Man RayAmerican Filmmaker, Painter, Photographer

Movements: Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Futurism

BiographyMan Ray was born as Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Philadelphia. His tailor father and seamstress mother soon relocated the family to the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where Ray spent most of his childhood. His family changed their surname to Ray due to the fear of anti-Semitism. His name evolved to Man Ray after shortening his nickname, Manny, to Man. He kept his family background secret for most of his career, though the influence of his parents' occupations is evident in many of his works.

In high school, Ray learned freehand drawing, drafting and other basic techniques of architecture and engineering. He also excelled in his art class. Though he hated the special attention from his art teacher, he still frequented art museums and studied the works of the old masters on his own. Such self-motivation from the early age proved to be a solid grounding for the versatility he showed throughout his artistic career. Upon graduating from high school in 1908,

he turned down a scholarship to study architecture, and began pursuing his career as an artist.

Summary of Man Ray’s CareerMan Ray's career is distinctive above all for the success he achieved in both the United States and Europe. First maturing in the center of American modernism in the 1910s, he made Paris his home in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the 1940s he crossed the Atlantic once again, spending periods in New York and Hollywood. His art spanned painting, sculpture, film, prints and poetry, and in his long career he worked in styles influenced by Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism. He also successfully navigated the worlds of commercial and fine art, and came to be a sought-after fashion photographer. He is perhaps most remembered for his photographs of the inter-war years, in particular the camera-less pictures he called 'Rayographs', but he always regarded himself first and foremost as a painter.

Key Ideas Although he matured as an abstract painter, Man Ray

eventually disregarded the traditional superiority painting held over photography and happily moved between different forms. Dada and Surrealism were important in encouraging this attitude; they also persuaded him that the idea motivating a work of art was more important than the work of art itself.

For Man Ray, photography often operated in the gap between art and life. It was a means of documenting sculptures that never had an independent life outside the photograph, and it was a means of capturing the activities of his avant-garde friends. His work as a commercial photographer encouraged him to create fine, carefully composed prints, but he would never aspire to be a fine art photographer in the manner of his early inspiration, Alfred Stieglitz.

André Breton once described Man Ray as a 'pre-Surrealist', something which accurately describes the

artist's natural affinity for the style. Even before the movement had coalesced, in the mid 1920s, his work, influenced by Marcel Duchamp, had Surrealist undertones, and he would continue to draw on the movement's ideas throughout his life. His work has ultimately been very important in popularizing Surrealism.

Artworks :OBJET INDESTRUCTIBLE

Dimensionsh;21.8×w11.4×d11.2 cm

Mediumready-made, metronome, photo

Creation Date1965

RAMAPO HILLSDimensions

20 1/8 by 19 in. 51.1 by 48.2 cmMedium

Oil on canvasCreation Date

1914

Source : http://www.theartstory.org/artist-ray-man.htmMan ray as fashion PhotographerMan Ray came out of an era when photographers painted with light. There is a stillness about his fashion photography: stark, static studio images of models in black lace, organdy silk and embroidered crepe, their arms stretched skyward, their faces lighted from above. His women never look into the camera. They seem to be in no particular space or place. They look chipped out of marble. The first exhibition to focus on his fashion images, ''Man Ray/Bazaar Years: A Fashion Retrospective,'' at the International Center of Photography Midtown, includes photographs of clothes by the leading designers of the 1920's and 30's: Poiret, Worth, Vionnet, Lanvin, Chanel and Schiaparelli. There are also portraits, nude studies, experimental Rayographs and solarized prints, and tear sheets from magazines like Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Vanity Fair and Charm (published by Bamberger's Department Stores), which essentially paid the artist's rent.Fashion photography today emphasizes the model in motion, practically leaping off the page. From page to page, there is the relentless jitter and bop of men and women making various scenes: in the cafe with the mini-skirt up to here, on the motor scooter with the mini-skirt up to here, off to the restaurant with the, well, decolletage down to there.For Man Ray, who worked before the development of ''fast film'' and motor-drive cameras, there was no question of snapping pictures of models cavorting at hot spots or on the beach. The film was too slow; the model had to stand still.Women's lives, of course, were different then, and Man Ray's pictures reflect the incredible languor of the fashionable woman of the time. There she stands in a sheer black-net Mainbocher, one hand clasped to her breast, the other clutching a ruffled fan, the face upturned, a vision in some fey romantic dream. The year is 1936.In 1937 she applies her lipstick, ''the red badge of courage,'' for a Harper's Bazaar article on the use of lipstick to summon courage in moments of stress. (The color red was

added to the lips in the black-and-white photo in the printing.) Fashion is now marketed and photographed as part of a ''life style concept.'' It is very much ''on the go'' for ''today's active woman,'' to quote every magazine and none in particular. Man Ray's fashion pictures are totally divorced from any such concept. They are an artist's view of fashion.Indeed, Man Ray saw fashion only as a means to support his experimental art. So it is not at all surprising that his fashion photographs should demonstrate his restless need to reshape and reinvent images, a need that extended, of course, to himself.Man Ray's first fashion assignments were to photograph the collection of Paul Poiret, a leading Paris couturier of the 20's. A photograph of Peggy Guggenheim captures the heavy Oriental opulence of his clothes, which were eventually superseded by the sportier styles of Chanel. But another, with a Brancusi sculpture in the background, is more to Man Ray's point.He wanted ''something different, not like the stuff turned out by the usual photographers,'' he said at the time, according to the running text of the exhibition. So he had the model stand next to the Brancusi, which threw off beams of light. ''This was to be the picture, I decided; I'd combine art and fashion.'' Source : http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/14/arts/illuminating-man-ray-as-fashion-photographer.html

Angus McBeanBritish | 1904 – 1990

BiographyAngus McBean was a British photographer who was born in 1904. Angus McBean has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg Rupertinum and at the All Visual Arts. Numerous works by the artist have been sold at auction, including 'Sixty-five

theatrical images' sold at Christie's South Kensington 'PHOTOGRAPHS' in 2006 for $10,430. There have been many articles about Angus McBean, including 'Audrey Hepburn: Portraits of an Icon, National Portrait Gallery,

London' written for Aesthetica in 2015. The artist died in 1990.

Artworks :Audrey Hepburn

by Angus McBeanbromide print, October 1950

17 1/2 in. x 13 7/8 in. (444 mm x 354 mm)

Given by the photographer, Angus McBean, 1985

René Ray (née Irene Lilian Creese), Countess of Midletonby Angus McBean

bromide print, 193811 1/2 in. x 8 7/8 in. (292 mm x

226 mm)

Purchased, 2001

Source : https://www.mutualart.com/Artist/Angus-McBean/E655BB195F1CD35A?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=angus%20mcbean&utm_content=%7BK_CREATIVE_HEADLINE%7D&utm_campaign=Artist&KEYWORD_K=angus%20mcbean&TRACKING_ID_K=cr2141221&CHANNEL_K=google&CAMPAIGN_K=Artist&AdGROUP_K=Angus+McBean&gclid=CNiZhP_rlNACFUk8GwodnMsAMQ#Articles

Angus McBean: Portraits is the first museum retrospective devoted to Angus McBean (1904-90), one of the most significant British photographers of the twentieth century. It brings together over 100 photographs in black and white and colour, including a large number of vintage prints from museum collections and important loans from private collections. The exhibition offers an unprecedented opportunity to see the astonishing range of McBean's work. From the striking surrealist portraits of the 1930s to his period as indisputably the most important photographer of theatre and dance personalities of the 1940s and 1950s. The exhibition also showcases his cult re-emergence as a chronicler of pop music and includes his famous Beatles covers.Highlights of the exhibition include the iconic 1951 photograph of the then unknown Audrey Hepburn, her head and shoulders emerging from sand - and posed amidst classical pillars. The forty-year spread of the exhibition

includes more recent photographs of Derek Jarman and Tilda Swinton, while other significant portraits include Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and Katharine Hepburn. The exhibition also features several defining portraits of Vivien Leigh, whom McBean photographed many times over the course of their thirty-year association.On show for the first time is the complete series of his self-portrait Christmas cards which McBean produced between 1934 and 1985. These inventive and innovative portraits are displayed alongside theatrical props used in their composition, including a Mae West puppet, a marble 'Greek God' bust, bisque 'bathing beauties' and two 1930s papier mâché masks of Greta Garbo and Ivor Novello.Born near Newport in South Wales in 1904, Angus McBean bought his first camera at the age of fifteen. He used his friends and family as models, and also began to make masks and theatrical props for local amateur dramatic productions. After the death of his father in 1924, McBean moved to London and found work in the antiques department of Liberty's on Regent Street, spending his spare time photographing his friends and making masks. After leaving Liberty's in 1931 he decided to try and live by his art, growing a distinctive beard that he claimed was symbolic of the fact that he no longer wished to be a wage earner. McBean was briefly apprenticed to society photographer Hugh Cecil, who taught him photographic techniques, and after a year he set up his own studio in Victoria.McBean's big break came in 1936 when Ivor Novello asked him to create masks for Clemence Dane's adaptation of a Max Beerbohm short story, The Happy Hypocrite. Novello was delighted with the masks and immediately commissioned McBean to take portrait photographs for the production. In 1937 The Sketch commissioned him to photograph the actress Beatrix Lehmann playing Lavinia in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. The dramatic composition of this photograph was inspired by the surrealist art of the era, and working with the artist Roy

Hobdell, McBean went on to produce a number of 'surrealist' portraits of leading actresses in a weekly series, which ran until the early months of the war. Among those on display are portraits of Flora Robson, René Ray and Peggy Ashcroft as Portia.After the war, McBean set up a new studio in Endell Street, London and was commissioned to photograph the American actress Clare Luce in a new production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. He then produced a series of portraits that incorporated significant objects from the lives of his sitters into their photographs: Cecil Beaton is shown surrounded by pages from his scrapbooks, while Ivor Novello leans over bound editions of his musicals. Other portraits show 'Play Personalities' such as Noel Coward, Ralph Richardson and Hugh 'Binkie' Beaumont (Binkie Pulls the Strings). Also on display are portraits of ballet dancers Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann.In the 1950s and '60s McBean's career took a new direction as he began taking colour photographs for LP covers. The exhibition shows his photographs of Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Shirley Bassey and The Beverley Sisters and Spike Milligan's head encased in a glass jar for his album Milligan Preserved. McBean was responsible for the front cover of The Beatles album Please, Please Me, taking a spontaneous shot of the group leaning over the balcony at the EMI Offices in London. Six years later he was asked to recreate the 1963 photograph for the proposed Get Back album. It later appeared on the retrospective LP The Beatles 1967-1970, and these will be displayed alongside one another. Angus McBean retired in 1966 to focus on decorating and restoring his house, Flemings Hall in Suffolk, but he returned to photography in 1982 and the exhibition includes late work such as his portraits of Vivienne Westwood and Jean Paul Gaultier.

Source : http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2006/angus-mcbean-portraits.php

Jerry UelsmannAmerican | 1934

BiographyBorn in Detroit in 1934, Uelsmann received his BFA Degree

at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957 and his M.S. and M.F.A at Indiana University in 1960. He began teaching

photography at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1960. He became a graduate research professor of art at the

University in 1974, and is now retired from teaching. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, with his wife, the artist Maggie

Taylor.Uelsmann received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1972. He is a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, a founding member of the Society of Photographic Education,

and a former trustee of the Friends of Photography. Uelsmann's work has been exhibited in more than 100

individual shows in the United States and abroad over the past forty years. His photographs are in the permanent collections of many museums world wild, including the

Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the Samuel P. Harn

Museum in Gainesville, the International Museum of Photography and the George Eastman House, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliptheque National in Paris, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the National Gallery of Canada, the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Galleries of Scotland, the

Center of Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the

National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, and the Museum of Photography in Seoul, Korea.

Source : http://www.peterfetterman.com/artists/jerry-uelsmannArtworks:

The Burden of Dreams, 2013Silver Gelatin Print

16 × 20 in40.6 × 50.8 cm

Untitled, 1975, 1975Silver Gelatin Print

16 × 20 in40.6 × 50.8 cm

Undiscovered, 1999

Gelatin Silver Print29 × 23 in

73.7 × 58.4 cm

Elusive Journal, 2009Silver Gelatin Print

16 × 20 in40.6 × 50.8 cm

Source : https://www.artsy.net/artist/jerry-uelsmann?medium=photography

Salvador DalíSpanish Painter and Printmaker

Movement: Surrealism

BiographyDali was born in Figueres, a small town outside Barcelona, to

a prosperous family. His larger-than-life persona started early: aged 10, he had his first drawing lessons where he

claimed that he manifested hysterical, rage-filled outbursts toward his family and playmates. Throughout his life, Dali retained his love for Catalan culture, and he depicted the landscape surrounding Figueres in several key paintings throughout his career. Dali entered the Madrid School of

Fine Arts in 1921.

Summary of Dali’s CareerSalvador Dali is among the most versatile and prolific artists of the twentieth century. Though chiefly remembered for his painterly output, in the course of his long career he successfully turned to sculpture, printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and, perhaps most famously, filmmaking in his collaborations with Luis Bunuel and Alfred Hitchcock. Dali was renowned for his flamboyant personality

as much as for his undeniable technical virtuosity. In his early use of organic morphology, his work bears the stamp of fellow Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. His paintings also evince a fascination for Classical and Renaissance art, clearly visible through his hyper-realistic style and religious symbolism of his later work. Dali is most often associated with the Surrealist movement, despite his formal expulsion from the group in 1934 for his reactionary political views.

Key Ideas Freudian theory underpins Dali's attempts at forging a

formal and visual language capable of rendering his dreams and hallucinations. These account for some of the iconic and now ubiquitous images through which Dali achieved tremendous fame during his lifetime and beyond.

Obsessive themes of eroticism, death, and decay permeate Dali's work, reflecting his familiarity with and synthesis of the psychoanalytical theories of his time. Drawing on blatantly autobiographical material and childhood memories, Dali's work is rife with often ready-interpreted symbolism, ranging from fetishes and animal imagery to religious symbols.

Dali subscribed to Surrealist André Breton's theory of automatism, but ultimately opted for a method of tapping the unconscious that he termed "critical paranoia," a state in which one could cultivate delusion while maintaining one's sanity. Paradoxically defined by Dali himself as a form of "irrational knowledge," the paranoiac-critical method was applied by his contemporaries, mostly Surrealists, to varied media, ranging from cinema to poetry to fashion.

Famous artworks:

Honey is Sweeter than Blood (1927)Artwork description & Analysis: Dali's first surreal painting, Honey is Sweeter than Blood, shows a marked progression away from Cubism toward the depiction of subconscious obsessions. Dali's

preoccupations with decadence, death, and immortality returned repeatedly in future works. This painting was made between Dali's first visits to Paris where he was socializing with artists who would found the Surrealist movement.Oil on canvas

Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933)Artwork description & Analysis: Retrospective Bust of a Woman exemplifies Dali's found object sculptures in which the original materials would be recontextualized through a process of assembly and composition. This piece was constructed around an inkstand, atop which was placed a replica of figures from Jean-Francois Millet's painting The

Angelus (1857-1859). Dali was fixated on this painting, deeming it a marvelous representation of sexual repression, which he worked compulsively to unleash. The necklace draped around the bust is made from a zoetrope strip,

indicating the potential for movement in a still object as well as Dali's interest in film.Painted porcelain, bread, corn, feathers, paint on paper,

beads, ink stand, sand, and two pens - Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Persistence of Memory (1931)Artwork description & Analysis: This iconic and

much-reproduced painting depicts time as a series of melting watches surrounded by swarming ants that hint at decay, an organic process in which Dali held an unshakeable fascination. The important distinction between hard and soft objects, associated by Dali with order and putrefaction respectively, informs

his work method in subverting inherent textual properties: the softening of hard objects and corresponding hardening of soft objects. It is likely that Dali was using the clocks to symbolize mortality (specifically his own) rather than literal time, as the melting flesh in the painting's center is loosely based on Dali's profile. The cliffs that provide the backdrop are taken from images of Catalonia, Dali's home.Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York

Source : http://www.theartstory.org/artist-dali-salvador.htmMax Ernst

German Painter and SculptorMovements: Dada, Surrealism

BIographyMax Ernst was born into a middle-class Catholic family of nine children in Bruhl, Germany, near Cologne. Ernst first learned to paint from his father, a strict disciplinarian who

was deaf, and a teacher who held an avid interest in academic art. A good deal of Ernst's work as an adult sought

to undermine authority including that of his father. Other than this introduction to amateur painting at home, Ernst

never received any formal training in art: thus he was responsible for his own artistic techniques. Ernst

matriculated at the University of Bonn in 1914 to study philosophy but soon abandoned it, later claiming that he

avoided "any studies which might degenerate into breadwinning." Instead, the artist preferred those areas of study considered "futile by his professors - predominately

painting...seditious philosophers, and unorthodox poetry." At this time, Ernst became deeply interested in psychology and the art of the mentally ill. When World War I broke out Ernst

was conscripted into the German army and served in an

artillery division in which he directly experienced the drama and bloodshed of trench warfare - he served on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. Ernst was one of multiple artists who emerged from military service emotionally wounded and alienated from European traditions and

conventional values.

SummaryGerman-born Max Ernst was a provocateur, a shocking and innovative artist who mined his unconscious for dreamlike imagery that mocked social conventions. A soldier in World War I, Ernst emerged deeply traumatized and highly critical of western culture. These charged sentiments directly fed into his vision of the modern world as irrational, an idea that becamethe basis of his artwork. Ernst's artistic vision, along with his humor and verve come through strongly in his Dada and Surrealists works; Ernst was a pioneer of both movements. Spending the majority of his life in France, during WWII Ernst was categorized as an "enemy alien"; the United States government affixed the same label when Ernst arrived as a refugee. In later life, in addition to his prolific outpouring of paintings, sculpture, and works-on-paper, Ernst devoted much of his time to playing and studying chess which he revered as an art form. His work with the unconscious, his social commentary, and broad experimentation in both subject and technique remain influential.

Key Ideas Max Ernst attacked the conventions and traditions of art,

all the while possessing a thorough knowledge of European art history. He questioned the sanctity of art by creating non-representational works without clear narratives, by making sport of religious icons, and by formulating new means of creating artworks to express the modern condition.

Ernst was profoundly interested in the art of the

mentally ill as a means to access primal emotion and unfettered creativity.

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. While turning inwards unto himself, Ernst was also tapping into the universal unconscious with its common dream imagery.

Interested in locating the origin of his own creativity, Ernst attempted to freely paint from his inner psyche and in an attempt to reach a pre-verbal state of being. Doing so unleashed his primal emotions and revealed his personal traumas, which then became the subject of his collages and paintings. This desire to paint from the sub-conscious, also known as automatic painting was central to his Surrealist works and would later influence the Abstract Expressionists.

Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924)Artwork description & Analysis: A red wooden fence affixed to the painting's surface opens in a welcoming manner and reveals what at first seems to be an idyllic setting. Against a pleasing background of a blue sky, Ernst has diligently rendered a scene of confusion and terror. At top, a small figure strikes down on a buzzer as if to signal a warning. Our eye quickly catches sight of a crazed female figure at left

running in distress - painted in grisaille -- wielding a knife as if fighting off the nightingale. A second female, similarly painted in just grey and white tones, collapses on the ground as if fainted. Ernst later provided two autobiographical references for the nightingale:

first, was the death of his sister in 1897. The second was a boyhood fevered hallucination in which the wood grain of a panel near his bed took on "successively the aspect of an eye, a nose, a bird's head, a menacing nightingale, a

spinning top and so on." Ernst would often depict birds in his works, which he used as an autobiographical symbol. Although Ernst painted from his own life and rendered personal symbols, he successful conveys the terror of dreams that is universal.Oil on wood with painted wood elements and frame -

Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child Before Three Witnesses: Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and the Painter (1926)

Artwork description & Analysis: Here, portrayed as an earthy, frustrated woman, the Virgin Mary sharply paddles her young son - the unruly baby Jesus - on his bottom which displays red marks already left by her punishing hand. Watching through the background window and serving as witnesses are Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and the painter himself; all three seem untroubled by the scene. Ernst successfully upends both his own Catholic faith with its devotion to Christ's mother Mary, while simultaneously debasing much of Western art history with its proliferation of

loving scenes between the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Christ child, and also, undercutting the secular, bourgeois sanctity of motherhood. Ernst's painting is simultaneously blasphemous and sharply humorous. As expected, not

everyone saw humor in the theme and the work created considerable controversy as an attack on Christianity and contemporary values.Oil on canvas - Museum Ludwig, Cologne

The Fireside Angel (1937)Artwork description & Analysis: This fantastical creature, with arms and legs extended, appears to be leaping with a garish, yet joyous, expression on its face. The figures and its appendages are oddly colored and malformed. Further, its leg seems to be spawning another being, as if a cancerous

growth spreading. Fireside Angel is one of the rare works by Ernst that was inspired directly by world political events. The artist was motivated to paint the work after Franco's fascists defeated the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Ernst strove to create a painting suggestive of the ensuing chaos he feared was spreading across Europe, and emanating from his native Germany. Revisiting the benign and misleading title, it was Ernst's play to attract viewers with pleasing words, and then shock them into questioning their own beliefs by labeling monsters as angels.Oil on canvas

Source : http://www.theartstory.org/artist-ernst-max.htmRene Magritte

Belgian PainterMovement: Surrealism

BiographyRene Magritte was the eldest of three boys, born to a fairly

well-off family. His father is thought to have been in the manufacturing industry, and his mother was known to be a milliner before her marriage. Magritte's development as an

artist was influenced by two significant events in his childhood; the first was an encounter with an artist painting in a cemetery, who he happened across while playing with a companion. Magritte later wrote, "I found, in the middle of

some broken stone columns and heaped-up leaves, a painter who had come from the capital, and who seemed to me to be performing magic." The second pivotal event was

the suicide of his mother in 1912 when Magritte was 14. According to the apocryphal account, Magritte was present when her body was fished out of a river, her face covered

completely by her white dress. While current scholars believe this to be no more than a myth propagated by his

nurse, the image of a head uncannily concealed by a contour-hugging cloth reoccurs throughout the artist's

oeuvre.

SummarySurely the most celebrated Belgian artist of the twentieth century, Rene Magritte has achieved great popular acclaim for his idiosyncratic approach to Surrealism. To support himself he spent many years working as a commercial artist, producing advertising and book designs, and this most likely shaped his fine art, which often has the abbreviated impact of an advertisement. While some French Surrealists led ostentatious lives, Magritte preferred the quiet anonymity of a middle-class existence, a life symbolized by the bowler-hatted men that often populate his pictures. In later years, he was castigated by his peers for some of his strategies (such as his tendency to produce multiple copies of his pictures), yet since his death his reputation has only improved. Conceptual artists have admired his use of text in images, and painters in the 1980s admired the provocative kitsch of some of his later work.

Key Ideas Magritte wished to cultivate an approach that avoided

the stylistic distractions of most modern painting. While some French Surrealists experimented with new

techniques, Magritte settled on a deadpan, illustrative technique that clearly articulated the content of his pictures. Repetition was an important strategy for Magritte, informing not only his handling of motifs within individual pictures, but also encouraging him to produce multiple copies of some of his greatest works. His interest in the idea may have come in part from Freudian psychoanalysis, for which repetition is a sign of trauma. But his work in commercial art may have also played a role in prompting him to question the conventional modernist belief in the unique, original work of art.

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. They seem to declare that they hide no mystery, and yet they are also marvelously strange.

Magritte was fascinated by the interactions of textual and visual signs, and some of his most famous pictures employ both words and images. While those pictures often share the air of mystery that characterizes much of his Surrealist work, they often seem motivated more by a spirit of rational enquiry - and wonder - at the misunderstandings that can lurk in language.

The men in bowler hats that often appear in Magritte's pictures can be interpreted as self-portraits. Portrayals of the artist's wife, Georgette, are also common in his work, as are glimpses of the couple's modest Brussels apartment. Although this might suggest autobiographical content in Magritte's pictures, it more likely points to the commonplace sources of his inspiration. It is as if he believed that we need not look far for the mysterious, since it lurks everywhere in the most conventional of lives.

Artworks:

The Treachery of Images (1929)Artwork description & Analysis: The Treachery of Images cleverly highlights the gap between language and meaning. Magritte combined the words and image in such a fashion that he forces us to question the importance of the sentence and the word. "Pipe," for instance, is no more an actual pipe than a picture of a pipe can be smoked. Magritte likely borrowed the pipe motif from Le Corbusier's book Vers une architecture (1923), since he was admirer of the architect and painter, 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." The painting is the subject of a famous book-length analysis by Michel Foucault. One might also compare it with Joseph Kosuth's handling of a

similar problem of image, text, and reality in his 1965 installation One and Three Chairs.

Oil on canvas - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The Pebble (1948)Artwork description & Analysis: The Pebble was included in Magritte's first Paris exhibition in 1948, where he shocked critics and public alike with an uncharacteristic group of his "vache" works. This group of around thirty pictures was

painted rapidly in only a few weeks. It borrowed from the sketchy style of comics and caricatures, but some elements were also derived from Edouard Manet and Fauvism (the background in this picture may come from Henri Matisse). It

also borrows the Venus de Milo motif that Magritte had used before. Perhaps unfortunately for the artist, the exhibition achieved its perverse effect, and was both financially and critically devastating to him. However, he remained attached to the work, and later gave this piece to his wife.Oil on canvas - Private collection

Bather (1925)Artwork description & Analysis: This elegant work is a fine example of Magritte's early attempts to find a restrained, illustrative style. 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, and his interest in the works of Fernand Léger. Bather can be compared to his painting The Bather between Light and Darkness (1935-36), which

explores the same scene in the artist's mature style. In 1930, the artist gifted the picture to his sister-in-law, Leontine Berger.Oil on canvas - Private collection

Source : http://www.theartstory.org/artist-magritte-rene.htmBill Brandt

British, born Germany, 1904–1983

BiographyThroughout a career that encompassed a wide variety of

subjects and printing styles, British photographer Bill Brandt enabled viewers to see the world with, as he put it, “a sense of wonder.” He began his career as an assistant to Man Ray in Paris, where he discovered the work of Eugène Atget and Hungarian photographer Brassaï. Upon returning to England,

he became known for his incisive documentary work, including his landmark series “The English at Home”, and, later, revealing images of London under siege during the

Blitz of WWII. After the war, he turned his focus to the

human body, using unusual perspectives to transform flesh

into abstract landscapes. Unlike his famous contemporaries like Henri

Cartier-Bresson, Brandt experimented freely with artificial

light, cropping, and photomontage. “Photography is

not a sport,” he said. “It has no rules. Everything must be dared and

tried.”British, born Germany, 1904–

1983, Hamburg, GermanySource : https://www.artsy.net/artist/bill-brandt

Artworks:

Hampstead, London, 1952Gelatin silver print; printed c. 19529 × 9 3/4 in22.9 × 24.8 cmUnique

East Sussex Coast, 1957Gelatin silver print, printed circa 1966, mounted9 × 7 4/5 in22.9 × 19.7 cm

Nude, London, 1952Silver gelatin print, printed later13 3/10 × 9 2/5 in33.8 × 23.8 cm

St. John’s Wood, London, 1957Silver gelatin print15 7/10 × 11 4/5 in40 × 30 cm

Responses1. Man Ray

Most of his artwork has its own meaning that reflect his life. He often created strange and illogical things that makes people to think even harder of what he is trying to deliver through his artworks. The sentence

‘documenting sculptures that never had an independent life outside the photograph’ is a very good way of expressing his idea and I really love this sentence as it makes a great sense and it can be an inspirational quote as well. I might say that not all of the artist can be a photographer and not all photographer can be an artist but in fact, he has talent in both of them which makes him to be special. I also love his idea of connection surrealistic movement to fashion photography.

2.Angus McBeanI do think that Angus has a very creative collages of his photography as he mostly uses a woman as his main subject. The idea of woman getting out from the sand land and framed photograph of a woman hanging in the sky have a really nice concept of his photography. Some of the photographs are rather dreamy while the other are like collaging a human to another object kind of surrealistic or dada style. His surrealism photography somehow looks more logical than Man Ray’s photography.

3.Jerry UelsmannThe four chosen pictures above are my favorite photographs. It looks very dreamy that I can’t really tell how imaginative and innovative his ideas are. I’m seriously in love with his photography works that it makes me want to purchase and hang them in my room. His idea of making a print of someone’s face on the bed and added clouds is very meaningful and artistic at the same time. His surreal type of work connects to every object that is included in his photographs.

4.Salvador DalíOne of the most famous painter who has a high dream and hallucinations in his mind which is then poured in his piece of artworks and resulted a very illogical painting. Mostly his paintings described how one thing

can connect to other meaning which is then combined together to form a meaning of the paintings. I like the idea of him putting the melting clock in the middle of a dessert island which seems to be quite mysterious and cause people to think what is the purpose of each object included in his painting.

5.Max ErnstIt is said that Max first learn painting from his father who is deaf which I think it is really amazing because it is kind of hard to teach in a disabled condition. In my opinion, Max’s talent genetically comes from his father as he never took or received any painting class which he made his own style of painting. He applied wide-range of colors to his painting which end up with a good combination. He 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 used his inner psyche to paint which he reflects most of his traumas to his collages and paintings.

6.Rene MagritteIt is very interesting that Rene can bring idiosyncratic to approach surrealism. He have done lots of advertisement job to support himself which means Rene is a very active artist. His painting seems to hide no mystery and pretty straight forward but the painting is marvelously strange. Most of his painting can be interpreted as self-portrait. Natural and nude colors are mostly applied in his paintings.

7.Bill BrandtBill first did incisive documentary work which became popular which is made upon his return to London. He then seems to have an interest in capturing part of human body as it is shown in most of his photographs. In my opinion, I think he wanted people to understand the

art side of human body and how the shapes look interesting as it is combined with some irrelevant stuffs which some of the photographs appear to be some kind of surrealistic collages. He also used a very unusual perspective to transform flesh into abstract landscapes.