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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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Breton, Desnos, Delteil, Simonne
Breton, Paul and Gala Eluard, Baron, Ernst
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CHAPTER SEVEN
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The object
Meret Oppenheim
Joseph Cornell
Jacques Doucet
Jean
Benoit
Elsa Schiaparelli
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Andre Breton
Self-Portrait
1929 |
The object is an even more typically surrealist creation
than the collage. Surrealism imposed the object on modern art, and brought
it into competition with sculpture, which was thus forced to redefine
itself on the basis of the object. Connoisseurs of objects had existed in
the past, but their choice was limited to curios and antiquities. The
writer C.C. Lichtenberg was the first to set out - in the 'pocket almanach'
of Gottingen, 1798 - a list of a collection of absurd instruments,
including 'a double children's spoon for twins', 'a mobile bed for moving
around the bedroom in, during the night', and, most famous of all, 'a
bladeless knife with the handle missing'. The aim of this list was to pour
scorn on the ignorant collectors of the day, who were prepared to buy
anything. Following his example, the surrealists at first pursued a
satirical aim. They wanted to question the utility of domestic objects,
and the worth of objets d'art, by comparing them with products of
pure fantasy.
It was only later that they renewed the psychology of
the object by giving it a deeper significance and increasing its extension
to human life, and by making it indispensable to the development of
thought. To understand the cult of the object, which came about without
any aesthetic intention, one must first know of its multiple variations,
which tall into clearly defined categories. In 1936 the first group
exhibition of objects was held at the Galerie Charles Ratton in Paris, and
an attempt was made on this occasion to present the works in some form of
classification. This classification today seems inadequate, and needs
corrections in the light of the whole range of surrealist inventions. I
shall therefore analyse point by point the different genres of objects
which have been used or invented since the start of the movement.
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The found object (objef
trouve).
Surrealism has often urged the intrinsic worth of the found object, and
the only purpose of those frequent forays down to the Flea Market which
Breton extolled at the
time of Nadja (1928) was the discovery of such objects. The tound
object is one which when seen among a large
number of other objects possesses an attraction - the art or the jamais
vu, the 'never before seen'. It is usually an
old-fashioned manufactured object, whose practical function is not evident
and about whose origins nothing is known. There is an element of passion
in the impulse to acquire it or to stop in front of it. Surrealist
commentaries showed that the found object was capable of providing a
surprise solution to a problem which one had been trying in vain to solve.
In this way an old fencing-mask, which
Giacometti
found,
enabled him to resume work on a sculpture which he had left unfinished.
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The natural object.
This may be a root or a seashell, but the surrealists always preferred
stones.
Breton
organized group walks to look for stones, sometimes on the banks of the
Seine; he saw in the mineral kingdom 'the domain of signs and
indications'. The interpretation of the stones which one finds is
considered to satisfy and develop the poetic sense, which needs to be
educated in man. In La Langue des pierres,
Breton stated the methods
of the cult : 'Stones - particularly hard stones - go on talking to those
who wish to hear them. They speak to each listener according to his
capabilities; through what each listener knows, they instruct him in what
he aspires to know.' The discovery of a bed of stones on a drizzly day
in the country gave
Breton 'the perfect
illusion of treading the ground of the Earthly Paradise'. The divinatory
nature of stones, and the 'second state' which they induce in the
connoisseur, are found only where the stones have been discovered as the
result of a special expedition.
Breton said that an
unusual stone found by chance is of less value than one which has been
sought for and longed for.
The interpreted found object.
This is most frequently an ornament or a utensil which has been converted
by sleight of hand into a bizarre object.
Dominguez was
particularly gifted in this way : Arrival of the Belle Epoque
(1936) is a statuette of a woman cut in two, with the hips separated from
the body by a picture frame. Never (1938) is an old phonograph,
painted white, with a woman's legs emerging from the horn. The
Surrealist Elephant is
Dali's
transformation of a little coral elephant by the addition of bird's feet,
lobster's antennae and the shell of a sea-snail ridden by a wax mahout.
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Oscar Dominguez
Caja con Piano y Toro
1936
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The interpreted natural object.
In this case, a poetic camouflage either
entirely conceals the characteristics of the root or the stone on which it
is based, or on the other hand faithfully follows its suggestions. The
Garden of Giacometti after Max Ernsf's Visit is the best example. At
Majola in 1934,
Max Ernst
took chunks of granite from a stream close to
Giacometti's house,
and turned them into objects by colouring them or slightly hollowing them
out. These were among the origins of his first major sculptures.
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The readymade.
This term can be applied only to an industrially mass-produced object
whose function is altered, and which is dragged from its context of
automatic reproduction in the most ingenious way possible. In 1916
Marcel Duchamp took a
grey steel comb and wrote on it : '3 or 4 drops of height have nothing to
do with savagery'. With this addition, there would be a reluctance to use
this comb for combing one's hair. It has become to a certain degree
untouchable, because the artist has made it into the receptacle of his
thought. This is the readymade, the art of turning the most material thing
into a thing of the mind.
Duchamp refined this idea, and designed the 'mythological
readymade', such as Why not sneeze (1921, Philadelphia,
Museum of Art), a bird-cage containing imitation sugar lumps made of
marble, a thermometer and a cuttlefish bone.
Marcel Duchamp, the
inventor of the genre, was followed by other creators of readymades :
Man Ray's Gift
(1921), a flat-iron with its ironing surface bristling with nails, was
a remarkable example.
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Marcel Duchamp
Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy?
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Man Ray
Indestructible Object
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The assemblage.
This is made up of natural objects or found objects arranged to form a
sculpture. In 1939
Andre
Masson made some
handsome assemblages - Bottom of the Sea, Caryatid and The Great
Lady - from material he found washed up on the beaches of Brittany.
Max Ernst's best
assemblage, Are You Niniche? (1956), was made by using two yokes
and a printing plate.
The incorporated object.
This is an object associated with a painting or
a sculpture in such a way that it cannot be removed without depriving the
work of its raison d'etre.
Miro has made a number of
famous picture-objects, such as The Spanish Dancer (1928, Chicago,
private collection), where a hatpin and a feather are fastened to the
virgin canvas. This kind of use of the object is close to collage.
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The phantom object.
Described by
Andre Breton
in Les Vases communicants (1932) on the basis of the
'envelope-silence' which he had designed with one side bordered with
eyelashes and a handle to hold it by, the phantom object is an object
which might be made, but which is instead merely suggested by a verbal or
graphic description. The oddest phantom object is Luis Bunuel's
Giraffe. He imagined the construction of a wooden effigy of the animal
with the spots on the body mounted on hinges so that they could be opened,
each revealing a different spectacle similar to the dreamlike sequences of
his films. The phantom object can also be an object which does not exist,
but whose existence, by some subterfuge, is made to be felt and its
absence regretted. For example, The Invisible Object (1934-5), by
Giacometti, is a
woman whose hands clutch at empty space, holding something which does not
exist but to which the sculptor seems to have given volume, although it
cannot be seen. Another example is
Man Ray's Destroyed
object, which he burnt, photographing all the stages of its
destruction.
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The dreamt object.
According to
Breton, this corresponds
to 'the need, inherent in the dream, to magnify and to dramatize'. It is a
humble, familiar object, which by some caprice of desire is given a
sumptuous appearance. The most remarkable is
Meret Oppenheim's
Cup, saucer and spoon in fur (1936, New York, Museum of Modern Art).
The Wheelbarrow (1937) decked out in red satin by
Dominguez, and
Kurt Seligmann's winged
soup tureen are also dreamt objects. By extension this term can also be
applied to any object in which a fantastic mise en scene is used.
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Remedios Varo, Meret Oppenheim
and Leonora Carrington
An Animated Portrayal of Female Surrealists
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Man Ray
Portrait of Meret Oppenheim
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Meret Oppenheim
Object (Luncheon in Fur)
1936
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Meret Oppenheim
My Nurse
1936
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The box.
This object comprises the arrangement of various elements brought together
in a box. Joseph
Cornell was the greatest creator of boxes; although he always
wanted to stay independent of surrealism, he remained associated with it
by his creative experience and by his friendships. In 1930
Cornell began to make
collages, inspired by
Ernst's
La Femme 100 Tetes, and his first box, shown in 1936 in the
exhibition of 'Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism', was followed by many
others which he showed in New York in 1939.
Cornell's glazed boxes,
whose bottoms are lined with newspapers or astronomical prints, contain
flasks, glasses, crystal cubes, balls, feathers, all set out in a striking
arrangement. Some of his boxes evoke imaginary streets or hotels, others
are bird cages or jewel caskets containing coloured sand on which various
pieces of debris rest.
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Joseph
Cornell
Eclipsing binary, algol, with magnitude
changes
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Joseph
Cornell
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born December 24, 1903, Nyack,New York, U.S.
died December 29, 1972, New York, New York
U.S. artist, one of the originators of the form of sculpture called
assemblage, in which unlikely objects are joined together in an unorthodox
unity.
Cornell was self-taught, and in the 1930s and 1940s he associated with
Surrealist artists and writers, concerned with expressing the
subconscious, his works being presented in the first U.S. exhibition of
Surrealists (New York City, 1932).
Many of Cornell's works take the form of glass-fronted boxes containing
objects and collage elements arranged in enigmatic, often poetic
juxtaposition. Recurrent themes and motifs include astronomy, music,
commedia dell'arte, birds, seashells, broken crystal, and souvenirs of
travel. Chocolat Menier (1950), for example, is a spare yet fancifulboxed
collage of tattered labels and worn surfaces.
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Marcel Duchamp
Rotary
Hemisphere (Precision Optics)
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The optical machine.
In 1920
Marcel Duchamp worked in
New York on his first optical machine (New Haven, Yale University), whose
motor turned five glass plates on which white and black lines created an
optical illusion. The second optical machine, Rotary hemisphere,
commissioned and financed by the couturier Jacques Doucet, was
made in 1925. This was a glass globe surrounded by a copper disc which
bore an inscription. The Rotoreliefs which
Duchamp showed at the
Concours Lepine in 1935 were a series of six cardboard discs whose front
and rear surfaces bore twelve spiral-based designs. When these discs were
spun on a gramophone turntable, they gave the impression of expanding
forms, like flowers coming to life and dancing.
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Jacques
Doucet
(1924 – 1994)
French surrealist painter
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Jacques
Doucet
Croisee |
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Jacques
Doucet
Les Petites Alpilles
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Jacques
Doucet
Sans titre
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Jacques
Doucet
Jeune fille Indienne
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Jacques
Doucet
Nomades, aux abords du grand désert blanc
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Jacques
Doucet
Untitled
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Jacques
Doucet
Veines du glacier
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The poem-object.
Invented by
Andre Breton, who was in
fact the only person to provide valid examples, this is a kind of relief
which incorporates objects in the words of a poetic declaration so as to
form a homogeneous whole. For example, in Communication relative to
objective chance (1929), a text written at the top of the panel has
numbered references, each of which is represented below by an object.
The mobile and mute object.
When he made The Hour of Traces (1930),
Giacometti launched
the idea of a 'mobile and mute object'. A wooden ball with a notch was
suspended by a violin string over a crescent. The spectator was tempted to
slide the notch in the ball along the
edge of the crescent, but the length of the string allowed him to slide it
only part of the way. So we have an irritating, disconcerting object, one
element of which moves although the necessity for the movement is not
clearly perceptible.
Giacometti designed several 'mobile and mute objects' for Le
Surrealisme аu service de la Revolution, no. 3, and accompanied them
by commentaries in which he associated them with childhood memories.
Giacometti soon lost
interest in this kind of object, but the genre continued to exist. It is
recalled by
Calder's
Mobiles, which are likewise objects
whose movement teases and intrigues the spectator.
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Alexander Calder
Mobile |
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Gherasim Luca
Vierge a la Colonne
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The symbolically functioning object.
This was invented by
Dali,
inspired by
Giacometti.
Dali
has defined it as an
object produced by an 'objective perversion', which expresses a repressed
desire or allows a compensatory satisfaction of the libido. He made one
consisting of a woman's shoe inside which was placed a glass of milk. The
'symbolic function' took the form of putting into the milk a sugar lump on
which the picture of a shoe had been painted. The object was complemented
by various accessories, including a box of spare sugar lumps.
Dali also made The
Aphrodisiac Jacket (1936), to which were attached fifty glasses of
peppermint, The Atmospheric Chair, whose seat was replaced by bars
of chocolate, and one of whose feet rested on a door handle so as to make
the chair unstable, and The Hypnagogic Clock, which consisted of
twelve inkwells baked into a loaf of bread, each of them containing a
quill pen of a different colour. He proposed subdivisions of symbolically
functioning objects : transubstantiated objects (straw watches), objects
for throwing (made to be hurled violently against a 'pedestal wall'),
wrapped objects (which could not be seen), etc. 'Museums will become full
of objects whose uselessness, size and cumber-someness will make it
necessary to build special towers to house them in the deserts', he said
ironically. Valentine Hugo made a symbolically functioning object which
included two hands - one white, and holding a dice, and the other red,
placed together on a green roulette cloth, and caught in a network of
white threads.
The objectively offered object.
This was the term used by Gherasim Luca in his book Le Vampire
passif (1945) - a document which illustrates the psychology or the
object in the surrealist movement - to denote a kind of object made while
thinking of the person for whom it was intended. In this way the object
can be used as a vehicle for sentimental or intellectual exchanges, and
becomes a qualitative description which can be interpreted like a rebus.
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Salvador Dali
Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically
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The being-object.
This too was invented by
Dali,
who describes it in one of his articles in Minotaure
('Being-objects are strange bodies of space'), and cites as a model a
statue of Marshal Ney in a fog. In
this article he shows how to give a person the various characteristics of
a symbolically functioning object. Although
Dali donned masks to produce
in the spectator 'the mysterious vertigo of strange bodies', the
'being-object' would have remained only a mental conception had not
Dali's ideas been carried
through and corroborated by his successors. Jean Benoit created
being-objects in the shape of bizarre ceremonial costumes. On 2 December
1959, for the 'Execution of the Will of the Marquis de Sade', performed in
Paris specially for the surrealists, Jean Benoit donned once again
the costume he had made in 1950. This consisted of a jumper, a medallion,
a mask, wings, 'anti-eurythmic' shoes, and crutches, and enabled him to
incarnate a 'totem of man-liberty'. Benoit explained : 'All the
items of the costume interlock, fit to one another, or superimpose
themselves one on another. They can both 'unfold' themselves for the wall,
and form a vast panoply'. By extension, any object of human appearance,
such as
Bellmer's
Doll, can be described as a 'being-object'.
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Jean Benoit
(From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Jean Benoit is an artist called "The Enchanter of Serpents," best known
for his surrealist sculptures. He was born in Quebec, Canada, and studied
art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Montréal where he met Mimi
Parent whom he married in 1948. He met Andre Breton in 1959, joined the
Surrealist group that same year. In 1959 he also performed
Exécution
Du Testament Du Marquis De Sade
for which he made
costumes. The dark, grotesque characters wear sharp, seemingly-mechanical
pieces mixed biomorphic, anamilistic shapes that make the humans look like
torture devices. Breton mentioned Benoit in Surrealism and Painting:
"STAND ASIDE to let the Marquis de Sade pass 'in his own likeness' and
reinvented by Jean Benoît with all his powers." One sculpture called "Book
Cover for Magnetic Fields" features demonic figures ripping an egg from a
book. Magnetic Fields was the name of the book Breton wrote with
Philippe Soupault which Breton called the first surrealist book. Many of
his works include demonic figures, brutal sexual images, exaggerated
phalluses, and so on.
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Jean Benoit
Execution
Du Testament Du Marquis De Sade
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Jean Benoit
The Eagle, Miss...
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Jean Benoit
The same Way
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Jean Benoit
Adam and Eve
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Jean Benoit
The Magnetic Fields
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Jean Benoit
Fad in head
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Jean Benoit
Untitled
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Jean Benoit
The Necrophile
1964-65
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Jean Benoit
Costume for the Execution of the Testament
of the Marquis de Sade
1950
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Jean Benoit
Costume for the Execution of the Testament
of the Marquis de Sade
1950
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Jean Benoit
Costume for the Execution of the Testament
of the Marquis de Sade
1950
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Jean Benoit
Untitled
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Jean Benoit
Untitled
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Jean Benoit
Untitled
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Jean Benoit
Untitled
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Jean Benoit
Untitled
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Jean Benoit
Untitled
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This list does not include 'mathematical
objects', which were dear to
Man Ray and
Max Ernst,
who singled them out at the Institut Henri Poincare : these are only a
variety of found object. Nor does it include primitive objects, which
belong to a different category of interest. I have excluded jewel objects
(Meret Oppenheim and
Alexander Calder produced some examples), for they can clearly be included
among dreamt objects. Many non-surrealist painters have added new elements
to the tradition of the object which the surrealists established.
Rauschenberg's
'combine painting' and
Arman's 'accumulations' prove that the most
original results are still attributable to the ideas mentioned above.
There would not have been such a vast range of possibilities in this field
had it not been for surrealist action. We would not have passed beyond the
Dada object, which was limited to one variety, and which, in order to
provoke the idea of destruction, set out to be horrible, whereas the
surrealist object set out to be sumptuous while using the simplest means,
and to exalt the nuances of analogical thought.
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Rauschenberg
Odalisk
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Arman
Violon cubiste
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Elsa Schiaparelli
Shoe hat
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Elsa Schiaparelli
Monkey Fur Shoes
1938
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