Modernism: Surrealism - Inside the rebels' mental world

PREMISE: FUTURISM & DADAISM

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city.

Dada (or Dadaism) was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centers in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire. New York Dada began circa 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris. Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent toward violence, war, and nationalism.

INTRODUCTION TO SURREALISM

Surrealism was a cultural movement which developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I and was largely influenced by Dada. The movement is best known for its visual artworks and writings and the juxtaposition of uncommon imagery. Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes, sometimes with photographic precision, creating strange creatures from everyday objects, and developing painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself. Its aim was, according to leader Andre Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality.

Origin

The advent of surrealism is attributed to the fall of Dadaism. The latter was a movement where artists expressed their disgust with traditional approaches of art and life as a whole. Art from Dadaism often had a sense of violence and attitude of protest.

Surrealism mainly started in Europe mainly in Paris. Although it traces its roots from Dadaism, it was actually based on art more than violence. Andre Breton, the French poet is prominently known as “Pope of Surrealism.” The movement rose to become internationally known and included the British Surrealism starting in 1936.

Basic tenets

Surrealist artists wanted to use art to show the inner workings of the mind, especially in regards to areas of sexuality or violence, which they considered to be frequently oppressed. In fact, artists often sought psychoanalysis to dig up deep, repressed feelings to use for inspiration. Surrealism embraced the psychoanalytic idea of unconscious desires, or things we want that we do not know we want. The Surrealism movement focused on these ideas of chaos and unconscious desires in an effort to dig deep into the unconscious mind to find inspiration for political and artistic creativity.

Theme: Automatic Writing / Juxtaposition / Association / Irrational / The Unconscious Dream and Fantasy / Revolution / World War I

ARTISTS

Giorgio De Chirico

Giorgio De Chirico was an Italian painter. From 1910, he developed the Metaphysical painting movement with painter Carlo Carrà. His works in this mode attract a lot of attention, especially in France, where he was called a precursor by the French Surrealists. De Chirico is most famous for the eerie mood and strange artificiality of the cityscapes he painted in the 1910s. He treats the scenes not as conventional cityscapes but rather as the kinds of haunted streets we might encounter in dreams. They are backdrops for pregnant symbols or even, at times, for collections of objects that resemble still lifes. De Chirico's innovative approach to these pictures - an approach rather like that of a theatrical set designer - has encouraged critics to describe them as "dream writing.”

The anguish of departure

Giorgio De Chirico always wanted to transfer normal objects in everyday life into something that can emerge new feelings, such as uncertainty, alienation, or fear, in viewers. In this painting, the train along the horizon, the horse-drawn cart in the foreground, and the two central figures that are presumably saying goodbye reflect the concept of departure introduced in the work’s title. Anguish, however, is expressed through the scene’s unusual light and overall feeling of emptiness. Many of these elements likely refer to de Chirico’s life experiences: His father died when the artist was just sixteen years old. This significant event may be conceivably alluded to in several ways throughout the composition: the overall mood and title, the train, and the tall tower, a motif that de Chirico frequently utilized as a symbolic reference to man and particularly his father.

The Disquieting Muse

The muse is a recurring motif in de Chirico's paintings. He believed they inspired the artist to see beyond mere appearances and look into the metaphysical - the world of memory, mythology and truth. This was originally painted while he was living in Ferrara. The city's Castello Estense can be seen in the background. In the painting, de Chirico disregards the true scale of architecture, and seems to represent it almost as a miniature model in which he can place the symbolic objects of an uncanny still life. This painting inspired a poem with the same name by Sylvia Plath, published in 1917.

Max Ernst

Max Ernst was born in Germany in a strict family. He attacked the conventions and traditions of art, while possessing a thorough knowledge of European art history. He was profoundly interested in the art of the mentally ill as a means to access primal emotion and unfettered creativity. He became familiar with the works of some of the greatest artists of all time including Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh. He was also drawn to themes such as fantasy and dream imagery, which were among the common subjects of the works of Giorgio de Chirico. More importantly, Ernst was one of the first artists to apply Sigmund Freud's dream theories investigate his deep psyche in order to explore the source of his own creativity. He explored himself and the world of dreams simultaneously.

The Eye of Silence

Dream is the key element of this painting. This is the combinations of items that one would never consciously put together. A close examination of The Eye of Silence will uncover elements of vegetation, stone and rock. Indeed, some of the formations of rock also resemble everyday items. But with a general look, viewers cannot find this painting familiar, since Max Ernst creates a strange and surreal composition here.

The artist makes use of a fairly standard sky to fill the upper quarter of the painting, but everything else feels pure fantasy. Jewels can be seen embedded into parts of the rock faces, and there are also what look like facial features disguised within other parts of the scene. There is a small pool in the foreground, around which the stoned walls are placed. There also appears to be a small female figure in the bottom right hand corner. This painting is detailed and bold, but also aesthetic in a mystery way.

Celebes

At center, a large round shape dominates the composition that Ernst based upon a photograph of a Sudanese bin for storing corn which the artist has refigured as an elephant-like mechanical being from the subconscious. The creature is highly ambiguous. It has a horned head with apparently sightless eyes, but a pair of tusks projecting on the left suggests the possible presence of a second head on the other side. Its neck seems to consist of a long snake-like coil which emerges from a hole in its upper section; the top is surmounted by a brightly-coloured construction containing a mysterious eye.

This painting demonstrates Max Ernst’s indebtedness to Freudian dream theory with its odd juxtapositions of disparate objects. Despite the headless and nude woman, the painting holds together as a finished composition. Through this work, Ernst questions which is the "real" world - that of night-time and dreams - or that of the waking state.

Salvador Dali

Dali was born in a city of Spain which is close to the France border. He is known as the most famous Surrealist. Freudian theory supported Dali's attempts at forging a visual language capable of rendering his dreams and hallucinations. These account for some of the iconic and now ubiquitous images, which earns his fame at the time. Obsessive themes of eroticism, death, and decay permeate Dalí's work, reflecting his familiarity with and synthesis of the psychoanalytical theories of his time. His work is rife with often ready-interpreted symbolism, ranging from fetishes and animal imagery to religious symbols.

Persistence of Memory

Persistence of Memory is Dali’s most famous artwork. This iconic painting depicts the fluidity of time as a series of melting watches, implying that time cannot be passed and the moment will stay there, just like the painting’s title.

The distinction between hard and soft objects highlights Dali's desire to flip reality lending to his subjects characteristics opposite their usually inherent properties, an un-reality often found in our dreamscapes. They are surrounded by a swarm of ants hungry for the organic processes of putrefaction and decay of which Dali held huge fascination. The melting flesh at the painting's center resembles Dali, therefore viewers can see this piece as a reflection on the artist's immortality amongst the rocky cliffs of his Catalonian home.

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans- Premonition of Civil War

This piece was created by Dali to represent the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Dali painted it only six months before the war began. The painting depicts the destruction of the war. The weird creature in the center of the painting is self-destructive, just as the civil war is. This painting continues to convey his Surrealist idea and it looks very realistic. Dalí is quoted as saying the reason he included boiled beans was "one could not imagine swallowing all that unconscious meat without the presence of some mealy and melancholy vegetable." By this he meant that there were many hardships in the war so the Spanish citizens had to do their best to deal with their problems. Dali played with themes of love, eating, and the war and how they are all related.

Lobster Telephone

This Lobster Telephone is one of the most famous Surrealist objects ever created. The juxtaposition of two objects that have little to do with each other is a staple of Dada and Surrealist ideas. Dali combined the telephone, an object meant to be held, intimately next to one's ear, with a large lobster, its genitalia aligned with the mouthpiece. It presents a literal juxtaposition of a freakish underwater creature with a normal machine of daily life in the way of dream pairings, in which we are disconcertedly jared from our reality and viscerally unnerved by the presence of things that make no sense on a conscious level.

Rene Magritte

As the most celebrated Belgian artist of the 20th century, Rene Magritte has achieved great popular acclaim for his idiosyncratic approach to Surrealism. While some French Surrealists led ostentatious lives, Magritte preferred the quiet life, symbolized by the bowler-hatted men that often populate his pictures. Magritte avoided the stylistic distractions of most modern paintings. He settled on a deadpan, illustrative technique that clearly articulated the content of his pictures. The illustrative quality of Magritte's pictures often results in a powerful paradox: images that are beautiful in their clarity and simplicity, but which also provoke unsettling thoughts. Besides, he was fascinated by the interactions of textual and visual signs, and some of his most famous pictures employ both words and images.

The Treachery of Image

The Treachery of Images belongs to a series of word-image paintings by Magritte from the late 1920s. He combined images and text in a style suggested both by children's books, and by Magritte's early career in advertising. The picture shows a pipe. Below it, Magritte painted, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", which is French for "This is not a pipe." The painting is not a pipe, but rather an image of a pipe. This masterpiece of Surrealism creates a three-way paradox out of the conventional notion that objects correspond to words and images. Magritte may have borrowed the pipe image from Le Corbusier's book Vers une architecture, but he may also have been inspired by a comical sign he knew in an art gallery, which read, "Ceci n'est pas de l'Art."

Personal Values

In this painting, Rene Magritte presents a room filled with familiar things, but creating a sense of disorientation and incongruity. Inside and out are inverted by his rendering of a skyscape on the interior walls of the room. The familiar things now appear in a strange size. Magritte creates a paradoxical world that is, in his own words, "a defiance of common sense."

When he first saw this painting, Magritte's dealer, Alexander Iolas, was violently upset by it. Tellingly, the artist replied, "In my picture, the comb has specifically lost its “social character,” it has become an object of useless luxury, which may, as you say, leave the spectator feeling helpless or even make him ill. Well, this is proof of the effectiveness of the picture."

Bathers

This work is a fine example of Magritte's early attempts to find a restrained, illustrative style. It is really elegant, in contrast to his later works. It bears comparison with contemporary Belgian Expressionism and also with the classicizing modernist styles that were then popular throughout Europe. We can recognize many of the elements that characterized his later paintings, such as the prominence of the sea and the mysterious sphere in the background. This work also bears the influence of Magritte's professional forays into the world of fashion advertising.

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Frida Kahlo typically uses the visual symbolism of physical pain in a long-standing attempt to better understand emotional suffering. Prior to her, the language of loss, death, and selfhood, had been relatively well investigated by some male artists, but she was the first female artist to do so.

Henry Ford Hospital

This painting is a good example where Kahlo used the ex-voto format but subverts it by placing herself centre stage, rather than recording the miraculous deeds of saints. Kahlo painted her own story, as though she becomes saintly and the work is made not as thanks to the lord but in defiance, questioning why he brings her pain.

In this painting, Kahlo lies on a bed, bleeding after a miscarriage. From the exposed naked body six “ribbons” flow outwards, attached to symbols. One of these six objects is a fetus, suggesting that the ribbons could be a metaphor for umbilical cords. The other five objects that surround Frida are things that she remembers, or things that she had seen in the hospital. It shows Kahlo’s connection to other things, from physical to the mundane and metaphor images.

The Broken Column

In this painting, a gap resembling an earthquake fissure splits her in two. The opened body suggests surgery and Frida's feeling that without the steel corset she would literally fall apart. A broken column replaces the artist's crumbling spine and sharp metal nails pierce her body. The hard coldness of this inserted column recalls the steel rod that pierced her body during a car accident. More generally, the architectural feature now in ruins, has associations of the simultaneous power and fragility of the female body. Beyond its physical dimensions, the cloth wrapped around Kahlo's pelvis, recalls Christ's loincloth. Indeed, Kahlo again displays her wounds like a Christian martyr. She uses physical pain, nakedness, and sexuality to convey the message of spiritual suffering.

Joan Miro

Joan Miro was a Surrealist Spanish painter. There are two museums dedicated to his works in Europe, one in his homeland Barcelona and one in his adoptive city, Palma de Mallorca. Via his own Surrealism-inspired exploration, Miro invented a new kind of pictorial space in which carefully rendered objects issuing strictly from the artist's imagination became juxtaposed with basic, recognizable forms. He devoted his career to exploring various means by which to dismantle traditional precepts of representation. Miro balanced the kind of spontaneity and automatism encouraged by the Surrealists with meticulous planning and rendering to achieve finished works that seemed plausibly representational despite their considerable level of abstraction. He often worked with a limited palette, yet the colors he used were bold and expressive.

Escargot, femme, fleur, toile

This painting of Miro’s bears Surrealist characteristics but is also heavily influenced by the simultaneous literature world, specifically poetry. The work holds fantastical shapes that resemble living organisms, but are painted freely. The title translates to “Snail, Woman, Flower, Star”, and is printed directly on the image, signifying that in itself the title is freely associated rather than a description of the painting. The forms are completely hallucinatory and were created without conscious thought, creating the essentially pure figures that are characteristic of Surrealism.

Harlequin’s Carnival

This painting is one of the most remarkable paintings of Joan Miro. It depicts a festive and crowded scene where quixotic biomorphs seem to be caught up in a lively celebration. Every form both evokes resemblances and refuses them, as at center left, the harlequin, identified by the black and white checks of the costume of an Italian figure, has a body shaped like a distorted guitar. The cat, at lower right, stands up on its legs, its “arms” held out to the scene, while its red and yellow face turns to look at the viewer. A yellow and black fish lies on the table, an ear and an eye grow out of the ladder on the left, music notes appear on the wall, black and white snake-like tubes cross in the center, and many of the forms are connected by thin scrolling lines, as the black and yellow creature dancing in the lower center grasps a thread that extends to the cat's whiskers. The viewer is caught up in this imagined world, intrigued by the dissonance between identification and meaning.

IMPORTANCE

So, why was Surrealism so important at the time and why do people still do research about it nowadays? Simply put, it is because Surrealism has brought a new breeze to the Modernism movement. People no longer had to compose poetry and novels as well as paint an artwork following a specific method. The Modernism in general marked the era of freedom and emphasized individualism. Specifically, Surrealism had changed perceptions of the world by expressing imaginative dreams and visions free from conscious rational control. Surrealists rebeled with the world and built for them own a dreamland without following any rules of painting.