Art History

SURREALISM

Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early 20s as a literary movement that experimented with new modes of expression called automatic writing, or automatic, which seeks to liberate the imagination is not controlled by the subconscious. formally dedicated in Paris in 1924 with the publication of the manifesto of surrealism by the poet and critic Andre Breton (1896-1966), surrealism became an intellectual and political movement. Breton, a trained psychiatrist , together with the French poet Louis Aragon (1897-1982), Paul Eluard ( 1895-1952) , and Philippe Soupault (1897-1990), influenced by the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and dream research (1897-1939) and the political ideas of Karl Marx (1818-1883). Using Freudian free association, poetry and prose, they draw on the private world of the mind, has traditionally been limited by the lack of common sense and social, to produce a startling, unexpected imagery. Cerebral and irrational tenets of surrealism find their ancestors in ignoring the clever and quirky traditions fostered by Dadaism previous decade

In the Beginning

Surrealism as we know it today is closely related to some forms of abstract art. In fact, they shared similar origins, but they diverged on their interpretation of what those origins meant to the aesthetic of art.

At the end of the First World War, Tristan Tzara, leader of the Dada movement, wanted to attack society through scandal. He believed that a society that creates the monstrosity of war does not deserve art, so he decided to give it anti-art-not beauty but ugliness. With phrases like Dada destroys everything! Tzara wanted to offend the new industrial and commercial world-the bourgeoisie. However, his intended victims were not insulted at all. Instead they thought that this rebellious new expression opposed, not them but the "old art" and the "old patrons" of feudalism and church dominion. In fact, the bourgeoisie embraced this "rebellious" new art so thoroughly that anti-art became Art, the anti-academy the Academy, the anti-conventionalism the Convention, and the rebellion through chaotic images, the status quo.

One group of artists, however, did not embrace this new art that threw away all which centuries of artists had learned and passed on about the craft of art. The Surrealist movement gained momentum after the Dada movement. It was lead by Andre Breton, a French doctor who had fought in the trenches during the First World War. The artists in the movement researched and studied the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Some of the artists in the group expressed themselves in the abstract tradition, while others, expressed themselves in the symbolic tradition.

Two Distinct Groups Emerge

Michael S. Bell, through his research, realized that these two forms of expression formed two distinct trends of surrealism with marked differences. One could be qualified as Automatism, the other, as Veristic Surrealism. "Automatism" explains Mr. Bell, "is a form of abstraction. It has been the only type of surrealism accepted by critical reviewers after the war."

Basically, two different interpretations of the works of Freud and Jung divided the two groups. For the purpose of personal analysis, Jung had talked about not judging the images of the subconscious, but simply accepting them as they came into consciousness so they could be analyzed. This was termed Automatism.

The Automatists

When psychology talked about Automatism, these artists interpreted it as referring to a suppression of consciousness in favor of the subconscious. This group, being more focused on feeling and less analytical, understood Automatism to be the automatic way in which the images of the subconscious reach the conscience. They believed these images should not be burdened with "meaning."
Faithful to this interpretation, the Automatists saw the academic discipline of art as intolerant of the free expression of feeling, and felt form, which had dominated the history of art, was a culprit in that intolerance. They believed abstractionism was the only way to bring to life the images of the subconscious. Coming from the Dada tradition, these artists also linked scandal, insult and profanity toward the elite's with freedom. They continued to believe that lack of form was a way to rebel against them.

The Veristic Surrealists

This group, on the other hand, interpreted Automatism to mean allowing the images of the subconscious to surface undisturbed so that their meaning could then be deciphered through analysis. They wanted to faithfully represent these images as a link between the abstract spiritual realities, and the real forms of the material world. To them, the object stood as a metaphor for an inner reality. Through metaphor the concrete world could be understood, not by looking at the objects, but by looking into them.
Veristic Surrealists, saw academic discipline and form as the means to represent the images of the subconscious with veracity; as a way to freeze images that, if unrecorded, would easily dissolve once again into the unknown. They hoped to find a way to follow the images of the subconscious until the conscience could understand their meaning. The language of the subconscious is the image, and the consciousness had to learn to decode that language so it could translate it into its own language of words.

Later, Veristic Surrealism branched out into three other groups (see Research on Surrealism in America).

Two Masters, Two Opposing Approaches to Art

Every profession has its own history in which the accumulation of knowledge is the basis to push the frontiers into the unknown. Dali and Picasso are two masters who stand at the vanguard of two opposite approaches to art in the Twentieth Century: To use that accumulated knowledge and build upon it, or to discard it.

Dali embraced all the science of painting as a way to study the psyche through subconscious images. He called this process the Paranoiac Critical Method. As any paranoiac, the artist should allow these images to reach the conscience, and then do what the paranoiac can not do: Freeze them on canvas to give consciousness the opportunity to comprehend their meaning. Later on, he expanded the process into the Oniric-Critical Method, in which the artist pays attention to his dreams, freezing them through art, and analyzing them as well. As Freud said, "A dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is not opened."

Picasso took the opposite approach to art. He inherited the gusto for ugliness, scandal and chaos of the Dada movement and the automatic surrealists. Picasso rejected the craft to become "primitive," deciding that the ingenuity of childhood is the basis of art. To him this meant that the less the artist is preoccupied with his craft, the better his art. To Dali, however, the "ingenuity of childhood" meant keeping an open mind and maintaining the curiosity and excitement of the child throughout one's life, not painting as a child.

The Struggle of Surrealism

For the automatists the approach to the mystery of Nature is to never become conscious of the mystery, for the surrealists it is to learn from it. The Picasso camp, won the "faith" of society. The Dali camp would have to secure a dialogue with the public to be able to show the individual the "surrealist way of life" or the "path of individuation" as Jung called it.

The Veristic Surrealist quest is none other than the one described by Breton as, "The cause of freedom and the transformation of man's consciousness." In the works of surrealists we find the legacy of Bosch, Brueguel, William Blake, the Symbolic painters of the Nineteenth Century, the perennial questioning of philosophy, the search of psychology, and the spirit of mysticism. It is a work based on the desire to permit the forces that created the world to illuminate our vision, allowing us to consciously develop our human potential.

The Veristic surrealists of today recognize the difficulties that their movement has faced during the second half of the Twentieth Century as it attempted to become a major cultural force, like modernism had. The United States, a country in which the business community never had to share its power with the aristocracy, wholeheartedly embraced abstraction and modernism. They shared the belief of abstract artists that the chaos of action painting and Automatism were expressions of freedom, and that form, subjugation and inhibition walked hand in hand.

The American art establishment looked at the image of form with mistrust until the advent of Pop Art, which glorified the imperialism of commerce, advertisement and marketing. Later, Photorealism which glorified modern life, was accepted. With these two cultural movements Realism entered the picture again (see Art Through the Ages). Therefore, the only historical artistic expression still in want of recognition as a cultural force in the Twentieth Century, is Veristic Surrealism.

The Future of Surrealism

Because it was ignored and rejected by the new academy of modernism, Veristic Surrealism in its evolution has become a new art. A new art that in the words of Donald Kuspit, "Must first show that it has democratic appeal-appeal to those generally unschooled in art or not professionally interested in it. Then it must suffer a period of aristocratic rejection by those schooled in an accepted and thereby 'traditional' form of art-those with a vested interest in a known art and concerned with protecting it at all costs. "

Veristic Contemporary Surrealists have worked for the past fifty years in silent seclusion. A renaissance of this art form will provide the world with new eternal aesthetic pleasures and reawaken the use of meaningful expression in art, so that it can once again have a dialogue with the public.

It would take fifty years for artists born after the Second World War to discover how this method is right for helping us all understand the architecture of the psyche. Those who have understood the method, who have faithfully followed the images of the subconscious and, with patience, painted and analyzed them, have a lot to teach us about the make-up and interaction of the three planes of the spiritual, the psychological, and the physical.

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali (1904-89) Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer. After passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, he joined the Surrealists in 1929 and his talent for self-publicity rapidly made him the most famous representative of the movement. Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism (one of his most famous acts was appearing in a diving suit at the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936), claiming that this was the source of his creative energy. He took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method which he named `critical paranoia'. According to this theory one should cultivate genuine delusion as in clinical paranoia while remaining residually aware at the back of one's mind that the control of the reason and will has been deliberately suspended. He claimed that this method should be used not only in artistic and poetical creation but also in the affairs of daily life. His paintings employed a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal `dream' space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory characters of his imagery. He described his pictures as `hand-painted dream photographs' and had certain favorite and recurring images, such as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made from melting wax (The Persistence of Memory, MOMA, New York; 1931).

In 1937 Dalí visited Italy and adopted a more traditional style; this together with his political views (he was a supporter of General Franco) led Breton to expel him from the Surrealist ranks. He moved to the USA in 1940 and remained there until 1955. During this time he devoted himself largely to self-publicity; his paintings were often on religious themes (The Crucifixion of St John of the Cross, Glasgow Art Gallery, 1951), although sexual subjects and pictures centring on his wife Gala were also continuing preoccupations. In 1955 he returned to Spain and in old age became a recluse.

Apart from painting, Dalí's output included sculpture, book illustration, jewellery design, and work for the theatre. In collaboration with the director Luis Buñuel he also made the first Surrealist films Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Age d'or (1930) and he contributed a dream sequence to Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). He also wrote a novel, Hidden Faces (1944) and several volumes of flamboyant autobiography. Although he is undoubtedly one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, his status is controversial; many critics consider that he did little if anything of consequence after his classic Surrealist works of the 1930s. There are museums devoted to Dalí's work in Figueras, his home town in Spain, and in St Petersburg in Florida.

The Elephant

It first appeared in his 1944 work 'Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening'. The elephants, inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture base in Rome of an elephant carrying an ancient obelisk, are portrayed 'with long, multi-jointed, almost invisible legs of desire' along with obelisks on their backs. Coupled with the image of their brittle legs, these encumbrances, noted for their phallic overtones, create a sense of phantom reality. 'The elephant is a distortion in space,' one analysis explains, 'its spindly legs contrasting the idea of weightlessness with structure. 'I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.' —Salvador Dalí, in Dawn Ades, Dalí and Surrealism."

POP ART

The term Pop-Art was invented by British curator Lawrence Alloway in 1955, to describe a new form of "Popular" art - a movement characterized by the imagery of consumerism and popular culture. Pop-Art emerged in both New York and London during the mid-1950s and became the dominant avant-garde style until the late 1960s. Characterized by bold, simple, everyday imagery, and vibrant block colours, it was interesting to look at and had a modern "hip" feel. The bright colour schemes also enabled this form of avant-garde art to emphasise certain elements in contemporary culture, and helped to narrow the divide between the commercial arts and the fine arts. It was the first Post-Modernist movement (where medium is as important as the message) as well as the first school of art to reflect the power of film and television, from which many of its most famous images acquired their celebrity. Common sources of Pop iconography were advertisements, consumer product packaging, photos of film-stars, pop-stars and other celebrities, and comic strips.

History.
British Pop-Art emerged from within the Independent Group - an informal circle of artists including painter Richard Hamilton, curator and art critic Lawrence Alloway, and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, that met in the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

From the first meeting, in 1952, when Paolozzi presented a number of collages assembled from magazine clippings and other "found objects", including his (now) celebrated collage entitled "I was a Rich Man's Plaything" (created 5 years previously in 1947) their discussions centred largely around the artistic value and relevance of popular mass culture.

Four years later, in 1956, another member of the group, Richard Hamilton, produced his own collage, "Just what is it that makes today's homes so appealing?" - which, along with Paolozzi's 1947 collage, is regarded as one of the earliest examples of British Pop-Art. In 1961, a number of Pop-style works by Derek Boshier, David Hockney, Allen Jones, RB Kitaj and Peter Phillips, featured in the Young Contemporaries Exhibition. In 1962, further publicity was given to British Pop when the BBC screened "Pop Goes the Easel", a film by Ken Russell which explored the new movement in Britain.

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923 into an upper-middle-class New York City family, and attended public school until the age of 12. He then enrolled at Manhattan's Franklin School for Boys, remaining there for his secondary education. Art was not included in the school's curriculum; Lichtenstein first became interested in art and design as a hobby. He was an avid jazz fan, often attending concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He would frequently draw portraits of the musicians playing their instruments.

Lichtenstein then left New York to study at the Ohio State University which offered studio courses and a degree in fine arts. His studies were interrupted by a three year stint in the army during and after World War II between 1943 and 1946. Lichtenstein returned home to visit his dying father and was discharged from the army under the G.I. Bill. Returning to studies in Ohio under the supervision of one of his teachers, Hoyt L. Sherman, who is widely regarded to have had a significant impact on his future work. Lichtenstein would later name a new studio he funded at OSU as the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center. Lichtenstein entered the graduate program at Ohio State and was hired as an art instructor, a post he held on and off for the next ten years. In 1949 Lichtenstein received a M.F.A. degree from the Ohio State University and in the same year married Isabel Wilson.

He moved to Cleveland in the same year. His work at this time fluctuated between Cubism and Expressionism. In 1954 his first son, David Hoyt Lichtenstein, was born. He then had his second son, Mitchell Lichtenstein in 1956. In 1957 he moved back to upstate New York and began teaching again. It was at this time that he adopted the Abstract Expressionism style.

In 1961 Lichtenstein began his first Pop Art paintings using cartoon images and techniques derived from the appearance of commercial printing. This phase would continue to 1965 and included the use of advertising imagery suggesting consumerism and homemaking. His first work to feature the large-scale use of hard-edged figures and Benday Dots was Look Mickey (1961; National Gallery of Art). This piece came from a challenge from one of his sons, who pointed to a Mickey Mouse comic book and said; "I bet you can't paint as good as that, eh, Dad?" In the same year he produced six other works with recognizable characters from gum wrappers and cartoons. In 1961 Leo Castelli started displaying Lichtenstein's work at his gallery in New York. Lichtenstein had his first one-man show at the Castelli gallery in 1962; the entire collection was bought by influential collectors before the show even opened.

It was at this time, that Lichtenstein began to find fame not just in America but worldwide. Lichtenstein used oil and Magna paint in his best known works, such as Drowning Girl (1963), which was appropriated from the lead story in DC Comics' Secret Hearts #83. Also featuring thick outlines, bold colors and Benday Dots to represent certain colors, as if created by photographic reproduction. Lichtenstein would say of his own work: Abstract Expressionists "put things down on the canvas and responded to what they had done, to the color positions and sizes. My style looks completely different, but the nature of putting down lines pretty much is the same; mine just don't come out looking calligraphic, like Pollock's or Kline's."

Rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work tackled the way mass media portrays them. Lichtenstein would never take himself too seriously however: "I think my work is different from comic strips- but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is important to art". When his work was first released, many art critics of the time challenged its originality. More often than not they were making no attempt to be positive. Lichtenstein responded to such claims by offering responses such as the following: "The closer my work is to the original, the more threatening and critical the content. However, my work is entirely transformed in that my purpose and perception are entirely different. I think my paintings are critically transformed, but it would be difficult to prove it by any rational line of argument". His most famous image is arguably Whaam! (1963, Tate Modern, London).

In addition to paintings, he also made sculptures in metal and plastic and over 300 prints - mostly in screenprinting. In 1996 the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. became the largest single repository of the artist's work when he donated 154 prints and 2 books. In total there are some 4,500 works thought to be in circulation. He died of pneumonia in 1997 at New York University Medical Center. He was survived by his second wife Dorothy and by his sons, David and Mitchell, from his first marriage. The DreamWorks Records logo was his last completed project. More information can be found at the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.

Oh, Jeff...I Love You, Too...But... (1964) 

Measuring 121.9 cm × 121.9 cm (48 in × 48 in), Oh, Jeff...I Love You, Too...But... is among the most famous of his early romance comic derivative works from the period when he was adapting cartoons and advertisements into his style via Ben-Day dots. The work is said to depict the classic romance-comic story line of temporary adversity.Lichtenstein's sketch for this was done in graphite and colored pencils on paper in a 4 3/4 x 4 3/4 inches (12.1 x 12.1 cm) scale. Using only a single frame from its source, Oh, Jeff...I Love You, Too...But...'s graphics are quite indicative of frustration, but the text in the speech balloon augment the romantic context and the emotional discord. After 1963, Lichtenstein's comics-based women "...look hard, crisp, brittle, and uniformly modish in appearance, as if they all came out of the same pot of makeup." This particular example is one of several that is cropped so closely that the hair flows beyond the edges of the canvas. This was painted at the apex of Lichtenstein's use of enlarged dots, cropping and magnification of the original source. The tragic situations of his subjects makes his works a popular draw at museums.