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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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ADDITION
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From Surrealism to Fantastic Art
Surrealism, Dream art, Visionary art,
Neo-surrealism,
Magic realism, Psychedelic art,
Fantastic realism, Vienna School of Fantastic realism,
Fantastic art.

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Surrealism
(From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia)
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Surrealism
is a cultural movement that began in the mid-1920s, and is best known for
the visual artworks and writings of the group members. The works feature
the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur,
however many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an
expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost with the works
being an artifact, and leader André Breton was
explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary
movement. From the Dada activities of World War I
Surrealism was formed with the most important center of the movement in
Paris and from the 1920s spreading around the globe, eventually affecting
films such as the Angel's Egg and El Topo, amongst
others.
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Founding of the movement
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World War I scattered
the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and while away from
Paris many involved themselves in the Dada movement
believing that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought
the terrifying conflict upon the world. The Dadaists protested with
anti-rational anti-art gatherings,
performances, writing and art works. After the war when they returned to
Paris the Dada activities continued.
During the war
Surrealism's soon-to-be leader André Breton who had
trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where
he used the psychoanalytic methods of Sigmund Freud with
soldiers who were shell-shocked. He
also met the young writer Jacques Vaché and
felt that he was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysician Alfred Jarry, and he
came to admire the young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for
established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, "In literature, I am
successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry,
with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it
is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most."
Back in Paris, Breton
joined in the Dada activities and also started the literary journal
Littérature along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault.
They began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously
writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the "automatic"
writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in Littérature. Breton and
Soupault delved deeper into automatism and wrote the novel
The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Maqnétiques)
in 1920. They continued the automatic writing, gathering more artists and
writers into the group, and coming to believe that automatism was a better
tactic for societal change than the Dada attack on prevailing values. In
addition to Breton, Aragon and Soupault the original Surrealists included Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise, Marcel Noll, Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Simone Breton, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy.
As they developed
their philosophy they felt that while Dada rejected categories and labels,
Surrealism would advocate the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions
are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be
open to the full range of imagination according to the Hegelian Dialectic.
They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and
the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse.
Freud's work with
free association, dream analysis and the hidden unconscious was of the
utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate
imagination. However, they embraced idiosyncrasy, while
rejecting the idea of an underlying madness or darkness of the mind. (Later
the idiosyncratic Salvador Dalí
explained it as: "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am
not mad."
The group aimed to
revolutionize human experience, including its personal, cultural, social,
and political aspects, by freeing people from what they saw as false
rationality, and restrictive customs and structures. Breton proclaimed,
the true aim of Surrealism is "long live the social revolution, and it
alone!" To this goal, at various times surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism.
In 1924 they declared
their intents and philosophy with the issuance of the first Surrealist Manifesto.
That same year they established the Bureau of Surrealist Research,
and began publishing the journal
La Revolution surrealiste.
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Surrealist Manifesto
Breton wrote the manifesto of 1924
(another was issued in 1929) that defines the purposes of the group and
includes citations of the influences on Surrealism, examples of Surrealist
works and discussion of Surrealist automatism. He defined Surrealism as:
Dictionary:
Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express,
either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of
thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by
reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.
Encyclopedia: Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the
belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected
associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of
thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to
substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.
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Towards another definition
The English word
"Surrealism" is a mis-translation of the French word "Surréalisme." The
correct translation should be "Superrealism." Breton somewhere said that the
"surréel is to the réel what the surnaturel is to the naturel."
English-speakers say "supernatural". The reason why this matters is that the
prefix "surr-" in English is often, not always, associated with the Latin
prefix "sub" e.g. surreptitious (Fr. subreptice), surrogate (Fr. subrogé),
implying exactly the opposite of the intended meaning.
Breton would later qualify
the first of these definitions by saying "in the absence of conscious moral
or aesthetic self-censorship," and by his admission through subsequent
developments, that these definitions were capable of considerable expansion.
La Revolution surrealiste
Shortly after
releasing the first Surrealist Manifesto
in 1924, the Surrealists published the inaugural issue of
La Révolution surréaliste
and publication continued into 1929. Pierre Naville and Benjamin Péret were
the initial directors of the publication and modeled the format of the
journal on the conservative scientific review La Nature. The format
was deceiving, and to the Surrealists' delight La Révolution surréaliste
was consistently scandalous and revolutionary. The journal focused on
writing with most pages densely packed with columns of text, but also
included reproductions of art, among them works by Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, André Masson and Man Ray.
Bureau of Surrealist Research
The Bureau of Surrealist Research
(Centrale Surréaliste) was the Paris office where the Surrealist writers and
artists gathered to meet, hold discussions, and conduct interviews with the
goal of investigating speech under trance.
Expansion
The movement in the
mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists
played collaborative drawing games and discussed the theories of Surrealism.
The Surrealists developed techniques such as automatic drawing.
Breton initially
doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement
since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This
caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage, and decalcomania.
Soon more visual
artists joined Surrealism including Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Enrico Donati, Alberto Giacometti, Valentine Hugo, Méret Oppenheim, Toyen, Grégoire Michonze,
and Luis Bunuel. Though
Breton admired Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and
courted them to join the movement, they remained peripheral.
More writers also
joined, including former Dada leader Tristan Tzara, René Char, Georges Sadoul, André Thirion and Maurice Heine.
In 1925 an autonomous
Surrealist group formed in Brussels becoming official in 1926. The group
included the musician, poet and artist E.L.T. Mesens,
painter and writer René Magritte, Paul Nougé, Marcel Lecomte, Camille Goemans, and André Souris. In 1927
they were joined by the writer Louis Scutenaire.
They corresponded regularly with the Paris group, and in 1927 both Goemans
and Magritte moved to Paris and frequented Breton’s circle.
The artists, with
their roots in Dada and Cubism, the
abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky and Expressionism, and Post-Impressionism,
also reached to older "bloodlines" such as Hieronymus Bosch, and
the so-called primitive and naive arts.
André Masson's automatic drawings of 1923, are often used
as the point of the acceptance of visual arts and the break from Dada, since
they reflect the influence of the idea of the unconscious mind.
Another example is Alberto Giacometti's 1925 Torso,
which marked his movement to simplified forms and inspiration from
preclassical sculpture.
However, a striking
example of the line used to divide Dada and Surrealism among art experts is
the pairing of 1925's Little
Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person (Von minimax dadamax selbst
konstruiertes maschinchen)
with The Kiss (Le Baiser)
from 1927 by Ernst. The first is
generally held to have a distance, and erotic subtext, whereas the second
presents an erotic act openly and directly. In the second the influence of Miró and the drawing
style of Picasso is visible
with the use of fluid curving and intersecting lines and colour, where as
the first takes a directness that would later be influential in movements
such as Pop art.
Giorgio de Chirico,
and his previous development of Metaphysical art, was
one of the important joining figures between the philosophical and visual
aspects of Surrealism. Between 1911 and 1917, he adopted an
unornamented depictional style whose surface would be adopted by others
later.
The Red Tower (La tour rouge)
from 1913 shows the stark
colour contrasts and illustrative style later adopted by Surrealist
painters. His 1914 The Nostalgia
of the Poet (La Nostalgie du poete)
has the figure turned away from the viewer, and the juxtaposition of a bust
with glasses and a fish as a relief defies conventional explanation. He was
also a writer, and his novel
Hebdomeros
presents a series of dreamscapes with an unusual use of punctuation, syntax
and grammar designed to create a particular atmosphere and frame around its
images. His images, including set designs for the Ballets Russes, would
create a decorative form of visual Surrealism, and he would be an influence
on the two artists who would be even more closely associated with Surrealism
in the public mind: Salvador Dalí and Magritte. He would,
however, leave the Surrealist group in 1928.
In 1924, Miro and Masson applied
Surrealism theory to painting explicitly leading to the La Peinture
Surrealiste exhibition.
Breton published
Surrealism and Painting in 1928 which summarized
the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the 1960s.
Major exhibitions in the 1920s
1925 - La Peinture Surrealiste - The first ever Surrealist
exhibition at Gallerie Pierre in Paris. Displayed works by Masson, Man Ray, Klee, Miró, and others. The
show confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts (though it
had been initially debated whether this was possible), techniques from Dada,
such as photomontage were
used.
Galerie Surréaliste
opened on March 26, 1926 with an
exhibition by Man Ray.
Writing continues
The first Surrealist
work, according to leader Breton, was
Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Magnétiques)
(1921). But even before that, in 1919, Littérature contained
automatist works and accounts of dreams. The magazine and the portfolio both
showed their disdain for literal meanings given to objects and focused
rather on the undertones, the poetic undercurrents present. Not only did
they give emphasis to the poetic undercurrents, but also to the connotations
and the overtones which "exist in ambiguous relationships to the visual
images."
Because Surrealist
writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize their thoughts and the images
they present, some people find much of their work difficult to parse. This
notion however is a superficial comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton's
initial emphasis on automatic writing as the main route toward a higher
reality. But — as in Breton's case itself — much of what is presented as
purely automatic is actually edited and very "thought out". Breton himself
later admitted that automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and
other elements were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of
visual artists in the movement forced the issue, since automatic painting
required a rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus such elements as
collage were introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling
juxtapositions as revealed in Pierre Reverdy's
poetry. And — as in Magritte's case
(where there is no obvious recourse to either automatic techniques or
collage) the very notion of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation
in and of itself. Surrealism was meant to be always in flux — to be more
modern than modern — and so it was natural there should be a rapid shuffling
of the philosophy as new challenges arose.
Surrealists revived
interest in Isidore Ducasse,
known by his pseudonym "Le Comte de Lautréamont" and for the line "beautiful
as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an
umbrella", and Arthur Rimbaud, two
late 19th century writers
believed to be the precursors of Surrealism.
Examples of
Surrealist literature are
Crevel's Mr. Knife
Miss Fork (1931), Aragon's Irene's
Cunt (1927), Breton's Sur la
route de San Romano (1948),
Peret's Death to
the Pigs (1929), and
Artaud's Le
Pese-Nerfs (1926).
La Révolution surréaliste
continued publication into 1929 with most pages densely packed with columns
of text, but also included reproductions of art, among them works by de Chirico, Ernst, Masson and Man Ray. Other works
included books, poems, pamphlets, automatic texts and theoretical tracts.
Films from Surrealists
Early films by Surrealists include:
Entr'acte by René Clair (1924)
La Coquille et le clergyman
by Germaine Dulac,
screenplay by Antonin Artaud (1927)
Un chien andalou
by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dalí (1928)
L'Étoile de mer
by Man Ray (1928)
L'Âge d'Or by
Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dalí (1930)
Le sang d'un poète by Jean Cocteau (1930)
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Surrealism and international politics
Surrealism as a
political force developed unevenly around the world, in some places more
emphasis was on artistic practices, in other places political and in other
places still, Surrealist praxis looked to supersize both the arts and
politics. During the 1930s the Surrealist idea spread from Europe to North America, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and
throughout Asia. As both an
artistic idea and as an ideology of political change.
Politically
Surrealism was ultra-leftist, communist, or anarchist. The
split from Dada has been characterised as a split between anarchists and
communists, with the Surrealists as communist. Breton and his comrades
supported Leon Trotsky and
his International Left Opposition for a while, though there was a certain
openness to anarchism that manifested more fully after World War II. Some
Surrealists such as Benjamin Peret
aligned with forms of left communism. Dalí supported
capitalism and the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco
but cannot be said to represent a trend in Surrealism in this respect; in
fact he was considered, by Breton and his associates, to have betrayed and
left Surrealism.
Breton’s followers,
along with the Communist Party,
were working for the "liberation of man." However, Breton’s group refused
to prioritize the proletarian
struggle over radical creation such that their struggles with the Party
made the late 1920s a turbulent time for both. Many individuals closely
associated with Breton, notably Louis Aragon, left
his group to work more closely with the Communists.
Surrealists have
often sought to link their efforts with political ideals and activities.
In the "Declaration of January 27, 1925"
for example, members of the Paris-based Bureau of Surrealist Research
(including André Breton, Louis Aragon, and, Antonin Artaud, as well as
some two dozen others) declared their affinity for revolutionary politics.
While this was initially a somewhat vague formulation, by the 1930s many
Surrealists had strongly identified themselves with communism. The
foremost document of this tendency within Surrealism is the "Manifesto for a Free Revolutionary Art"
published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera but
actually co-authored by Breton and Leon Trotsky.
However, in 1933
the Surrealists’ assertion that a 'proletarian literature' within a
capitalist society was impossible led to their break with the Association
des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, and the expulsion of Breton,
Éluard and Crevel from the Communist Party.
In 1925, the Paris
Surrealist group and the extreme left of the French Communist Party
came together to support Abd-el-Krim, leader
of the Rif uprising
against French colonialism in Morocco. In an open
letter to writer and French ambassador to Japan, Paul Claudel, the
Paris group announced:
- "We Surrealists pronounced
ourselves in favour of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and
colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the
disposal of the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and
defined our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the
colour question."
The anticolonial
revolutionary and proletarian politics of "Murderous Humanitarianism"
(1932) which was drafted mainly by Rene Crevel, signed
by André Breton, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Peret, Yves Tanguy, and
the Martiniquan Surrealists Pierre Yoyotte and J.M. Monnerot
perhaps makes it the original document of what is later called 'black
Surrealism',
although it is the contact between Aimé Césaire and
Breton in the 1940s in Martinique that really lead to the communication of
what is known as 'black Surrealism'.
Anticolonial
revolutionary writers in the Négritude movement
of Martinique, a
French colony at the time, took up Surrealism as a revolutionary method -
a critique of European culture and a radical subjective. This linked with
other Surrealists and was very important for the subsequent development of
Surrealism as a revolutionary praxis. The journal
Tropiques,
featuring the work of Cesaire along with René Ménil, Lucie Thésée, Aristide Maugée and
others, was first published in 1940.
It is interesting
to note that when in 1938 André Breton traveled with his wife the painter
Jacqueline Lamba to Mexico to meet
Trotsky; staying as the guest of Diego Rivera's
former wife Guadalupe Marin; he met Frida Kahlo and saw
her paintings for the first time. Breton declared Kahlo to be an "innate"
Surrealist painter.
Internal politics
In 1929 the
satellite group around the journal Le Grand Jeu, including Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Maurice Henry and
the Czech painter Josef Sima, was
ostracized. Also in February, Breton asked Surrealists to assess their
"degree of moral competence", and theoretical refinements included in the
second
manifeste du surréalisme
excluded anyone reluctant to commit to collective action: Leiris, Limbour, Morise, Baron, Queneau, Prévert, Desnos, Masson and Boiffard. They
moved to the periodical
Documents,
edited by Georges Bataille,
whose anti-idealist materialism produced a hybrid Surrealism exposed the
base instincts of humans.
Other members were ousted
over the years for a variety of infractions, both political and personal,
and others left of to pursue creativity of their own style.
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Golden age
Throughout the
1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large.
A Surrealist group developed in Britain
and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition
was a high water mark of the period and became the model for international
exhibitions.
Dalí and Magritte created
the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dalí joined the group
in 1929, and
participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.
Surrealism as a visual
movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping
ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a
compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to
evoke empathy from the viewer.
1931 marked a year
when several Surrealist painters produced works which marked turning
points in their stylistic evolution: Magritte's Voice of Space (La Voix
des airs)
is an example of this process, where three large spheres representing
bells hang above a landscape. Another Surrealist landscape from this same
year is Yves Tanguy's
Promontory Palace (Palais promontoire),
with its molten forms and liquid shapes. Liquid shapes became the
trademark of Dalí, particularly in his
The Persistence of Memory,
which features the image of watches that sag as if they are melting.
The characteristics
of this style - a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the
psychological - came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in
the modern period,
combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be
"made whole with one's individuality".
Long after
personal, political and professional tensions fragmented the Surrealist
group, Magritte and Dalí continued to define a visual program in the arts.
This program reached beyond painting, to encompass photography as well, as
can be seen from a Man Ray self
portrait, whose use of assemblage influenced Robert Rauschenberg's
collage boxes.
During the 1930s Peggy Guggenheim,
an important American art collector, married Max Ernst and began
promoting work by other Surrealists such as Tanguy and the
British artist John Tunnard.
World War II and the Post War period
World War II
created havoc not only for the general population of Europe but
especially for the European artists and writers that opposed Fascism, and
Nazism. Many important artists fled to North America, and
relative safety in the United States. The
art community in New York City in
particular was already grappling with Surrealist ideas and several artists
like Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell,
and Roberto Matta,
converged closely with the surrealist artists themselves, albeit with some
suspicion and reservations. Ideas concerning the unconscious and dream
imagery were quickly embraced. By the Second World War,
the taste of the American avant-garde swung
decisively towards Abstract Expressionism
with the support of key taste makers, including Peggy Guggenheim, Leo Steinberg and Clement Greenberg.
However, it should not be easily forgotten that Abstract Expressionism
itself grew directly out of the meeting of American (particularly New
York) artists with European Surrealists self-exiled during WWII. In
particular, Arshile Gorky
influenced the development of this American art form, which, as Surrealism
did, celebrated the instantaneous human act as the well-spring of
creativity. The early work of many Abstract Expressionists reveals a tight
bond between the more superficial aspects of both movements, and the
emergence (at a later date) of aspects of Dadaistic humor in
such artists as Rauschenberg sheds
an even starker light upon the connection. Up until the emergence of Pop Art, Surrealism
can be seen to have been the single most important influence on the sudden
growth in American arts, and even in Pop, some of the humor manifested in
Surrealism can be found, often turned to a cultural criticism.
The Second World
War overshadowed, for a time, almost all intellectual and artistic
production. In 1940 Yves Tanguy married
American Surrealist painter Kay Sage. In 1941,
Breton went to the United States, where he co-founded the short-lived
magazine
VVV with Max Ernst, Marcel
Duchamp, and the American artist David Hare.
However, it was the American poet, Charles Henri Ford,
and his magazine
View which
offered Breton a channel for promoting Surrealism in the United States.
The View special issue on Duchamp was crucial for the public
understanding of Surrealism in America. It stressed his connections to
Surrealist methods, offered interpretations of his work by Breton, as well
as Breton's view that Duchamp represented the bridge between early modern
movements, such as Futurism and Cubism, to
Surrealism.
Though the war
proved disruptive for Surrealism, the works continued. Many Surrealist
artists continued to explore their vocabularies, including Magritte. Many
members of the Surrealist movement continued to correspond and meet. While
Dalí may have been excommunicated by Breton, he neither abandoned his
themes from the 1930s, including
references to the "persistence of time" in a later painting, nor did he
become a depictive pompier. His classic period did not represent so sharp
a break with the past as some descriptions of his work might portray, and
some, such as Thirion, argued that there were works of his after this
period that continued to have some relevance for the movement.
During the 1940s Surrealism's
influence was also felt in England and America. Mark Rothko took an
interest in biomorphic figures,
and in England Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Paul Nash used or
experimented with Surrealist techniques. However, Conroy Maddox, one
of the first British Surrealists whose work in this genre dated from 1935, remained
within the movement, and organized an exhibition of current Surrealist
work in 1978 in response to
an earlier show which infuriated him because it did not properly represent
Surrealism. Maddox's exhibition, titled Surrealism Unlimited, was
held in Paris and attracted international attention. He held his last
one-man show in 2002, and died
three years later. Magritte's work became more realistic in its depiction
of actual objects, while maintaining the element of juxtaposition, such as
in 1951's Personal
Values (Les Valeurs Personneles)
and 1954's Empire of
Light (L’Empire des lumières).
Magritte continued to produce works which have entered artistic
vocabulary, such as Castle in the Pyrenees (La Chateau des Pyrenees),
which refers back to Voix from 1931, in its
suspension over a landscape.
Other figures from
the Surrealist movement were expelled. Several of these artists, like Roberto Matta (by
his own description) "remained close to Surrealism."
Many new artists
explicitly took up the Surrealist banner for themselves. Dorothea Tanning
and Louise Bourgeois
continued to work, for example, with Tanning's Rainy Day Canape
from 1970. Duchamp
continued to produce sculpture in secret including an installation with
the realistic depiction of a woman viewable only through a peephole.
Breton continued to
write and espouse the importance of liberating of the human mind, as with
the publication
The Tower of Light
in 1952. Breton's return to France after the War, began a new phase of
Surrealist activity in Paris, and his critiques of rationalism and dualism
found a new audience. Breton insisted that Surrealism was an ongoing
revolt against the reduction of humanity to market relationships,
religious gestures and misery and to espouse the importance of liberating
of the human mind.
Post Breton Surrealism
There is no clear
consensus about the end of Surrealism, or if there is an end, of the
Surrealist movement. Some art historians suggest that WWII effectively
disbanded the movement. However, art historian Sarane Alexandrian
(1970) states, "the death of André Breton in 1966 marked the end of
Surrealism as an organized movement." There have also been attempts to tie
the obituary of the movement to the 1989 death of Salvador Dalí.
In the 1960s,
avantegardists grouped around the Parisian Situationist were
closely associated with Surrealism. While the leadership - especially Guy Debord was
critical and distanced himself from Surrealism, others such as Asger Jorn were
explicitly using Surrealist techniques and methods. The 1968 General strike and student revolt
in France included a number of Surrealist ideas, and among the slogans the
students spray-painted on the walls of the Sorbonne were familiar
Surrealist ones. Joan Miró would
commemorate this in a painting titled May 1968. There were also
groups who associated with both currents and were more atttached to
Surrealism, such as the Revolutionary Surrealist Group.
In Europe and all
over the world since the 1960s, artists have combined Surrealism with what
is believed to be a classical 16th century technique called
mischtechnik, a
kind of mix of egg tempera and oil
paint rediscovered by Ernst Fuchs, a
contemporary of Dalí, and now practiced and taught by many followers,
including the highly regarded Robert Venosa and Chris Mars who has
recently exhibited at major museums. The former curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
Michael Bell, has called this style of Surrealism "veristic
Surrealism". Veristic Surrealism, depicts
with meticulous clarity and often in great detail a world analogous to the
dream world. Other tempera artists,
such as Robert Vickrey,
regularly depict Surreal imagery.
During the 1980s,
behind the Iron Curtain,
Surrealism again entered into politics with an underground artistic
opposition movement known as the Orange Alternative.
The Orange Alternative was created in 1981 by Waldemar Fydrych
(alias 'Major'), a graduate of history and art history at the University
of Wrocław. They used
Surrealist symbolism and terminology in their large scale happenings
organized in the major Polish cities during the Jaruzelski regime,
and painted Surrealist graffiti on spots covering up anti-regime slogans.
Major himself was the author of a "Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism". In
this manifesto, he stated that the socialist (communist) system had become
so Surrealistic that it could be seen as an expression of art itself.
Surrealistic art
remains enormously popular with museum patrons. The Guggenheim Museum
in New York City held an exhibit, Two Private Eyes, in 1999, and in
2001 Tate Modern held an
exhibition of Surrealist art that attracted over 170,000 visitors. In 2002
the Metropolitan Museum
in New York City had a blockbuster show, Desire Unbound, and the Centre Georges Pompidou
in Paris had a show called La Révolution surréaliste.
A contemporary
development is known as Massurrealism.
Impact of Surrealism
While Surrealism is
typically associated with the arts, it has been said to transcend them;
Surrealism has had an impact in many other fields. In this sense,
Surrealism does not specifically refer only to self-identified
"Surrealists", or those sanctioned by Breton, rather, it refers to a range
of creative acts of revolt and efforts to liberate imagination.
In addition to
Surrealist ideas that are grounded in the ideas of Hegel, Marx and Freud, Surrealism
is seen by its advocates as being inherently dynamic and as dialectical in
its thought. Surrealists have also drawn on sources as seemingly diverse
as Clark Ashton Smith, Montague Summers, Horace Walpole, Fantomas, The Residents, Bugs Bunny, comic strips, the
obscure poet Samuel Greenberg
and the hobo writer and
humourist T-Bone Slim. One
might say that Surrealist strands may be found in movements such as Free Jazz (Don
Cherry, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor etc.)
and even in the daily lives of people in confrontation with limiting
social conditions. Thought of as the effort of humanity to liberate
imagination as an act of insurrection against society, Surrealism finds
precedents in the alchemists,
possibly Dante, Hieronymus Bosch, Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, Comte de Lautreamont
and Arthur Rimbaud.
Surrealists believe
that non-Western cultures also provide a continued source of inspiration
for Surrealist activity because some may strike up a better balance
between instrumental reason and imagination in flight than Western
culture. Surrealism has had an identifiable impact on radical and
revolutionary politics, both directly — as in some Surrealists joining or
allying themselves with radical political groups, movements and parties —
and indirectly — through the way in which Surrealists' emphasize the
intimate link between freeing imagination and the mind, and liberation
from repressive and archaic social structures. This was especially visible
in the New Left of the
1960s and 1970s and the French revolt of May 1968,
whose slogan "All power to the imagination" rose directly from French
Surrealist thought and practice.
Many significant
literary movements in the later half of the 20th century were directly or
indirectly influenced by Surrealism. This period is known as the Postmodern era;
though there's no widely agreed upon central definition of Postmodernism, many
themes and techniques commonly identified as Postmodern are nearly
identical to Surrealism. Perhaps the writers within the Postmodern era who
have the most in common with Surrealism are the playwrights of Theatre of the Absurd.
Though not an organized movement, these playwrights were grouped together
based on some similarities of theme and technique; these similarities can
perhaps be traced to influence from the Surrealists. Eugene Ionesco in
particular was fond of Surrealism, claiming at one point that Breton was
one of the most important thinkers in history. Samuel Beckett was
also fond of Surrealists, even translating much of the poetry into
English; he may have had closer ties had the Surrealists not been critical
of Beckett's mentor and friend James Joyce. Many
writers from and associated with the Beat Generation
were influenced greatly by Surrealists. Philip Lamantia and Ted Joans are often
categorized as both Beat and Surrealist writers. Many other Beat writers
claimed Surrealism as a significant influence. A few examples include Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg. In
popular culture much of the stream of consciousness
song writing of the young Bob Dylan, c. 1960s
and including some of Dylan's more recent
writing as well, (c. mid - 1980s-2006) clearly have Surrealist connections
and undertones. Magic Realism, a
popular technique among novelists of the latter half of the 20th century
especially among Latin American writers, has some obvious similarities to
Surrealism with its juxtaposition of the normal and the dream-like. The
prominence of Magic Realism in Latin American literature is often credited
in some part to the direct influence of Surrealism on Latin American
artists (Frida
Kahlo, for example).
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Surrealist
artists
Dietrich Schughardt
Pavel Tchelitchew
Stanley William Hayter
Arnulf
Rainer
Boris Margo
James Gleeson
Antonio
Berni
Collette Calascione
Alfredo Castaneda
Tiffany Bozic
Anne Bachelier
Marcel Jean
Edward Wadsworth
Nicholas Kalmakoff
Catalina Chervin
Photographers
Claude Cahun
Bill Brandt
Edward Weston
Clarence Laughlin
Paul Outerbridge
Rodney Smith
Maurice Tabard
Joyce Tenneson
Jerry Uelsmann
Dominic Rouse
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Paul Cava
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Dream art
(From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia)
Dream art is any
form of art
directly based on material from dreams, or
which employs dream-like imagery. References to dreams in art are as old as literature itself: the
story of
Gilgamesh, the Bible, and
the Iliad
all describe dreams of major characters such as Callum and the meanings
thereof. However, dreams as art, without a "real" frame story,
appear to be a later development—though there is no way to know whether
many premodern works were dream-based.
In European literature, the
Romantic movement emphasized the value of emotion and irrational
inspiration. "Visions", whether from dreams or intoxication, served as raw
material and were taken to represent the artist's highest creative
potential.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
Symbolism and
Expressionism introduced dream imagery into visual art. Expressionism
was also a literary movement, and included the later work of the
playwright
August Strindberg, who coined the term "dream play" for a style of
narrative that did not distinguish between fantasy and reality.
At the same time, discussion of dreams reached a new level of public
awareness in the Western world due to the work of
Sigmund Freud, who introduced the notion of the
subconscious mind as a field of scientific inquiry. Freud greatly
influenced the 20th-century
Surrealists, who combined the visionary impulses of Romantics and Expressionists with a focus on the unconscious as a creative tool, and an
assumption that apparently irrational content could contain significant
meaning, perhaps more so than rational content.
The invention of film and
animation brought new possibilities for vivid depiction of
nonrealistic events, but films consisting entirely of dream imagery
have remained an avant-garde rarity. Comic
books and
comic strips have explored dreams somewhat more often, starting with
Winsor McCay's popular newspaper strips; the trend toward confessional
works in
alternative comics of the 1980s saw a proliferation of artists drawing
their own dreams.
Dream material continues to be used by a wide range of contemporary
artists for various purposes. This practice is considered by some to be of
psychological value for the artist—independent of the artistic value of
the results—as part of the discipline of "dream work".
Artists associated with Dream
art include:
Jake Baddeley
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Visionary art
(From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia)
Visionary art is art that
purports to transcend the physical world and portray a wider vision of
awareness including
spiritual or mystical
themes, or is based in such experiences.
Both trained and self-taught (or
outsider) artists have, and continue to create visionary works. Many
visionary artists are actively engaged in spiritual practices, and some
have drawn inspiration from
psychedelic drug experiences.
Walter Schurian, professor at the
University of Munster, is quick to point out the difficulties in
describing visionary art as if it were a discrete genre, since "it is
difficult to know where to start and where to stop. Recognized trends have
all had their fantastic component, so demarcation is apt to be fuzzy."
Despite this ambiguity, there does seem to be emerging some definition
to what constitutes the contemporary visionary art 'scene' and which
artists can be considered especially influential. Contemporary visionary
artists count
Hieronymous Bosch,
William Blake,
Morris Graves (of the Pacific Northwest School of Visionary Art),
Emil Bisttram, and
Gustave Moreau amongst their antecedents.
Symbolism,
Surrealism and
Psychedelic art are also direct precursors to contemporary visionary
art.
The
Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, which includes Ernst
Fuchs and Arik
Brauer, is also to be considered an important technical and
philosophical catalyst in its strong influence upon the contemporary
visionary culture.
Important networks and
organisations
During the 20th century, two notable groups organized to champion the
mission of visionary art. The
Northwest School of Visionary Art, with famous artists
Morris Graves, and Mark
Tobey, as well as the
Transcendental Painting Group (TPG), a collective of 10 painters, such
as
Raymond Jonson,
Emil Bittstram,
Florence Pierce, and
Ed Garman.
Several institutions have recently developed to represent visionary art,
including the
Society of Layerists in MultiMedia (SLMM) founded by
Mary Carroll Nelson, the
Chapel of Sacred Mirrors founded by Allyson and Alex Grey
in
New York City, The
American Visionary Art Museum in
Baltimore, Maryland, and the in-progress Paradiso project in Vienna are
notable examples.
On the internet, the
Society for the Art of Imagination, founded by
Brigid Marlin serves as an important portal for visionary art events.
Laurence Caruana's Paris-based The Visionary Revue brings
attention to lesser-known visionary artists and analyses aspects of
visionary art from an erudite scholarly perspective.
Artists associated with Visionary
Art include:
Remedios Varo
A. Andrew Gonzalez
Antonio Roybal
De Es Schwertberger
Robert Venosa
Vincent
Castiglia
Amanda Sage
Alex Grey
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Neo-Surrealism
(From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia)
Neosurrealism or Neo-Surrealism is an artistic genre that
illustrates the complex imagery of dream or subconscious visions and
irrational space and form combinations.
The term has been given to the reappearance of well-known
surrealism movement in the late 1970s. Initially, the movement focused
on relating surrealism with pop-art,
but lately modern artists have been exploring extra directions similar to
fantastic,
visionary, and
fantasy art within the present genre. Neosurrealism frequently called
"modern
surrealism" due to a noticeable visual resemblance of these two
genres. However, the main distinction between them is that Neosurrealism
does not imply the original
surrealist idea of a freedom from rational control or psychic
automatism declared by
André Breton, in his “Manifeste du surréalisme” .
Any art
movement is defined as a tendency or style in art with a specific common
philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted
period of time. This definition may be applied to Neosurrealism but it does
not have a particular founder
or group. The movement is still not clearly defined, but it develops rapidly
adding more
professional and amateur art
enthusiasts every day. As it was suggested above, the field of
neosurrealism is a highly intricate and fiercely contested one, and there is
no
universal consensus
on precisely what constitutes neosurrealism. The name itself remains very
unstable, shifting in meaning according to who uses it, when, where, and in
what context. Whether or not this merely multiplies problems of
definition is a debatable point, but it certainly reflects the
dynamically conflicted, constantly developing, and heterogeneous nature of
the movement itself. Neosurrealism and Realism in art are visual dramas
diametrically opposite in intent. Neosurrealism expresses interior poetic
states of being, envisaged in irrational space and form. Realism,
illuminated by objectivity and directed by rational representation, appeals
to recognizable truth.
Visual arts
Neosurrealism is a combined imagery
of dreams, fantasies, and subconscious mind visions in fine art painting,
digital art graphic,
and
photography. In the mid 1980s, modern computer technologies brought tons
of additional depicting power to contemporary artists. The arrival of
desktop publishing and the introduction of
software applications introduced a generation of artists to computer
image manipulation and 3D image creation that had previously been
unachievable. There are thousands of artists, digital and traditional fine
art media, who create neo-surrealistic, surreal fantasy, and fantasy realism
artworks comparable to Neosurrealism.
Artists associated with
Neo-surrealism include:
George Grie
Mirko Sevic
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Magic realism
(From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia)
Magic realism (or magical realism) is an artistic genre in
which magical elements appear in an otherwise realistic setting. As used
today the term is broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous.
The term was initially used by German
art critic Franz Roh to describe painting which demonstrated an altered reality, but
was later used by
Venezuelan
Arturo Uslar-Pietri to describe the work of certain
Latin American writers. The Cuban
writer
Alejo Carpentier (a friend of Uslar-Pietri) used the term "lo real
maravilloso" (roughly "marvelous reality") in the prologue to his novel
The Kingdom of this World (1949). Carpentier's conception was of
a kind of heightened reality in which elements of the miraculous could
appear while seeming natural and unforced. Carpentier's work was a key
influence on the writers of the Latin American "boom" that emerged in
the 1960s.
The term magic realism was first used by the German art critic Franz
Roh to refer to a painterly style also known as
Neue Sachlichkeit. It was later used to describe the unusual realism
by American painters such as
Ivan Albright,
Paul Cadmus,
George Tooker and other artists during the 1940s and 1950s. It
should be noted though that unlike the term's use in literature, in art
it is describing paintings that do not include anything fantastic
or magical, but are rather extremely realistic and often mundane.
The term was first revived and applied to the realm of fiction as a
combination of the fantastic and the realistic in the 1960s by a
Venezuelan essayist and critic
Arturo Uslar-Pietri, who applied it to a very specific South
American genre, influenced by the blend of realism and fantasy in
Mário de Andrade's influential 1928 novel
Macunaíma. However, the term itself came in vogue only after
Nobel prize winner
Miguel Ángel Asturias used the expression to define the style of his
novels. The term gained popularity with the rise of such authors as
Mikhail Bulgakov,
Ernst Junger and
Salman Rushdie and many
Latin American writers, most notably
Jorge Luis Borges,
Isabel Allende,
Juan Rulfo,
Dias Gomes and
Gabriel García Márquez, who confessed, "My most important problem
was destroying the lines of demarcation that separates what seems real
from what seems fantastic." Mexican author
Laura Esquivel also wrote in this vein when she penned
Like Water for Chocolate. The most widely read of the South
American magical realism narratives is García Márquez's novel
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
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With Friends: Six Magic Realists, 1940–1965
The Chasen Museum of Art, formely the Elvehjem is currently showing
the exhibition With Friends: Six Magic Realists, 1940–1965 which will be
on display until September 18, 2005. The exhibition will focus on the
art and friendships of the American artists Gertrude Abercrombie
(1909–1977), Sylvia Fein (b. 1919; University of Wisconsin BS, 1942), Marshall Glasier (1902 –1988), Dudley Huppler (1917–1988; University of
Wisconsin BS and MS, 1939), Karl Priebe (1914–1976), and John Wilde (b.
1919; University of Wisconsin BS, 1942, MS, 1948). The show will include
104 works of art (15-20 objects by each artist) dating between 1940 and
1965. A selection of archival material—sketchbooks, postcards with
original drawings, letters, photographs, and scrapbooks—will also be
included. The exhibition, which will be the first intensive study of
this close-knit group, will explore the artistic and personal
relationships they shared. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue
will provide insight into a figurative branch of postwar American
modernism that has been often neglected in favor of abstract
expressionism. The exhibition is being organized for the Elvehjem Museum
of Art by guest curator Robert Cozzolino.
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Magic Realism
Style of painting popular in Europe and the USA mainly from
the 1920s to 1940s, with some followers in the 1950s. It
occupies a position between Surrealism and Photorealism, whereby
the subject is rendered with a photographic naturalism, but
where the use of flat tones, ambiguous perspectives and strange
juxtapositions suggest an imagined or dreamed reality. The term
was introduced by art historian Frank Roh in his book
Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus (1925) to describe
a style deriving from Neue Sachlichkeit, but rooted in late
19th-century German Romantic fantasy. It had strong connections
with the Italian
Pittura Metafisica of which the work of Giorgio
de Chirico was exemplary in its quest to express the mysterious.
The work of Giuseppe Capogrossi and the Scuola Romana of the
1930s is also closely related to the visionary elements of
Magic
Realism. In Belgium its surreal strand was exemplified by René
Magritte, with his ‘fantasies of the commonplace’, and in the
USA by Peter Blume, as in South of Scranton (1930–31; New
York, Met.). Later artists associated with Magic Realism include
the American George Tooker (b 1920), whose best-known
work Subway (1950; New York, Whitney) captures the
alienation of strangers gathered in public, and the German Christian Schad, who also used the style in the 1950s. The later
use of the term for types of non-Western, particularly Latin
American fiction was not connected with the artistic
application.
Magic realism is a style of
visual art which brings extreme
realism to the depiction of mundane subject matter.
In painting, magical realism is a term often used interchangeably
with
post-expressionism. In 1925, art
critic Franz Roh used this term to describe painting which signaled a
return to
realism after
expressionism's extravagances which sought to redesign objects to
reveal the spirits of those objects. Magical realism, according to Roh,
instead faithfully portrays the exterior of an object, and in doing so
the spirit, or magic, of the object reveals itself.
Artists associated with Magic
Realism include:
Heather Nevay
John
Wilde
Charles Becker
Brad
Noble
George Tooker
Rob Gonsalves
Michael Parkes
Paul Cadmus
Ivan Albright
Jared French
Peter Blume
Wes
Wilson
Mati Klarwein
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Psychedelic art
(From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia)
Psychedelic art is art inspired by the
psychedelic experience induced by drugs such as LSD,
Mescaline, and
Psilocybin. The word "psychedelic" (coined by British psychologist
Humphrey Osmond) means "mind manifesting". By that definition all
artistic efforts to depict the inner world of the psyche may be considered
"psychedelic". However, in common parlance "Psychedelic Art" refers above
all to the art movement of the
1960s counterculture. Psychedelic visual arts were a counterpart to
psychedelic rock music. Concert posters, album covers, lightshows,
murals, comic books, underground newspapers and more reflected not only
the kaleidoscopically swirling patterns of LSD hallucinations, but also
revolutionary political, social and spiritual sentiments inspired by
insights derived from these psychedelic states of consciousness.
Psychedelic Art is informed by the notion
that altered states of consciousness produced by psychedelic drugs are a
source of artistic inspiration. The psychedelic art movement is similar to
the surrealist movement in that it prescribes a mechanism for obtaining
inspiration. Whereas the mechanism for surrealism is the observance of
dreams, the psychedelic artist turns to his drug induced hallucinations.
Both movements have strong ties to important developments in science.
Whereas the surrealist was fascinated by Freud's theory of the
unconscious, the psychedelic artist has been literally "turned on" by
Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD.
The early examples of "Psychedelic Art"
are literary rather than visual. It should also be noted that these came
from writers involved in the Surrealist movement. Antonin Artaud writes of
his Peyote experience in "Journey to the Land of the Tarahumara" (1937).
Henri Michaux wrote "Miserable Miracle" (1956), to describe his
experiments with Mescaline and also hashish.
Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception"
(1954), and "Heaven and Hell" (1956), remain definitive statements on the
psychedelic experience.
Albert Hofmann and his colleagues at
Sandoz Laboratories were convinced immediately after its discovery in 1943
of the power and promise of LSD. For two decades following its discovery
LSD was marketed by Sandoz as an important drug for psychological and
neurological research. Hofmann saw the drug's potential for poets and
artists as well, and took great interest in the German poet, Ernst
Junger's psychedelic experiments.
Early artistic experimentation with LSD
was conducted in a clinical context by Los Angeles based psychiatrist
Oscar Janiger. Janiger asked a group of 50 different artists to each
do a painting from life of a subject of the artist's choosing. They were
subsequently asked to do the same painting while under the influence of
LSD. The two paintings were compared by Janiger and also the artist. The
artists almost unanimously reported LSD to be an enhancement to their
creativity.
Ultimately it seems that psychedelics
would be most warmly embraced by the American counterculture. Beatnik
poets
Allen Ginsberg and
William S. Burroughs became fascinated by psychedelic drugs as early
as the 1950s as evidenced by "The Yage Letters" (1963). The Beatniks
recognized the role of psychedelics as sacred inebriants in Native
American religious ritual, and also had an understanding of the philosophy
of the surrealist and symbolist poets who called for a "complete
disorientation of the senses" (to paraphrase
Arthur Rimbaud). They knew that altered states of consciousness played
a role in Eastern Mysticism. They were hip to psychedelics as psychiatric
medicine. LSD was the perfect catalyst to electrify the eclectic mix of
ideas assembled by the Beats into a cathartic, mass-distributed panacea
for the soul of the succeeding generation.
Psychedelic
Art in 1960s Counterculture
Leading proponents of the 1960s
Psychedelic Art movement were
San Francisco poster artists such as:
Rick Griffin,
Victor Moscoso,
Stanley Mouse &
Alton Kelley, and Wes
Wilson. Their Psychedelic Rock concert posters were inspired by Art
Nouveau, Victoriana, Dada, and Pop Art.
Richly saturated colors in glaring contrast, elaborately ornate lettering,
strongly symmetrical composition, collage elements, and bizarre
iconography are all hallmarks of the San Francisco psychedelic poster art
style. The style flourished from about 1966 - 1972. Their work was
immediately influential to album cover art, and indeed all of the
aforementioned artists also created album covers.
Although San Francisco remained the hub
of psychedelic art into the early 1970s, the style also developed
internationally: Majorca based painter
Mati Klarwein created psychedelic masterpieces for
Miles Davis' Jazz-Rock fusion albums, and also for
Carlos Santana Latin Rock. Pink
Floyd worked extensively with London based designers,
Hipgnosis to create graphics to support the concepts in their albums.
Psychedelic light-shows were a new
art-form developed for rock concerts. Using oil and dye in an emulsion
that was set between large convex lenses upon overhead projectors the
lightshow artists created bubbling liquid visuals that pulsed in rhythm to
the music. This was mixed with slideshows and film loops to create an
improvisational motion picture art form to give visual representation to
the improvisational jams of the rock bands and create a completely "trippy"
atmosphere for the audience. The
Brotherhood of Light were responsible for many of the light-shows in
San Francisco psychedelic rock concerts.
Out of the psychedelic counterculture
also arose a new genre of comic books:
underground comix. "Zap Comix" was among the original underground
comics, and featured the work of
Robert Crumb,
S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, and
Robert Williams among others. Underground Comix were ribald, intensely
satirical, and seemed to pursue weirdness for the sake of weirdness.
Gilbert Shelton created perhaps the most enduring of underground
cartoon characters, "The
Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers," whose drugged out exploits held a
hilarious mirror up to the hippy lifestyle of the 1960s.
Psychedelic art was also applied to the
LSD itself. LSD began to be put on blotter paper in the early 1970s and
this gave rise to a specialized art form of decorating the blotter paper.
Often the blotter paper was decorated with tiny insignia on each
perforated square tab, but by the 1990s this had progressed to complete
four color designs often involving an entire page of 900 or more tabs.
Mark McCloud is a recognized authority on the history of LSD blotter
art.
The fact that LSD blotter art kept
evolving over decades shows that the Psychedelic Art movement did not end
with the '60s, and if considered more deeply it did not begin in that
decade either. The use of drugs by artists is nothing new - the Roman poet Ovid said,
"There is no poetry among water drinkers." However, since drugs have
always been taboo, the drug use of artists has not always entered the
historical record. It was part of the youth rebellion of the 1960s to
openly use drugs, but the psychedelic drugs were also seen in a different
light from more traditional inebriants such as opiates, cocaine and
alcohol. LSD was a new invention that had shown wondrous promise as a
psychiatric medicine. It is beyond the scope of this article to describe
LSD research and its various results, but importantly to the
counterculture movement of the 1960s it had been strongly associated with
creativity and had been promoted as a gateway to mystical experience.
These aspects drew artists and intellectuals to experiment with LSD and
other psychedelic drugs.
Psychedelic Art in Corporate Advertising
By the late 1960s, the commercial
potential of psychedelic art had become hard to ignore. General Electric,
for instance, promoted clocks with designs by New York artist Peter Max. A
caption explains that each of Max’s clocks “transposes time into
multi-fantasy colors.”In this and many other corporate advertisements of
the late 1960’s featuring psychedelic themes, the psychedelic product was
often kept at arm’s length from the corporate image: while advertisements
may have reflected the swirls and colors of an LSD trip, the
black-and-white company logo maintained a healthy visual distance. Several
companies, however, more explicitly associated themselves with
psychedelica: CBS, Neiman Marcus, and NBC all featured thoroughly
psychedelic advertisements between 1968 and 1969. In 1968, Campbell’s soup
ran a poster promotion that promised to “Turn your wall souper-delic!”
The early years of the 1970s saw
advertisers using psychedelic art to sell a limitless array of consumer
goods. Hair products, cars, cigarettes, and even pantyhose became colorful
acts of pseudo-rebellion.The Chelsea National Bank commissioned a
psychedelic landscape by Peter Max, and neon green, pink, and blue monkeys
inhabited advertisements for a zoo.[
A fantasy land of colorful, swirling, psychedelic bubbles provided the
perfect backdrop for a Clearasil ad. As Brian Wells explains, “The
psychedelic movement has, through the work of artists, designers, and
writers, achieved an astonishing degree of cultural diffusion… but, though
a great deal of diffusion has taken place, so, too, has a great deal of
dilution and distortion. ”Even the term “psychedelic” itself underwent a
semantic shift, and soon came to mean “anything in youth culture which is
colorful, or unusual, or fashionable.” Puns using the concept of
“tripping” abounded: as an advertisement for London Britches declared,
their product was “great on trips!” By the mid-1970’s, the psychedelic art
movement had been largely co-opted by mainstream commercial forces,
incorporated into the very system of capitalism that the hippies had
struggled so hard to change.
Psychedelic Art and the Digital Age
Computer Arts have allowed for an even
greater and more profuse expression of psychedelic vision. Fractal
generating software gives an accurate depiction of psychedelic
hallucinatory patterns, but even more importantly 2D and 3D graphics
software allow for unparalleled freedom of image manipulation. Much of the
graphics software seems to enable a direct translation of the psychedelic
vision. The "digital revolution" was indeed heralded early on as the "New
LSD" by none other than
Timothy Leary.
The Rave movement of the 1990s was a
psychedelic renaissance fueled by the advent of newly available digital
technologies. The rave movement developed a new graphic art style
partially influenced by 1960s psychedelic poster art, but also strongly
influenced by graffiti art, and by 1970s advertising art, yet clearly
defined by what computer graphics software and home computers had to offer
at the time of creation.
Concurrent to the rave movement, and in
key respects integral to it, are the development of new mind altering
drugs, most notably, MDMA
(Ecstasy). Ecstasy, like LSD, has had a tangible influence on culture and
aesthetics, particularly the aesthetics of Rave Culture. But MDMA is
(arguably) not a real psychedelic, but is described by psychologists as an
"empathogen". Development of new psychedelics such as "2CB"
and related compounds (developed primarily by chemist
Alexander Shulgin) are truly psychedelic, and these novel psychedelics
are fertile ground for artistic exploration since many of the new
psychedelics possess their own unique properties that will affect the
artist's vision accordingly.
Perhaps the future of psychedelic art
will be defined by those artists who have practiced it most purely. That
is to say by those artists who have sought to record the visions derived
from the psychedelic drug experience into works of art. Even as fashions
have changed, and art and culture movements have come and gone certain
artists have steadfastly devoted themselves to psychedelia. Well known
examples are Alex
Grey and
Robert Venosa. These artists have developed unique and distinct styles
that while containing elements that are obviously "psychedelic", are
clearly artistic expression that transcend simple categorization. While it
is not necessary to use psychedelics to arrive at such a stage of artistic
development, serious psychedelic artists are demonstrating that there is
tangible technique to obtaining visions, and that technique is the
creative use of psychedelic drugs.
Artists associated with
Psychedelic Art include:
M.C. Escher
H. R. Giger
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Fantastic realism
(From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia)
The Vienna School of Fantastic Realism is a group of artists founded
in Vienna
in 1946. It
includes
Ernst Fuchs, Arik
Brauer,
Rudolf Hausner,
Wolfgang Hutter,
Anton Lehmden and
Fritz Janschka, all students of Professor
Albert Paris Gutersloh at the
Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. It was Gutersloh's emphasis on the
techniques of the Old Masters that gave the
Fantastic Realist painters a grounding in realism (expressed with a
clarity and detail some have compared to early Flemish painting) combined
with religious and esoteric symbolism.
Artists associated with Fantastic
Realism include:
Rudolf Hausner
Ernst
Fuchs
Brigid Marlin
Hugues Gillet
Victor
Safonkin
Aric Brauer
Wolfgang Hutter
Bruno di Majo
Jacek Yerka
Odd
Nerdrum
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Fantastic art
(From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia)
Fantastic art is a loosely defined art genre. The first
"fantastic" artist is generally believed to be
Hieronymus Bosch.
Other artists who have been labeled fantastic include
Brueghel,
Giuseppe Arcimboldo,
Matthias Grünewald,
Hans Baldung Grien,
Francisco de Goya,
Gustave Moreau,
Max Magnus Norman,
Henry Fuseli,
Odilon Redon, Max
Klinger,
Arnold Bocklin,
William Blake,
Gustave Doré,
Giovanni Battista Piranesi,
Salvador Dalí, Arik
Brauer,
Johfra, Odd
Nerdrum, and
Mati Klarwein.
Fantasy has been an integral part of art since its beginnings, but has been particularly important in
mannerism,
romantic art,
symbolism and
surrealism. fantastic art celebrates fantasy, imagination, dreamworlds,
the
grotesque, visions and other-worldliness. With symbolism, it shares its choice of
themes such as
mythology,
occultism and
mysticism.
In French, the genre is called le
fantastique, in English it is sometimes referred to as visionary
art, grotesque art or
mannerist art.
Fantastic art should not be confused with
fantasy art, which is the domain of science-fiction and fantasy
illustrators such as
Boris Vallejo and others:
Ernst
Fuchs ,De
Es Schwertberger ,H.R.
Giger ,Peter
Gric ,Robert
Venosa ,Gio'
Myart ,Judson Huss ,Jacek
Yerka ,Von Stropp ,Damian Michaels ,Zdzislaw
Beksinski ,Antonio
Roybal ,Lukasz Banach ,Sean
Hopp ,Peter Proksch ,Jorgen
Mahler Elbang
Michèle Vincent ,Anne
Sudworth
Artists associated with Fantastic
Art include:
Zdzislaw Beksinski
David Bowers
Frank Kortan
Siegfried Zademack
Michael Fuchs
Jaroslaw Kukowski
Chris Mars
David Ho
Eli Tiunine
Joshifumi Hayahi
Jito
Katharina Kranichfeld
Michael Bergt
Edward Black
Kim
Istvan
Sandorfi
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Fantasy art
(From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia)
Fantasy art is a genre of art that depicts
magical or other
supernatural themes, ideas, creatures or settings. While there is some
overlap with
science fiction,
horror and other
speculative fiction art, there are unique elements not generally found
in other forms of speculative fiction art. Depictions of ancient myths and
legends, as well as depictions of modern day fantasy in the form of divine
interventions and other magical or supernatural forces, are very common
elements, and help distinguish fantasy art from other forms. Dragons,
wizards, fairies and other fantastical and mythical creatures are common
features in fantasy art.
Fantasy art is strongly linked to fantasy fiction. Indeed fantasy art
pieces are often intended to represent specific characters or scenes from
works of fantasy literature. Such works created by amateur artists may be
called fanart.
There is a large subculture based around the creation of amateur fantasy
art. This is largely centred around websites such as Elf wood.
Such sites are noticeably less male-dominated than some other pursuits
related to the fantasy genre.
Fantasy art should not be confused with the
fantastic art genre, which can contain fantastical elements that are not
always considered "fantasy" per se.
Fantasy Art and High Culture
Despite the technical skill of many of its practitioners, and despite (or
arguably because of) its popularity, Fantasy art is not considered part of
the 'canon',
or 'fine art', in the sense that it is not hung in galleries, subsidised by
governments, studied in art schools etc.
A few works which are 'canonical', particularly
surrealist or
pre-Raphaelite works, have many characteristics in common with fantasy
art. For example The Castle in the Pyrenees by
Rene Magritte, and The Lady of Shalott by
John William Waterhouse, would almost certainly be accepted as fantasy
art if they had been created recently by an artist who presented them as
such. As with much fantasy art, the latter illustrates a scene from another
work. Other modern fantasy artists use the Art Nouveau Movement and other
high culture art movements with the contention that fantasy or faerie
art should be critically evaluated and noticed by academic institutions.
Finucane defines his art stylistics as "Neo-Medieval", rather than using the
escapist terminology of "fantasy art" to define his work. Historical
standards of what is high art or what is not high art was a common problem
for now famous artists like the
Glasgow School, who were also unfairly defined as inferior artists in
their time.
Nonetheless these works are accorded the status of fine art, and not
considered to be connected to fantasy art. The situation could arguably be
compared to the way in which certain critically-esteemed works may be
treated as if they had no connection to non-'literary' genres, for example
Nineteen Eighty-Four and
science fiction.
see
collection:
Fantasy Art
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