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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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Man Ray, Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy, Andre Breton.
Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dali, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Rene Clevel
1930
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CHAPTER SIX
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Across the world
Rene Magritte
Paul Delvaux
Raoul Ubac
Wilhelm
Freddie
Jindrich Styrsky
Toyen
Roland Penrose
Paul Nash
Eileen Agar
Edward Burra
Stellan Morner
Erik Olson
Esaias Thoren
Sven
Jonson
Waldemar Lorentzon
Axel Olson
Rita Kernn-Larsen
Taro Okamoto
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Paul Eluard
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From 1935 to 1938
Andre Breton and
Paul Eluard led a vigorous propaganda campaign aimed at 'the
internationalization of surrealist ideas'. Their lectures and their
contacts with the leaders of the avant-garde in many countries showed that
the Paris group was looking for a universal audience, and trying to ensure
the widest possible availability of precise information about the ideology
of surrealism. But world-wide interest in surrealism had been aroused long
before this, and the movement had attracted supporters throughout the
world.
At the urging of the poet Marko Ristic,
Yugoslav surrealism was born as early as 1924, the year in which the first
Manifeste du surrealisme was published. The Yugoslav surrealists
set out their principles in the Belgrade Declaration of 1930, a
document whose signatories could hardly have suspected that fifteen years
later they would be holding high office in public life : Kosta Popovic was
to become Foreign Minister, and Marko Ristic ambassador in Paris. In 1931
their review Nadrealizam danas i ovde ('Surrealism here and now')
presented experiments similar to those which were being conducted by their
Parisian friends. For example, there was an 'essay in the simulation of
paranoiac delirium' in which six painters and poets each gave their
interpretation of an old wall. They carried out a survey on the question
'Is humour a moral attitude?' Among the painters in the Yugoslav
surrealist group were Zivanovic-Noe and Vane Bor, who wrote an open letter
to Dali explaining that
he chose his colours for their smell, their name, and the shape of the
tube.
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Nusch Eluard
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Nusch Eluard
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Paul Eluard
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born Dec. 14, 1895, Saint-Denis, Paris, Fr.
died Nov. 18, 1952, Charenton-le-Pont
pseudonym of Eugène Grindel French poet, one of the founders of the
Surrealist movement and one of the important lyrical poets of the 20th
century.
In 1919 Éluard made the acquaintance of the Surrealist poets André Breton,
PhilippeSoupault, and Louis Aragon, with whom he remained in close
association until 1938. Experiments with new verbal techniques, theories
on the relation between dream and reality, and the free expression of
thought processes produced Capitale de la douleur (1926; “Capital ofSorrow
”), his first important work, which was followed by La Rose publique
(1934; “The Public Rose”) and Les Yeux fertiles (1936; “The Fertile
Eyes”). The poems in these volumes are generally considered the best to
have come outof the Surrealist movement. At this time Éluard also
explored, with André Breton, the paths of mental disorders inL'Immaculée
Conception (1930).
After the Spanish Civil War Éluard abandoned Surrealist experimentations.
His late work reflects his political militance and a deepening of his
underlying attitudes: the rejection of tyranny, the search for happiness.
In 1942 he joined the Communist Party. His poems dealing with the
sufferings and brotherhood of man, Poésie et vérité (1942; “Poetry and
Truth”), Au rendez-vous allemand (1944; “To the German Rendezvous”), and
Dignes de vivre (1944; “Worthy of Living”), were circulated clandestinely
during World War II and served to strengthen the morale of the Resistance.
After the war his Tout dire (1951; “Say Everything”) and Le Phénix (1951)
added, in simple language and vivid imagery, to the great body of French
popular lyrical poetry.
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In Belgium too, surrealism found an
immediate echo. A group was formed in 1926 by the poets E.L.T. Mesens and
Marcel Lecomte, the theoretician Paul Nouge, the dealer Camille Goemans,
and the painter
Rene Magritte.
They founded a review, Varietes, in 1928, in which they set out
their position vis a vis the 'Modern Spirit'.
The man who dominated Belgian surrealism
from the start was the incomparable
Rene Magritte, who
created the most astounding visual dialectic of our time. Magritte had
been a reluctant student at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and
in 1922, the year in which he married, he became a designer in a wallpaper
factory.
Magritte
spent some time doing abstract painting in association with Victor
Servranckx. But by chance he came across a magazine reproduction of The
Lope Song by
Chirico,
which showed him the way he was to follow. In 1924 he painted the picture
which he considered to be his point of departure. This showed a window
seen from inside a room, with, outside the window, a hand trying to catch
a bird in flight. Another picture which he did shortly afterwards showed a
woman with a rose in place of her heart.
In 1926, the support which
Magritte got from the
Galerie 'Le Centaure' enabled him to take up painting full time. He lived
in France from 1927 to 1930, first in Paris, where he contributed to La
Revolution Surrealiste, and later in Perreux, north-west of Lyons.
During this period he produced a great many pictures, some of them of
enormous size. He outgrew the influence of
Chirico, which is
still
apparent in The Difficult Crossing (1926) and The Flying Statue
(1927). In Threatening Weather (London, Roland Penrose
collection), which has a female torso, a tuba, and a chair suspended over
the horizon, Magritte tried to explain the 'why' - or rather the 'why not'
- of the exterior world. His shapes were still crude, and his colours of a
mineral hardness.
In The Passer-by (1929), a
cloud-flecked sky-blue silhouette outlined against a wall, he began to use
a kind of contrast which he always valued. He invented a repertory of
'problems', which implied 'object lessons', and used telling combinations
to make the familiar strange. He based himself in this on the following
principles : enlargement of a detail (an immense apple or rose filling up
all the space in a room), the association of complementaries (the
leaf-bird or the leaf-tree, the mountain-eagle, etc.), the animation of
the inanimate (the shoe with toes, the dress with breasts), the mysterious
opening (the door swinging open on to an unexpected view), material
transformation of creatures (a person made of cut-out paper, or a stone
bird flying above the rocks of the seashore), and anatomical surprises
(the hand whose wrist is a woman's face).
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Andre Breton wrote later
in Les Vases communicants: 'The highest endeavour to which poetry
can aspire is to compare two objects as remote as possible from one
another, or, by any method whatsoever, to bring them into confrontation in
an abrupt and striking way'.
Magritte was totally committed to this task, and constantly varied
its possibilities. He was also able to bring two closely related objects
together and to bring out the differences between them, or to put an
object at odds with the name used to describe it. This confrontation
between the word and the object, between the drawing and the writing,
enabled him to give the spectator the kind of revelatory shock which can
be seen in Vertigo (1943), where he painted a female nude with the
word 'Tree' written across her stomach.
Magritte was often moved by brief
flashes of illumination. One day he saw his wife eating a chocolate bird,
and immediately produced an image of a young woman eating a live bird,
with its blood flowing over her hands. On another occasion a glimpse of
the lathe-turned feet of a table inspired him to paint the huge
wood-turnings of the landscape in Annunciation (1928, Brussels,
E.L.T. Mesens collection).
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Magritte
is a painter of revelations. His painting excludes symbols and myths, and
he is not a prospector of the invisible. He transmits faithfully what is
revealed to him by his attentive contemplation of reality. Even when he
changes its meaning, he bases himself on the object which inspires him. In
1934 he wrote in the Belgian periodical Documents: 'We must never,
at any price, depart from the reality of the element which has delivered
up its secret to us. This is a point of reference.'
In The Human Condition (1934,
Paris, Claude Spaak collection), a painting on an easel allows us to see,
by its apparent transparence, the landscape exactly behind it. This
picture is the essence of
Magritte.
He paints transparent enigmas, and his mysteries are always crystal clear,
livery one of his paintings is an act of poetic reflection on the nature
of the world. He does not try to find new solutions to old problems, but
sets new problems which bring back into play all the solutions which have
already been found. Perpetual motion (1934), The Rаре (1934)
and The Amorous Perspective (1935, Brussels, Robert Giron
collection) were the first masterpieces of this wholly committed
style. Like
Dali,
Magritte needed a
scrupulously academic technique to give maximum precision to the
extraordinary content of his paintings. From 1940 to 1946, the period
which his friend Scutenaire described as 'full sunlight',
Magritte tried to paint
like the impressionists, playing with the efflorescences of colour.
Fortunately he reverted to his normal style, where technique is the
servant of the idea. Towards the end of his life Magritte experimented
with the transposition of the idea from one medium to another. (La
folie des grandeurs, 1961-6).
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Rene Magritte
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born Nov. 21, 1898, Lessines, Belg.
died Aug. 15, 1967, Brussels
Belgian artist, one of the most prominent Surrealist painters whose
bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril, comedy, and mystery. His
works were characterized by particular symbols—the female torso, the
bourgeois “little man,” the bowler hat, the castle, the rock, the window,
and others.
After studying at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts (1916–18), Magritte
became a designer for a wallpaper factory and then did sketches for
advertisements. In 1922 hesaw a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico's
painting “The Song of Love” (1914), an evocative and haunting
juxtaposition of odd elements (a classical bust and a rubber glove among
them) in a dreamlike architectural space; it had a great influence on
Magritte's mature style. For the next fewyears he was active in the
Belgian Surrealist movement. With the support of a Brussels art gallery,
he became a full-time painter in 1926.
His first solo show was held in 1927. It was not well received by the art
critics of the day. That same year he and his wife moved to a suburb of
Paris. There he met and befriended several of the Paris Surrealists,
including poets André Bretonand Paul Éluard, and he became familiar with
the collages of Max Ernst. In 1930 Magritte returned to Brussels, where
(except for the occasional journey) he remained for the rest of his life.
During the 1940s he experimented with a variety of styles, sometimes, for
example, incorporating elements of impressionism, but the paintings he
produced in this period were not successful by most accounts, and he
eventually abandoned the experimental. For the rest of his life he
continued to produce his enigmatic and illogical images in a readily
identifiable style. In his last year he supervised the construction of
eight bronze sculptures derived from images in his paintings.
The sea and wide skies, which were enthusiasms of his childhood, figure
strongly in his paintings. In “Threatening Weather” (1928) the clouds have
the shapes of a torso, a tuba, and a chair. In “The Castle of the
Pyrenees” (1959) a huge stone topped by a small castle floats above the
sea. Other representative fancies were a fish with human legs, a man with
a bird cage for a torso, and a gentleman leaning over a wall beside his
pet lion. Dislocations of space, time, and scale were common elements. In
“Time Transfixed” (1939), for example, a steaming locomotive is suspended
from the centre of a mantelpiece in a middle-class sitting room, looking
as if it had just emerged from a tunnel. In “Golconda” (1953) bourgeois,
bowler-hatted men fall like rain toward a street lined with houses.
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Paul Delvaux came across
surrealism in 1936. Before this, he had studied architecture at the
Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and had then painted in a
naturalistic impressionistic style. He showed paintings in this style in
his first exhibition at the Galerie Manteau in 1926. But at a group
exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, he was deeply impressed by works
by Chirico and
Magritte. He set off on
a parallel road, and first broached the style which was to become his own
in Procession in Lace (1936, Brussels, Jean Giron collection),
clothed women moving towards a triumphal arch, and in Woman with a rose
(1936), who bends down to pluck a flower in a corridor, and in The
Sleeping Town (1938, Brussels, Robert Giron collection), a weird night
scene observed by a man from the threshold of his house.
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Delvaux visited Italy,
where his study of the painters of the Quattrocento confirmed him in his
taste for linear perspective, for architecture, and for women of ideal
proportions. In Nocturne (1939) and The Visit (1939), he
showed flesh as a function of enchantment; his naked women are
materializations of moonbeams. In Dawn over the town (1940) and
Entry into the town (1940, Brussels, Robert Giron collection), he
produces an astounding contrast by introducing into a crowd of naked women
and youths an austerely dressed man who remains totally indifferent to his
surroundings. When he brings skeletons into scenes of this kind, they seem
to be tamed and vanquished by the splendour of the nudes.
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Paul Delvaux
Entry into the City
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The war inspired him to paint The Anxious Town (1941,
Brussels, Dr Demol collection), where almost a hundred characters in a
city are in a state of panic, as if a storm were approaching the Earthly
Paradise. So many of Delvaux'
pictures - The Hands (1941), in which one of the clothed figures is
the painter himself, The Echo (1943, Paris, Claude Spaak
collection), Iron Age (1951, Ostend) - show him to be a painter who
has best succeeded in combining modern beauty and the beauty of antiquity,
and in giving all his anxieties and all his hopes the radiant appearance
of the women of his dreams.
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Paul Delvaux
The Iron Age
1951 |
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Paul Delvaux
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born Sept. 23, 1897, Antheit, Liège, Belg.
died July 20, 1994, Veurne
Belgian Surrealist painter, whose canvases portray transfixed humans in a
mysterious time and place.
Delvaux studied first architecture, then painting at the Academie des
Beaux-Arts in Brussels. His early work, in the 1920s, was influenced by
Postimpressionism and Expressionism. Impressed by the Spaniard Salvador
Dalí, theItalian Giorgio de Chirico, and later his fellow Belgian René
Magritte, he joined their Surrealist ranks in the mid-1930s. When touring
Italy before World War II, he was influenced by its classic architecture
(as de Chirico had been) and by the early-16th-century Mannerist
paintings, which took liberties with form and space.
A representative Delvaux painting is “The Echo” (1943), in which three
somnambulistic nudes walk in tandem past dead temples, as if walking
through time. In “Entombment” (1951),skeletons bury fellow skeletons.
Major exhibitions of his work have been held in North and South America
and Africa as well as at many places in Europe; important awards have come
to him from Italy and Belgium. From 1950 to 1962 he was a professor of
painting in Brussels.
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Belgian surrealists also included
Raoul Ubac, who published an
album called L'Invention collective with
Magritte in 1935, and
who from about this period composed 'photo-reliefs', in which a relief
effect is produced by printing from positive and negative transparencies
superimposed and slightly out of register. In these photographs nudes and
statues seem to be completely fossilized. He later tried to transfer this
kind of effect into his burin engraving. Subsequently he went on to
sculptures in slate which have only a remote connection with his
surrealist period.
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Raoul Ubac
Group III
1939
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In Sweden, the Manifeste du
surre'alisme had inspired the poets Lundkvist, Ekelof, Vennberg and
Asklund and an anthology of surrealist poetry, Spektrum, was
published in 1933. Work on the visual aspects of surrealism was carried on
by the Halmstadgruppen (a group from Halmstad, a Swedish Baltic
coast town), which was led by G.A. Nilson, and included the painters
Stellan Morner, Erik Olson, Esaias Thoren, Sven
Jonson, Waldemar Lorentzon and Axel Olson. These
painters, after having originally defined their position as orthodox, took
up an eclectic imagery full of romantic reminiscences. These artists
stayed together, and in 1954 produced a collective set design for the
Halmstad theatre.
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Stellan Morner
(1896-1979)
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Lady Macbeth
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Dremland med hjdrtan |
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Dromland
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Composition
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Kandelabrarna och mormorsvasen |
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Drö |
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Erik Olson
(1901-1986) |

Poeten har vaknat |

Deus ex machina I
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Handsken or
kastad
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Aftonlandskap |
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Eko frеn skilda horisonter
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Sekaren |
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Sisyfos - Stenhuggaren
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Dagens Evangelium
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Stormen. Luften. Vattnet. Elden. Jorden
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Untitled
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Prismatic landscape
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Choc Meni
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Torsos
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Esaias Thoren
(1901-1981)
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Esaias Thoren
Huvudet med stensystrarna
1940
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Esaias Thoren
Spelet har borjat
1938
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Esaias Thoren
Forintelse
1938
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_____________
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Sven Jonson
(1902-1981)
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Sven Jonson
Meditation
1955
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Sven Jonson
Morgen
1941
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Sven Jonson
Preludium II
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Sven Jonson
Reliker
1937
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Waldemar Lorentzon
(1899-1984)
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Waldemar Lorentzon
Havet ger
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Waldemar Lorentzon
Kosmisk Moder
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Waldemar Lorentzon
Forlеt!
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Waldemar Lorentzon
Sallsam timme |

Waldemar Lorentzon
Odesnatt
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Waldemar Lorentzon
Kort gastspel
1937
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_____________
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Axel Olson
(1899-1986)
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Axel Olson
Gondoliar och blomsterflicka
1929
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Axel Olson
Gra figur
1923
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Axel Olson
Poeten har vaknat
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Axel Olson
Ogat
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In Denmark there was a group whose views
were contained in the review Konkretion, which first appeared in
1935. The group, which took part in the 'Cubist Surrealist Exhibition' in
Copenhagen, included the painters Henry Carlsson, Elsa Thoresen and
Rita Kernn-Larsen, and the sculptor Heerup.

Rita Kernn-Larsen
Valmue
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Rita Kernn-Larsen
Handelse i
fremtiden
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But the two outstanding
members were Wilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, who organized various surrealist
exhibitions, and who often wrote about the movement, and the greatest of
Danish surrealists,
Wilhelm Freddie.
In 1930, when he was twenty-one,
Freddie showed his picture Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite at the
Copenhagen Autumn Salon. This was the signal for the scandal which was
aroused by the introduction of surrealism into Denmark.
Freddie was
a follower of Dali in his use of aggressive phantoms; but, unlike
Dali, he was not able to
develop a personality eccentric enough to allow him to carry off his
artistic audacity. The English customs refused to admit Monument to war
and other pictures he sent to the London Surrealist Exhibition in
1936. In 1937 there were angry scenes at his Copenhagen exhibition
'Sex-Surreal', which included 'sado-masochistic interiors' and 'sensual
objects'. One protester was so infuriated that he hurled himself on
Freddie on the day of the opening and tried to strangle him. The
gallery was closed by the police, who confiscated the works on show, some
of which, including Monument to war, went to their 'black museum',
from which Freddie was not able to retrieve them until much later.
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Wilhelm Freddie
Sex-kanon
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Freddie began to impose his
personality in 1940. His new exhibition in Copenhagen drew an enormous
public, and his ballet, The Triumph of Lore, staged at hlsinore,
established his reputation. But the Nazi occupation of Denmark brought him
more troubles. He was wanted by the SS because of the attack he had made
on Hitler in his large picture Meditation on anti-Nazi love, and
was forced first into hiding and then to flee to Sweden. Not until after
the war was Freddie able to work without restrictions and to be judged at
his true worth.
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Jindrich Styrsky
Vitezslav Nezval "Sexualni
nocturno"
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Czechoslovak surrealism, which grew out
of the "Devetsil" group which combined all avant-garde tendencies, was
formulated in 1933 at the instance of the theoretician Karel Teige and the
poets Vitezslav Nezval and Konstantin Biebl.
Breton and Eluard had an
enthusiastic reception at the international surrealist exhibition in
Prague in 1935. The Czechoslovak group included the sculptor Makovsky, who
used all sorts of materials - stone, canvas, card - in his reliefs, and
the painters
Jindrich Styrsky and his wife
Toyen. Styrsky, born at
Cermna in 1899, began his career by illustrating the 'poetist' trend in
Czechoslovak painting. But in 1934 he began an extraordinary series of
collages, The Removal Office. Later he showed a series of paintings
- Roofs - but returned to collage during the war, working on
violently anti-clerical themes. He died in 1942, and a retrospective
exhibition of his work was held in Prague in 1946.
Styrsky's wife
Toyen was initially an
abstract painter, but rapidly developed towards a form of figurative
painting which recalled folk imagery. A major work in this style is The
Dancers (1925), immense figures in transparent veils, who parade
before minutes pectators who are holding bouquets and turning their backs
on the dancers.
Toyen
played an active part in the foundation of Czechoslovak surrealism, and
she became the country's greatest surrealist painter. In one period or her
work she showed a cracked and fissured universe : the human silhouette in
The Red Spectre (1934) and the night bird in The Voice of the
Forest (1934) are both covered in a network of cracks as if they were
about to disintegrate. Her first major exhibition in Prague in 1938 was
accompanied by the publication of monographs about her work and about that
of Styrsky. Her paintings are held together by her outstanding
draughtsmanship, which shows brilliantly in her series of drawings The
Spectres of the Desert (1937), The Shoot (1940) and Hide,
War (1944).
Her painting, with its subtle dreamlike quality, creates an outlandish
atmosphere by the use of sober means; a dress lifted at the window of
a house, showing on the wall the impression of a woman's body ; the
sky forms an angle from which a bird's nest is suspended ; lips and
hair form a stifling erotic dream-world; she makes any number of
discoveries which bring the surreal into action. Her self-effacing
attitude may have resulted in her name being left off the lists of the
great surrealists, but there is no doubt that she is an artist of the
first rank, who brought to painting something of what Kafka gave to
literature.
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Toyen (Marie Cerminova)
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Toyen
Shooting Range I
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Toyen
The Snap
Photocollage, 1967
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Alberto Martini
La finestra di psiche nella casa del poeta |
There was no real surrealist group in Italy. The
review Suirealismo, published by the writer Curzio Malaparte, was
not the mouthpiece of a group, but merely a selection of various
international writings about the movement. But some Italian painters were
inspired by the trend.
Alberto Martini, a painter born in 1876, had
illustrated the works of Mallarme, Рое and Rimbaud as early as 1911; his
extraordinary paintings, his albums of lithographs (Mysteries and
bantasies bham and cruel), his designs for sets and costumes for a
'theatre on whom
rumour had it that he had smashed pianos by the enthusiasm and vigour of
his performance. He gave a concert in Paris in 1914, organized by Les
Soirees de Paris with the support of Apollinaire, who announced to the
audience : 'You will see him play his piano. He sits there in
shirtsleeves, his monocle in his eye, and screams and yells while the
instrument does what it can to reach the musician's enthusiastic range.'
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Alberto Martini
Il conte Ugolino e l'arcivescovo
Ruggeri |

Alberto Martini
The turnip that the Prussians wanted to plant in Paris |
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Alberto Savinio wrote
music for operas and ballets, including The Death of Niobe,
produced in Rome in 1925. He also wrote a poem-cycle, Chants de la
Mi-Mort (1914), and astonishing stories, including the Introduction
a une vie de Mercure. He returned to Paris, and lived there from 1926
to 1934; during this time he began to paint, holding his first exhibition
at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in November 1927. His pictures were always
perfect irrational
images, and there is much in Henri Parisot's opinion that he was 'the
Fuseli
of the twentieth century'.
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Alberto Savinio
Sodome
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Henry Moore
Woman
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The appearance of English surrealism was
marked by the opening in June 1936 of the 'International Surrealist
Exhibition' at the New Burlington Galleries in London. This had been
organized by
Roland Penrose,
the painter and collector, who himself made collages and objects. More
than sixty artists took part. The star of the English section was
Paul Nash, who might have
been the best English surrealist painter, had not his versatility led him
to try every genre. Another leading exhibitor was Humphrey Jennings,
painter and film-maker, who painted oddly sophisticated pictures.
Henry Moore showed
sculptures which stood at the frontiers of dream and reality. Some of the
others who stood out were
Eileen
Agar, with her poetic objects, and the caricaturist
Edward Burra, whose
paintings were derivative of those of
Max Ernst.
On the evening
of the private view the guests were joined by a 'woman with a head of
flowers', whose head was entirely hidden in a bouquet of roses.
Salvador Dali turned up to
lecture wearing a diving suit and holding two white greyhounds on a leash.
The success and influence of this exhibition were remarkable. In 1938,
E.L.T. Mesens moved to London and took on the direction of the London
Gallery. Until June 1940 he published the London Bulletin and used
his expertise to support English surrealism.
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A surrealist group was founded in
Romania in 1933, but showed no original, individual development until much
later, when it adopted an attitude to life and art which was,
systematically, delirious. The moving spirit of this group was the poet
Gherasim Luca, who invented a new form of collage which he called 'cubomania'.
This consisted of cutting squares from illustrations and joining them up
in an arbitrary pattern. He got unexpected results from this, and brought
together a selection of these strange puzzles in his album Les Orgies
des Quanta (1946). He exhibited cubomanias in Bucharest and in Paris,
where he went to live.
In Japan, surrealism developed almost
immediately, thanks to the tireless proselytizing of the poet Shuzo
Takiguchi, who began to spread surrealist ideas, through his articles and
publications, as early as 1927. At first he disseminated the ideas of
surrealist poetry, but from 1930 on, he contributed to the rapid
development of the visual side of the movement, particularly by his
translation of what
Andre
Breton and Aragon had written about painting. A group of artists
formed around the review Mizue, in which Takiguchi published an
essay on 'Art and Surrealism'. From 1934 to 1936, the movement won a large
following among the Japanese public, and influenced painters and sculptors
through the formation of the Shin-Zokei ('New Plastic') association. In
June 1937, an International Surrealist Exhibition in Tokyo was a huge
success, and was put on in three other Japanese cities. A 'Surrealist
Album', with many reproductions, was put together for the occasion by
Takiguchi and Yamanaka. Takiguchi published a book called The
Metamorphoses of Modern Art in 1938, and monographs on
Dali (1939) and
Miro (1940). After an
eclipse due to the war, he resumed work and in 1958 set up a Centre of
Surrealist Studies in Tokyo. The best known Japanese surrealist painters
are Fukuzawa, Otsuka, Shimozato, Ayako Suzuki,
Shigeru Imai and Taro Okamoto.
Okamoto, who was in close touch with the
Paris group, is an especially representative figure. His father, Ippei,
was a satirical draughtsman, and his mother, Kanoko Okamoto, was a
novelist. He was born in Tokyo in 1911, and moved to Paris in 1929; in
1932 he exhibited at the 'Salon des Surindependants'. His work developed
in two directions, that of non-figurative art (he belonged at first to the
Abstraction-Creation movement) and that of fantastic imagery. He painted
numerous pictures, heavy with tragic irony, on the theme of ribbons
entwining bodies and holding them captive in enormous knots, as if to show
humanity imprisoned in the silken bonds of frivolity : examples are The
Dolorous Hand (1935) and The Woman Beribboned (1936). On his
return to Japan in 1940, Okamoto continued to work in his
half-abstract, halt-visionary style. Of all Japanese painters, he is among
those who have most thoroughly assimilated the message of the Western
avant-garde.
In other countries, including Egypt,
Turkey, and (after the war) Spain and Portugal, there were groups which
claimed to be surrealist, and which published periodicals, but all of them
concentrated more on verbal work than on visual creation. This spread of
surrealist activity throughout the world is a sufficiently convincing
proof that surrealism was tar from being the concern of a closed circle,
but was a response to a profound hope which had a universal place in man's
sensibilities.
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Taro Okamoto
(1911-1996)
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Taro Okamoto
Tower of the Sun
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Taro Okamoto
Myth of Tomorrow
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Taro Okamoto
Sculptures in Omotessando
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Taro Okamoto
Sculptures in Omotessando
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