art between wars...surrealism
TRANSCRIPT
ART between the Wars
Dadaism & Surrealism
Guernica, Picasso
Dadaism: Anti Art 1915-25
• regression (baby talk)
• context: aftermath of World War I• challenged established values (moral & aesthetic)• credo: “Everything the artist spits is art”
• randomness & chance • playful & experimental• techniques/materials: historically unacceptable
Dadaism
Marcel DuchampFountain (1917)
medium: ‘Ready-Made’
Mass produced object (found object) taken out of context
Surrealism 1925-45
“the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of the dream”-Breton’s Second Manifesto
of Surrealism
Ernst’s The Eye of Silence
Political & Scientific Context
Time Transfixed, Magritte
•Anti fascist & antibourgeois
•Freud’s psychology of the unconscious
•Automatism
•Juxtaposition of objects
Magritte’s False Mirror (1926)
Surrealism
• Salvador Dalí – The Persistence of Memory
(1931)• wordplay:
– montrer --> to show --> montre (watch)
– langue --> “tongue” --> langueur (languid)
• theme: Oedipal desires– distorted fetal image
of artist himself– ants --> expression of
anxieties
Miro’s Carnival of the Harlequin (1925)
Exercises