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Art of the 20th Century
A Revolution in the Arts
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Art Styles
in 20th century Art Map
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The Great Avant-garde Movements
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*
see also:
Surrealism - 1924
Max Ernst
"A Week of Kindness"
(A surrealistic novel in
collage)
EXPLORATION:
Rene Magritte
"Thought rendered visible"
EXPLORATION:
Salvador Dali
EXPLORATION:
Surrealism "The Dream of Revolution"
*
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
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The post-war period
Enrico Donati
Jacques Herold
Clovis Trouille
Leonor Fini
Felix Labisse
Isamu Noguchi
Emile Malespine
Maria
Martins
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The 'Exposition Internationale du
Surrealisme' which was held at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in July 1947,
under the direction of
Andre Breton and
Marcel Duchamp, was a 'spiritual
parade', planned to the last detail to establish the directions that
members of the group were to follow on the threshold of the post-war
period, and to take stock of everything that surrealism had acquired since
its beginnings. The exhibition brought out into the open a need which
until then had remained unvoiced : the need to create a collective myth.
The layout of the exhibition was
conceived as a series of ritual tests, reduced to a minimum, through which
the visitor had to pass beiore he could look at the works on show.
Progress from one room to another was intended to help in the gradual
transformation of the neophyte into an initiate. So the visitor gained
access to the upper rooms by climbing a red staircase made up or
twenty-one steps in the form of spines of books, whose titles - the
Sermons of Master
Eckhardt, Frazer's The Golden Bough,
Rousseau's Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire, Swedenborg's
Memorabilia etc. - indicated the degrees of ideal Knowledge. This
staircase was swept from above by the light of a small revolving
lighthouse, and above it, Calder's mobiles trembled from the ceiling. Next
the visitor passed into the Hall of Superstitions, designed by
Frederick
Kiesler. This hall was a synthesis of major superstitions, which the
spectator was forced to overcome before continuing his visit. Yellow and
blue light created a disturbed and disturbing atmosphere, and around the
black Lake painted on the floor by
Max Ernst were ranged shapes
which represented the atavistic fears of mankind. The walls were hung with
dark drapes, through openings in which the visitor could catch mysterious
glimpses or the paintings. Some of the sculptures in this sanctuary had
been made to
Kiesler's designs - for instance David Hare's Anguish-Alan
and the Totem of Religions, made by Etienne-Martin. (Incidentally, the
considerable influence of
Kiesler's Dwellings on Etienne-Martin has
not been fully recognized.)
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The visitor came next to a hall divided
into two parts by 'curtains of rain' which poured down on to a floor of
duckboards. This room housed magnificent paintings by all the masters of
the movement. The only way out of the room was by going round a billiard
table, which should have been in constant use — an idea which could not be
maintained. Then came the initiatory labyrinth, where visitors were guided
by a transparent Ariadne's thread. Here, twelve octagonal recesses, like
the cells of a honeycomb, were set out as altars, dedicated, alter the
pattern of pagan cults, to beings or to objects capable of being endowed
with a mythical life. So they were consecrated to
animals (The
Condylura, or Star-nosed mole, or The Secretary-Bird), to
phantom objects (The Wolftable, by
Victor Brauner, which he used
in several of his paintings, the Window of Magna sed Apta, which
had been described by George du Maurier in his book
Peter Ibbetson), and to fictional characters (Jeanne Sabrenas, the heroine of La Dragonne by Alfred Jarry, or Leonie
Aubois d'Ashby from Rimbaud's poem Devotion). An electric bell rang
continuously.
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Surprise followed
surprise - the visitor passed from canvases to sculpture, from masks to
'objects' of every kind, and the whole was surrounded by a luxuriance of feathers, glass, mirrors,
light and shadow. Works by newcomers to the movement, including Gerome Kamrowski, Braulio Arenas, Maurice Baskine, E.F. Granell, Seigle, Isabelle
Waldberg and Isamu Noguchi, were scattered everywhere. The fact that
surrealism had not rejected
Dada was shown by the presence, among the exhibitors, of the former
leader of the Lyons dadaists, Emile Malespine, who showed 'kissograms' or
mouth prints. The last room was crammed with documents, photographs,
pamphlets, first editions, and still more objects. Eighty-seven artists
from twenty-four different countries took part in this major exhibition,
quite apart from the writers who contributed to the catalogue.
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Isamu Noguchi
Red
Cube
1968
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Isamu Noguchi
(1904-1988)
American sculptor and designer.
He was the son of an American writer mother and Japanese poet father
and was brought up in Japan (1906–18) before being sent to the USA to
attend high school in Indiana (1918–22). In 1922 he moved to
Connecticut, where he was apprenticed to the sculptor Gutzon Borglum (1867–1941). Discouraged by Borglum, Noguchi
moved to New York and enrolled to study medicine at Columbia University
(1923–5). From 1924 he attended evening classes at the Leonardo da Vinci
Art School; encouraged by the school’s director, he decided to become a
sculptor. In addition he frequented avant-garde galleries, including
Alfred Stieglitz’s An American Place and the New Art Circle of J. B.
Neumann; he was particularly impressed by the Brancusi exhibition at the
Brummer Gallery (1926).
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Isamu Noguchi
Kouros
1944
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Isamu Noguchi
Heimar
1968, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
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Isamu Noguchi
Cronos
1947
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Isamu Noguchi
Red Untitled
1966
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Emile Malespine
(French, 1892-1952)
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Emile Malespine
Composition abstraite
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Emile Malespine
Untitled
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Preparations for the exhibition took
place in an atmosphere of intense intellectual excitement, and impassioned
discussion went into the smallest details. I recall an entire evening
being spent in deciding what should go into the show-window in the Avenue
de Messine; everyone put forward ideas for a symbolic display. The choice
finally fell on a sculpture by
Victor Brauner, Conglomeros, three
bodies with one head, which never lost its power to shock passers-by.
It was at this time that Antonin Artaud,
who had been discharged from the Rodez asylum, spoke out with a prophet's
voice, producing drawings which were like cries in which he expressed the
human face, and Rene Char, Julien Gracq, Jacques Prevert and Aime Cesaire
produced coruscating examples of the purest surrealist language.
In 1947, to cope with the
world-wide interest in surrealism,
Andre Breton founded Cause, an
action bureau which had the job of coordinating manifestations of interest
in surrealism from every country. Cause was charged with the
publication of two pamphlets, Rupture Inaugurate (1947) and
A la Niche (1948), which
defined the distance which separated surrealism from politics and
religion. The surrealist group, which met each week at the Cafe de la
Place Blanche, was swamped by such a flood of visitors that, in an attempt
to eliminate the merely curious, Breton instituted a questionnaire which
was submitted to every poet or painter who wanted to join the movement.
This questionnaire, which was drawn up in a collective session, consisted
of eight questions, including : 'What exactly, at the present time, do you
expect of surrealism ?' and 'What confidence do you put in rational means
of knowledge?'
The review Neon, which set out to
be a kind of poetic newspaper, was founded in 1948. Responsible for its
layout was the Czechoslovak poet Jindrich Heisler, who had some most
delightful inspirations. Finally, in autumn 1948, another exhibition,
'Solution surrealiste', at the Galerie du Dragon, offered itself as a
meeting-place for young artists who were moving towards surrealism, and
provided a register for them to enter their claims. So
everything was ready for surrealism to become an effective organ of action
which would absorb by synthesis the ideas which were in the air at the
time.
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Maria Martins |
A series of exhibitions in Paris from
1947 to 1950 confirmed the reappearance of surrealist artists such as
Yves Tanguy,
Victor Brauner,
Francis Picabia and
Toyen.
Maria's exhibition in
1948, at the Galerie Drouin, gave
Breton an opportunity of further
formulating his thought. Maria (her full name was Maria Martins) was the wife
of a diplomat. During a stay in Japan she had made ceramics in the
local tradition, but in 1939 she decided to turn to sculpture, and the
spirit of her native Brazil became apparent in her work. The curves and
entanglements of her bronzes are derived from the vegetation of the Amazon
forests, and evoke 'the quest for a liberation which must, above all,
never be obtained'.
Breton saw in Maria an example
of the message which
the tropics have for the Occident, and said 'What is important is that
Maria's development has led her from the macrocosm to the microcosm, and
has not made her follow the road in the opposite direction, where its path
is strewn with ambushes and decoys. It can never
be said often enough that it is the universe which must be questioned
about man, and not man who should be questioned about the universe.'
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Maria Martins
1949 |
Maria Martins
(1894-1973)
The Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins better known professionally as
simply 'Maria,' as she insisted upon being referred to in all matters
pertaining to her artistic life is one of the most important sculptors
of the Surrealist period, singled out by André Breton in 1948 as the
`shining star' of post-war art.
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Maria Martins
Don't Forget I Come From the Tropics
1942 |

Maria Martins
The
Impossible
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Maria Martins
Untitled
1953
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Maria Martins
O Implacavel
1947
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Maria Martins
A soma de nossos dias
1955
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Maria Martins
O rito
dos ritmos
1954
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There were some painters who were caught
up with surrealism, but who soon sheered off in an opposite direction.
This happened to
Jean-Paul Riopelle, a Canadian painter whose work
Breton
and other members of the group found very attractive, although he did not
share their worship of the image.
Riopelle was born in Montreal, and had
been a disciple of Paul-Emile Borduas, the founder in 1944 of a Canadian
group called the 'automatists', who derived their inspiration from
surrealism. When he arrived in Paris,
Riopelle shared a show called 'Automatisme'
with the Canadian painter Leduc, and he took part in the surrealist
exhibition at the Galerie Maeght. In pictorial automatism
Riopelle was
seeking freedom and breadth of gesture; his robust nature gave a special
sensibility to his interlacing of colours. When he held his first major
exhibition at the Galerie du Dragon in March 1949, Elisa,
Andre Breton and
Benjamin Peret contributed a portrait in dialogue to the catalogue. 'For
me, his is the art of a superior trapper', said Breton, to which Peret
added : 'Everything in the work of
Riopelle is lit by the sun of the great
forests, where the leaves fall like a biscuit of snow soaked in sherry.'
When Riopelle abandoned surrealism for lyrical abstraction in 1950, he was
one of the most regretted of all the defectors.
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Another was
Enrico Donati, an Italian
painter who had come to Paris in 1934, and left for New York in 1940.
Helped by his friendship with
Marcel Duchamp, he stood out among the
surrealists in exile in America;
Donati was an exponent of a fluid form of
painting, with colour glazes diluted on automatist principles, which
vaguely evoked rockets or shadows in a night sky (The Cabal, 1944,
Gore et Mandro, 1946). This seductive art, which was however rather
slight, demanded some form of evolution.
Donati turned towards the
abstract in 1950, dividing each painting into stripes of granitic or
coal-like matter.
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Enrico Donati
Chantecler
1946
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In September 1948,
Andre Breton took
part in the foundation of the Compagnie de L'Art Brut, which initially
held its meetings in the basement of the Galerie Drouin in the Place
Vendome.
Jean Dubuffet
had been the first, in 1945, to start collecting
'works by people unscathed by artistic culture'. In October 1949,
Dubuffet
organized a big exhibition at the Galerie Drouin, as a preface to which he wrote a pamphlet on
l'art brut (art in the raw or crude state) and its superiority to 'cultural
art' : L' Art brut prefere aux arts culturels. The style of this
pamphlet recalls Tzara's eulogy of idiocy. 'The wise men would have to
commit the great harakiri of the intelligence, launch themselves on the
great leap into superlucid imbecility ; that's the only way their millions
of eyes would ever start to grow.'
Breton encouraged this action, and took
an interest in the brut painters like Miguel Hernandez and Aloise,
and in the Scots-Canadian naif,
Scottie Wilson, whose
meticulous and disturbing Hand-made pen drawings are made up
largely of minute parallel hatchings within firm outlines.
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Breton was fascinated most of all by
Joseph Crepin, a plumber who had run a musical society, and who had
subsequently discovered that he had the gift of healing. He treated his
patients by sending them cut-out paper hearts which they had to lay on
their chests. At the beginning of the war
Crepin began to
paint a long sequence of pictures, all of exactly the same size, because
he had heard a voice which had told him : 'The war will end on the day
when you have painted three hundred pictures.' He took a great delight in
saying that he finished the three-hundredth on 7 May 1945. The same voice
instructed him again in 1947 : 'You will paint forty-five marvellous
pictures, and then the world will be at peace.' When
Crepin died in 1948,
he was working on the forty-second. His paintings consist of an infinite
number of what he called 'points', which look like studs of colour.
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The beginning of the post-war period saw
the blooming of the great masters or surrealism, who became
international masters of modern art and whose influence can be seen in the
new tendencies which formed at that time. Some of them isolated
themselves, others stayed in close relationship with the movement, but all
of them, even those who seemed to have broken away, moved towards the
climax of an evolution which had begun or matured within the group.
After
Miro
had produced his
Constellations, in 1940-1, he went on in 1945 to large canvases with
white or black backgrounds, which were followed in 1949 by a double
alternating series of 'slow' and 'spontaneous' paintings, and then by
extremely poetic pictures, whose light gracefulness is carried over into
their titles : The Jasmines
embalm the
dress of the young girl with their golden perfume (1952), and
Rhythm of the passage of the serpent attracted by the breath of the
unloosed tresses of the setting sun (1953). In 1954 he stopped
painting in order to make a series of ceramics in association with the
potter Artigas; then in 1956 he left his Barcelona studio and moved to a
house in Palma de Mallorca, where he picked up the thread of his
inspiration, working, as he said, 'like a gardener'.
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Those who kept in faithful contact with
Breton often did so trom a distance. At his home in Connecticut,
Yves Tanguy, starting from pictures like The Rapidity of Sleep (1945,
Art Institute of Chicago), set off en route for those vertiginous
enumerations of stones which ended with The Multiplication of Arcs
(1954, New York, Museum of Modern Art), and which seem to describe the
depths of the abyss.
Hans Bellmer did not lose sight of his Doll
theme, but now he carved and polished the image of woman like a rough
diamond, as if he were trying to make the strangest jewel in the world.
Wolfgang Paalen, in an attempt to found a 'plastic cosmogony', did a
series of paintings on the theme of 'Ancestors to Come', and expressed the
forces of nature and mankind without using symbolism or figuration.
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Hans Bellmer
Tete de femme sur une
tour
1940
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Rene
Magritte pursued his mental adventure, image by image, using the methods
which he had perfected to discover the 'never before seen' - the jamais
vu - in the banal and commonplace.
Max Ernst, who moved with
Dorothea Tanning in 1955
to Huismes in Touraine, abandoned anti-painting in favour of painting. His
etchings and his sculptures completed his statement of a universe 'in the
interior of the view'.
Wifredo Lam, who had a studio in Milan and another
in Paris, was constantly on his travels, using his vocabulary of forms to
evoke immemorial nostalgia.
Andre Masson and
Giacometti
forged links
with the existentialist writers, but their work did not acquire new
meaning as a result. From 1947
Masson lived near Aix-en-Provence, and drew
his inspiration from the surrounding countryside. He did many etchings and
lithographs which formed sequences such as Veminaire (1956). Then
in 1962 he returned to his former paroxysmic manner with The Drunken
Man, and then a series of India ink drawings.
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When Giacometti returned from Switzerland,
where he had met his wife Annette, he resumed work at his Paris studio in
1945 on nudes and heads, which, as before, became smaller and smaller the
more he worked on them. From 1949 to 1951 he made groups of static or
moving figures. His avidity for perfection led him to seek the impossible
even in certainty and reality.
Victor Brauner, who stood apart from
surrealism from 1948 onwards, moved out of his magic period to the
evocation of an extremely varied personal mythology, with astonishing
heroes, in a style which was predominantly calligraphic. From A Being
retracted... (1948) to The Mother of Myths (1965), he
contrived to enclose a poetic or philosophical story in every painting.
Matta lived in Rome in 1949-55,
and his painting drew nourishment from his political preoccupations. In Think, no more of
fleeing (1953)
and Cover the earth with a new dew (1955), he tried to
achieve 'the marximum of being' without
changing his style at all. His drawings - as in the scries of 1955,
Mattamorphose (interieure et exterieure)
- became
graphic serial stories.
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Wiwredo Lam
Altar for "La chevelure de Falmer"
1947
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Roberto Matta
Altar dedicated to Marcel Duchamp's
"He who takes care of Gravity"
1947
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Salvador Dali's 'mystic period', which
began with The Madonna of Port Lligat (1950) was nothing but a
continuation of his 'revolutionary' period. Both periods derive from the
'paranoiac-critical method'. When in 1951 he published his Manifeste
mystique in Latin and French,
Dali painted a Soft self-portrait
with grilled bacon (1951), which shows the skin of his face hanging on
a branch like an empty envelope. The
Dali
who in the past had said 'Beauty
will be edible or will not exist', and who delivered a lecture in
Barcelona with a loaf fastened on his head, is still there in toto
in the Dali who, in a Sorbonne dissertation in December 1955, drew an
analogy between the rhinoceros and the cauliflower, or
in the
Dal who, in 1956, illustrated Don Quixote by using a
blunderbuss with bullets filled with ink.
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Some painters who had been attached to
the surrealist group for many years made their presence felt only late, in
the post-war period.
Jacques Herold was a Romanian painter who had joined
the movement in 1934, soon after his arrival in Paris, at the urging of
Tanguy, whom he admired. When he failed to make the kind
of contact with
Breton and the group which he had hoped tor,
Herold stayed on the
fringe
of the movement until 1938. At first his canvases showed flayed animals.
In his own words he was moving towards 'a systematic flaying, not only of
characters, but also of objects, landscapes, the atmosphere'. He even wanted 'to tear the
skin from the sky'. Then he became haunted by crystal, and his forms took
on a stratified, vitrified appearance, with facets or cutting edges. 'As
crystallization is a resultant of the coming together of form and matter,
painting should strive towards the crystallization of the object. In
particular the human body is a constellation of fiery points from which
crystals radiate', he wrote. Dante and Beatrice (1939) is one of
the earliest
examples of this style, which later, in The Eagle
Reader (1942), in Whirlwind of signs (1946) and in The Nurse
of the Forests (1947, Paris, private collection), was applied to
poetic subjects. In 1951
Herold broke with surrealism, and conceived the
ideal of 'painting the wind', which led him to effects of dispersion and
luminosity which can be seen in The Initiatrix (1959) and The
Pagan Woman (1964). He illustrated several books, and published a 'Maltreatise
on painting' (Maltraite de peinture), a series of notes and
drawings, in 1957.
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Jacques Herold
Crystal amoureux
1934
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Clovis Trouille
Dialogue at the Carmel
1944
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Clovis Trouille's painting emerged
gradually from the shadows, where he had been peacefully cultivating it,
and became the delight of a group of connoisseurs. In 1930 his painting
Remembrance was exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Revolutionnaires,
and was noted by the surrealists, who henceforth claimed
Trouille as one
of themselves.
Trouille was a Sunday painter - and what Sundays! - who
worked in a Paris factory which made wax dummies for shop windows. His
style was inspired by the Belle Epoque, in which his youth was spent, the
gay 1890s and the Edwardian era. His imagery recalls the films of Melies,
Art
Nouveau
posters, Grand Guignol, picture postcards, and the 'news in brief columns
of Le Petit Journal. Clovis
Trouille wanted to be an 'arbitrary
colourist' and to illuminate scenes of passion to the ultimate degree. 'I
use academic forms and themes for subversive ends. That is what I find
piquant', he has said. He painted 'anti-everything' pictures, to which he
returned year after year to perfect some detail, and which he refused to
sell. His painting My Funeral caused a sensation at the 1947
surrealist exhibition, and he has done two other versions which are just
as
remarkable. In 1942, in The Drunken Ship (le Bateau Ivre), where
he shows convicts fleeing from a ship which has been wrecked, he painted
Cezanne clutching a mast and trying to dodge a sailor's boathook. Since
then, he has gone on producing strange and humorous pictures which are all
evidence of his wit, which remains fresh, vital and sharp, and of his
skill as a painter. In his work the unexpected bursts out like a cymbal
clash.
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Outside the surrealist group, properly
so called, there were several painters who, while not really sharing its
spirit, contributing to its debates or submitting to its disciplines,
appropriated its methods to lead a parallel existence. They
battened on to what was most obvious in surrealism, the way in which it
used fantastic imagery, and sometimes they achieved results which led the
public to believe that they, as much as say
Magritte or
Tanguy, were part
of the pictorial revolution which was carried out at the instigation and
under the control of Andre Breton.
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The most notable of the figures on the
fringe of surrealism is
Leonor Fini. She was born in Buenos Aires
in 1908, spent her childhood and youth in Trieste, and finally settled in
Paris. In 1936 she took part in the London 'International Surrealist
Exhibition', and in 1937 the catalogue of her one-man show at the Julian
Levy Gallery in New York included a preface by
Chirico. Initially she drew her inspiration from Italian
mannerism, with the addition of a modernist accent derived from the
influence of
Max Ernst. She placed a showy style at the service of an
inspiration whose favourite subjects were sphinxes, vampires, witches and
ghouls with strange accessories, masks and seashells : The Shepherdess
of Sphinxes (1941, Venice, Peggy Guggenheim collection); Sphinx
Regina (1946); The end of the world (1949)- Her painting, which
is inclined to show Woman reigning over a world of artifice and guile,
employs curious effects which can be found in her other work, such as her
illustrations for Juliette by de Sade (1944), and her sets and
costumes for the play, Le Mai court by Audiberti (1956). Her
evolution finally brought her to produce female apparitions treated in the
style of Viennese
Art
Nouveau
(Jugendstil), which are similar to
Gustav Klimt's figures, and which are certainly her best paintings :
The Secret Festival (1964),
The Window pane
from the other side (1965).
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Leonor Fini
Photographed by Pierre Argillet
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Leonor Fini
Photographed by Pierre Argillet
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Felix Labisse, who was born at Douai in
1905, is another of these painters who while fluttering around surrealism,
and superficially coming under its influence, remain
'painters of the image' whereas genuine surrealists wished to be 'painters
of the unimaginable'. In 1923 Labisse went to live in Belgium, first at
Heyst-sur-Mer and then at Ostend, where he became a pupil of
James Ensor.
Later he moved to Paris, and began to work as a theatrical designer. He
designed Jean-Louis Barrault's first production at the Atelier in 1934,
Аutour d'une mere, after Faulkner. He was a friend of Robert Desnos,
who encouraged him from the start. Desnos wrote : 'His paintings already
stand out for their sense of theatre, their lyrical inspiration, and, if I
dare use the term in speaking of easel pictures, for their feeling of the
open air'.
His painting speculates on the theme of
metamorphosis, and he plays on the contrast which derives from placing an
animal's head on the body of a woman. In this idiom he showed a woman with
the head of a praying mantis - Snatched Portrait (1942) - or with
the head of a lioness : The Happiness of being loved (1943). In a
collection of drawings with an explanatory text, Histoire naturelle (1948),
Labisse described a series of hybrid animals he had invented : The
Rose-Tears, the Wyvern-Guenegote, the Adrouide, the Arthus of the Sands,
and many others, including the Fluviot, a fish in the shape of a human
face. He has always remained faithful to this kind of effect, with some
variants. His figures later became tree-trunks in human form, as in The
Inconstancy of Jason (1955); or his women were concealed behind a
veil, as in The Mourning of Salome (1961). When he eliminated
figures from his paintings he moved on to the evocation of 'libidoscaphes',
which are a kind of meteor fallen in a desert space : an
example is
Libidoscaphes in a watchful state (1962).
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Felix Labisse
Histoire Naturelle
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Felix Labisse
Décor pour la salle a manger du Paquebot
Laos
1953
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Around 1950, surrealism had to take up a
definite position on abstract painting. Until this time, the requirements
of abstract art had been so fundamentally different from those of
surrealist art that the surrealists had not even felt any need to define
their position relative to abstractionism; this did not prevent Breton
from admiring
Kandinsky, or from claiming that
Mondrian's
Boogie-woogies were surrealist paintings. But after the war,
geometrical abstraction gave place to lyrical abstraction : the painting
of artists like
Wols and
Mark Tobey, which implied some inner drama or
cosmic preoccupations, escaped from the aestheticism which the surrealists
so detested. Action painting, which was derived from American Abstract
Expressionism, involved the use of pictorial
automatism, and so the surrealists were obliged to examine this automatism
to see whether or not it could correspond to their views.
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Wols
(Abstract
Expressionist Painter,1913-1951)
L'homme
terrifie
1940
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Wols
Untitled
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Wols
Untitled
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Wols
Untitled
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Wols
Untitled |

Wols
Le Pavilion de L'Elegance |
(Mannequins row 136)
1937 |

Wols
Madeleine Vionnet
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Mark Tobey
(American Abstract Expressionist Painter, 1890-1976)

Titré au dos "landscape"
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Jean Degottex
(French,
1918-1988)
Culture
is dead
1968
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Their reaction at first was unfavourable.
Benjamin Peret, writing
in L'Almanach surrealiste du demi-siecle (1950), expressed it in categorical arguments. In his view, abstract art
was an abdication of the mind, and he claimed that it was 'an ersatz
for plastic science', but not an art. 'In reality, no abstract art can
exist, as art tends to represent figuratively either the artist's inner
world, or the exterior world, or an interdependence between the two.'
But the critic Charles Estienne, who
hovered on the fringes of surrealism, encouraged the development of free
abstraction as opposed to geometrical abstraction, which was still
dominant. He pushed some young painters, who had been complaining that
they had been badly hung in the Salon de Mai in 1952, to found as a
protest the Salon d'Octobre, which brought together some abstract pictures
of the kind which are known under the designation of 'art informel'',
in the context of a tribute to
Marcel Duchamp. Shortly afterwards, in
an article entitled 'Abstraction et Surrealisme', Estienne wrote : 'If we
take into account the death - which to me has obviously occurred - both of
decorative abstraction and of surrealist imagery, I think that in the
acutest abstract art, and in a surrealism which, far from being broadened,
is brought back to its first principles, we hold the two vital keys of
modern art, both of that which has already been created and of that which
is now in the process of being created.'
Andre Breton
gave his assent to this conception. The surrealist gallery, A L'Etoile
Scellee, II Rue du Pre-aux-Clercs, opened in December 1952 with a group
show, which was followed in January 1953 by the first one-man show of
Simon Hantai, whose sixteen large paintings were saluted by
Breton
in the catalogue : 'Once more, as happens perhaps once in every ten years,
we see a great beginning'. Hantai, a Hungarian painter who had been
living in Paris since 1949, was at this time making picture-objects such
as Solidified Dew
(1953) and Collective Narcissus (1953), in which figuration
tended to disappear under a riot of colour. In March 1953 Breton mounted a
show at L'Etoile Scellee of four members of the October group, Jean
Degottex, Duvillier, Matcelle Loubchansky and Messagier.
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Simon Hantai
(1922-1966)
Dossier Pedagogique
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At the end of this year the second and
last Salon d'Octobre, put on at the Galerie Craven with a tribute
to Francis Picabia, showed a possible way of fusing surrealism and
abstraction. To this, Charles Estienne gave the name of 'tachism'. This
was not his own word, but had been invented by Pierre Gueguen, a critic on
the periodical Art d'Aujourd'hui, who had used it in a general
sense. Charles Estienne gave it the meaning which he wanted; and in
an article in Combat, 1 March 1954, he sets out the history of
tachism. 'It is plain that if the tachists make taches [blobs] they
do so in the same way and to the same extent that the fauves
[literally, 'the wild beasts'] were denizens of the 200, or that the
cubists made cubes.... The enemies of October know perfectly well that the
"blobs of October" have little to do with daubs and smears, but everything
to do with a total freedom of expression which starts again from zero
every time.'
This birth certificate of
tachism
provoked all manner of protests from painters and critics who wrote back
to Combat. One of them said : 'Surrealism, vintage 1954, running
out of invention, has discovered a new recipe, the blob,
tachism, for
painters, poets and citizens.' Charles Estienne wound up the debate in his
article 'Dont Acte' ('Duly noted') on 5 April 1954, which showed that he
was only the indirect cause of the uproar. 'It all blew up when
surrealism, by which I mean
Breton, said that he was in agreement - and
all tachism, as everyone certainly knows, goes beyond the principle of
unification of the two tendencies in painting today : lyrical abstraction
and pictorial surrealism, as they are represented in the work of Simon Hantai
and Paalen, for example.'
This attempt to reconcile two movements
which were so radically divergent was bound to end in failure. Hantai, to
whom Breton had looked to bring it about, joined up with
Georges Mathieu,
with whom in 1957 he organized a series of exhibitions, commemorating the
heresy of Siger de Brabant, which the surrealist group had anathematized
in their pamphlet Coup de semonce. The word 'tachism', which no
longer defined any kind of abstract surrealism, became synonymous with
informal abstraction, and
Mathieu himself used it to describe his
painting.
Breton overrode all these distinctions and returned to the line
he had traced long before, proscribing 'the ribbon-work of art, at so much
a metre', and praising the 'work of art as event', the only form which
surrealism had always sought to produce.
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