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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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Max Ernst
At the Rendezvous of Friends
1922
Seated from left to right:
Rene Crevel, Max Ernst, Dostoyevsky, Theodore Fraenkel, Jean Paulhan,
Benjamin Peret, Johannes T. Baargeld, Robert Desnos. Standing: Philippe Soupault, Jean Arp, Max Morise, Raphael, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Andre
Breton, Giorgio de Chirico, Gala Eluard
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CHAPTER FOUR
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Surrealism and painting
Max Ernst
Max Ernst
"A Week of Kindness"
(A surrealistic novel in
collage)
Andre Masson
Joan Miro
Yves Tanguy
Georges Malkine
Jean Arp
Man
Ray
Georges Hugnet
E.L.T. Mesens
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When he published Le Surrealisme et
la peinture in 1928,
Andre Breton's intention was to give a decisive
answer to those who still doubted the existence of surrealist painting, or
who did not fully realize what freedoms it should claim for itself. He
immediately broadened the debate and carried it into the field of mental
adventure. 'I find it impossible to think of a picture save as a window,
and my first concern about a window is to find out what it looks out
on. . . and there is nothing I love so much as something which
stretches away from me out of sight.' In unambiguous language he
urged painters no longer to draw their inspiration from reality, even from
a transfigured reality. 'Because they believed that man is able only to
reproduce a more or less felicitous image of the object which concerns
him, painters have been far too conciliatory in their choice of models.
Their mistake has been to believe either that a model could be derived
only from the exterior world, or that it could be derived from there at
all. ... This is an unforgivable abdication. ... If the plastic arts are
to meet the need for a complete revision of real values, a need on which
all minds today are agreed, they must therefore either seek
a purely interior
model or cease to exist.'
To establish what this 'interior model'
was, Breton defined 'the attitude of some men who have genuinely
rediscovered the reason for painting'. These were
Picasso,
Max Ernst,
Andre Masson,
Miro,
Tanguy,
Arp,
Picabia,
Man Ray : in other words the
first pioneers of the surrealist plastic arts. He casually rejected
Matisse and
Derain, 'old lions, discouraged and discouraging', and
Braque,
'a great refugee', because they attached too much importance to what they
saw. 'To see or to hear is nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) is
everything.... What I love includes what I love to recognize and what I
love not to recognize. I believe that surrealism has raised itself up to
the conception of this most fervent of all relationships, and has abided
by it.'
Max Ernst was the only one of these
painters to have taken a real part in the formation of surrealism.
Shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1922, he painted At the
Rendezvous of Friends (Hamburg, private collection), which showed the
Litterature group after the dissolution of
Dada. Ernst's qualities
of inspired imagination, full of ferocity and humour, had always led him
to take pleasure in cultivating visions of the half-sleeping, half-waking
state. As a child he had seen in the pattern of a mahogany panel in his
bedroom 'a huge bird's head with thick black hair'. When he was a young
man, he sometimes saw, as he fell asleep, a transparent woman standing at
the toot of his bed. She wore a red robe, and her skeleton showed through
like filigree work. These faculties for seeing visions led to his
invention in 1919 of collage, a technique vastly different from the
papiers colle's which had been done by others before him.
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Max Ernst
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born April 2, 1891, Brühl, Ger.
died April 1, 1976, Paris, Fr.
German painter, sculptor, one of the leading advocates of irrationality in
art, and an originator of the Automatism movement of Surrealism. His
youthful interests were psychiatry andphilosophy, but he abandoned his
studies at the University of Bonn for painting.
After serving in the German army during World War I, Ernst was converted
to Dada (q.v.), a nihilistic art movement, and formed a group of Dada
artists in Cologne; with the artist-poet Jean Arp, he edited journals and
created a scandal by staging a Dada exhibit in a public rest room. More
important, however, were his Dada collages and photomontages, such as
“Here Everything Is Still Floating” (1920), a startlingly illogical
composition made from cutout photographs of insects, fish, and anatomical
drawings ingeniously arranged to suggest the multiple identity of the
things depicted.
In 1922 Ernst moved to Paris, where, two years later, he became a founding
member of the Surrealists, a group of artists and writers whose work grew
out of fantasies evoked from the unconscious. To stimulate the flow of
imagery from his unconscious mind, Ernst began in 1925 to use the
techniques of frottage (pencil rubbings of such things as wood grain,
fabric, or leaves) and decalcomania (the technique of transferring paint
from one surface to another by pressing the two surfaces together).
Contemplating the accidental patterns and textures resulting from these
techniques, he allowed free association to suggest images he subsequently
used in a series of drawings (“Histoire naturelle,” 1926) and in many
paintings such as “The Great Forest” (1927) and “The Temptation of St.
Anthony” (1945). These vast, swamplike landscapes stem ultimately from the
tradition of nature mysticism of the German Romantics.
After 1934 Ernst's activities centred increasingly on sculpture, using
improvised techniques in this medium just as he had in painting. “Oedipus
II” (1934), for example, was cast from a stack of precariously balanced
wooden pails to form a belligerent-looking phallic image.
At the outbreak of World War II, Ernst moved to the United States, where
he joined his third wife, the collector and gallery owner Peggy
Guggenheim, and his son, the American painter Jimmy Ernst. While living on
Long Island, N.Y., and after 1946 in Sedona, Ariz. (with his fourth wife,
the Americanpainter Dorothea Tanning), he concentrated on such sculptures
as “The King Playing with the Queen” (1944), which shows African
influence. After his return to France in 1949, his work became less
experimental: he spent much time perfecting his modeling technique in
traditional sculptural materials.
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Max Ernst
Loplop Introduces Members of the Surrealist Group, 1931
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Ernst began by using figures clipped
from illustrated catalogues, and moved on to 'the alchemy of the visual
image', working on a principle which he defined as 'the exploitation of
the chance meeting of two remote realities on a plane unsuitable to them'.
Paintings like Edipus Rex (1921, Paris, Hersaint collection),
The Revolution by Night (1923, London, Roland Penrose collection)
and Men shall know nothing of it (1923, London, Tate Gallery) were
built up in the same way as
his collages. In Two children are threatened by a
nightingale (1924, New York, Museum of Modern Art), his
painting,even included some real objects fastened to the canvas : a bell
push and a little door. It was with some justice that he was able to say :
'If plumes make plumage, it is not glue (colle) that makes
collage.'
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Max Ernst
Two children are threatened by a
nightingale
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Max Ernst
The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: Andre Breton,
Paul Eluard and the artist
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His pictorial work would have been
limited had it not been for his discovery of frottage, which gave him a
means of self-liberation. On 10 August 1925, in a seaside inn, he was
seized by an obsession with the grooves in the graining of the
floorboards. He placed a piece of paper on the boards and rubbed it with
blacklead so as to obtain a tracing. And from this tracing an image arose
whose shape became clear to him. Frottages suggested to him forests,
pampas, hordes of animals, heads. He brought these together in his
collection Histoire Naturelle published in Paris in 1926. From this
time on he regarded frottage as 'the true equivalent of what we already
know as automatic writing . He made
frottages from all sorts of materials as well as from floorboards : the
leaves of trees, the unwound thread from a spool, the ragged edges or a
piece of cloth. He also used this technique in painting, by scraping a
canvas thickly covered in wet paint, or by placing it on a rough surface.
He justified this technique by saying : 'The artist is a spectator,
indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the
phases of its development.' Whatever the justification, what he gained
from the use of this technique in paintings such as The Bride of the
Wind (1926), and Carnal delight complicated by visual
representations (1931), moved him towards the materialization of the
imaginary, which liberated his paintings from the imitation of his
collages. The 'artist as spectator' theme reappears in a purely painterly
variation on the Virgin and Child theme which is one of his most
famous (or notorious) works.
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Max Ernst
Natural History
1923
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One spring day in 1924, Andre Breton
visited the studio of
Andre Masson at 45 Rue Blomet. He had just bought
Masson's picture The Four Elements, and wanted to meet the painter.
Masson has admitted : 'There have been
few men whose first impression on
me has been one which compelled such respect.' After their conversation,
Masson immediately went over to surrealism. He was twenty-eight, and he
was the focal point of a group which included Michel Leiris, Antonin
Artaud, Armand Salacrou and Georges Limbour. As a result of a serious war
wound he had been under observation in psychiatric hospitals, and he was
now in permanent revolt against society. He had a lively and intelligent
mind, which had been nourished on Nietzsche, Heraclitus and the German
romantics. He wanted to create in order to explain the universe, and tried
to put 'a philosophy into a picture'. No one painted with more violence,
more fury even, than
Masson,
for he used every possible method to invoke a state of trance. He used
also what were known as 'support words' : while he worked he would say
aloud words like 'attraction', 'transmutation', 'fall', whirling'. At
other times he sang. It one of his canvases failed
to satisfy him, he flung himself at it
and slashed savagely with a knife. 'One must get some physical idea of
revolution', he told his friends. His disorder and anarchy became
legendary. He earned his living by working at night as a proof-reader on
the Journal Officiel. He filled himself with sleeping drugs and
strong stimulants, which shattered his nerves.
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Andre Masson
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born Jan. 4, 1896, Balagny, Oise,Fr.
died Oct. 28, 1987, Paris
In full André-aimé-rené Masson noted French Surrealist painter and graphic
artist.
Masson studied painting in Brussels and then in Paris. He fought in World
War I and was severely wounded. He joined the emergent Surrealist group in
the mid-1920s after one of his paintings had attracted the attention of
the movement's leader, André Breton. Masson soon became the foremost
practitioner of automatic writing, which, when applied to drawing, was a
form of spontaneous composition intended to express impulses and images
arising directly from the unconscious. Masson's paintings and drawings
from the late 1920s and the '30s are turbulent, suggestive renderings of
scenes of violence, eroticism, and physical metamorphosis. A natural
draftsman, he used sinuous, expressive lines to delineate biomorphic forms
that border on the totally abstract. Masson lived in Spain from 1934 to
1936 and in the United States during World War II. His work was the
subject of major retrospective exhibitions in Basel, Switz, (1950) and New
York City (1976).
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Andre Masson
Battle of Fishes
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Andre Masson
Automatic Drawing
1924 |
From 1925 on, his automatic drawings
showed the power of his outbursts of passion. His paintings, obsessed by
two themes, the sun and the destiny of animals, expressed the tragedy of
natural instincts in the form of myth. When he was painting Horses
devouring the birds, he announced wildly : 'I will make the birds
bleed'. He tried to give this immolation the feeling of an antique
sacrifice. As painting did not allow him enough freedom, in 1927 he began
making pictures with sand. The gesture with which he
scattered the sand over a glue-coated canvas, and added a flashing
brushstroke, amounted to a ritual. He began to introduce materials such as
feathers into his paintings. When he parted company with the surrealists,
from 1929 to 1936, his development did not change for the worse. He went,
on in a similar spirit, intensified by his friendship with the philosopher
Georges Bataille, to his series of Massacres and Abattoirs
(1931), for which he made sketches in the slaughterhouses at La Villette
and Vaugirard. His painting took on a multiplicity of forms - some dealt
with the theme of abduction and pursuit, others evoked a journey he made
on foot to Spain in 1934, yet others described insect revels, or burst out
into scenes of delirium, the best example of which is In the Tower of
Sleep (1938), or surrealistically explored the human figure. All had
the same aim, a fervent desire to give a carnal presence to the sensation
of the Cosmos. But above all,
Masson drew. He drew tirelessly : series
which made up chronicles, such as his Mythologies (1936),
magnificent drawings in which eroticism, cruelty and sacred dedication
reach a scale of epic grandeur. Some of
Masson's paintings may be disappointing; his drawings
never. He is a passionate interpreter of the metamorphoses of Nature, the
paroxysms of Being.
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Andre Masson
The
Tower of Sleep
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Joan Miro had the studio next to
Masson
in the Rue Blomet.
Masson's virulence encouraged
Miro's cautious and
meticulous development.
Miro had said of the cubists : 'I will break their
guitar'. Since his first exhibition in Barcelona in 1918, he had
constantly exerted pressure on reality, in the landscapes, portraits,
nudes and still-lifes of what has been called his detailliste
period. After paintings like The Farm (1921-2) and The Ear of
Corn (1923, New York, Museum of Modern Art), he felt that he had come
to a dead end. Then in the summer of 1923, when he was on one of his
visits to his family at Montroig, he began to paint Ploughed land
(Philadelphia, H. Clifford collection). Suddenly reality yielded place to
the imaginary - the pine tree opened its eyes and cocked an ear, animals
began to look like plants and seashells.
At the time that his style was changing,
he wrote to his friend Ratols : 'I confess that I am often gripped by
panic, the kind of panic that is felt by an explorer travelling through
virgin territory'. He confided to Rafols his desire 'to express precisely
all the golden sparks of our soul'. This tendency is accentuated still
further in Olee
(1924), and particularly in The Carnival
of Harlequin (1924, Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery). This is an
extraordinary fancy-dress ball, where not only human beings, but also
animals and everyday objects, are wearing masks. An entire landscape has
put on a disguise. Then
Miro asked
Masson : 'Should I go to see
Picabia or
Breton?'
Masson replied without hesitation : 'Picabia is
already the past.
Breton will be the future.'
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Joan Miro
Harlequin's Carnival
1924
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Miro's exhibition at the Galerie Pierre
in June 1925 was an official surrealist event. The invitation was signed
by all the members of the group, and the preface to the catalogue was
written by Benjamin Peret. The private view took place at midnight, and
was a great success.
From this time on,
Miro began to play.
He played a wild, distracted game with signs which he scattered on
monochrome backgrounds of grey, blue or white. A dotted line and a blob
were enough for him to create
astonishing effects, as in Head of Catalan
Peasant (1925), Person throwing a stone at
a bird (1925, New York, Museum of Modern Art), The Grasshopper
(1926), Dog howling at the moon (1926). Although he claimed to want
to 'murder painting', in his case this would have had to be a crime
passionel, for no painter has ever produced his work with greater love
than Miro. He painted as naturally as a flower blossoms. He used all
materials and techniques with equal virtuosity. He painted on black paper,
on glass paper, on card, on wood, on sacking, on copper, on masonite. He
used egg tempera, pastel colour, either powdered or mixed with indian ink
; he made poem-pictures, picture-objects, drawing-collages and wooden
constructions. He produced stunning parodies of old pictures; his three
Dutch interiors, painted in 1928, are interpretations of pictures he had seen in Holland, such as The Cat's Dancing
Lesson by Jan Steen. Various Imaginary portraits (1929) include
a Portrait of a Lady in 1820,
after
Constable. In 1934 he began his 'wild paintings which make monsters
arise'. Breton wrote : 'He could pass for the most 'surrealist' of us
all'. Until 1937, when he went through a short crisis which drove him to
paint from life at the Grande Chaumiere, and to paint the apocalyptic
Still-life with old shoe (James Thrall Soby collection), it was always
Miro who created the finest fireworks of surrealism.
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Joan Miro
Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird
1926
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Joan Miro
Dutch Interior I
1928
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Joan Miro
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born April 20, 1893, Barcelona, Spain
died Dec. 25, 1983, Palma, Majorca, Spain
Catalan artist, one of the foremost exponents of abstract art and
Surrealist fantasy. The influence of Paul Klee is apparent in his “dream
pictures” and “imaginary landscapes” of the late 1920s. His mature style
evolved from the tension between thisfanciful, poetic impulse and his
vision of the harshness of modern life. He worked extensively in
lithography and produced numerous murals, tapestries, and sculptures for
public spaces.
Miró's father was a watchmaker and goldsmith. Both the artisan tradition
and the austere Catalan landscape were of great importance to his art.
Miró's artistic development did not progress with the directness of his
countryman Picasso, who could draw like a master while still a boy.
Instead of being allowed to go to an art school, Miró was expected to
complete high school, though he failed to do so. He then attended a
commercial college and worked for two years as a clerk in an office, until
he had a mental and physical breakdown. His parents took him for
convalescence to an estate, Montroig, near Tarragona, which they bought
especially for this purpose, and finally allowed him to attend an art
school in Barcelona. His teacher at this school, Francisco Galí, showed a
great understanding of his 18-year-old pupil, advising him to touchthe
objects he was about to draw, a procedure that strengthened Miró's feeling
for the spatial quality of objects. Galí also introduced his pupil to
examples of the latest schools of modern art from Paris as well as to the
buildings of Antonio Gaudí, Barcelona's famous Art Nouveau architect.
Whereas artists of the contemporary Fauve and Cubist schools deliberately
attempted to destroy the canons of tradition in order to attain a new kind
of pristine vision, Miró possessed such a vision naturally. In his
paintings and drawings he sought above all to establish means of
metaphorical expression—that is, to discover signs that stand for concepts
of nature in a transcendent, poetic sense. He wanted to depict nature as
it would be depicted by a primitive man or a child equipped with the
intelligence of a 20th-century adult; in this respect, he had much in
common with the Surrealists and Dadaists, two other schools of modern
artists who were striving to achieve similar aims by more intellectual
means than Miró used. Miró's art developedslowly from his first clumsy
attempts at expression to the apparently playful masterpieces of his later
period. His fanatical honesty and his conscientious craftsmanship
compelled him to work on many of his pictures for years.
From 1915 to 1919 Miró worked in Barcelona, at Montroig, and on Majorca,
painting landscapes, portraits, and nudes in which his interest centred on
the rhythmic interplay of volumes and areas of colour. His colours were
still dark and heavy, though he delineated details as if superimposing on
aheavy earthly ground a filigree of luminous leaves and blossoms. His
manner was the same in landscapes, portraits,and nudes.
Miró was one of the many artists who made their way from abroad to Paris
during the first two decades of the 20th century and enriched French
painting, which was to influencethe art of the whole world. Most of these
foreign artists elected to become Frenchmen after coming into contact
with the French artistic metropolis, but Miró remained attached tohis
Catalan homeland, in his choice both of dwelling places and of subjects
for his pictures.
From 1919 onward Miró lived alternately in Spain and Paris. In the
paintings he produced in the period between World Wars I and II—the great
still lifes, landscapes, and phantasmagorias set free from both space and
time—he gradually removed the objects he portrayed from their natural
context and reassembled them as if in accordance with a new, mysterious
grammar, creating a ghostly, eerie impression.
From 1925 to 1928, under the influence of the Dadaists, Surrealists, and
Paul Klee, he painted “dream pictures” and “imaginary landscapes” in which
the linear configurations and patches of colour look almost as though they
were set down randomly. After a trip to The Netherlands, where he studied
the 17th-century Dutch realist painters in the museums, the figurative
elements in his pictures once more assumed a firmer shape. But, when a
tendency toward beautiful, tasteful forms emerged in his works, he
countered it with more brutal signs, collages, and objects made up of the
waste products of industry.
By the 1930s Miró's artistic horizons were expanding. He designed decor
for ballets. His paintings began to be exhibited regularly in French and
American galleries. In 1934he designed tapestries, and that led to an
interest in the monumental and in murals.
At the time of the Spanish political turmoil and Civil War in the late
1930s, Miró was living in Paris. In their demonic expressiveness, his
pictures of this period mirrored the fearsand horrors of those years. At
the Paris World Exhibition of 1937, he painted for the pavilion of the
Spanish Republic a mural, “The Reaper,” containing a strong element of
social criticism.
During World War II Miró returned to Spain, where he painted his
“Constellations,” a series of small works that constitute symbols of the
happy collaboration of everything creative, of the elements and the
cosmos. They represent a challenge to the anonymous powers of corruption
in social and politicallife, the cause of misery and wars. During the last
year of the war, Miró, together with his potter friend Artigas, produced
ceramics that revealed a new impetuosity of expression.
From 1948 onward he once more divided his time between Spain and Paris.
That year saw the start of the series of very poetic works the symbols of
which were based on the theme of woman, bird, and star. Pictures wildly
spontaneous in character came into being alongside others whose forms were
executed with punctilious craftsmanship. Both approaches were also
combined in Miró's sculptures; in themall his earlier figurations were
happily amalgamated to form erotic fetishes or signals towering into
space.
In the years following World War II, Miró became world famous; his
sculptures, drawings, and paintings were exhibited in many countries. In
1950 he painted a wall for Harvard University. His ceramic experiments
were crowned by the great ceramic wall in the UNESCO building in Paris
(1958), for which he received the Great International Prize of the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Foundation. In 1962 Paris honoured him with the first major
exhibition of his collected works in the National Museum of Modern Art.
The architect José Luis Sert built for him on Majorca the large studio of
which he had dreamed all his life. Among his later works were several
monumental sculptures, such as those executed for Chicago and for Houston,
Texas. In 1980, in conjunction with his receipt of Spain's Gold Medal of
Fine Arts, a plaza in Madrid was named in Miró's honour.
In spite of his fame, however, Miró continued to devote himself
exclusively to looking and creating. A taciturn, introverted man of short
stature, Miró had not found it easy to attain the wisdom permeated by
irony that ultimately characterized his work. From his youth, he had felt
compelledby an almost anarchic obstinacy to keep his eyes firmly fixed on
his goal despite the resistance he met from society or from the prevailing
artistic theories. His late works manifest an even greater simplification
of figure and background than his early ones. In order to realize his
inner visions, it had become enough for Miró to set down a dot and a
sensitive line on a sea-blue surface; in this the spectator could still
find himself in a state of total enchantment. His early works anticipated
the representational techniques of his later style; thus, although the
former playful or aggressive irony gave way to a quasi-religious
meditation, all of his works form a coherent whole manifested by a common
quality of rejuvenation and deepening.
Walter Erben
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It has been said that
Pablo Picasso was
influenced by
Miro's example. Strictly speaking,
Picasso had no surrealist
period; but there are several periods in which his development approaches
surrealism.
Breton considered that
Picasso first showed a real interest in
surrealism in 1926; in Le Surrealisme et la peinture, he took
Picasso as the supreme
guide. 'If surrealism ever comes to adopt a line of moral conduct, it has
only to accept the discipline that
Picasso has accepted and
will continue to accept. In saying this, I am setting very severe
standards.'
Indeed, the surrealists regarded
Picasso's period of 'analytical cubism', which included paintings like
The Accordeon Player (1911, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum),
as the beginning of a new form of vision. Paul Eluard wrote : 'After
perpetual wanderings through dark or dazzling rooms, the irrational took
its first rational step with Picasso's paintings, which have been given
the derisory label of ''cubist"; that first step was at last a raison
d'etre.' La Revolution Surrealiste reproduced one of his pen drawings
made up of dots connected by lines. His Dinard period in 1928 and 1929,
his 'Bathers (c. 1930), like prehistoric apparitions, his metal
Constructions of 1930-1, and his sand reliefs of 1933, bear witness to
the close links which bound him to the surrealist family.
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Yves Tanguy, who at the time claimed to
be more a surrealist than a painter, had spent his childhood at Locronan,
in the far west of Brittany, and had been to sea as a cadet in the
Merchant Navy. He was a melancholic character, in search of amusement and
excitement,
and his sea-inspired dreams of
adventure, his memories or the
Breton beaches, and his Celtic background
were the reasons which prompted his escape into the marvellous. In Paris,
Tanguy shared quarters with Jacques Prevert and Maurice Duhamel at 54 Rue
du Chateau in Montparnasse, which has become a legend because of the
fantasy which reigned there.
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Tanguy started by doing humorous
drawings which he exhibited in 1924 with the Montmartre illustrators Gus
Bota, Chas Laborde, Daragnes and Vertes. His first painting was of the
wall of the Sante prison, done in the manner of
Chirico. He had caught a
glimpse of a
Chirico painting in a gallery window from the platform of a
bus, and had been dazzled by it. He met Robert Desnos in 1925, and was
introduced by him into the surrealist group. In 1926 he painted The
Storm (Philadelphia, Museum of Art), and then Genesis. The
works of this initial period, which are very different from the later
style for which he is known, describe fluid, airy spaces where
imponderable elements are suspended in the air.
Goblins appear and disappear in a troubled atmosphere, a circle of mad
sprites forms in the invisible.
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Yves Tanguy
The
Storm
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He came back to earth with such works as
The Promontory Palace (1930, Venice, Peggy Guggenheim collection).
In this, and in such
later paintings as Infinite divisibility
(1942) and The Rapidity of Sleep (1945), he travelled to a shore
where strange minerals held council, and where horizons which awoke a
sense of the infinite receded before the eyes. He painted like a
sleepwalker, allowing the growth of images which were made even more
mysterious by the fact that he never felt any need to explain them even to
himself. His titles, which he often asked his friends to suggest, are not
commentaries on the paintings. Without wishing to be so,
Tanguy was the
Watteau of surrealism ; his pictures are
'Conversations' and 'fetes galantes' in which inanimate forms take
on the roles of men and women who have gathered together for the pleasures
of the dream.
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Yves Tanguy
Infinite divisibility |
Yves Tanguy
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born Jan. 5, 1900, Paris, France
died Jan. 15, 1955, Waterbury, Conn., U.S.
French-born American painter who made a highly individual contribution to
Surrealism.
After sailing with the merchant marine in his youth, Tanguy in 1922
returned to Paris, where he lived a Bohemian life andsearched for a
vocation. In 1923 a painting by Giorgio de Chirico that he saw in an art
gallery made such a strong impression on him that he immediately took up
painting. He joined the Surrealists in 1925, and he subsequently
participated in all the Surrealists' major exhibitions. He visited the
United States in 1939 and settled there, becominga U.S. citizen in 1948.
Though he had no formal art training, Tanguy had found his own unique
style of painting by 1927. His paintings depict groups of strange,
unidentifiable objects that resemble marine invertebrates or sculpturesque
rock formations. These ambiguous forms are painted with smooth,
painstaking detail and are set in barren, brightly lit landscapes that
have an infinite horizon and a timeless, dreamlike quality. After Tanguy
resettled in the United States, the objects in his paintings took on a
more metallic appearance. Tanguy's eerie and illogical paintings made
himthe artist most faithful to Surrealist precepts.
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Jean Arp
Automatic Drawing
1918
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In 1925
Arp came to Paris and moved into
a studio in the Cite des Fusains, 22 Rue Tourlaque, where among his
neighbours were
Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, and later
Miro. He began to write
poems in French ; previously he had written in Alsatian or German.
Arp was a man of lively wit
and a beautifully precise inventive sense. When he was a child, he had
painted the lower part of his window panes blue, so that the houses that
he looked out on would seem to be floating in the sky. On another occasion
he cut a rectangular hole through the wall of a wooden hut, and put a
picture frame round it. Then he invited his father to come and admire the
'landscape' he had created ; the opening looked out on a rural scene.
During the Dada period, his objects
set the public by the ears. There was the Glove (le Gant), which
was a hat intended to be worn by the Gantleman, not on, but in
place of, his head; there was the Navel Bottle, a
monstrous household object.
Arp
brought to surrealism the grace of his carved and painted wood reliefs -
Painted wood, Semi-Colon, Endless
Moustache, Configuration.
In 1926 he left Paris and set up house
at Meudon with Sophie Taeuber. He went over completely to sculpture, and
built up a repertoire of 'cosmic shapes' (the egg, breasts, the human
head, the bell, and so on) which he used in his Concretions. In
1931 he showed his papiers decbires at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher.
These combined the lessons of abstract art with the demands of surrealism.
Although he was a member of the 'Abstraction-Creation' group,
Arp's mental
agility always allowed him to reconcile non-figurative art with plastic
poetry. In his view, it was the artist's task to produce fruit, like a
tree. To define the aims which drove him on, he once said : To wanted to
find a new order, a new value for man in nature. Man should no longer be
the standard against which everything is measured, nor should he relate
everything to his own stature. On the contrary, all things and man should
be like nature, and not have any standard scale.'
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Jean Arp
Die Grablegung der
Vogel und Schmetterlinge
1916
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Jean Arp
Enak's Tears (Terrestrial Forms)
1917
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Jean Arp
Sculpture to be Lost in the Forest
1932
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Jean Arp
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born September 16, 1887, Strassburg, Germany [now Strasbourg, France]
died June 7, 1966, Basel, Switzerland
Also called Hans Arp French sculptor, painter, and poet who was one of the
leaders of the European avant-garde in the arts during the first half of
the 20th century.
First trained as an artist in his native Strasbourg, he later studied in
Weimar, Germany, and at the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1912 he went to
Munich, where, through his friend Wassily Kandinsky, he became briefly
associated with Der Blaue Reiter. He returned to Paris in 1914 and became
acquainted with the artists Modigliani, Picasso, and Robert Delaunay, as
well as with the writer Max Jacob. During World War I he took refuge in
Zürich, where he became one of the founders of the Dada movement. It was
there that he produced his first painted reliefs. After the war he lived
in Germany until 1924, when he and his wife, the artist Sophie Taeuber,
whom he had married in 1921, settled near Paris in the town of Meudon.
During the 1920s he was associated with the Surrealists, and in 1930 he
was a member of the Cercle et Carré group. This was also theyear in which
he made his first papiers déchirés (“torn papers”). In 1931 he
participated in the Abstraction-Créationmovement. During World War II he
again went to live in Zürich, where his wife died in 1943. While in
Switzerland he did his first papiers froissés (“crumpled papers”). After
the war Arp returned to Meudon, where he continued his experiments with
abstract form and colour and wrote poetry. Arp on Arp: Poems, Essays,
Memories by Jean Arp (1972) and Arp's Collected French Writings (1974)
were edited by MarcelJean.
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Georges Malkine
Nicole
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Georges Malkine
(1898-1970) was not mentioned in
Le Surrealisme et la peinture, despite the fact that he had been a
member of the 'heroic wave'. La Revolution surrealiste published
his drawn stories, his drawing Ecstasy, and his painting The
Valley of Chevreuse. He was a friend of Robert Desnos, and illustrated
his The Night of Loveless Nights. Malkine had an inventive mind
which was supported by a kind of pictorial sensuality. But he was little
concerned to make a career in art, being too absorbed by the vicissitudes
of his life, which led him into a strange mixture of trades : violinist,
photographer, street vendor of neckties, actor, fairground hand,
proof-reader. Claude-Andre Puget, who had known him since his youth, said
of him : 'His was the only genuinely surrealist existence I have known.'
In 1927 Malkine's exhibition at the Galerie Surrealiste
was a great success. Shortly afterwards he left for the South Seas, where
he travelled for three years. He was able to get back to France only by
working his passage as a dishwasher. He began to paint again in 1930 and
continued until 1933, when he stopped. He did not resume painting until he
went to live in America in 1949. His work has retained a vein of
surrealist fantasy, as his 1966 tribute to the composer Satie (a kindred
spirit) shows.
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Georges Malkine
La place Falguiere
1927
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Georges Malkine
La visite
1927
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Georges Malkine
Le boudoir
1927
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Although the Galerie Surrealiste had
been inaugurated, on 26 March 1926, with an exhibition of paintings by
Man
Ray,
Breton pays greater tribute in his book to Man Ray the photographer
than to Man Ray the painter. Indeed,
Man
Ray is above all the man who revolutionized photography by
transforming it into a poetic means of investigating the world. As his
pictures failed to sell,
Man
Ray began to
practise photography to earn a living - he had combined this activity with
painting for a long time previously. In 1921 he invented 'rayograms',
which made phantoms of objects appear. He has described the technique :
'This is the principle of the rayogram, which is sometimes, in my view
erroneously, called a photogram. Various objects, whatever one wishes, are
placed in the dark on a sheet of light-sensitive paper. This combination
is then illuminated by a ray of light. The objects placed on the paper
protect the sensitive surface, and so do the shadows they cast, to a
degree which depends on the intensity of the shadow. When the paper
exposed in this way is developed, the rayogram appears as white
silhouettes and incredibly delicately graduated shadows. The effect is
absolutely unique to this kind of technique.'
Man
Ray made rayograms with
wash-tongs, drawing pins, salt, and all kinds of items.
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Man
Ray
Rayograms
1922-1927
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Apart from these experiments, he took
fashion pictures for the couturier Paul Poiret, did portrait photographs,
and made reproductions of avant-garde works. He worked in a hotel room
with rudimentary equipment. Indeed, he affected scorn for elaborate
cameras and for technical skill. He wanted to photograph ideas rather than
things, and dreams rather than ideas. He had no interest in landscapes :
'I think that rather than taking banal representations of a view, it is
better to take my handkerchief from my pocket, twist it as I want, and
photograph it as I wish.' He used the close-up at a time when most
photographers never dreamed of doing so.
The Marquise Casati was most
enthusiastic about a photograph he had done of her showing her with two
pairs of eyes; she declared that he had taken a portrait of her soul. From
that time on,
Man
Ray found himself with an aristocratic clientele, and
was able to set himself up in a studio. His portraits are given a kind of
inner treatment - that of James Joyce, taken at a moment when the sitter
was dazzled by the lights, is a demonstration of the art of giving full
value to the sensitive part of the face.
Man
Ray began to do nudes in
1925, first of his girl-friend Kiki de Montparnasse, and then with many
amateur models. He used all processes - for example solarization, which
allows the values of cast shadows to be inverted - to give flesh a
dream-like aureole. He treated the female body in the same way as
Duchamp
made a readymade. He used some personal detail to make each different from
all the others. His portrait of
Meret Oppenheim, naked, with one raised
arm covered in black ink, behind the wheel of an etching press, is justly
famous for this reason. His films, like Starfish (Etoile de mer,
1928), where instead of blurred outlines he aimed at a frosted glass
effect, pushed his photographic successes one stage further. One of his
paintings, more than eight feet wide, Observatory Time, the lovers
(1932-4, New York, William N. Copley collection), shows a giant mouth
floating in the sky above the Jardin du Luxembourg. A symbol : for
Man
Ray, photography was
a kiss given by Time to Light.
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Man
Ray
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born August 27, 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
died November 18, 1976, Paris, France
original name Emmanuel Radnitzkyphotographer, painter, and filmmaker who
was the only American to play a major role in both the Dada and Surrealist
movements.
The son of an artist and photographer, he grew up in New York City, where
he studied architecture, engineering, and art, and became a painter. As
early as 1911, he took up the pseudonym of Man Ray. As a young man, he was
a regular visitor to Alfred Stieglitz's “291” gallery, where he was
exposed to current art trends and earned an early appreciation for
photography. In 1915 Man Ray met the French artist Marcel Duchamp, and
together they collaborated on many inventions and formed the New York
group of Dada artists. Like Duchamp, Man Ray began to produce ready-mades,
commercially manufactured objects that he designated as works of art.
Among his best-known ready-mades is The Gift (1921), a flatiron with a row
of tacks glued to the bottom.
In 1921 Man Ray moved to Paris and became associated with the Parisian
Dadaand Surrealist circles of artists and writers.Inspired by the
liberation promoted by these groups, he experimented with many media. His
experiments with photography included rediscovering how to make
“cameraless” pictures, or photograms, which he called rayographs . He made
them by placing objects directly on light-sensitive paper, which he
exposed tolight and developed. In 1922 a book of his collected rayographs,
Les Champs délicieux (“The Delightful Fields”), was published, with an
introduction by the influential Dada artist Tristan Tzara, who admired the
enigmatic quality of Man Ray's images. In 1929 Man Ray alsoexperimented
with the technique called solarization, which renders part of a
photographic image negative and part positive by exposing a print or
negative to a flash of light during development. He was one of the first
artists to use theprocess, known since the 1840s, for aesthetic purposes.
Man Ray also pursued fashion and portrait photography and made a virtually
complete photographic record of the celebrities of Parisian cultural life
during the 1920s and '30s. Many of his photographs were published in
magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, Vu, and Vogue. He continued his
experiments with photography through the genre of portraiture; for
example, he gave one sitter three pairs of eyes, and in Violon d'Ingres
(1924) he photographically superimposed sound holes, or f holes, onto the
photograph of the back of a female nude, making the woman's body resemble
that of a violin. He also continued to produce ready-mades. One, a
metronome with a photograph of an eyefixed to the pendulum, was called
Object to Be Destroyed (1923)—which it was by anti-Dada rioters in 1957.
Man Ray also made films. In one short film, Le Retour à la raison (1923;
Return to Reason), he applied the rayograph technique to motion-picture
film, making patterns with salt, pepper, tacks, and pins. His other films
include Anémic cinéma (1926; in collaboration with Duchamp) and L'Étoile
de mer (1928–29; “Star of the Sea”), which is considered a Surrealist
classic.
In 1940 Man Ray escaped the German occupation of Paris by moving to Los
Angeles. Returning to Paris in 1946, he continued to paint and experiment
until his death. His autobiography, Self-Portrait, was published in 1963
(reprinted 1999).
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Finally, in the catalogue for an
exhibition of collages which was held in March 1930 at the Galerie Goemans,
49 Rue de Seine, Aragon wrote an essay called La Peinture аu deft,
a seminal text in which he vigorously reproached painting for having
become an 'anodine entertainment', and expressed his preference for
collage, which seemed to him to be the ideal way of passing beyond the
preoccupations of matter, subject and decoration. 'It substitutes a method
of expression of hitherto unimagined strength and scope for a debased art
form. ... It restores a genuine meaning to the old pictorial demands by
preventing the painter from falling prey to narcissism, to art for art's
sake, by bringing him back to the magical practices - the origins of, and
the justification for, plastic representations - which many religions have
forbidden.' In collage Aragon saw the possibility of an assault on reality
by a subversive form of the marvellous, using elements borrowed from
reality with the sole purpose of being used against it. This attitude
shows the kind of hope which collage engendered in the surrealist group.
All of them saw it as a weapon directed against everyday banalities,
against the spirit of the serious.
Poets as well as painters made
collages :
Georges Hugnet,
E.L.T. Mesens and Jacques Prevert were among
them. But none of them surpassed
Max Ernst, who, in his picture books, La Femme 100 Tetes
(1929), Reve d'une
petite fille qui voulut entrer аи Carmel (1930) and Une Semaine de
Bonte on les sept Elements Capitaux (1934), unravels stories with a
multiplicity of twists and turns which derive their validity from the
beliefs they reflect. 'Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously
accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the
exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period', said
Max Ernst. His visual novels form a fantastic mythology whose hero is Loplop, 'Superior of the Birds', one of the best of his hallucinatory
fantasies. One consequence of collage was that surrealist paintings of
this period took on the form of painted collages : those of Emile Savitry,
before he went over to photography, are an example. Even
Rene Magritte and
Salvador Dali, when they were starting their careers, made the content of
their paintings conform to that of collages.
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Georges Hugnet
"La Querelle tout en elle…" (Planche refuse for "La Septieme face du
de")
1936
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E.L.T. Mesens (1903-1971)
The Night Prowler
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E.L.T. Mesens (1903-1971)
The Staff
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