ART HISTORY 4450 Surrealism. “Pittura Metafisica” deChirico (1888-1978) –The Child’s Brain (1914) subject: self-portrait theme: “metaphysical” –to destabilize.

ART HISTORY 4450

Surrealism

“Pittura Metafisica”

• deChirico (1888-1978)– The Child’s Brain

(1914)• subject: self-portrait

• theme: “metaphysical”

– to destabilize meaning of everyday objects by making them symbols of

» fear

» alienation

» uncertainty

Surrealism

• de Chirico (cont.)– Ariadne (1913)

• motifs: childhood memory of Turin (Italy)

– architectural settings» towers» piazza

– trains• light/shadow: Nietzsche

– hidden realities seen in strange juxtapositions

– long shadows cast by setting sun into large open city squares & public monuments

Surrealism

• de Chirico (cont.)– Mystery & Melancholy

of a Street (1914)• theme: isolation & sense

of foreboding

• composition: dynamic• color: limited range• light/shadow: chiaroscuro• perspective: linear & aerial

– Mannerist exaggerations

– bizarre spatial constructions

Surrealism

• de Chirico (cont.)– Great Metaphysician (1917)

• setting: Turin– background

architecture – piazza

• central figure: – mannequin – Cubist assemblage – urban monument

• scale: deliberately disproportionate

• light/shadow: Nietzschian

Surrealism

• Surrealism (c. 1919/24-45)– relation to de Chirico’s “Picturra Metaphysica”

• when Surrealists first discovered him, saw him as “a fixed point”

• became “a metaphysical or mystic rope to be placed afterwards round our necks” (Breton)

• represented in every number of La Révolution Surréaliste, but article devoted to him by Breton in June 1926 issue passed a crushing judgment on him

– due to perceived shift in style post-1919– declared de Chirico unworthy of the “marvels” of his

metaphysical period

Surrealism

• Surrealism (cont.)– definition: 1924

• “Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of the dream”

– definition: Breton’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930)

• “… a certain state of mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, height and depth, are no longer perceived as contradictory”

Surrealism

• context: political– André Breton’s lecture (June 1934)

• anti-Fascist (re: Hitler & Mussolini)– “role of fascism to re-establish for the time being

the tottering supremacy of finance-capital”• anti-bourgeois & critical of capitalist society

– “hypocrisy & cynicism have now lost all sense of proportion & are becoming more outrageous…”

• aim: “to detach the intellectual creator from illusions with which bourgeois society has

sought to surround him”

Surrealism

• process: “automatism”– definition: Breton

• intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought

• absence of all control exercised by the reason • outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations• “a monologue poured out as rapidly as possible,

over which the subject's critical faculty has no control”

• distinguished by high degree of immediate absurdity

Surrealism

• context: Freudian psychology (c. 1895)– Surrealists preoccupied w/ Freud’s methods of

investigation– Freud distinguishes different levels of consciousness,

including the unconscious:• repository for traumatic repressed memories; • source of anxiety-provoking drives socially or ethically

unacceptable to the individual• manifested in dreams

– relation to painting: “sublimation” • energy invested in sexual impulses shifts to pursuit of

socially valuable achievements

Surrealism

• context: gender issues– women important to the Surrealists as muses & lovers – inherited late 19C view polarized view:

• embraced both creative & subversive powers of the love instinct

• rejected popular image of women during 1920s as an independent, often androgynous, being who fled stifling domesticity of late Victorian culture

– Breton• Freud’s erotic desire & “pleasure principle”• Sade’s revolutionary eroticism• reintegration of male & female principles

Surrealism

• Max Ernst – definition: "Beyond Painting" (1936)

• “One rainy day in 1919, happening to be in a town on the banks of the Rhine, I was struck by the way my excited gaze became obsessed with the pages of an illustrated catalogue showing objects designed for anthropological, microscopic, psychological, mineralogical and palaeontological demonstrtions. There I found brought together such disparate elements of figuration that the sheer absurdity of this assemblage caused a sudden intensification of my visionary faculties and brought forth a hallucinating succession of contradictory images, double, triple and multiple images overlaying each other with the persistence and rapidity peculiar to love memories and the visions of half-sleep."

Surrealism

• Ernst (cont.)– Elephant of Celebes (1921)

• theme: scatological– long hose --> urinate– holes for excrement

• figure: monstrous– crafted from various

inanimate objects

• landscape: bareness mixed w/ absurdity of flying fish forms

• iconography: metaphysical– e.g., mannequin

Surrealism

• Ernst (1891-1976)– Oedipus Rex (1922)

• subject: Freudian– loving & hostile

wishes children experience towards parents at height of phallic phase

• theme: sadism• style: illusionistic• scale: disjointed• architecture:

dislocated

Surrealism

• Ernst (cont.)– Two Children

Threatened by a Nightingale (c. 1924)

• theme: childhood fears &

anxiety produced by dreams

• technique: tromp l’oeil

visual pun

Surrealism

• Max Ernst (cont.)– The Virgin Spanking the

Christ (1926)• aim: to destroy all myths

about art that for centuries have permitted economic exploitation of painting, sculpture, literature, etc.

• subject: voyeurism & masochism

• forms: derived from Parmigianino’s Mannerist

Madonna w/a Long Neck (c. 1525)

Ernst’s Eye of Silence (1943-44)

Surrealism

• Rene Magritte (1898-1967)– nationality: Belgian

– style: illusionistic; deliberate literalism

– subject: “preconsciousness”

• the state before and during waking up

• did not draw on hallucinations, dreams, occult phenomena, etc.

– method: disjunction between context, size, or juxtaposition of objects

– effect: simplicity is suspect

Magritte’s False Mirror (1926)

Magritte’s The Murderer Threatened (1927)

Surrealism

• Magritte (cont.)– Rape (1934)

• medium: drawing• theme: sadistic

aggression• subject: relate to fear

produced by Freud’s perception of women as harbinger of death & destruction

• facial features: witty sexualized re-formulation

Surrealism

• Magritte (cont.)– Human Condition

(1935)• theme: artistic creation

• subject: perception, eternity & ambiguity

• forms: illusionistic

• strategy: wit/humor

• significance: absence of

muse

Magritte’s Golconde (1953)

Surrealism

• Dalí (1904-89)– style: illusionistic

– training: studied at the Academy of Fine Arts (Madrid)

• mastered academic techniques

• expelled for indiscipline in 1923

Surrealism

• Dali (cont.)– method: “paranoiac-critical”

• “… it will be possible (simultaneously with automatism and other passive states) to systematize confusion and thus to help to discredit completely the world of reality.”

• “uninterrupted becoming” – the ultra-confusing activity rising out of the obsessing

idea– allows the paranoiac who is the witness to consider

the images of the external world unstable and transitory, or suspect

Surrealism

• Dalí (cont.)– The Persistence of Memory

(1931)

• subject: landscape

• theme: decay

– also relate to current scientific speculations about universe

• environment: extraordinary universe

• shapes/figures: distorted

Surrealism

• Dalí (cont.)– Premonition of Civil War

(1936)

• political sympathies:

– fascination for Hitler

– relations w/ Surrealists strained c. 1934

– break came when Dali supported Spanish dictator, Franco, in 1939

Surrealism

• Dalí (cont.)– Crucifixion (1954)

• relate to Renaissance:– figure along CVA– aerial & linear persp.– naturalistic drapery,

shadows, musculature• variance from Renaissance

– floating forms– misplaced nails &

absence of wounds– figures’ scale reversed– viewer deprived of C’s

human emotion

Surrealism

• Miró (1893-1983)– Dutch Interior (1928)

• aim: to cast viewer adrift in one’s own unconscious mind

• subject: woman as muse

• color: vibrant

• light/shadow: absent

• forms: abstract

• spatial order: compressed

Miro’s Carnival of the Harlequin (1925)

Miró’s Dog Barking at the Moon (c. 1930)

Miró’s Still-life with Old Shoe (1937)

Surrealism

• Yves Tanguy– biography:

• French-born American painter• originally a merchant seaman• impelled to take up painting after seeing pictures by de

Chirico • joined Surrealist group in 1925 • emigrated to USA in 1939 where he lived for the rest of

his life• married American Surrealist painter Kay Sage in 1940

Surrealism

• Tanguy (cont.)– Indefinite Divisibility (1942)

• style: illusionistic

– scrupulous technique reminiscent of Dalí

• setting: spectral dream- space

• forms: highly distinctive

– half marine and half lunar landscapes

– amorphous nameless objects

• light/shadow: chiaroscuro

Exercises

IMAGE INDEX

• Slide 2: DE CHIRICO, Giorgio. The Child’s Brain (1914), Oil on canvas, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweeden

• Slide 3: DE CHIRICO, Giorgio. Ariadne (1913), Oil and graphite on canvas, 53 3/8 x 71 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

• Slide 4: DE CHIRICO, Giorgio. Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914), Oil on canvas, Private Collection.

• Slide 5: DE CHIRICO, Giorgio. The Great Metaphysician (1917).

IMAGE INDEX

• Slide 13: ERNST, Max. The Elephant of Celebes (1921), oil on canvas, 4’ 1” x 3’ 6”, Tate Gallery, London.

• Slide 14: ERNST, Max. Oedipus Rex (1922), Oil on canvas, 93 x 102 cm., Private collection, Paris.

• Slide 15: ERNST, Max. Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale (c. 1924).

• Slide 16: ERNST, Max. The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and the Painter (1926), Oil on canvas, 196 x 130 cm., Museum Ludwig, Cologne (Germany).

IMAGE INDEX

• Slide 17: (Left) ERNST’s Surrealist The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child (c. 1925); and

(right) PARMIGIANINO’s Mannerist Madonna with the Long Neck (c. 1525).

• Slide 18: ERNST, Max. The Eye of Silence (1943-44 ), Oil on canvas, 42 1/2 x 55 1/2 in., Washington University Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO.

• Slide 20: MAGRITTE, Rene. The False Mirror (1926).

• Slide 21: MAGRITTE. The Menaced Assassin (1927), Oil on canvas, 59 1/4 x 76 7/8 in., The

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

IMAGE INDEX

• Slide 22: MAGRITTE, Rene. Rape (1934).

• Slide 23: MAGRITTE, Rene. Human Condition (1935).

• Slide 24: MAGRITTE, Rene. Golconde (1953), Oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 39 1/2 in., The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas.

• Slide 25: MAN RAY. Salvador Dali (1929), photograph.

• Slide 27: DALI. The Persistence of Memory (1931), oil on canvas, 9 1/2” x 13”, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

IMAGE INDEX

• Slide 28: DALI. Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War (1936), Oil on

canvas, 39 3/8 x 39 in., Philadelphia Museum of Art.

• Slide 29: DALI. Crucifixion ('Hypercubic Body') (1954), Oil on canvas, 194.5 x 124

cm., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

• Slide 30: MIRO, Joan. Dutch Interior (1928), Oil on canvas, 36 1/8 x 28 3/4 in., Museum

of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

IMAGE INDEX

• Slide 31: MIRO. Carnival of Harlequin (1925), Oil on canvas, 66 x 93 cm ., Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.

• Slide 32: (Left) Detail from MIRO’s Carnival of Harlequin (1925); and (right) detail from MATISSE’s Harmony in Red (1910).

• Slide 33: MIRO, Joan. Dog Barking at the Moon (c. 1930).

• Slide 34: MIRO, Joan. Still-Life with Old Shoe (1937).• Slide 36: TANGUY, Yves. Indefinite Divisibility

(1942), Oil on canvas, 40 x 35 in., Albright- Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.