction (e.g. Shells by Jan
Cybis, 1953–4; Poznan, N. Mus.). Zygmunt Waliszewski was the
only member of the group who did not reject literary
subject-matter (e.g. the Toilet of Venus, 1933; Warsaw,
N. Mus.). Kapists were well-represented on the staff of the
Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, opened in 1945. Along with
Constructivism, the Polish Colourism introduced by the Kapists
became one of the most popular trends in Polish painting in
the first half of the 20th century.
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Jan Cybis
(1897–1972)

Still Life
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Zygmunt Waliszewski
(1897-1936)

Portrait of a Woman
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Fellowship of St Luke
[Brotherhood of St Luke; Pol. Bractwo
Swietego Lukasza].
Polish group of painters that flourished in 1925–39. It
emerged from the studio of Tadeusz Pruszkowski (1888–1942) at
the School of Fine Arts (Sekola Sztuk Pieknych), Warsaw, and
was the first post-war group in Warsaw’s largest art school.
The fellowship’s 14 members, all pupils of Pruszkowski,
included Boleslaw Cybis (1895–1957), Jan Gotard (1898–1943),
Antoni Michalak (1902–75) and Jan Zamojski (1901–85). The
fellowship modelled itself on the medieval guilds, and the ‘Master’ Pruszkowski ceremoniously emancipated
his pupils. The leadership of the group rested with the
‘Chapter’ (Kapitula). The members of the fellowship received
special diplomas of emancipation. The group’s artistic
programme was also based on former models, primarily on 16th-
and 17th-century Dutch painting, although the group was
essentially held together by ties of friendship. The artistic
character of the fellowship was largely influenced by the
personality of Pruszkowski, an admirer of Frans Hals and Diego
Velázquez and a colourful character in the Warsaw art world.
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Boleslaw Cybis
(1895–1957)
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Staruszka
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Spotkanie
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Golebiarze
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Kompozycja
architektoniczna z fryzjerem
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Kompozycja
architektoniczna ze złotym lwem
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Primavera
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Toaleta
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Kaktusy
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Association of
Revolutionary Art of Ukraine
[Ukrain.
Asotsiatsiya Revolyutsiynoho Mystetstva Ukrainy].
Ukrainian group of artists active from 1925 to 1930. The
association was founded by statute on 25 August 1925 in Kiev,
with branches formed subsequently in other Ukrainian cities
such as Kharokov (Kharkiv), Odessa, Dnepropetrovs’k (Dnipropetrivs’k)
and Uman’. Members also lived in Moscow, Leningrad (now St
Petersburg) and Paris. Artists of various artistic backgrounds
and different training belonged to the association, but it was
best represented by the avant-garde artists Oleksandr
Bogomazov(1880-1930),
Oleksandr Bogomazov
(1880-1930)

Armenian Woman
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Nina Genke-Meller (1893–1954), Vasyl’ Yermilov
(1894–1967), Oleksandr Khvostov (1895–1968), Vadym Meller
(1884–1962), Viktor Pal’mov (1888–1929) and
Vladimir Tatlin.
Its theoretical platform, formulated by Ivan Vrona
(1887–1970), rector of the progressive Kiev State Art
Institute, was based on Marxist principles, recognizing the
era as a transitional stage towards a more cohesive national
proletarian reality. The association’s objective was to
develop the strengths of Ukrainian artists and to be flexible
enough to be able to consolidate a variety of formalist
leanings without sacrificing high technical quality. Together
with the Association of Artists of Red Ukraine (AKhChU:
Asotsiatsiya Khudozhnykiv Chervonoi Ukrainy), it succeeded in
organizing one of the first exhibitions devoted to Ukrainian
art of the 1920s. By 1927 ARMU was the single most influential
body of artists in the country. It came to be dominated by
painters who were attracted to the monumental art of MYKHAYLO
BOYCHUK, which was inspired by the Byzantine period. Among
those who followed Boychuk’s style were Sofiya A.
Nalepins’ka-Boychuk (1884–1939), Ivan I. Padalka (1897–1938),
Oksana Pavlenko (1895–1991), Mykola Rokyts’ky (1901–44), and
Vasyl’ F. Sedlyar (1889–1937). In debating the means whereby
ARMU’s aim to revitalize the artistic culture of Ukraine could
be realized, Sedlyar (1926) laid equal emphasis on the
importance of concepts such as artistic industry and material
culture, as well as on the visual arts. He defended the
association against its rival, the ASSOCIATION OF ARTISTS OF
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA (AKhRR), a group that turned to
19th-century Realism and by doing so stood in opposition to
the left wing and to Productivist art as a whole. By June
1930, internal differences with ARMU had caused its leaders to
dissolve it and to organize the group October (Ukrain. Zhovten’)
in its place.
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Gresham
group
Association of Hungarian artists who met regularly at the
Gresham Café in Budapest from the mid-1920s to 1944. A loose
and friendly association free from institutional constraints,
they were united merely by the approximate similarity of their
aesthetic thinking, rather than any particular style. Such
leading members of the Hungarian avant-garde as Róbert Berény
and Aurél Bernáth were, especially in their youth, among the
artists at the Gresham. In the 1920s the group contained such
representatives of the nascent Hungarian Expressionist
movement as József Egry, István Szonyi, Béni Ferenczy and Pál
Pátzay (1896–1979). They are also often referred to as the
‘post-Nagybánya school’, which refers to the principles of the
NAGYBÁNYA COLONY, active in the 1910s, and to their desire to
uphold the artistic tradition and stance of the group
represented primarily by Károly Ferenczy.
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Robert Bereny
(1887-1953)

Woman Playing a Cello
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Aurel Bernath
(1895-1982)

Marili before blue
background, birthday
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Gruppe Progressiver
Kunstler [Gruppe der Progressiven]
German group of artists. It was founded in Cologne in
1925 by Franz Seiwert (1894–1933) and Heinrich Hoerle
(1895–1936), with Otto Freundlich, Gerd Arntz (b 1900),
Hans Schmitz (1896–1977), Augustin Tschinkel (b 1905)
and the photographer August Sander. The group extended the
programme of a ‘proletarian’ art that had characterized
Seiwert and Hoerle’s STUPID GROUP and their intervening work
to include artists from other centres in the Rhineland and
throughout Germany. They supported the revolutionary
opposition to the ineffectual Weimar Republic, which they saw
as a tool of repressive right-wing elements in the
establishment. Following collaborations with the idealist and
pacifist Berlin periodical Die Aktion, Seiwert and
Hoerle started their own artistic publication, A bis Z,
in October 1929, beginning the group’s most fertile period.
While the periodical attracted contributions from a broad
cross-section of artists (including Raoul Haussmann, Jean
Hélion and
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy), the group favoured a
stripped-down figurative style, whose schematized forms and
abstract elements drew attention to the mechanization of
contemporary existence. With echoes of Oskar Schlemmer’s work
and of Parisian Purism, some compositions also tended towards
the coldness of Neue Sachlichkeit. Their critical political
stance made them an immediate target for Nazi opposition. The
group and periodical were ended in 1933, Seiwert died the same
year, and Hoerle and Freundlich’s work was subsequently
designated as entartete Kunst.
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Heinrich Hoerle
(1895 - 1936)
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Self-Portrait in Front of Trees and Chimneys, 1931
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Denkmal der unbekannten Prothesen, 1930
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Arbeiter, 1923
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Drei Invaliden |
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Paar, 1931
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OSA [Ob’edineniye
Sovremennikh Arkhitektorov; Rus.: Union of Contemporary Architects].
Soviet architectural group, active in Moscow from 1925 to 1930. It was
founded by MOISEY GINZBURG and Aleksandr Vesnin and it attracted many of Moscow’s Modernist architects
by arguing for architecture’s pivotal role in creating the new
Soviet society. OSA’s activities passed through several
distinct phases in response to changing political
circumstances and engaged the public on several fronts: these
included an exhibition of contemporary architecture in 1927;
architectural conferences in 1928 and 1929; and the bi-monthly
journal Sovremennaya arkhitektura, which appeared from
1926 to 1930. Disavowing aesthetic and formal considerations,
OSA made functional and technical matters pre-eminent.
Starting with general reflections about the USSR, OSA
architects then analysed the State’s building requirements in
terms of cost, user profile and building types. The group
endorsed a view of architecture as an integral part of the
State apparatus, with a role in transforming society, for
example by evolving new building types, such as the Workers’
Club, and with responsibilities, for example in containing
costs by adopting prefabrication methods. Their approach to
design was disciplined, with the design process itself being
reduced to four distinct phases: the building programme’s
spatial organization and technical requirements; the
volumetric implications of these factors; their physical
implementation; and the consolidation of the previous three
steps into architectural coherence and unity. This rigorous
design method helped OSA to forge its own identity and to
create a legacy of designs challenging the best work of other
European and Soviet avant-garde groups. The most
characteristic designs by architects associated with the group
include: the Vesnin brothers’ unexecuted projects for the
Palace of Labour (1922–3), Moscow, and the Leningrad Pravda
Building (1924), Moscow;
Grigory Barkhin’s Izvestiya Building (1925–7), Moscow;
Ginzburg’s unexecuted project for the Orgametals Headquarters
(1926–7); Il’ya Golosov’s Zuyev Club (1927–9), Moscow; and Ivan Leonidov’s
unexecuted projects for the Lenin Institute (1927) and the Ministry of
Heavy Industry (1933–4), both Moscow. All
of these designs, however, owed as much to the talents of
their respective authors as to OSA’s design method.
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Circle of Artists
[Rus. Krug Khudozhnikov].
Russian group of painters and sculptors, active from 1926
to 1932. It was founded in 1926 by graduates in painting from
the Higher (State) Artistic and Technical Institute (Vkhutein)
in Leningrad (now St Petersburg); most of them had been
students of Aleksey Karev (1879–1942),
Kuz’ma Petrov-Vodkin
and Aleksandr Savinov (1881–1942). The group’s goal, similar
to that of the SOCIETY OF EASEL PAINTERS and the FOUR ARTS
SOCIETY OF ARTISTS, was to promote the professional role of
painters and sculptors and to play an intermediary role
between conservative artists and those who were avant-garde
extremists. Seeking a modern art that actively drew on the
painterly achievements of the past and yet was an expression
of contemporary life, the group declared its rejection of
literary content and ‘agitprop’ intention. Instead, it
concentrated on easel painting and sculpture in the round
while at the same time encouraging formal experimentation.
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Gruppo 7
Italian group of architects. It was formed in 1926 by seven
students from the Scuola Superiore di Architettura del
Politecnico, Milan: GIUSEPPE TERRAGNI, Guido Frette, Ubaldo
Castagnoli, Sebastiano Larco, Carlo Enrico Rava, Luigi Figini
and Gino Pollini . Castagnoli
was replaced in 1927 by Adalberto Libera.
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Scuola Romana
[Ecole de Rome; Roman school].
A loosely associated group
of artists active in Rome between 1927 and 1940. It originated
in 1927 with the painters Mario Mafai, Antonietta Raphael,
Gino Bonichi Scipione and the sculptor Marino Mazzacurati
(1907–69). They met as students at the Accademia delle Belle
Arti in Rome and gathered at Mafai’s studio in Via Cavour. In
1929 the art critic Roberto Longhi first termed them the
‘Scuola di Via Cavour’ in his review of the Prima Mostra del
Sindicato Laziale Fascista. The painter Fausto Pirandello was
also associated with the group. Apart from Scipione, who
painted fantasy subjects tinged with surrealism, members of
the group painted in a lyrical, expressionist manner inspired
to a large extent by the Ecole de Paris. By the early 1930s
their intimate still-lifes, nudes and interiors provided an
alternative to the monumental classicism of the Novecento
Italiano group and prepared the ground for the artistic
rebellion of the Milanese Corrente.
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Mario Mafai
(1902-1965)
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Fantasia o Corteo
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Studente innamorato
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Antonietta Raphael
Mafai
(1895-1975)
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Self-Portrait
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Sognatrice
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Le tre sorelle
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Marino Mazzacurati
(1907–1969)
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Obeso con bambino in braccio
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La madre
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Man
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Szentendre colony
Hungarian artists’ colony
founded in 1928 in Szentendre on
the Danube Bend near Budapest. Its founder-members had all
been pupils of István Réti, a member of the Nagybánya colony
and, though designed as a centre for the creation of a
national art, it soon incorporated an eclectic variety of
styles, from Neo-classicism to Surrealism. Its more
interesting developments came from the influence of such
international movements as Constructivism and
Surrealism,
although in both cases these received a peculiarly Hungarian
interpretation. Jeno Barcsay joined soon after the foundation
of the colony and later arrivals included Antal Deli
(1886–1960), Miklós Gollner (b 1902), Pal Milhaltz (b
1899), Janos Kmetty and Vilmos Pelrott-Csara (1880–1955). In
addition to the artists in the colony itself, there was an
equally significant number who worked in the town either
permanently or in the summer, such as Béla Czóbel, Lajos Vajda
and Imre Amos.
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Der Block
German association of architects formed in Saaleck early in
1928, in reaction to the avant-garde group Der Ring and to the
emerging Modern Movement in general. The most prominent
members were Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Paul Schmitthenner,
German Bestelmeyer and Paul Bonatz. Bonatz and Schmitthenner
were both supposed to take part in the exhibition of the
Deutscher Werkbund in Stuttgart in 1927, and even prepared a
layout plan for the Weissenhofsiedlung, the showpiece of the
exhibition. Their design was, however, rejected in favour of
the modernist design by Mies van der Rohe. Schultze-Naumburg
from the early years of the century had propagated a return to
organic and traditional forms of architecture, for example in
his series of books Kulturarbeiten (1902–17). He was
the leading theorist of the Heimatschutz movement, which
advocated the preservation and continuation of German
traditions and values. Bestelmeyer, Schmitthenner and Bonatz
were among the most prominent architects of southern Germany,
all holding influential teaching posts in Munich and
Stuttgart. Der Block wanted to retain traditional skills and
lifestyles and rejected functional, modern architecture with
its emphasis on internationalism. Their ‘Manifesto’ appeared
in Baukunst 4 (v (1928; its polemic, enriched with an emphasis on ‘German-ness’,
was eventually to evolve into the fierce opposition and
persecution by the Third Reich of the ‘cultural bolshevism’ of
the architecture and architects of the Modern Movement. As a
group, however, Der Block was shortlived, active only into
1929.
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CIAM [Congrčs
Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne].
International organization of modern architects founded in
June 1928 at the château of La Sarraz, Switzerland. It was
instigated by Hélčne de Mandrot (who had offered her château
as a venue for a meeting of architects interested in
discussing developments in modern architecture), Le Corbusier
and Sigfried Giedion. Its foundation was stimulated by the
campaign in defence of Le Corbusier’s unexecuted competition
entry (1927) for the League of Nations Building, Geneva, as
well as the success of the Weissenhofsiedlung (1927) in
Stuttgart—a permanent, model exhibition of social housing in
which several noted European Modernists had participated (for
further discussion and illustration see DEUTSCHER
WERKBUND). The creation of CIAM established the MODERN
MOVEMENT in architecture as an organized body, with a
manifesto, statutes, a committee and an
address in Zurich: that of Giedion, who became its first
secretary-general. Karl Moser was its first president,
followed by Cornelis van Eesteren (1930–47) and Josep Lluís
Sert (1947–56).
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CIRPAC [Comité
International pour la Résolution des Problčmes de
l’Architecture Contemporaine].
Elected executive organ of CIAM (Congrčs Internationaux
d’Architecture Moderne), which was founded in 1928 at La
Sarraz, Switzerland, on the initiative and leadership of Le
Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion to coordinate the international
forces of modern architecture. CIRPAC was formally constituted
as the executive organ by statutes adopted at CIAM II (1929),
held in Frankfurt am Main. The congress of CIAM members
elected their delegates and their deputies by a two-thirds
majority; these delegates then became members of CIRPAC. The
election was held with a view to providing representation for
each national CIAM group on the executive board. The President
and Deputy President of CIAM (and concurrently of CIRPAC) were
also elected by the congress with a two-thirds majority. The
President could select a Secretary. The mandate was carried
over from one congress to another, and the officers could be
re-elected. CIRPAC was involved in the organization of
congresses; its President determined the time and place of the
next convention, and it operated an office during congresses
and executed the resolutions passed at them. Every national
group could delegate a further member with an advisory status
only to meetings of CIRPAC, and more members could be drafted
into work in progress on the suggestion of the President. In
practice it fell to the members of CIRPAC to organize and
administer the CIAM group of their country while keeping in
contact with the leaders of CIAM. It was the task of CIRPAC
members to publicize the aims of CIAM in their own countries
by organizing exhibitions and drawing on the press; they were
also required to recruit new supporters, to carry through the
resolutions passed by previous congresses and to prepare
subsequent ones. CIRPAC organized ten congresses between 1929
and 1959, when CIAM was formally disbanded.
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Halmstad group
[Swed. Halmstadgruppen]
Swedish group of six painters active from 1929. It
disbanded only with the death of the various members. The
artists were the brothers
Axel Olson (1899–1986) and
Erik Olson (1901–86), their cousin (Anders)
Waldemar
Lorentzon (1899–1984),
Sven Jonson
(1902–83),
Stellan Morner (1896–1979) and
Theodor Esaias Thorén
(1901–81). All had connections with Halmstad, a town on the
west coast of Sweden. In 1919 Egon Östlund, a mechanical
engineer working in Halmstad, established contact with the
Olsons and Lorentzon. Through Östlund, they became familiar
with the work of Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, and over the years
Östlund supported the Halmstad group. Adrian-Nilsson’s
paintings were important early mutual influences for the
group, as were Cubism and Neo-plasticism. In the early 1930s
the group began to paint in a Surrealist style, as in, for
example, Erik Olson’s the Day through the Night (1935;
Stockholm, Mod. Mus.); they were influenced by such artists as
Salvador Dalí and
Yves Tanguy. Gradually the painters
developed in different directions, but the group remained
active, exhibiting together. They were the most significant
exponents of Surrealism in Sweden and took part in various
Surrealist exhibitions in Europe in the 1930s. Axel Olson
became very involved in local art life, while Erik Olson had
close contacts with Danish Surrealists and participated in the
resistance to the German occupation of Denmark during World
War II. In 1950 he converted to Catholicism and had
connections with the art sacré movement in France. He
also painted many religious works. In 1963 he was awarded the
Order of Gregory the Great by Pope John XXIII (reg
1958–63). Lorentzon joined the Oxford Movement in 1938 and
from that time executed mainly religious decorations. Mörner
was very versatile, designing sets for various theatres,
mostly in Stockholm and Göteborg. He wrote articles on art and
several books, including his autobiography Spegel mot mitt
liv (‘Mirror to my life’; Stockholm, 1969) and Det
varma kvällsljuset (‘The warm evening light’; Stockholm,
1976).
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Artes
Group of Polish avant-garde artists active in Lwów (now
Lviv, Ukraine) between 1929 and 1935, from 1933 known as ‘Neoartes’.
Among its members were painters who studied in Lwów, Kraków
and Paris: Otto Hahn (1904–42), Jerzy Janisch (1901–62),
Henryk Streng (who after 1939 used the pseudonym Marek
Wlodarski), Margit Sielski (b 1903), Roman Sielski (b
1903), Mieczyslaw Wysocki (1899–1930), the self-taught painter
Ludwik Lille (1897–1957) and the architect Aleksander
Krzywoblocki (1901–79). Between 1930 and 1932 they held 11
exhibitions in Lwów, Warsaw and other cities. They searched
for new, modern art, but they never defined it or formed any
programme. Their art was heterogenous and covered various
disciplines: painting, drawing, graphic art, collage and
photomontage. Some of them were students of
Léger and followed
his style, but most of them moved towards Surrealism, for
example Wysocki in his Fantasy of a Fight (1930) and
Hahn in his lithograph Composition with Leaves (1930;
both Wroclaw, N. Mus.). They explored subjects popular among
Surrealists, such as the journey, sea and dreams, as in Roman Sielski’s Seascape (1931; Warsaw, N. Mus.). But they
also made use of everyday subjects and depicted simple
objects. Finally they broke with the timelessness and
unreality of Surrealist visions and called for involvement in
socio-political art. In 1933 Streng organized an opinion poll
on new realism in art, and in 1936 he published in the monthly
magazine Sygnaly an article entitled ‘Fighting for Live
Art’. The move to realism was characteristic of the majority
of Artes members. After the break-up of the group only Jerzy
Janisch remained faithful to Surrealism; the others, for
example Roman Sielski and Tadeusz Wojciechowski (1902–82),
turned to Polish Colourism or, in the case of Streng, to
abstraction.
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Jerzy Janisch
(1901–1962)

Mona Liza w sleepingu
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Aeropittura
Italian movement that emerged in the late 1920s from the second
wave of
Futurism,
which it eventually supplanted. It was announced by the publication on
22 September 1929 of the Manifesto dell’Aeropittura, signed by
Giacomo Balla, Benedetta (Marinetti’s wife, the painter and writer
Benedetta Cappa, 1897–1977), Fortunato Depero, Gerardo Dottori, Fillia,
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Enrico Prampolini, the painter and sculptor
Mino Somenzi (1899–1948) and the painter Tato (pseud. of Guglielmo
Sansoni, 1896–1974). This text became the key document for the new
adherents of Futurism in the 1930s. Although Marinetti had written the
first Futurist manifestos, and
Balla, Depero and Prampolini were
senior figures within the movement, it was Dottori and younger
painters who developed the new form most impressively. Building on
earlier concerns with the speeding automobile, both Marinetti and the
Fascist government gave particular importance to aeronautics in the
1920s, extolling the pilot as a type of Nietzschean ‘Superman’.
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Fortunato Depero
(1892 - 1960)
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I bevitori
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Coppa del deserto
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Robot. Composición mecánica, 1920
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Cercle et Carre
Movement founded in Paris in late 1929 during a meeting
between the writer Michel Seuphor (born 1901) and the
Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García, which became public
in 1930. Though having no official manifesto, it is best
characterized as broadly
Constructivist
in outlook. It comprised mainly abstract artists from
Constructivism,
Futurism,
Purism,
Neo-plasticism,
Dada and
Bauhaus, whose
common motivation was to create an artistic opposition to the
dominant Surrealists. The movement comprised both a
periodical, which ran for three issues in 1930, and a single
exhibition held at Galerie 23, Rue la Boetie, Paris, from 18
to 30 April 1930. There were 130 exhibits, covering painting,
sculpture, architecture and stage design, by 46 artists,
including
Hans Arp,
Vasily Kandinsky,
Le Corbusier,
Fernand
Léger,
Piet Mondrian,
Amédée Ozenfant,
Antoine Pevsner,
Luigi Russolo and Georges Vantongerloo. Notably,
Theo van Doesburg
refused to join, instead forming a rival group, Art concret.
The exhibition closed with a lecture by Seuphor on ‘Art
poétique’, with musical accompaniment from
Russolo, but it was
a commercial and critical failure.
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Union des Artistes Modernes
[U.A.M.].
French group of architects and designers founded in Paris
in 1929 and active until 1958. Its founder-members included
Charlotte Perriand, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Francis Jourdain,
René Herbst (1891–1982) and Jean Puiforcat. During the group’s
existence membership varied widely. The activities of the
U.A.M. may be divided into two periods. Between 1929 and 1939
the group represented a centre of activity for a broad range
of tendencies within the French avant-garde, from advanced
technology to fine craftsmanship. Although spokespersons for
the group at times claimed to be creating a ‘movement’, in
reality the U.A.M. was not doctrinaire; it was essentially
devoted to the idea of the unity of the arts common to the
ideology of applied arts reform from the mid-19th century. Le
Corbusier was a member of the U.A.M., and his Pavillon de
L’Esprit Nouveau for the Exposition Internationale des Arts
Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (Paris, 1925), intended as
a mass-produced dwelling, was in keeping with the U.A.M.’s aim
to design prototypes for mass production.
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Vopra
[Vsesoyuznoye
Ob’yedineniye Assotsiatsii Proletarskikh Arkhitektorov; Rus.:
All-Union Alliance of Associations of Proletarian Architects].
Russian architectural group, active from 1929 to 1932. It
was one of several ‘proletarian’ cultural organizations that
came into being in every branch of art in the late 1920s and
served to criticize Constructivism and the avant-garde from
the viewpoint of proletarian class ideology. Organizations
particularly attacked by Vopra were OSA (Association of
contemporary architects) for its Constructivism, ASNOVA
(Association of new architects) for its rationalist formalism,
and MAO (Moscow architectural society) for its eclecticism and
stylizations. Vopra’s chairman was the art historian Ivan
Matsa (1893–1974), while other prominent members included the
architects Karo Alabyan (1897–1959), Vasily Simbirtsev, Arkady
Mordvinov (1896–1964), Aleksandr Vlasov, Gevork Kochar
(1901–73), Abram Zaslavsky (1899–1962) and Viktor Baburov
(1903–77), many of whom were recent graduates from Vkhutein
(Higher (state) artistic technical institute), Moscow. In its Declaration published in
Stroitel’stvo Moskvy in 1929, Vopra denounced the
Constructivists for their ‘mechanical approach’ and proclaimed
that ‘the new proletarian architecture must develop its theory
and practice on the basis of an application of the method of
dialectical materialism’, which was to be combined with
critical use of historical experience and the latest
technological achievements. Disseminating its ideas through
the unofficial organ Sovetskaya arkhitektura (‘Soviet
architecture’), it also sought to consolidate young Communist
Party members who were architects on the grounds of
Marxist–Leninist theory and the ‘Party general line’. By 1930
Vopra had 49 members in its Moscow section and had also
organized branches in the Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Leningrad
(now St Petersburg) and Tomsk. Teams of architects from the
organization took part in many open competitions in 1930 and
1931, for example that for the Palace of Soviets, Moscow.
Although its members were able to realize very little during
the Vopra period, not least because this was abruptly
curtailed in 1932 with the dissolution of the group and the
foundation of the all-embracing Union of Soviet Architects,
many went on to assume dominant positions in the latter and as
a result became successful Soviet architects.
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