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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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Baron, Queneau, Breton, Boiffard, de Chirico,
Vitrac, Eluard, Soupault, Desnos, Aragon.
Naville, Simone Collinet-Breton, Morise,
Marie-Louise Soupault.
1924 |
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CHAPTER FIVE
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Towards a revolutionary art
EXPLORATION:
Salvador
Dali
Alberto Giacometti
Oscar Dominguez
Wolfgang Paalen
Victor Brauner
Hans Bellmer
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From 1930 onwards surrealist art became
more harsh, more violent, and more impatient to influence social life. It
was now aware of its methods, of its powers to disturb and to seduce,
which it wished to force to serve entirely positive ends. The previous
year the movement had been shaken by a crisis brought on by disagreements
about the meaning of its adhesion to Marxism, a perennial question which
had been first raised in 1926. Antonin Artaud had been the first to
protest against surrealism's political preoccupations, when in his
pamphlet A la grande Nuit (1927) he matched against them 'the point
of view of consistent pessimism'. Later the group separated from part of
its membership, whom Breton branded with a red hot iron in his Second
Manifeste du surrealisme (1929). 'What could people who still have
some concern about the position they occupy in the world hope to
gain from the surrealist experience?' he wrote scornfully. The target he
indicated to his friends was revolution; dialectical materialism now
played the part which had previously been taken by psychoanalysis.
The surrealists wanted to help in the
advancement of the proletariat and in the destruction of capitalist
society; but they were not prepared to sacrifice any part of their basic
preoccupation. The
review Le Surrealisme аu service de la
Revolution, which was their organ at this time (1930-3), raised the
problems of social agitation only in connection with that of finding a way
for the ideal expression of the passions. In his role of militant
activist, Breton acted as a true apostle, trying to persuade organizations
of the Left that true revolutionary art was not simply the art which made
the most of a propaganda content, but an art which took human desires into
account with audacity and originality. In the lectures he delivered and
the interviews he gave, this is a constantly recurring idea. In La
Position politique du Surrealisme (1935) he writes : 'Artistic
imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity
to circumstances, especially to the
intoxicating circumstances of history. The work of art must remain
detached from any kind of practical aim, if it is not to cease to be
itself. . . . We put forward, in opposition to painting with a social
subject, painting whose latent content is revolutionary, whatever the
subject expressed. We stress the fact that today this form of painting can
derive its elements only from pure mental representation, inasmuch as this
extends beyond true perception, without being confused with
hallucination.'
While in public
Breton was defending the
rights of the artist, he urged his friends not to give way to any desire
to please; the Second Manifeste is firm on this point. 'The
approval of the public must be avoided above all. The public must be
forbidden to enter if confusion is to be avoided. I would add that
the public must be held exasperated at the door by a system of taunts and
provocations.'
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If ever anyone was qualified to follow
this advice, and to take it to its ultimate conclusion, it was
Salvador
Dali. He was later to declare : 'Le surre'alisme, c'est тоi'.
Certainly, before he became the popularizer of surrealism,
Dali breathed a
new dynamism into the movement. From the other point of view, had
Dali not
had the framework, the propitious climate which the group offered him, his
personality would not have developed with so much brilliance.
Initially his eccentricity was nothing
more than that of a spoilt child. His father was a lawyer from Figueras
who put all his hopes in him, and nothing was spared in the encouragement
of his precocious vocation. An uncle from Barcelona gave him a king's
costume; wearing his crown and his ermine cloak in the wash-house he used
as a studio,
Dali gloried in the idea that everything was permitted him.
He went to the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Madrid in 1921, and became known
for his extravagant clothes and his stubborn insistence on doing the
opposite of what everyone else was doing. For this he became the hero of a
group of 'ultraist' students, who included Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Bunuel, and Kugcnio Montes. He was expelled from the school for protesting
against the appointment of a professor, and even imprisoned for a few
weeks. When he was released he became even more wild. But his dandysme
led him only to futile actions, like soaking banknotes in whisky, and
his painting was merely a series of stylistic exercises ranging from
futurism to
cubism.
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Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Bunuel;
Un Chien andalou; L'age d'or (The Golden Age)
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Luis Bunuel
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born Feb. 22, 1900, Calanda, Spain
died July 29, 1983, Mexico City
Spanish director and filmmaker, noted especially for his early Surrealist
films and for his work in the Mexican commercial cinema. He is
distinguished for his highly personal style and controversial obsession
with social injustice, religious excess, gratuitous cruelty, and
eroticism.
Life
Bunuel was born in northeastern Spain, the eldest of seven children. From
his father, Leonardo Bunuel, a businessman, who had left home at the age
of 14 to join the army and fight in Cuba in the Spanish-American War
(1898), Luis inherited an adventurous spirit. He excelled at school, in
Zaragoza, spending only his holidays in his hometown. He was good at
sports, such as boxing, and also played the violin well. He attended a
Jesuit college in Zaragoza, until at 17 he entered the University of
Madrid, where he became a friend of the painter Salvador Dalí and the poet
Federico García Lorca. In 1920 Bunuel founded the first Spanish movie club
and wrote critiques of the films shown there.
Having discovered Freudian psychoanalysis and having broken away from
religion, he went to Paris in 1925 and entered film-producing circles,
feeling that film would become his true medium of expression. In 1926 he
became an assistant director, and in 1928 he directed his first picture,
Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog ), in collaboration with Dalí. It
created a sensation: at a time whemovies tended to be dominated by the
natural and the literal, Buńuel discovered the cinema of instinct, which
issued through him from the Surrealist movement.
His next two films—L'Age d'or (1930; The Golden Age), a radically
anticlerical and antibourgeois film made in France, and Las Hurdes (1932;
Land Without Bread), a documentary about a particularly wretched region of
Spain—asserted his concern with the freedom to dream and to imagine, his
revolutionary attitude toward social problems, his aggressive sense of
humour, and his rejection of traditional logic.
In Spain, Bunuel acted as producer of a number of commercial films in an
attempt to build a native industry. When the Spanish Civil War began in
1936 he volunteered to the Republican government in Paris, and in 1938, he
acted asa technical adviser for two Hollywood films about the Spanish
Republic. In the United States, he experienced his greatest difficulties.
He did some film editing and worked briefly for the Museum of Modern Art,
in New York City, until it became known that he had directed the atheistic
L'Age d'or, and he was allegedly forced to resign. In 1947 he settled in
Mexico with his wife and two sons.
There his career was reinvigorated; he directed two pictures designed to
have box-office appeal, into which he introducedone or two freely creative
sequences. The success of one of these, El gran calavera (1949; The Great
Madcap), allowed him to make a personal film, Los olvidados (1950; The
Youngand the Damned). This fascinating and sympathetic study of slum
youths reestablished his reputation as a director of note.
Bunuel exercised more and more freedom in allowing the “free” sequences to
invade otherwise conventional films, and his own blasphemous but tender
world reappeared more often. Soon all his films, even those imposed upon
him by producers, such as Robinson Crusoe (1952), rendered the Bunuelian
universe—a dreamland in which strange and unwonted happenings occur.
Poetry is combined with an aggressiveness, born of tenderness, in his
work. His great films from this Mexican period include Ensayo de un crimen
(1955; The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz) and Nazarín (1958),
about an unworldly priest.
In 1960 Bunuel was allowed to return to Spain to make Viridiana (1961);
the Spanish authorities, however, found the completed film to be
anticlerical and tried to suppress it. Nonetheless, it was smuggled out to
be shown at the Cannes Festival, where it was awarded the top prize. In
1962, in Mexico, he made another major work, El ángel exterminador (The
Exterminating Angel), about a formal dinner party from which the guests
find themselves powerless to depart; it too was interpreted as having
powerful anticlerical connotations.
By then acclaimed throughout the world, Buńuel was again free to make
films as he chose, as he had not been since his first period in France.
His next film, Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (1964; The Diary of a
Chambermaid), was his most overtly political film, wherein the
turn-of-the-century story of the decadent French aristocracy is updated
and transformed into a metaphor for the growth of Fascism. The 42-minute
Simón del desierto (1965; Simon of the Desert), concerning the temptations
of anchorite Simeon Stylites, and Belle de jour (1967), about the
fantasies of a middle-class woman, though quite different in narrative,
explore some of the central themes in Bunuel's work.
His better known, later films—including Tristana (1970), Le Charme discret
de la bourgeoisie (1973; The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), and Cet
obscur objet du désir (1977; That Obscure Object of Desire)—also reflect
Buńuel's concern with dream and reality, the confusion of true and false,
the untrustworthiness of the foundations of social structure, and the
nature of obsession itself. His autobiography, My Last Sigh (originally
published in French), was published in 1983.
Assessment
Probably the most controversial of filmmakers, Bunuel owed his fame to his
absolute sincerity. Ignoring fashions and conventions, he pursued his
career in his native Spain, in France, in the United States, and in Mexico
for more than a half century, mostly working within the limitations of the
film industry. Yet, no other filmmaker has been more personal, more frank
in expressing his own obsessions as evidently in his first film as in his
last.
Ado Kyrou
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Gala with the
Elsa Schiaparelli
shoe hat,
after designs by Dali, 1936
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With Blood is sweeter than honey
(1927), he began to get some idea of what his future style would be. In
1928 he travelled to Paris, where he met
Miro, who introduced him to the
surrealists, and who abandoned his usual silence long enough to say to him
: 'The important thing in life is to be stubborn. When what I want to say
in a picture won't come out, I bang my head against the wall until the
blood flows.'
When he returned to his family's house
at Cadaques in 1929, Dali set out to paint a picture which would be a kind
of manifesto. He set up his easel at the foot of his bed so that he would
have the image before his eyes as he fell asleep and as he awoke. At this
time he had a visit from a surrealist delegation - the dealer Camille
Goemans,
Rene Magritte, Paul Eluard and his wife Gala. They were taken
aback by his appearance - he was wearing an imitation pearl necklace, a
bracelet, and a shirt with flowing sleeves - by his sudden outbursts of
hysterical laughter, and by the scatological violence of his picture,
whose principal figure was a man in shit-stained underpants. Eluard gave this painting the title of Le Jen lugubre (The
Dismal Sport) ; it was
Dali's first step, at the age of twenty-five,
along the road of surrealism. There and then was forged the union between
Dali and Gala which was to have so great an influence on his art, because
she was able to prevent his worst fantasies from becoming morbid. She made
him write, and herself put in order, the notes which he compiled for the
composition of La Femme visible (1930); these notes contained the
earliest exposition of his 'paranoiac-critical method'. This constant
vigilance was the reason for the way he worshipped her, going as far as
signing his pictures with their two names interwoven, and saying : 'Every
good painter who aspires to the creation of genuine masterpieces should
first of all marry my wife.'
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After his Paris exhibition in 1929 at
the Galerie Goemans,
Dali wanted to go further than his fellow
surrealists. Eternally contradictory, he wanted to be more than
everything : madder than a lunatic, more noble than an aristocrat, more
academic than the most conventional of painters, more refined than a
sybarite, and so on. So he became more surrealist than the surrealists,
and sowed paradoxes in their very beliefs.
Dali was the product of a
synthesis of everything the movement had acquired, but his determination
to 'cretinize' the public (a reminder of
Dada), his 'cannibalism' (a
reminder of
Picabia), and his appeal for bad taste (a reminder of
Breton's
statement 'I force myself to go further than anyone else in the bad taste
of the age'), acquired transcendent power because of his fanatical
egocentricity. He brought to surrealism not only a hyperbolic imagination,
not only a pictorial technique which had been developed by frenetically
hard work, but also his gift for savorous overstatement and his gift for
solemn clowning. He became the protagonist of a tragicomedy of art, in
which his actions and his gestures contributed to the emotional charge of
his painting.
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Dali and Gala filming the
"Dream of Venus"in the Murray Korman Studiosin New York, 1939
Photograph: George Platt Lyne
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When Breton and Eluard wrote L'Immaculee
Conception in 1930, they set out to demonstrate that the
mind could put every known form of madness to work in the cause of poetry.
Dali invented the 'paranoiac-critical method', and showed that an artist
could obtain spectacular results by the controlled and lucid simulation of
mental disease. Paranoia is an interpretative disorder with a rational
basis, which, if skilfully mastered by the painter, will allow him to
reveal the double significance of things. Thanks to this 'spontaneous
method of irrational knowledge based on the interpretative critical
association of phenomena which lead to delirium', the painter will act and
think as if under the influence of a psychic disorder, while remaining
fully aware of what is going on. The act of painting has no further
function save that of using a perfected trompe-l'ail technique to
make the images of this organized delirium unforgettable. It is from this
that Dali derives his definition of painting : 'photography (by hand and in colour) of concrete irrationality and
of the imaginary world in general'.
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Dali was a Renaissance man converted to
psychoanalysis. In The Invisible Alan (1529), the first picture in
which he used a double image, the man in this case being also a woman at
the same time,
The Great Masturbator (1929), Dancers,
lion, horse... invisible (1930), Birth of liquid desires
(1932), and Persistence of Memory (193 1, New York, Museum of
Modern Art), where time is abolished by the famous 'soft watches',
Dali
took a delight in painting what he called the 'psychic anamorph', defined
thus : 'The instantaneous reconstitution of the desire by its refraction
in a cycle of memories. Example : the instantaneous reconstitution of the
desire of thirst by its refraction in a cycle of masochistic memories'.
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Salvador
Dali
The Great Masturbator
1929
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This method, which was the art of
cultivating phantasms, made so great an impression only because the
phantasms were genuine.
Dali put on to canvas his panic tear of
grasshoppers, his phobia of the void, his perverse eroticism, and his
nostalgia for inter-uterine existence. He tore off the mask which reason
puts on reality, and behind it discovered a soft world which was subsiding
or decomposing, and which had to be propped
up on enormous crutches. His dramatic break with his father, whom he
compared with William Tell, is the reason for the baroque melodrama of
The Old Age of William Tell (1931, Paris, Marie-Laure de Noailles
collection), and The Enigma of William Tell (1933-4). The obsession
with food which drove him to paint Gala with two raw cutlets on her
shoulders gives an authentic flavour to paintings like The Weaning of
the Furniture Food (1934, Cleveland, Л. Reynolds Morse collection), in
which he espies through an opening in the body of his nurse the piece of furniture containing the
feeding bottle, and The Ghost of
Vermeer van Delft, which can be used as a table (1934, ibid.).
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Salvador
Dali
The Ghost of
Vermeer van Delft, which can be used as a table
1934
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Apart from writing the scenarios of the
films Un Chien Andalou (1928) and U Age d'Or (1930), which
were marked also by the kindred genius of his friend Luis Bunuel,
Dali was
also poet, librettist, sculptor, theoretician, dress-designer,
window-dresser and organizer of carnivals. The accumulation of his
'imperialist' paradoxes, which were such as to falsify the ideas of
surrealism, and his commercial opportunism, led to his break with the
group in 1939, but this did not stop
Dali from continuing to be a
surrealist. He went to live in California, where he painted some
magnificent compositions like
Geopolitical Child observing the birth of the New
Alan (1943, Cleveland, A. Reynolds Morse collection), and Dream
caused by the flight of a bee round a pomegranate a second before waking
(1944). The painting which indicates the official end of his
surrealist career is the Apotheosis of Homer (1945), in which he
tried to give expression to 'the visual sensations of the blind'. Even so,
in the 'mystic' period which followed, constant reterences to the past can
still be made out.
Dali has perhaps had a more coherent evolution than any
of the other surrealist painters.
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Salvador
Dali
One Second Before Awakening from a Dream Caused
by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate
1944
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Salvador
Dali
Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born May 11, 1904, Figueras, Spain
died Jan. 23, 1989, Figueras
In full Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí Y Domenech Spanish Surrealistpainter
and printmaker, influential for his explorations of subconscious imagery.
As an art student in Madrid and Barcelona, Dalí assimilated a vast number
of artistic styles and displayedunusual technical facility as a painter.
It was not until the late 1920s, however, that two events brought about
the development of his mature artistic style: his discovery of Sigmund
Freud's writings on the erotic significance of subconscious imagery, and
his affiliation with the Paris Surrealists, a group of artists and writers
who sought to establish the “greater reality” of man's subconscious over
his reason. To bring up images from his subconscious mind, Dalí began to
induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as
“paranoiac critical.”
Once Dalí hit on this method, his painting style matured with
extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings
which made him the world's best-known Surrealist artist. He depicted a
dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed, or
otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion.Dalí portrayed
these objects in meticulous, almost painfully realistic detail and usually
placed them within bleak, sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of his
Catalonian homeland. Perhaps the most famous of these enigmatic images is
“The Persistence of Memory” (1931), in which limp, melting watches rest in
an eerily calm landscape. With the Spanish director Luis Buńuel, Dalí also
made two Surrealistic films—Un Chien andalou (1928; An Andalusian Dog )
and L'Âge d'or (1930; The Golden Age)—that are similarly filled with
grotesque but highly suggestive images.
In the late 1930s Dalí switched to painting in a more academic style under
the influence of the Renaissance painter Raphael, and as a consequence he
was expelled from the Surrealist movement. Thereafter he spent much of his
time designing theatre sets, interiors of fashionable shops, and jewelry,
as well as exhibiting his genius for flamboyant self-promotional stunts in
the United States, where he lived from 1940 to 1955. In the period from
1950 to 1970 Dalí painted many works with religious themes, though he
continued to explore erotic subjects, to represent childhood memories, and
to use themes centring on his wife, Gala. Notwithstanding their technical
accomplishments, these later paintings are not as highly regarded as the
artist's earlier works. The most interesting and revealing of Dalí's books
is The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (1942–44).
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Alberto Giacometti brought into
surrealism the resentment and anxiety of a betrayed lover. He had wanted
to embrace reality in his art, and reality had become inaccessible to him.
Giacometti was the son of one of the best Swiss post-impressionist
painters, and painted and sculpted a number of portraits from life before
he came to Paris in 1922. Until 1925 he studied under
Emile-Antoine Bourdelle at the Grande Chaumiere; but he found it gradually more and more
impossible to translate the external world into sculpture; he called on
his imagination to supply the deficiencies of the model. Up to 1928, under
the influence of Laurens,
Arp and primitive masks, he made 'flat
sculptures', two - dimensional heads and figures, which were followed by
'open sculptures', such as Sleeping Woman who dreams (1929). He
came into the surrealist group in 1930, the year when he exhibited
sculpture-objects with
Miro and
Arp at the Galerie Pierre. As he could not
live from sales of his work, at this period he and his brother Diego
worked for Jean-Michel Franck, an interior designer for whom they made all
kinds of utilitarian objects such as light fittings, lamps, wall brackets
and so on.
Giacometti's
surrealist period included a series of 'affective' sculptures which gave
concrete form to definite feelings of aggression or anguish.
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Giacometti, photograph by
Gartier Bresson
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Alberto Giacometti
Suspended ball or the Hour of Traces

Alberto Giacometti
The Invisible Object |
He visualized each work complete in his
mind, and once this vision was formulated, he executed it usually without
changing anything, sometimes in no more than a day. Sometimes he made
objects, like
Suspended ball or the Hour of Traces (1930),
Circuit (1931, Paris, Henrictte Gomes collection), Pointe a
l'ail (1931) and sometimes plastic images like Caress (1932),
N0 more
play (1932), The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932, New York, Museum of
Modern Art), The Surrealist Table (1933, Paris, Musee National d'Art Moderne),
and The Invisible Object (1934-5).
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Alberto Giacometti
The Surrealist Table
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In 1935
Giacometti moved away from the
surrealists and took up sculpture from life again. Throughout the years he
tirelessly made and remade studies of heads, working from his brother
Diego and his model Rita. He was never satisfied, and while he worked on a
piece it gradually grew smaller and smaller, seeming to melt or shrink. It
was as if he were trying to find a nugget of pure reality by stripping off
successive wrappings from the work. Quite often a sculpture which he had
intended to be on a large scale ended up so small that it would fit into a
matchbox.
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Alberto Giacometti
Woman with Her Throat Cut
1932
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Alberto Giacometti
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born Oct. 10, 1901, Borgonovo, Switz.
died Jan. 11, 1966, Chur
Swiss sculptor and painter, best known for his attenuated sculptures of
solitary figures. Notable works include “Head of a Man on a Rod” (1947)
and “Composition with Seven Figures and a Head (The Forest)” (1950). His
work has been compared to that of the existentialists in literature; in
1963 Giacometti designed the set for Samuel Beckett's drama Waiting for
Godot .
Giacometti displayed precocious talent and was much encouraged by his
father, Giovanni, a Postimpressionist painter, andby his godfather, Cuno
Amiet, a Fauvist painter. He spent a happy childhood in the nearby village
of Stampa, to which hereturned regularly until his death. His brother
Diego became known as a furniture designer and shared Giacometti's life as
his model and aide. Another brother, Bruno, became an architect.
Giacometti left secondary school in Schiers in 1919 and then went to
Geneva, where he attended art classes during the winter of 1919–20. After
a time in Venice and Padua (May 1920), he went to Florence and Rome (fall
1920–summer 1921), where rich collections of Egyptian art taught him that
the impact of ancient and primitive hieratic styles—which adhere to fixed,
conventional types and frontal or rigid figures—could be used as an
equivalent for the force of reality.
Between 1922 and 1925 Giacometti studied at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumičre
in Paris. Although he owed much to his teacher, Émile-Antoine Bourdelle,
his style was very different. It was related to the Cubist sculpture of
Alexander Archipenko and Raymond Duchamp-Villon and to the Post-Cubist
sculpture of Henri Laurens and Jacques Lipchitz. An example is “Torso”
(1925). He was also inspired by African and Oceanic art, as in “The
Spoon-Woman” (1926). His first important personal achievements were flat,
slablike sculptures, such as “Observing Head” (1927/28), which soon made
him popular among the Paris avant-garde.
Any resemblance to reality had been abandoned in the period 1925–29, when
he created mannered figures, such as “Cubist Composition” (1926) and
“Three Figures Outdoors” (1929). The trend continued in the period
1930–32, in works in which emotions and erotic themes were given
Surrealist sculptural form (“Suspended Ball” and “The Palace at 4 A.M.”).
In 1933–34 Giacometti attempted metaphorical compositions using the themes
of life and death (“The Invisible Object” and “1 + 1 = 3”). At this time
he was disturbed by the thought that his serious works of art had as
little reference to reality as the merely decorative vases andlamps that
he made to earn a living. Breaking definitely with the Surrealist group in
1935, he began to work after nature again; what had started as mere
studies became a lifelong adventure: the phenomenological approach to
reality—that is, the search for the given reality in what one sees when
oneis looking at a person.
Around 1940 Giacometti arrived at matchstick-sized sculptures: figures and
heads seen frontally as ungraspable appearances of reality far away in
space. Around 1947 his massless, weightless image of reality was expressed
in a skeletal style, with figures thin as beanstalks. From 1947 to 1950 he
did compositions related to his work of the early 1930s—“Tall Figures”;
“City Square”; “Composition with Seven Figures and a Head (The Forest)”;
and “Chariot”—and rapidly became known, especially in the United States,
through two exhibitions (1948 and 1950) at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in
New York City and an essay on his art by the French existentialist writer
Jean-Paul Sartre.
The evolution of his art continued, taking the form of a search for ways
to challenge, actually to equal, reality in sculpture as well as in
painting. For Giacometti an artwork was to become an almost magical
evocation of reality in an imaginary space, as in heads of Diego and
figures after his wife Annette (1952–58), executed like apparitions on
gray canvases or on space-delimiting bases. The artwork also hadto be
invested with the power of acting on the spectator like a double of
reality in real space, as in portraits of Caroline or Elie Lotar, his
models and friends in the last years (1958–65), which are heads and busts
gazing intently and made only with lines of force, without contour lines
or surfaces. At this point the phenomenological approach was superseded;
he felt that reality was no longer dependent on being perceived by
someone; reality simply was. Like the characters of Beckett's novels and
plays his figures represented a worldview in which space and time have
their origin in the core of each being. Giacometti died of an inflammatory
heart condition, without having carried out the final composition of the
work he had been concerned with since the early 1930s, the metaphor of the
totality of life.
Giacometti was one of the outstanding artists of the 20th century. At a
time when avant-garde artists aimed at rendering nonfigurative or
expressive qualities rather than achieving resemblance to reality, he
worked for the unattainable goal of equaling reality by rendering a
portrait—whether drawing, painting, or sculpture—so that it would be
perceived by the spectator with the impact it would have were it a living
person. To do this he introduced into the art of sculpture a new concept
of rendering distance. Massless and weightless, his figures and heads are
immediately seen from a specific frontal point of view and therefore
perceived as situated in distance and space.
Giacometti had such intellectual integrity—for example, living in a shabby
studio in Montparnasse even after fame and fortune had reached him—that he
became for his contemporaries, especially those of the postwar generation,
an almost legendary figure during his lifetime.
The Art Gallery (Kunsthaus) in Zürich and the Beyeler Gallery in Basel,
Switz., have the most comprehensive collections of Giacometti's sculpture
(on loan from the Alberto Giacometti Foundation). Other important
collections are in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and in the
Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul, Fr.
Reinhold D. Hohl
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During this period of revolutionary
preoccupations, which
Breton called the 'period of preparation',
surrealism underwent a brilliant return to pictorial automatism. One of
those responsible was
Oscar Dominguez, who invented 'decalcomania without
preconceived object'.
Dominguez was a native of Tenerife,
and in 1933 he had had an exhibition there which he had described as
surrealist, although he had never met a member of the group. He did not
come into contact with them until 1934, in Paris, and when he did, he
became a redoubtable figure.
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Oscar Dominguez
Nostalgia for Space
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Every one of his
pictures revolved round a shock idea, like an advertising poster (he had
formerly been a poster artist). For example, in The Hunter (1934),
he showed a bird imprisoned in a hand-shaped cage. In 1935 he did his
first 'decalcomania', by laying a sheet or paper on top of another
covered in black gouache, rubbing at random with the hand, and separating
the sheets when almost dry. This technique, which allowed him to create
fantastic landscapes, was greatly appreciated by his entourage, among whom
it was widely used.
Dominguez also invented 'litho-chronism' or
'solidification of time', a form or sculpture which involved wrapping, to
form a bundle, one or more three-dimensional bodies. It one placed a
typewriter and some ornament together, and then wrapped them in stretch
material, this latter would become a 'lithochronic surface'.
Dominguez' imagination
was fertile in this kind of discovery, but he too often wasted his
possibilities. He painted his best pictures just before
the war, when he went through
a 'cosmic' period - Nostalgia for Space
(1939) and The Memory of the Future - and evoked extra-terrestrial
landscapes with crazy vegetation. His 'concrete irrationality' - as in
Los Porrones (1935) - is less savage than
Dali's.
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Wolfgang Paalen, who also played a part
in the revival of automatism, had a fine, meditative mind, rather given to
philosophical speculations. He had been born in Vienna, and had spent his
youth travelling in Austria, Germany and Italy. He settled in Paris in
1928, and belonged first to the Abstraction-Creation group. He joined the
surrealists in 1935, and presented them with a 'new method of forcing
inspiration': fumage. This process involved the interpretation of marks
left on a surface by a candle flame, and
Paalen used it in the composition
of handsome nocturnes showing phantom-like beings in murky landscapes
(Battle of the Saturnian Princes, 1938).
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Wolfgang Paalen
Battle of the Saturnian Princes
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Paalen had theories about the
'super-conscious', a state of ecstasy which he felt that surrealism should
encourage. He said 'The super-conscious, beyond the unconscious and the
conscious, is the third rang of the ladder of intellectual behaviour'. He
cut himself off from the surrealists for a time because he disagreed with
their analysis of Hegel's thought, and because he believed they failed to
attach enough importance to Einstein and to modern physics; but after he
had founded the ephemeral 'Dynaton' movement in Mexico, he returned to
surrealism, which he enriched by new experiments in what he called
'multi-dimensional space'.
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Victor Brauner,
Yves Tanguy
and Jacques Herold
Exquisite Corpse
1932 |
Andre Breton was delighted by the
arrival on the scene of
Victor Brauner, who was brought into the
surrealist circle in 1933 by his friends
Giacometti and
Tanguy.
Breton
immediately recognized in him the kind of painter he had been appealing
for since the Second Manifests, and wrote a vibrant preface highly
praising the works that
Brauner exhibited at the Galerie Pierre in 1934.
Brauner was Romanian, and ever since his first exhibition held in
Bucharest in 1924, when he was twenty-one, he had shown an acute sense of
the fantastic image. One of his pictures, Leisures, showed men
playing football with their own heads.
When he arrived in Paris in 1930, he immediately set about studying every
possible transformation of the human face. He painted canvases divided
into multiple compartments, and showed in each a different metamorphosis
of a being : Morphology
of man (1933);
The Strange Case of Monsieur K. (1933).
One of the strange things about him was
his preoccupation with mutilation of the eyes. He had painted a
self-portrait in 1931 in which he showed himself with one eye crushed and
his cheek covered in blood. He never knew what made him paint this picture
in this way. He subsequently painted figures with horns coming out of
their eyes, and others who looked in despair at an eye which had been
plucked out. In The hast Journey (1937), a man sits sadly on a
giant eye, while a monster rushes away with another eye clutched in its
fingers. On 27 August 1938, at a studio party,
Brauner tried to separate
two friends who were quarrelling, and was struck in the face by a bottle
thrown by
Dominguez. His left eye was put out. Everyone was stupefied, and
felt that Brauner had announced years ago that this accident was going to
happen — the more so since in
1932, in Mediterranean landscape, and in
1935, in Magic of the seashore, he had shown himself with his eye
pierced by an instrument with the letter D,
Dominguez' initial, on its
handle. Never had the surrealist idea of the mediumistic 'message' been as
conclusively vindicated as in
Brauner's case. Every one of his paintings
was a message which had matured in the light of his presentiments.
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After this event, which revealed to him
his powers of clairvoyance,
Victor Brauner's painting changed, left the
realm of cruel satire, and turned towards the universe of magic. He delved
into the spirit of witches' spells, and studied the treatises of Cornelius
Agrippa and Paracelsus. After the hypnotic paintings of his 'period of
Chimaeras' with their mysterious apparitions in the dusk (such as The
Inner Life, 1939), he began to make extraordinary pictures in wax,
which expressed abstruse, hermetic myths with a conviction and eloquence
which had rarely been achieved before him by other artists who shared his
interest in the occult.
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Victor Brauner
Frica as Fear
1950 |
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When
Hans Bellmer showed the surrealists
his Doll (Poupee), in this too they recognized an example of the
revolutionary art for which they longed. This was a love-hate
object, symbolizing all the fascination which the female body inspires and
all the rejections or the real world. The Doll was born as the
result of
Bellmer's revolt against his father and against society. In
Berlin, where he lived, he worked as an industrial designer. For his own
amusement he drew sketches of little girls, and of tiny scraps of waste
which he picked up in the street. After seeing Max Reinhardt's production
of The Tales of Hoffmann, he was inspired by the story of the
automaton Coppelia to build an artificial girl.
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In 1933
Bellmer began to build his
Doll with the help of his wife, his brother and a young girl cousin.
Initially it was composed of some broom-handles fastened together and
articulated. Bellmer wanted to give it an inner life by making six
'panoramas' which could be seen by pushing a button on its breast. While
he was working on the Doll he studied unusual physical attitudes
and then made a first naturalistic version which he photographed. An
object which
he made at this time, The Machine gun in a state
of grace, a weapon whose barrel is a female body, is a clear
indication of his intention to use his creations to repel the invading
forces of the world. Then he returned to his favourite theme and made a
new Doll with two pairs of legs arranged round the central core of
a 'stomach ball'. The photographs he took of this in a garden inspired
Paul Eluard's prose poems Les Jeux de la poupee (1938).
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Hans Bellmer
The
Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace
1937
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Hans Bellmer
A
Thousand Girls
1939 |
In 1938, after the death of his wife,
Bellmer took up permanent residence in Paris. His drawings and paintings,
which all start from the theme of the doll, expressed his 'interanatomic
dreams'. He dissected what he called the 'physical unconscious', the
images which a man can create for himself of his own body or of that of
the woman he desires. He composed hybrid women, most frequently by giving
concrete form to various attitudes in one image. 'If, instead of selecting
only three or four moments of a movement (as is done, for instance, in
manuals of gymnastics), all these movements are added integrally and in
the form of an object, the result is a visual synthesis of the curves and
surfaces along which each point of the body moves', he wrote in his
Anatomie de I'image (1957). He also evoked 'the strange object, the
tragic and mysterious trace which would be left by a nude thrown from a
window on to the pavement'. All these bodies, made up of a head and limbs
which are split or transposed, are plastic anagrams, menacing variations
on the theme of desire.
A number of key formulae have been used
over the years to define the work of the surrealists. These are not
orders, given by
Breton, and used as recipes; they are the cardinal
virtues of surrealism in which all its artists were steeped, and on which
they were all brought up. The first among these is 'convulsive beauty',
the beauty which results from a sharp conflict between movement and
immobility, and which implies an extreme tension of the being, and a
delirious agitation kept secret or compressed by circumstances.
Breton has
given as an example of this a locomotive abandoned in a virgin forest. The
second value is 'objective chance', that is the sum total of the
coincidences which control a destiny. The third is 'black humour'. This
form of humour has nothing derisive about it; on the contrary, because of
its tragic undertones, it constitutes a kind of poetic terrorism. The
fourth value, amour fou, 'extravagant love', is easily enough
understood. It is this that ensures that in most surrealist works the
image of woman shines out like that of a guardian goddess. Naturally no
surrealist painter ever set out with the intention of creating a picture
of 'convulsive beauty' or 'black humour'. The surrealists expressed these
values almost despite themselves, because of the forces which animated the
action of the group, and which as a result demanded that the temperament
of the group should exalt certain qualities in preference to others.
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Hans Bellmer
Untitled |
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