Surrealism

Early 20th Century

• Three styles compete to define the future of "modern" art
  • Cubism
  • Expressionism
  • Surrealism

The Surreal Aesthetic

• The "super-real"
  • Illogical and paradoxical
  • Subconscious more than the conscious
  • Dreamscapes replace landscapes
• Carl Jung presents the idea of the Collective Unconscious

Artists

• de Chirico
  • Paradoxical contradictions similar to a dream
    • Contradictions of perspective
    • Contradictions of light
  • Omens of nothingness
    • Mystery and Melancholy of a Street
    • Menacing Muses
• Chagall
  • Russian immigrant using such imagery
  • Collage dreamscapes of superimposed images from the "personal unconscious"
    • I and the Village
    • The Fiddler
• Dali
  • Symbols - phobias, delusions, and complexes
  • Surreal/dream-time
    • Persistence of Memory
    • Metamorphosis of Narcissus
• Miro
  • Fantasy/Surreal nonrepresentational
  • Self described his shapes as Biomorphic
  • Cutout shapes of positive and negative space
    • Personages With Stars
    • Personages in the Night
• Giacometti
  • Surrealism in fully-round
  • Eerie "beyond-world" of isolation
  • The Existential
  • Constructivism - Sculpture made from assembling/constructing rather than carving media
    • Palace at 4 a.m
    • Cage

Dada

• An anti-art movement growing from the Disillusionment of WW I
• Absurdity of the movement reflected in its name randomly chosen - "Hobby Horse"
• Ready-made - mass-produced objects presented in the context of art
  • L.H.O.O.Q.
  • Bicycle Wheel
  • Fountain

More extensive and full-sized art works may be seen in the Gallery

Humanities Resource of Mark Hunter