UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism
A The Armory Show
1. “The burgeoning styles of the early twentieth century in
western Europe did not reach the general American
public until 1913. In February of that year, the Armory of
the Sixty-ninth Regiment, National Guard, on Lexington
Avenue at 25th Street in New York was the site of an
international exhibition of modern art. A total of 1,200
exhibits, including works by Post-Impressionists, Fauves,
and Cubists, as well as by American artists, filled
eighteen rooms. This event marked the first widespread
American exposure to the European avant-garde” (Adams,
Art Across Time 845).
2. “The Armory was a vast, high-ceilinged space, a roofed
parade ground without internal walls that paintings could
be hung on. So the organizers used screens covered in
fireproof burlap, dividing the floor into eighteen octagonal
rooms- a maze inside the cavernous hall. These were
decorated with cut sprays of pine branches, with live,
potted pine trees set here and there. The pine tree had
been a symbol of Liberty in Massachusetts during the
American Revolution. It proclaimed both freedom from
the past and a continuing American tradition. The trees
may have given visitors the impression that they stood on
the disputed, unconquered frontier of art” (Hughes,
American Visions 355).
3. “No exhibition had ever had such a media blitz. For
once, here was an art event that had the crunch of real
news, the latest murder or the newest political scandal.
It provoked a torrent of satires, cartoons, and hostile
reviews. The French artists, in particular Matisse and the
Cubists, bore the brunt of it” (356). “By the end of its runit traveled to Chicago, where art students burned Matisse
and Brancusi in effigy, and then to Boston- about three
hundred thousand Americans had bought tickets to see
the
international
Exhibition
of
Modern
Art.
Unquestionably, many who came to scoff stayed to
wonder and went home to think. But since America is
the country where enough bad reviews almost equal good
ones, as long as they create a critical mass of celebrity for
their subject, one artist in particular benefited from the
Armory Show. This was Marcel Duchamp, and on the
basis of one picture: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,
1912. It became the freak star of the Armory Show- its
bearded lady, its dog-faced boy. People compared it to an
explosion in a shingle factory, an earthquake on the
subway; Theodore Roosevelt, a shade more benignly,
likened it to a Navajo blanket, which it did not resemble
in the least” (357).
4. “Linkages across the politico-cultural left made the
Armory Show a doubly inviting target for conservative
critics, and they help explain why paintings like Henri
Matisse’s, which now strike us as invocations of an
Edenic order, were accused of ‘anarchism’- along with all
the Cubists works in the show” (358). “The idea of
‘anarchy in art’ meant something graver than mere
esthetic disorder to a newspaper reader in 1913. It
suggested deliberate subversion, coming across the
Atlantic to derange its cultural polity and making
monsters or fools of real American artists. Fear of
‘anarchism’ fitted into the general matrix of suspicion of
the foreign immigrant. This ran strong and hot in 1910s
America, toward the end of its first age of mass
immigration” (358-359).
STUDY GUIDE
B Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending the Staircase
No. 2, 1912
Marcel Duchamp/Armory Show/ humorous attack on
Futurist proscriptions against the Academic Nude
1. “The Armory Show caused an uproar.
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) submitted
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which
was the most scandalous work of all. It was
a
humorous
attack
on
Futurist
proscriptions against traditional, Academic
nudity. The image has a kinetic quality
consistent with the Futurist interest in
speed and motion. At the same time, the
figure is a combination of Cubist form and
multiple images that indicate the influence
of photography. She is shown at different
points in her descent, so the painting
resembles a series of consecutive movie
stills, unframed and superimposed. Various
accounts published at the time ridiculed the
Nude’s debut in the United States.
Descriptions by outraged viewers included
the following: ‘disused golf clubs,’ an
‘elevated railroad stairway in ruins after an earthquake,’ ‘ a dynamited
suit of Japanese armor,’ an ‘orderly heap of broken violins,’ an
‘explosion in a shingle factory,’ and ‘Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush
Hour in the Subway).’ Duchamp recorded his own version of the Nude’s
place in the history of art: ‘My aim was a static representation of
movement- a static composition of indications of various positions
taken by a form in movement- with no attempt to give cinema effects
through painting’” (Adams, Art Across Time 845-846).
2. “A dull-brown painting in a Cubist idiom, its overlapping planes were
partly derived from the sequential images of the French photographer
who analyzed motion, Etienne Jules Marey. Its very title was ironic,
almost insupportable. Nudes, in art, were not expected to move, let
alone walk downstairs. They were meant to stand or lie still, to imitate
the chaste condition of statues. It suggested decorum fractured almost
to the verge of pornography, even though this nude had no detectable
sexual characteristics- not that the public didn’t try to find them”
(Hughes, American Visions 357). “Because Americans actually love the
new and embrace it quicker that anyone else, they are especially fond
of this myth and have built cathedrals to it, known as museums of
modern art. In their cult of the problematic, as distinct from the
enjoyable, Marcel Duchamp is a saint, and this is one of his prime
relics” (358).
3. While the Armory Show failed to promote the interests of its
organizers, it did “succeed in its goal of introducing a new
cosmopolitanism into the American art scene. It also proved a success
with collectors, who bought an astonishing number of works from the
exhibition” (Janson 789). When Duchamp submitted his painting to
the Salon des Independants, “it was coldly received. The Cubist painter
and theorist Albert Gleizes, who belonged to the hanging committee,
asked Duchamp’s brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond DuchampVillon, to have him ‘voluntarily’ withdraw it. It did not conform to what
the Cubist circle wanted for their representative exhibition. It seemed
too ‘Futurist’ to them, since it contained movement. The Cubists
wanted to clarify and strengthen their position against other ‘isms’ that
were cropping up. Embarrassed and series, the elder brothers asked
Duchamp to concede, which he did without making a fuss. However,
he was hurt. ‘[This affair] helped me to totally escape the past, my own
personal past. I said to myself, ‘Well, if that’s the way they want it, then
there’s no question about me joining a group; one can only count on
oneself, one must be a loner’”” (Mink 27).
19
UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism
STUDY GUIDE
C Marcel Duchamp. Bicycle Wheel, (third version made in 1951 after original of 1913), assemblage
readymade (or assemblage)/ Dada art movement/ raising questions of historical value and originality
1. “With the war as a backdrop, many artists contributed to an artistic and literary movement known as Dada.
This movement emerged, in large part, in reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an
insane spectacle of collective homicide. They clearly were ‘revolted by the butchery of the World War.’ The
international scope of Dada proves this revulsion was widespread; although Dada began independently in New
York and Zurich, it also emerged in Paris, Berlin, and Cologne, among other cities. Dada was more a mind-set
or attitude than a single identifiable style. As Andre Breton, founder of the slightly later Surrealist movement,
explained: ‘Cubism was a school of painting, futurism a political movement: DADA is a state of mind’. The
Dadaists believed reason and logic had been responsible for the unmitigated disaster of world war, and they
concluded that the only route to salvation was through political anarchy, the irrational, and the intuitive.
Thus, an element of absurdity is a cornerstone of Dada, even reflected in the movement’s name. ‘Dada’ is a
term unrelated to the movement; according to an often repeated anecdote, the Dadaists chose the word at
random from a French-German dictionary. Although dada does have meaning- it is French for a child’s hobby
horse- it satisfied the Dadaists’ desire for something irrational and nonsensical (It should be noted, however,
that this is just one among many explanations for the name selected for this movement.)” (Kleiner, Mamiya,
and Tansey 1022-1023).
2. “In 1913, at a single stroke, the artist fathered two of the major innovations of twentieth-century sculpture:
the mobile- sculpture that physically moves- and the readymade, or ‘found’ object- sculpture made from or
including existing objects, usually commonplace, here an old bicycle wheel mounted on an ordinary kitchen
stool. It is always possible to argue that both concepts existed earlier, but Duchamp’s introduction of them at
this particular moment led to their being developed in subsequent movements- Dada, Surrealism, kinetic
sculpture, ‘junk’ sculpture, and Pop Art” (Arnason 229). “In the readymades, Duchamp found forms that of
their nature raised questions regarding historic values in art. He has described the various stages of his
discovery, and, as quoted by Richter in Dada, Duchamp tells that in 1913 he mounted a bicycle wheel on the
top of a kitchen stool and watched it turn; bought a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape, in
which he inserted one red and one yellow dot at the horizon and gave it the title Pharmacy; bought a snow
shovel in 1915 and wrote on it ‘in advance of the broken arm’. About then he used the term ‘readymade’ to
designate this form of manifestation. The choice of these readymades was never dictated by aesthetic
delectation, but rather it ‘was based on a reaction of visual indifference with a total absence of good or bad
taste… in fact a complete anesthesia’. The short sentence occasionally inscribed on the readymade was
important, in that it was not intended as a title, but ‘to carry the mind of the spectator toward other regions,
more verbal’. Sometimes Duchamp added graphic details that, in order to satisfy his craving for word-play, he
called ‘ready-made aided’. Then, ‘wanting to expose the basic antinomy between art and ‘ready-mades’ I
imagined a reciprocal ready-made: use a Rembrandt as an ironing board!’ Because the readymade could be
repeated indiscriminately, he decided to make only a small number yearly, since ‘for the spectator even more
than for the artist, art is a habit-forming drug and I wanted to protect by ready-made against such
contamination’. He stressed that it was in the very nature of the readymade to lack uniqueness, and nearly
every readymade existing today is not an original in the conventional sense. Then, to complete this vicious circle, he remarked: ‘Since the
tubes of paint used by an artist are manufactured and ready-made products we must conclude that all paintings in the world are readymades aided’” (229).
3. “Despite his antiaesthetic attitude, readymades, as he warned, did finally become works of art and have taken on a perverse beauty of
their own. Younger artists have continued to make readymades or found objects, and the question of whether they are works of art at all
is argued to the present time. Duchamp was clear on the matter: the conception, the ‘discovery’, was what made a work of art, not the
uniqueness of the object. In New York he began serious work on his Large Glass. To the 1917 exhibition of the New York Society of
Independent Artists he submitted a porcelain urinal entitled Fountain and signed R. Mutt. When this entry was rejected, he resigned from
the association, and the Fountain became one of the most notorious of all Duchamp’s readymades” (229). “Duchamp had bought the
urinal and simply placed it on its flat side so that it would stand ‘erect’. He signed the based, right next to the hole for the plumbing: R.
Mutt. Although the signature was inspired by the comic-strip characters Mutt and Jeff, and the ‘R.’ stood for ‘Richard’, French slang for
‘moneybags’, the hanging committee probably though first of a filthy cur. But Duchamp was also playing on the real name of the
company he bought it from, the ‘Mott Works’ in New York, which he changed slightly, in the manner typical of him” (Mink 63, 67).
Complaints were made when the work was rejected. Walter Arensberg “offered to buy Fountain to support the artist, but it couldn’t be
found. After a while the urinal was discovered behind a partition wall, where it had waited out the entire duration of the exhibition.
Alfred Stieglitz was persuaded to take an almost ennobling photograph of Fountain, which appeared in the second issue of The Blind Man,
a magazine published by Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and H.-P. Roche” (67). “Duchamp was not the first to kidnap everyday stuff for art;
the Cubists had done so in collages, which, however, required aesthetic judgment in the shaping and placing of materials. The
Readymade, on the other hand, implied that the production of art need by no more than a matter of selection- of choosing a preexisting
object. In radically subverting earlier assumptions about what the artmaking process entailed, this idea had enormous influence on later
artists, particularly after the broader dissemination of Duchamp’s thought in the 1950s and 1960s. The components of Bicycle Wheel,
being mass-produced, are anonymous, identical or similar to countless others. In addition, the fact that this version of the piece is not
the original seems inconsequential, at least in terms of visual experience. (Having lost the original Bicycle Wheel, Duchamp simply
remade it almost four decades later.) Duchamp claimed to like the work’s appearance, ‘to feel that the wheel turning was very soothing’.
Even now, Bicycle Wheel retains an absurdist visual surprise. Its greatest power, however, is as a conceptual proposition” (Bee 87).
20
UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism
STUDY GUIDE
D Marcel Duchamp. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (or the Large Glass), 1915-23,
construction
machine aesthetic/ sexual metaphors/ broken while in transit
1. “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass, was completed in 1923, as
far as it could be completed. Whatever its state, the works seems the summation of the artist’s
dreams of a machine age, the mathematically derived love goddess, below whom swarm her
bachelors, mere drones or empty malic molds being infused with the sperm gas or fluid constantly
ground forth by the rollers of the chocolate machine. Large Glass can only be explained as a
complex love machine full of sexual overtones that terminate in a curious pattern of sterility and
frustration. Duchamp’s machines were never intended to have a rational or logical solution, and
his own exegeses add to the dimensions of the problems. After New York dust had fallen on certain
sections for over a year, the artist had it photographed by Man Ray; then he cleaned everything but
a section of the cones, to which he cemented the dust with a fixative. The final touch came when
the Glass was broken while in transit and was thereby webbed with a network of cracks.
Duchamp is reported to have commented with satisfaction, ‘Now it is complete’. Since the cracks
provide an unexpected transition between the Bride and her Bachelors, aesthetically he may have
been right (and this he would deplore)” (Arnason 229-230).
2. “He made his first sketches for the piece in 1913 but did not begin work on it until he arrived in
New York. Notes he made while working on it confirm that it is enormously complex in conception
and operates on several esoteric levels. At the most obvious level it is a pessimistic statement of
the insoluble frustrations of male-female relations. The tubular elements encased in glass at the
top represent the bride. These release a large romantic sigh that is stimulating to the bachelors
below, who are represented by nine different costumes attached to a waterwheel. The wheel
resembles and is attached to a chocolate grinder, a reference to a French euphemism for
masturbation. A bar separates the males from the female, preventing the fulfillment of their
respective sexual desires. Furthermore, male and female are not only separated but fundamentally
different. The female is depicted as a gas- the three strips of gauze in her sign punningly reveal
this- while the males are represented as liquids. Duchamp not only contradicts the conventionally
optimistic view of male-female relations found in much art but also reverses the conventional power roles of men and women. Unlike
what is implied in Kirchner’s Girl under a Japanese Umbrella, for example, Duchamp places the female in the dominant position, and
the males merely react to her” (Stokstad 1085, 1087).
3. “So what is the Glass? A machine: or rather, a project for an unfinished contraption that could never be built because its use was
never fully clear, and because (in turn) it parodies the language and the forms of science without the slightest regard for scientific
probability, sequence, cause and effect. The Large Glass, carefully painted and outlined in lead wire on its transparent panes, looks
explicit. But if an engineer were to use it as a blueprint he would be in deep trouble since, from the viewpoint of technical systems, it is
simply absurd: a highbrow version of the popular ‘impossible machines’ that were being drawn, at the time, by Rube Goldberg. The
notes Duchamp left to go with it, collected out of order in the Green Box, are the most scrambled instruction manual imaginable. But
they are deliberately scrambled. For instance, he talked about the machine in the Glass running on a mythical fuel of his own
invention called ‘Love Gasoline’, which passed through ‘filters’ into ‘feeble cylinders’ and activated a ‘desire motor’- none of which would
have made much sense to Henry Ford. But the Large Glass is a meta-machine; its aim is to take one away from the real world of
machinery into the parallel world of allegory. In the top half of the Glass, the naked Bride perpetually disrobes herself; in the bottom
section, the poor little Bachelors, depicted as empty jackets and uniforms, are just as perpetually grinding away, signaling their
frustration to the girl above them” (Hughes, Shock of the New 55). “The Large Glass is an allegory of Profane Love- which, Marcel
Duchamp presciently saw, would be the only sort left in the twentieth century. Its basic text was written by Sigmund Freud in The
Interpretation of Dreams, 1900: ‘The imposing mechanism of the male sexual apparatus lends itself to symbolization by every sort of
indescribably complicated machinery’. But to Duchamp, who had reason to know, the male mechanism of the Large Glass was not a bit
imposing. The Bachelors are mere uniforms, like marionettes. According to Duchamp’s notes, they try to indicate their desire to the
Bride by concertedly making the Chocolate Grinder turn, so that it grinds out an imaginary milky stuff like semen. This squirts up
through the rings, but cannot get into the Bride’s half of the Glass because of the prophylactic bar that separates the panes. And so the
Bride is condemned always to tease, while the Bachelors’ fate is endless masturbation” (55).
4. “In one sense the Large Glass is a glimpse into Hell, a peculiarly modern Hell of repetition and loneliness. But it is also possible to
see it as a declaration of freedom, if one remembers the crushing taboos against masturbation that were in force when Duchamp was
young. For all its drawbacks, onanism was the one kind of sex that could not controlled by the State or the Parent. It freed people from
the obligation to be grateful to someone else for their pleasures. It was a symbol of revolt against the family and its authority. Its sterile
and gratuitous functioning has made it a key image for an avant-garde that tended, increasingly, towards narcissism” (55-56). “The
Large Glass is a free machine, or at least a defiant machine; but it was also a sad machine, a testament to indifference- that state of
mind of which Duchamp was the master. Indeed, his finely balanced indifference was the divide between the late machine age and the
time in which we live. The Large Glass was very remote from the optimism that accompanied the belief that art still had the power to
articulate the plentitude of life, with which greater artists but less sophisticated men than Duchamp greeted the machine in those lost
days before World War I” (56).
21
UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism
E Marcel Duchamp. LHOOQ, 1919, pencil
on print of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa
Dada art as “anti-art” (Nihilist philosophy)/
element of humor/ fine line between
creation and destruction
1. Duchamp “shared the
Dada taste for word-play
and punning, which he
combined
with
visual
images.
Delighting, like
children, in nonsensical
repetition,
Duchamp
entitled his art magazine
Wrong Wrong. The most
famous instance of visual
and verbal punning in
Duchamp’s
work
is
L.H.O.O.Q.,
which
is
reminiscent of Malevich’s
collage
of
1914
that
included the image of the
Mona Lisa. In contrast to
the Malevich, Duchamp’s
title is a bilingual pun. Read phonetically in English,
the title sounds like ‘Look,’ which, on one level, is the
artist’s command to the viewer.
If each letter is
pronounced according to its individual sound in
French, the title reads ‘Elle (L) a ch (H) aud (O) au (O)
cul (Q),’ meaning in English ‘She has a hot ass’. Read
backwards, on the other hand, ‘Look’ spells ‘Kool’,
which counters the forward message” (Adams, Art
Across Time 859).
2. “When viewers do, in fact, look, they see that
Duchamp has penciled a beard and mustache onto a
reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, turning her into
a bearded lady. One might ask whether Duchamp has
‘defaced’ the Mona Lisa- perhaps a prefiguration of
graffiti art- or merely ‘touched her up’. This dilemma
plays with the sometimes fine line between creation
and destruction (The modern expression ‘You have to
break eggs to make an omelet’ illustrates the
connection between creating and destroying that is
made explicit by the Dada movement.)” (859).
3. “Man Ray’s and Duchamp’s artistic irreverence and
mischievous desire to challenge normative aesthetic
taste were associated with what came to be called New
York Dada, whose parent movement had been born in
Zurich in 1916 in response tot he atrocities of World
War I. ‘The beginnings of Dada,’ as Tristan Tzara, one
of its founders, remarked, ‘were not the beginnings of
art, but of disgust’. Revolted by the senseless carnage
of a war waged in the name of reason, European
Dadists sought to remove the veneer of rationalism and
expose the fundamental irrationality of human
behavior. But their nihilistic stridency was completely
absent from New York Dada. Distanced from the war
and comfortable in the private world of affluence that
the Arensbergs provided, American initially took little
interest in the Zurich group. Not until 1920, when
Picabia and Duchamp returned from visits to Europe,
where they met Tzara, was there any concentrated
collaboration between the Americans and the
Europeans” (Haskell 125).
STUDY GUIDE
F Kurt Schwitters. Merz 19, 1920, paper collage
collage/ Merz
1. Although not admitted to Club Dada, Kurt
Schwitters (1887-1948) “was the purest
exponent of the Dada spirit to emerge from
Germany, if not from the entire movement.
Schwitters completed his formal training at
the Academy in Dresden and painted portraits
for a living. Denied access to Berlin Dada,
Schwitters established his own variant in
Hanover under the designation Merz, a word
derived from Commerzbank. He was a talented
poet, impressive in his readings, deadly
serious about his efforts in painting, collage,
and construction. These always involved a
degree of deadpan humor delightful to those
who knew him, but shattering to strange
audiences. His collages were made of
rubbish picked up from the street- cigarette wrappers, tickets,
newspapers, string, boards, wire screens, whatever caught his fancy. The
works (merzbuilder) he created were seriously studied as Cubist
structures, but different in essence from Cubist, Futurist, Dada,
Expressionist, or propagandist collages. Miraculously, he was able to
transform the rubbish, the detritus of his surroundings, into strange and
wonderful beauty” (Arnason 241-242).
2. “Schwitters introduced himself to Raoul Hausmann in a Berlin café in
1918 by saying: ‘I am a painter and I nail my pictures together’. This
description applies to all his relief constructions, since he drew no hardand-fast line between them and papier colles, but most Column or
Merzbau. He began the first one in his house in Hanover as an abstract
plaster sculpture with apertures dedicated to his Dadaist and
Constructivist friends and containing objects commemorating them:
Mondrian, Gabo, Arp, Lissitzky, Malevich, Richter, Mies van der Rohe,
and Van Doesburg. The Merzbau grew throughout the 1920s with
successive accretions of every kind of material until it filled the room.
Having then no place to go but up, he continued the construction with
implacable logic into the second story. When he was driven from
Germany by the Nazis and his original Merzbau was destroyed, Schwitters
started another one in Norway. The Nazi invasion forced him to England,
where he began again for the third time. After his death in 1948, the
third Merzbau was rescued and preserved in the University of Newcastle”
(242). Schwitter’s “compositions were normally modest in size, made up
from a ‘palette of objects’, lovingly culled from urban waste. His system of
composition was based on a firm Cubist-Constructivist grid; despite the
contrast of materials, their edges, thicknesses, surfaces, and colours are
exactly calibrated, and the fragments of lettering serve much the same
ends as they did for Braque and Picasso- to introduce points of legible
reality into the midst of flux” (Hughes, Shock of the New 64). “Their
common theme was the city as compressor, intensifier of experience. So
many people, and so many messages: so many traces of intimate
journeys, news, meetings, possession, rejection, with the city renewing its
fabric of transaction every moment of the day and night, as a snake casts
its skin, leaving the patterns of the lost epidermis behind as ‘mere’
rubbish” (64). Jean “Arp and Schwitters used these ‘nonart’ materials
instead of oil on canvas ‘to avoid any reminder of the paintings which
seemed to us to be characteristic of a pretentious, self-satisfied world,’
Arp said” (Strickland 148). “Unlike most of the other Dadaists, Schwitters
did not want to make anti-art and non-art, but remained true to a
traditional of art. He was concerned with a law that obeyed its own rules,
that had its own effects. But, exactly like the Dadaists, he felt the
starting point of his art was the catastrophe of the First World War.
‘Everything was broken, and it was important to build new things out of
the wreckage’. So he turned to what was destroyed and functionless”
(Krausse 100).
22
UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism
STUDY GUIDE
G The Cabaret Voltaire
1. “The emphasis on individuality and irrational instinct evident in the work of artists like Gauguin and many of the Expressionists did
not die out entirely after World War I. It endured in the Dada movement, which began with the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire in
Zurich on February 5, 1916. The cabaret’s founders, German actor and artist Hugo Ball (1886-1927) and his companion, Emmy
Hennings, a nightclub singer, had moved to neutral Switzerland when the war broke out. Their cabaret, in the neighborhood where
Lenin then lived in exile, was inspired by the bohemian artists’ cafes they had known in Berlin and Munich. It immediately attracted a
circle of avant-garde writers and artists of various nationalities who shared in Ball’s and Hennings’s disgust with bourgeois culture,
which they blamed for the war” (Stokstad 1083).
2. “The way Ball performed one of his sound poems, ‘Karawane’, reflects the spirit of the place. His legs and body encased in blue
cardboard tubes, his head surmounted by a white-and-blue ‘witch-doctor’s hat’, as he called it, and his shoulders covered with a huge
cardboard collar that flapped when he moved his arms, he slowly and solemnly recited the poem, which consisted entirely of
nonsensical sounds. As was typical of Dada, this performance involved two separate and distinct aims, one critical and one playful.
The first, as Ball said, was to renounce ‘the language devastated and made impossible by journalism’. In other words, by retreating into
precivilized sounds, he avoided language, which had been spoiled by the lies and excesses of journalism and advertising. The second
aim was simply to amuse by reintroducing the healthy play of children back into what he considered overly restrained adult lives”
(1083).
H Giorgio de Chirico. The Soothsayer’s Recompense, 1913
metaphysical painting and Nietzsche/ anachronistic elements/ melancholy theme of departure
1. Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) “links nineteenth-century Romantic fantasy with
twentieth-century movements in the irrational, Dadaism, and Surrealism. Born in Greece
of Italian parents, De Chirico learned drawing in Athens. After the death of his father, a
railroad architect, the family moved to Munich, where the artistic leanings of the elder son
Giorgio (then seventeen), and the musical leanings of the younger son Alberto, could be
advanced” (Arnason 221). “De Chirico constantly referred to the metaphysical content of
his paintings, using the term loosely or inaccurately to cover various effects of
strangeness, surprise, and shock” (221). “De Chirico’s approach to art, during his early
and most important phase- up to 1920- was to examine a theme as though to wring from
it its central mystery. In 1912 and 1913 the artist painted a group of works incorporating
a Hellenistic sculpture of a reclining Ariadne, of which The Soothsayer’s Recompense, one
of the finest, presents Classical facades parallel to the picture plane, but the large clock
and the train moving along the horizon are nineteenth-century elements having an
anachronistic affinity with the architecture. Such anomalies are commonplace in Italian
cities: a palazzo may become a nineteenth-century railway station suggesting the
melancholy of departure (a title he used), a melancholy saturating the shadowed square in which deserted Ariadne mourns her
departed Theseus. At times, the strange, sad loneliness of De Chirico’s squares takes on a dimension of fear, of isolation in a vast,
empty space” (Arnason 221-222).
2. “De Chirico’s main source, however, was the Swiss artist Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901), whose work he saw when he was an art
student in Munich in 1906… His work was drenched in an atmosphere of nostalgia and melancholy whose ideal site was the ruins and
seacoasts of Italy. DeChirico found in Bocklin the very qualities that Italian Futurism most hated- mystery, nostalgia for the past, and
a tremulous feeling for what is history-bound, rather than ‘objective’ or ‘progressive’, in human character. What fascinated him in the
squares and arcades of Ferrara and Turin- the cities from which most of his motifs came- was not their solid architectural reality but
their staginess. The quality de Chiricio called ‘metaphysics’ or ‘metaphysical painting’ (pittura metafisica) would not have been
recognizable as such to a philosopher. It was a question of mood, the sense of a reality drenched in human emotion, almost pulpy with
memory. ‘I had just come out of a long and painful intestinal illness,’ he wrote of the first moment he felt it, in the Piazza Santa Croce
in Florence as a youth of twenty-two, ‘ and I was in a nearly morbid state of sensitivity. The whole world, down to the marble of the
buildings and fountains, seemed to me to be convalescent. In the middle of the square rises a state of Dante draped in a long cloak.
The autumn sun, warm and unloving, lit the statue and the church façade. Then I had the strange impression that I was looking at
these things for the first time…’ The form of this ‘convalescent world’ fills de Chirico’s paintings after 1912. It is an airless place, and its
weather is always the same. The sun has a late-afternoon slant, throwing long shadows across the piazzas. Its clear and mordant light
embalms objects, never caressing them, never providing the illusion of well—being. Space rushes away from one’s eye, in long runs of
arcades and theatrical perspectives; yet its elongation, which gives far things an entranced remoteness and clarity, is contradicted by a
Cubist flattening and compression- de Chirico had been in Paris just before the war, at the height of Cubism, and knew Apollinaire well
enough to have painted his portrait. When the picture plane is flattened but the things on it are still wrenched out of reach by de
Chirico’s primitive and inconsistent one-point perspective, the eye is frustrated” (Hughes, Shock of the New 217).
3. “The sense of strangeness de Chirico could conjure with familiar objects and scenes recalls Nietzsche’s ‘foreboding that underneath
this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed’” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey
1038). “Drawing on irrational childhood fears, De Chirico is known for his eerie cityscapes with empty arcades, raking light, and
ominous shadows. The skewed perspective and nearly deserted squares inhabited by tiny, depersonalized figures project menace. In
fact, with these paintings as his best evidence, De Chirico was exempted from military service as mentally unstable” (Strickland 149).
23
UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism
I Benito Mussolini and Fascism
1. “Fascism became an important ideological and
political force in Europe between World Wars I and II.
With its fusion of reactionary nationalism and political
authoritarianism, Fascism gained the support of a wide
spectrum of the population, particularly in Italy and
Germany” (Wren 2: 323). “Italy emerged World War I
with its national pride humiliated by military defeats
and its economy jeopardized by wartime debts,
unemployment, strikes, and acute depression. Against
a
background
of
increasing
social
unrest,
parliamentary government broke down, and Benito
Mussolini (live 188301945; premier 1922-43) rose to
power. A socialist ex-schoolteacher, Mussolini and
been interested in the Italian revolutionary movement
since his youth. He had also immersed himself in the
pessimistic philosophy of Nietzsche, which had led
him to believe that humanitarian ideals were the
weapons of the weak and feeble, that violence was the
fundamental element of social transformation, and that
Italy could be restored to greatness only by a plan of
vigorous action, even a ‘bath of blood’, directed by a
strong leader” (323).
2. “He himself served in the trenches and was badly
wounded. Upon recovery, he began to organize exsoldiers into ant-socialist fascios to combat left-wing
groups with strong-arm methods. Within two years,
there were more than eight hundred branches of the
‘black
shirt’
organization,
the
Fasci
di
Combattimento. In October 1922 the ‘March on Rome’
took place. Mussolini mobilized the Blackshirts for a
threatened coup, which ended when he became
premier. Opposition to his political reign as Il Duce,
The Leader, was crushed by assassination, police
terror, Fascist militia violence, press control, and, in
1928, the suspension of parliamentary government.
During the 1920s Mussolini tried to resolve Italy’s
economic difficulties by increasing state intervention.
During the 1930s Mussolini sought to expand Italy’s
political influence by invading Ethiopia, by aiding
Francisco Franco (1892-1975) in Spain, and by forming
an alliance with Germany. Il Duce waited until France
fell before bringing Italy into World War II in 1940. The
failure of his military campaign resulted in Mussolini’s
temporary fall from power in 1943. Restored to power
by German forces, Mussolini had little support within
Italy after the German defeat.
In 1945 he was
captured, tried, and executed by Italian partisans”
(323).
3. “Mussolini owed much to his rise to power to his
abilities as a spellbinding orator. In a speech delivered
in Parma, Italy, on December 13, 1914, the young
Mussolini not only advocated Italian entry into World
War I but also derided the sentiments of ‘brotherhood
and love’ and declared that war was of ‘divine origin’…
Like Mussolini, de Chirico was influenced by the
philosophy of Nietzsche.
In paintings such as
Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913) and Mystery and
Melancholy of a Street (1914), de Chirico uses
exaggerated perspective to create a disturbing
atmosphere. The silent and virtually empty city spaces
became haunting images of loneliness and isolation. At
the same time, they realize Nietzsche’s concept of art as
a symbolic vision” (323-324).
STUDY GUIDE
J Marc Chagall. I and the Village, 1911
elements of Expressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism/ simple
pleasures of folk life/ integrating circular shapes/ nature
vs. civilization/ varied proportions used in suggesting
memory
1. Marc Chagall (1889-1985) “was
born in Vitebsk, Russia, of a large
and poor Jewish family. From his
background he acquired a wonderful
repertoire
of
Russian-Jewish
folktales and a deep and sentimental
attachment to the Jewish religion
and tradition. There was also inbred
in him a fairytale sense of fantasy.
Out of these elements emerged his
personal
and
poetic
painting”
(Arnason 220). “In Paris, Chagall
entered the orbit of Apollinaire and
the leaders of the new Cubism, as
well as that of Modigliani, Soutine,
and Jules and Pascin.
Chagall’s
Russian paintings had largely been
intimate
genre
scenes,
often
brightened by elements of Russian or
Jewish folklore” (220).
2. “Painted the year after Chagall came to Paris, I and the Village evokes
his memories of his native Hasidic community outside Vitebsk. In the
village, peasants and animals lived side by side, in a mutual dependence
here signified by the line from peasant to cow, connecting their eyes. The
peasant’s flowering sprig, symbolically a tree of life, is the reward for their
partnership. For Hasids, animals were also humanity’s link to the
universe, and the painting’s large circular forms suggest the orbiting sun,
moon (in eclipse at the lower left), and earth. The geometries of I and the
Village are inspired by the broken planes of Cubism, but Chagall’s is a
personalized version. As a boy he had loved geometry: ‘Lines, angles,
triangles, squares,’ he would later recall, ‘carried me far away to
enchanting horizons’. Conversely, in Paris he used a disjunctive geometric
structure to carry him back home. Where Cubism was mainly an art of
urban avant-garde society, I and the Village is nostalgic and magical, a
rural fairy tale: objects jumble together, scale shifts abruptly, and a
woman and two houses, at the painting’s top, stand upside-down. ‘For
the Cubists,’ Chagall said, ‘a painting was a surface covered with forms in
a certain order. For me a painting is a surface covered with
representations of things… in which logic and illustration have no
importance’”(Bee 63).
3. “In 1914, Herwarth Walden…, arranged an exhibition of Chagall’s work
in Berlin. It had a great impact on the German Expressionists, one that
extended well beyond World War I. The outbreak of war caught Chagall in
Russia, where he then stayed until 1922. After the Russian Revolution,
like Malevich and other avant-garde artists, he served for a time as a
commissar of fine arts and formed a free art academy. Perhaps his most
fruitful work was for the Yiddish theater in Moscow, painting murals and
designing settings and costumes. This opportunity to work on a large
scale in the theater continued to fascinate him and to inspire some of his
most striking painting” (220). “Back in Paris in 1923, Chagall became
increasingly active in the graphic arts, especially for the dealer Ambroise
Vollard. Over the years he continued to move from project to project with
undiminished energy and enthusiasm. In 1945 he designed sets and
costumes for Stravinskky’s Firebird. He made color lithographs, produced
sculptures and ceramics, designed a ceiling for the Paris Opera and
murals for the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center in New York.
Chagall’s love of rich, translucent color, particularly the primaries blue,
red, and yellow, made stained glass a medium natural for him” (221).
24
UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism
Study Guide
K Max Ernst. Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924
increased sense of absurdity/ a strange title/ Andre Breton and “le merveilleux”
1. “The second European movement that resisted the rationalist tide of postwar art and
architecture, Surrealism, was the creation of a French writer, Andre Breton (1896-1966), one of
the many writers involved in the Paris Dada movement after the war. Breton became dissatisfied
with the playful nonsense activities of his colleagues and wished to turn Dada’s implicit desire to
free human behavior into something more programmatic. In 1924 he published his ‘Manifesto of
Surrealism’, outlining his own view of Freud’s discovery that the human psyche is a battleground
where the rational, civilized forces of the conscious mind struggle against the irrational, instinctual
urges of the unconscious. The way to achieve happiness, Breton argued, does not lie in
strengthening the repressive forces of reason, as the Purists insisted, but in freeing the individual
to express personal desires, as Gauguin and Die Brucke had asserted. Breton and the group
around him developed a number of techniques for liberating the individual unconscious, including
dream analysis, free association, automatic writing, word games, and hypnotic trances. Their aim
was to help people discover the larger reality, or ‘surreality’, that lay beyond the narrow rational
notions of what is real” (Stokstad 1087).
2. The self-taught painter Max Ernst (1891-1976) “was born near Cologne, Germany, in a family
headed by a stern disciplinarian father. Horrified by World War I, Ernst helped to organize a Dada
movement in Cologne. In 1922 he moved to Paris and joined the Dada group there. When Paris
Dada evolved into Surrealism, he participated in the search for new ways to free his imagination. One of the liberating techniques he
developed was frottage, the rubbing of a pencil or crayon across a piece of paper placed on a textured surface. Ernst found that these
imprints stimulated his imagination. He discovered in them a host of strange creatures and places” (1088).
3. “In Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, a girl, frightened by the bird’s flight (birds appear often in Ernst’s work),
brandishes a knife; another faints away. A man carrying a baby balances on the roof of a hut, which, like the work’s gate (which makes
sense in the picture) and knob (which does not), is a three-dimensional supplement to the canvas. This combination of unlike
elements, flat and volumetric, extends the collage technique, which Ernst cherished for its ‘systematic displacement’. ‘He who speaks of
collage,’ the artist believed, ‘speaks of the irrational’. But even if the scene were entirely a painted illusion, it would have a
hallucinatory unreality, and indeed Ernst linked this work of this period to childhood memories and dreams. Ernst was one of many
artists who emerged from service in World War I deeply alienated from the conventional values of his European world. In truth, his
alienation predated the war; he would later describe himself when young as avoiding ‘any studies which might degenerate into bread
winning,’ preferring ‘those considered futile by his professors- predominantly painting. Other futile pursuits: reading seditious
philosophers and unorthodox poetry’. The war years, however, focused Ernst’s revolt and put him in contact with kindred spirits in the
Dada movement. He later became a leader in the emergence of Surrealism” (Bee 105).
4. “For most of Ernst’s images from the early twenties, however, there is no rational explanation and no hope of one. They seem to
issue from a parallel world, a place of lucid dread, as if the dream world of de Chirico had lost all its yearning, melancholy, narcissism,
and historical nostalgia, and become infused with unique and sharp-edged modern fears. Ernst could compress a great deal of psychic
violence into a small space, the size of a booby-trapped toy- and maintain that pitch of intensity across a long run of images” (Hughes,
Shock of the New 222). “One of the channels through which Ernst’s aggression often ran was the idea of lost innocence seen, not
nostalgically, but with a sort of icy derangement, as in Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale. Parts of it look so innocuous; the
house is as harmless as a cuckoo clock, the landscape pastoral. Why should a nightingale frighten anyone? And what kind of world
could contain, as part of casual narrative, the idea of a ‘menacing’ nightingale? What disturbs the viewer, knowing the title- Ernst’s
long, mystifying titles were an integral part of his work- is the utter disproportion between cause, the bird’s song, and effect, the terror
it inspires. One cannot know what is happening in this little world within the frame- nor, the collage implies, in the big one that
includes the picture” (222).
5. “Surrealism’s favorite way of evoking what it called “the marvelous”, that most prized quality of all experience, was by chance
association. ‘The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful’, Breton wrote,
claiming that the perception of beauty belonged to the same order of experience as fear or sexual desire; there was nothing intellectual I
it, it could not be duplicated, only found. It could lurk equally well in a picture postcard, a 1900 inkstand in the Flea Market, a painting
by Hieronymus Bosch, an electric sign, or a friend’s suicide. Art could release it mediumistically, rather than deliberately create it”
(225). “The fantasy is given peculiar emphasis b the elements in actual relief- the house on the right and the open gate on the left. Even
the heavy, traditional frame introduces an oppressive note. Contrary to Ernst’s usual sequence, the title of this painting came first. In
his biographical summary, speaking in the third person, the artist noted: ‘He never imposes a title on a painting. He waits until a title
imposes itself. Here, however, the title existed before the picture was painted’” (Arnason 275).
6. “Here, Ernst displayed a private dream that challenged the post-Renaissance idea that a painting should resemble a window looking
into a ‘real’ scene rendered illusionistically three-dimensional through mathematical perspective. In Two Children Are Threatened the
artist painted the landscape, the distant city, and the tiny flying bird in conventional fashion; he followed all the established rules of
aerial and linear perspective. The three sketchily rendered figures, however, clearly belong to a dream world, and the literally threedimensional miniature gate, the odd button knob, and the strange closed building ‘violate’ the bulky frame’s space. Additional
dislocation occurs in the traditional museum identification label, which Ernst displaced into a cutaway part of the frame. Handwritten,
it announces the work’s title (taken from a poem Ernst wrote before he painted this), adding another note of irrational mystery…
Viewers must struggle to decipher connections between the images and words” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 1039).
25
UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism
L Max Ernst. The Elephant
Celebes, 1921
Surrealistic satire on machine
aesthetic/ influence of
assemblage art
“Other paintings from this stage of
Ernst’s work are simply indecipherable
in their strangeness, although one can
still identify their sources. The shape
of the monster whose gross bulk fills
the frame of The Elephant Celebes,
1921, was inspired by a photograph of
a Sudanese corn bin raised from the
ground on ‘legs’; his immediately
suggested, to Ernst, a waddling animal.
Its topknot obviously comes from de
Chirico’s
assemblies
of
drafting
instruments, and its title (according to
Ernst’s lifelong friend, the leader of the
English Surrealist group, Roland
Penrose)
was
extracted
from
a
schoolboy rhyme whose anal humor
amused Ernst- ‘The Elephant of
Celebes/ Has sticky, yellow bottomgrease’. Moreover, the animal bears
some general resemblance, in profile, to
the outline of the Island of Celebes on
the map, only with its ‘trunk’ in a
different position (although other
Surrealists
though
this
island
resembled an anteater, and accordingly
gave it a high place in the roster of
countries
of
Surrealist
interest)”
(Hughes, Shock of the New 222).
2. “A huge ‘elephant’ confronts a
beckoning, headless, nude female
mannequin. The elephant has a horned
head, but behind him is a set of tusks
with suggests a second, or alternative
head. True to the nature of collage,
clues in the picture hinder rather than
help
the
viewer’s
quest
for
understanding: the elephant is on solid
grown, yet fish swim in the sky”
(Bradley 28).
STUDY GUIDE
M Paul Klee. Twittering Machine, 1922, watercolor and pen and ink
attachment to the Bauhaus/ metaphorical mechanized birds/ exploring
the collective unconscious/ strong appreciation of children’s art
1. Paul Klee (1879-1940) “was born in Switzerland, the son of a
musician” (Arnason 130). “He married a pianist and until his
final illness played the violin for an hour every morning.
Although he was included in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition,
in 1912, his involvement with the group was never more than
tangential. It was not Der Blaue Reiter but a 1914 trip to
Tunisia that inspired in his interest in the expressive potential of
color” (Stokstad 1048). “Klee shared the widespread modern
apprehension about the rationalism driving a technological
civilization that could destroy as much as construct. As do
some psychologists, he sought clues to humanity’s deeper
nature in primitive shapes and symbols. Like Jung, Klee seems
to have accepted the existence of a collective unconscious that
reveals itself in archaic signs and patterns and that is
everywhere evident in the art of so-called ‘primitive’ cultures”
(Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 1043).
2. After serving in the German army, “Gropius invited him to join the staff of the Bauhaus at
Weimar, and he remained affiliated with the school from 1921 to 1931. Becoming a teacher
forced him to examine the tenets of his own painting, something that he did in publications
of the greatest significance for modern art and particularly for those aspects concerned with
expression of personal fantasy” (Arnason 329). “Like Mondrian and Kandinsky, Klee was
concerned in his teachings and his painting with the geometric elements of the work of artthe point, the line, the plane, and the solid. To him, however, these elements had a primary
basis in nature and growth. It was the process of change from one to the other that
fascinated him. To Klee the painting continually grew and changed in time as well as in
space” (329). “Klee thus was a Romantic, a mystic. He saw the painting, or rather the
creative act, as a magical experience in which the artist was enabled in moments of
illumination to combine an inner vision with an outer experience of the world, in the visible
rendering of a truth that was not ‘truth to man or nature,’ but was itself parallel to and
capable of illuminating the essence of man or nature” (329).
3. “Klee’s works, such as Twittering Machine, are small and intimate in scale. A viewer must
draw near to decipher the delicately rendered forms and enter this mysterious dream world.
The artist joined the ancient world of nature and the modern world of machines in this
picture. Four diagrammatic birds, like those in a cuckoo clock, appear forced into twittering
action- in this case, by the turning of a crank-driven mechanism… Klee linked the birds
permanently to the machine, creating an ironic vision of existence in the modern age. Each
bird responds in such an individual way that viewers may see all of them as metaphors for
themselves- being trapped by the operation of the industrial society that either created or
maintain” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 1044). “The ‘twittering’ in the title doubtless refers
to the birds, while the ‘machine’ is suggested by the hand crank. The two elements are,
literally, a fusing of the natural with the industrial world. Each bird stands with beak open,
poised as if to announce the moment when the misty cool blue of night gives way to the pink
glow of dawn. The scene evokes an abbreviated pastoral” (Bee 127). The birds “appear
closer to deformations of nature. The hand crank conjures up the idea that this ‘machine’ is
a music box, where the birds function as bait to lure victims to the pit over which the
machine hovers. We can imagine the fiendish cacophony made by the shrieking birds, their
legs drawn thin and taut as they strain against the machine to which they are fused” (Bee
127).
4. Some observes think that the individual birds “may represent the four temperaments of
the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance periods, while their loony appearance also features
avian shapes capable of luring real birds into a trap in the rectangular trough at the bottom
of the image” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 1044). Paul Klee “made many pencil drawings
that reveal his attraction to linear, childlike imagery, as well as the influence of Surrealist
‘automatic writing’” (Adams, Art Across Time 864). “With a few simple lines, he has created a
ghostly mechanism that simultaneously mocks our faith in the miracles of the Machine Age
and our sentimental appreciation of bird song. It is the quality of the line itself that evokes
the raspy sound made by this strange device. The little contraption is not without its
sinister aspect: the heads of the four sham birds look like fishermen’s lures, as if they might
entrap real birds. It thus condenses into one striking invention a complex set of ideas about
present-day civilization” (Janson 800-801).
26
UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism
STUDY GUIDE
N Andre Breton and the Surrealists
1. “The word Surrealism was coined in Paris in 1917 by the writer Guillaume Apollinaire. He used it to describe two instances of
artistic innovation. The first of these was Jean Cocteau’s ballet Parade, which had a score by Eric Satie and a curtain and costumes by
Pablo Picasso. In the programme notes, Apollinaire wrote that the artistic truth resulting from the evening’s combination of elements
was a truth beyond realism- ‘a kind of sur-realism’. The second instance was Apollinaire’s own play, Les Mamelles de Tiresias (The
Breasts of Tiresias), which he subtitled ‘A Surrealist drama’. Neither of these artistic events could be described as ‘Surrealist’ in the
sense in which we now understand it, but in 1924, in the Manifeste du surrealisme which launched the Surrealist movement, the writer
Andre Breton and his friend Philippe Soupault adopted the word, and ‘baptized by the name of Surrealism the new mode of expression
which we had at our disposal and which we wished to pass on to our friends’” (Bradley 6).
2. “Breton’s friends were primarily fellow writers, and Surrealism was initially a literary endeavor. No agenda was set for Surrealist
visual artists until Breton wrote Surrealism and Painting in 1925, and no specifically Surrealist exhibition space existed until the Galerie
surrealiste opened in 1926” (7). “In the case of the Surrealists, this new world was that of the unconscious mind; what they called the
‘merveilleux’, the marvelous. Surrealism sought communication with the irrational and the illogical, deliberately disorienting and
reorienting the conscious by means of the unconscious” (9). “The marvelous was thought to occur naturally, in spaces where the curse
of reason had yet to penetrate: in childhood, madness, sleeplessness and drug-induced hallucination; in so-called ‘primitive’ societies
whose members were thought to be closer to their instincts than to the learned sophistication of ‘civilization’; and, crucially, in dreams,
the conditions of which the painters attempted to reproduce” (9).
3. “The first visual artists came to Breton somewhat later than the first poets. The German artist Max Ernst’s first Paris exhibition was
in 1921, and was the result of an invitation from Breton, who wrote a preface for the exhibition catalogue. Ernst already knew of Breton
from reading Littérature in Germany. In February 1924, Breton bought a painting by Andre Masson at an exhibition and met him a few
months later. Masson was living and working on the rue Blomet and introduced Breton to his neighbor, Joan Miró. The two painters
had adjacent studios and talked to each other through a hole in the partition wall” (9). “Throughout the 1920s, Surrealism was a riot of
encounters, inaugurations, publications, and exhibitions. As well as the publication of the Manifesto, October 1924 also saw the
establishment of the ‘bureau des recherches surrealistes’, a bureau for Surrealist research which gave members of the group a base
other than the café and which was responsible for distributing leaflets and printed Surrealist aphorisms (‘tell your children your
dreams’) around the streets of Paris” (9).
4. “For visual artists, attempting to find a place within a movement whose development since before 1919 had been entirely in the realm
of spoken and written language, automatism meant placing their trust in the creative power of a purely visual language. Their medium
was the mark rather than the word, and so they began with automatic drawing. Andre Masson, in particular, was very successful. He
found that he was able to draw, or doodle, in an abstracted state of mind. His pencil called marks from out of his unconscious and onto
the paper. Only then did he allow his conscious mind to shape forms out the marks” (21). “Sand painting was a successful technique
discovered and practiced by Masson. He would drip or smear glue onto a piece of paper or canvas at random, sprinkle sand over the
glue, and then use the resulting sand patches as pre-pictorial inspiration. Like the initial marks in an automatic drawing, the glue and
sand gave him a starting point that was unaffected by either his rational mind or his artistic will. Miró had been recorded as working in
a similar way, but from an even more arbitrary starting point: he is said to have once made a painting around the traces of a fallen blob
of jam” (22). “Max Ernst developed a more or less automatic method of drawing which was translatable into oil paint. He would create
a surface pattern by rubbing with pencil or charcoal on a piece of paper laid over a rough or interesting surface. This technique, similar
to that of brass rubbing, he called ‘frottage’. It could be adapted for painting by laying a thickly painted canvas over a similar surface
while the paint was still wet, and scraping off layers of paint. Paint clung to the indentions of the material underneath so that, again, a
pattern was created. This Ernst called ‘grattage’. Both frottage and grattage provided Ernst with involuntarily produced marks out of
which he could develop finished works. He called the process of calling forth images from out of these textures ‘seeing into’, and was
inspired to do it by the childhood memory of an imitation mahogany panel” (22-23).
5. “Frottage, grattage, sand painting and automatic drawing are all techniques which seek to deny, or at least to defer until a later
stage, the individual creativity of their practitioners. ‘In striving more and more to restrain my own active participation in the unfolding
of the picture and, finally, by widening in this way the active part of the mind’s hallucinatory faculties I came to assist as a spectator at
the birth of all my works’ (Ernst, Beyond Painting). Decalcomania was another widely used technique for achieving such detachment. It
involved spreading gouache, ink or oil paint onto a smooth, non-absorbent surface such as glass. Paper or canvas was then pressed
onto the coated surface and, when peeled away, retained the color of the paint in fantastically textured surfaces which could then be
worked over. The surfaces themselves, like those of frottage, would suggest a direction for the finished work to take” (23-24).
“Collaboration was a further way to produce images which defied the rational apparatus of the artist’s individual, conscious mind.
Dada artists had already experimented with working collaboratively… Surrealism, however, was a movement for which collaboration
and collectivity were crucially important. The name of the movement itself had been coined during two separate instances of artistic
collaboration (a ballet and a play), and its members included artists with widely varying methods of practice” (24).“The Surrealists
invented the ‘cadavre exquis’ or exquisite corpse, a collaborative verbal and visual game the results of which were regularly published
in La Revolution surrealiste. Games were used by the group to catch out the conscious mind and to draw directly on the unfettered
imagination. This particular game had similarities to the game of ‘consequences’, and resulted in a sentence or a drawing of a figure
being completed on a piece of paper passed around the group. Each player contributed an element (a noun or a head, for example),
folded the paper down and passed it on. The game derived its name from one particular written result: ‘the exquisite corpse will drink
the new wine’. The ‘exquisite corpse’ game is an example of the continuous interchange between the poetic and the pictorial which is
one of the principal characteristics of early Surrealism. While experimenting with some of the techniques outlined above, Masson and
Miró also pursued this interchange as a way of making Surrealist images which might unlock the secrets of the unconscious” (24).
27
UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism
STUDY GUIDE
O Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory, 1931
technique of fifteenth century Flemish painting employed/ limp watches/ ants and a fly/ infinite space/
“paranoic-critical method
1. “Among the writers and artists around Breton was the Spanish painter and printmaker
Salvador Dali (1904-1989). In the early 1920s Dali had trained at the Academy in
Madrid, where he quickly mastered the traditional methods of representation. In 1928 he
took a taxi from Spain to see Versailles and meet Picasso in Paris. While there, he also
met the Surrealists and quickly converted to their cause. For several years Breton
considered him the movement’s official painter. Dali’s contribution to Surrealist theory
was the ‘paranoic-critical method’, in which the sane man or woman cultivates the
ability of the paranoic to misread ordinary appearances in order to free himself or herself
from the shackles of conventional thought. A good example of this method at work is The
Persistence of Memory, which is set on the Bay of Rosas near his birthplace and based on
a childhood memory of a doctor asking to see his tongue. The French words montrer (‘to
show’) and langue (‘tongue’), according to the paranoic-critical method, easily become
montre (‘watch’) and langueur (‘languid’). One of the soft watches drapes over a fetal image
of the artist himself, who claimed to have a classic Oedipal love for his mother. The
fetus belongs in the mother’s womb, where Dali longed to return. The ants on the hard watch in the foreground are an expression of
the anxieties that attended his Oedipal love, namely, the fears of the father’s anger. Curiously, Dali chose a highly realistic style in
order to make his irrational world seem more convincing” (Stokstad 1087).
2. “Surrealism had first come to New York in 1932, with the exhibition Surrealism at the Julien Levy Gallery. This exhibition both
introduced the American public to Surrealist art and launched Surrealist artists onto the American art scene. Dali in particular was a
great success. His The Persistence of Memory, his famous ‘soft watches’, was shown in this exhibition for the first time, and in 1933
and 1934 he had solo shows with the same gallery. He became a star” (Bradley 62). “Increasingly, however, Dali became an
ambassador for himself. He lectured at the Museum of Modern Art, was on the cover of Time magazine, and persuaded the cream of
New York society into Dalinian costume for an ‘oneiric ball’ given in his honor by Caresse Crosby. He was much in demand as a
portraitist, painting rich and influential American patrons in Surrealist guise, performing feats of metamorphosis upon their distinctive
profiles or chaining them to painted cliffs with their jewelry. Although throughout most of the 1932s Dali remained close to Breton’s
vision of Surrealism, by 1940 Breton had become impatient with what he perceived to be Dali’s cheapening of Surrealism into
portraiture, fashion, and fascist politics. Dali was fascinated by Hitler. His Mountain Lake of 1938 is part of a series of paintings
inspired by Chamberlain’s phone calls to Hitler which culminated in the Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938” (62). “It should be
remembered that Surrealism was a revolutionary movement not only in literature and art but also in politics. The periodical founded by
Breton in 1925 as the voice of Surrealism was named La Revolution surrealiste, and it maintained a steady Communist line during the
1920s. The Dadaists at the end of the war were anarchists, and many future Surrealists joined them. Feeling that government systems
guided by tradition and reason had led mankind into the bloodiest holocaust in history, they insisted that non-government was better,
that the irrational was preferable to the rational in art, and in all of life and civilization. The Russian Revolution and the spread of
Communism provided a channel for Surrealist protests during the 1920s” (Arnason 289). “Dali shared the Surrealist antagonism to
formalist art, from Neo-Impressionism to Cubism and abstraction. The Persistence of Memory of 1931 is a denial of every twentiethcentury experiment in abstract organization. Its miniature technique goes back to the Flemish art of the fifteenth century, and its sour
greens and yellows recall nineteenth-century chromo-lithographs. The space is as infinite as Tanguy’s, but rendered with hard
objectivity. The picture’s frame comes largely from the presentation of recognizable objects in an unusual context, with unnatural
attributes. The limp watches, in fact, have become a popular visual synonym for Surrealist fantasy” (292). “By 1930 Dali had left De
Chirico’s generalized dream world for his own world of violence, blood, and decay. He sought to create in his art a specific
documentation of Freudian theories applied to his own inner world. He started painting with the first image that came into his mind
and went on from one association to the next, multiplying images of persecution or megalomania like a true paranoiac. He defined his
paranoic-critical method as a ‘spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon he interpretative-critical association of delirious
phenomena’” (292).
3. “Dali had been a member of the Paris Surrealists for five years when The Persistence of Memory was shown in a New York gallery, and
ended up in the renowned Museum of Modern Art, New York. This saw the beginning of the Spanish artist’s spectacularly contentious
career as a big star, particularly in America. The soft clocks became one of the trademarks that he included in other paintings, graphic
work and stage designs. In newspaper caricatures of the time they hang over the door-handle of his hotel-room, flow out from beneath
his blankets or replace an out-stretched tongue” (Krausse 103). “The psychoanalyst Freud used a simple pair of concepts to describe
the everyday workings of the human psyche: the ‘reality principle’ ensures adaptation to one’s surroundings, but is constantly
infiltrated by the ‘pleasure principle’. For Dali, clocks, normalized instruments of measurement, represented the reality principle, while
soft, ‘edible’ objects belonged to the pleasure principle. In addition, Dali’s paintings show a connection between the perception of time
and the perception of space. The clocks, flowing through space and time, prompt thoughts of the ‘flow’ of time, and give the impression
of a time and space of memory dissolving into the distance, a zone invaded by the inexplicable, and one which unconsciously influences
the experience of the present” (103).“Hard objects become inexplicably limp in this bleak and infinite dreamscape, while metal attracts
ants like rotting flesh. Mastering what he called ‘the usual paralyzing trick of eye-fooling’, Dali painted with what he called ‘the most
imperialist fury of precision,’ but only, he said, ‘to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality’. It is
the classical Surrealist ambition, yet some literal reality is included too: the distant golden cliffs are the coast of Catalonia, Dali’s home.
Those limp watches are as soft as overripe cheese-indeed ‘the camembert of time’, in Dali’s phrase. Here time must lose all meaning.
Permanence goes with it: ants… represent decay… an approximation of Dali’s own face in profile, its long eyelashes seem disturbingly
insectlike or event sexual” (Bee 154).
28
UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism
STUDY GUIDE
P Meret Oppenheim. Object (Dejeuner en fourrure), 1936, fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon
Meret Oppenheim/ “convulsive beauty”
1. “Meret Oppenheim frequently used to recount how her famous fur-lined cup came into
being: it was a whimsical tale that even involved the magician Picasso. Despite her rapid
success de scandale in the Paris of the 1930s- thanks to Man Ray’s nude photographs of
her- the young painter had to struggle to earn a living with fashion and decorative work.
She had the idea of creating bracelets made of metal and covered with fur for Schiaparelli.
These creations were much admired by the artists who used to frequent the Café de Flore,
including Dora Maar and Picasso, and the latter began to speculate on other objects that
could be covered in fur. ‘The saucer- and the cup too…’ suggested Oppenehim,
whereupon, inspired by the idea, she went out and bought a cheap cup, saucer, and
spoon,, covered them with Chinese gazelle hide, and showed them in 1936 in two
Surrealist exhibitions. The artifact reduced to a monster soon ended up in the Museum
of Modern Art in New York, whose director, Alfred Barr Jr., realized that it was to become
a milestone in 20th century art, an icon caught between Dada and Pop Art, in which
artifacts were removed from their ordinary contexts and converted into aesthetic, demonized, ironic- and ultimately banal- objects
through a process of alienation” (Tesch and Hollmann 96).
2. “The metamorphosis of an everyday artifact with pleasant associations into a hairy object with animal overtones, mocking its former
purpose and implying a ‘function’ of another kind, met with a mixture of shock, irritation, and annoyance- despite its playful, witty
presentation. It triggered, of course, all sorts of tantalizing erotic associations, which Andre Breton subtly expressed in entitling it
Dejeuner en fourrure (Breakfast in Fur), with its reference to Manet’s frivolous paintings Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe and Sacher-Masoch’s
book Venus in Furs. Oppenheim’s work during this period is full of socially critical overtones and psychological traps- often of a
sexually pathological nature- that alternate between esprit, irony, poetry, and melancholy. The white, stiletto-heeled shoes served up
like chicken thighs in paper frills and entitled My Nurse, or the Stone Woman on the beach, whose body continues into the water in the
form of a mermaid, are Surrealist aphorisms that nevertheless offer wide scope for interpretation. Even in the later stages of her artistic
development, Meret Oppenheim remained highly individualistic, independent, and mercurial. It was, therefore, all the more
unfortunate that for decades the public associated her with the fur-lined cup. In 1970, when a gallery owner requested her to produce
it in multiples, she made it into a kitschy souvenir- thus sardonically bridging the gap between Surrealism and Pop Art” (96).
“A small concave object covered with fur, Object may also have a sexual connotation and politic: working in a male-dominated art world,
perhaps Oppenheim was mocking the prevailing ‘masculinity’ of sculpture, which conventionally adopts a hard substance and vertical
orientation that can be seen as almost absurdly self-referential. Chic, wry, and simultaneously attractive and disturbing, Object is
shrewdly and quietly aggressive” (Bee 155).
Q Women and Surrealism
1. “During the 1930s, women artists came to Surrealism in large numbers, attracted by the movement’s anti-academic stance and by
its sanctioning of art in which personal reality dominates. But they found themselves struggling toward artistic maturity in the context
of a movement that defined them as confirming and completing a male creative cycle and that metaphorically obliterated subject/object
polarities through violent assaults on the female image. Not surprisingly, most women ended by asserting their independence from
Surrealism. Almost without exception, women artists saw themselves as outside the inner circle of poets and painters which produced
Surrealist manifestos and formulated Surrealist theory. Most of them were young women just embarking on artistic careers when they
came to Paris; many of them did their mature work only after leaving the Surrealist circle. Often they came to Surrealism through
personal relationships with men in the group rather than shared political or theoretical goals. Yet they made significant contributions
to the language of Surrealism, replacing the male Surrealists’ love of hallucination and erotic violence with an art of magical fantasy and
narrative flow” (Chadwick 291-292).
2. “Surrealism’s multiple and ambivalent visions of woman converge in its identification of her with the mysterious forces and
regenerative powers of nature. Women artists were quick to draw on this identification, but they did it with an analytic mind and an
ironic stance. Artists like Leonora Carrington (b. 1917), Leonor Fini (b. 1918), the American painters Kay Sage (1898-1963) and
Dorothea Tanning (b. 1912) and the Spanish- Mexican artist Remedios Varo (b. 1908) received varying degrees of formal training. Yet
they meticulously built up tight surfaces with layers of small and carefully modulated brushstrokes. However fantastic their imagery,
they often worked with precision and care of illustrators, as if their creative model was scientific investigation rather than Surrealist
explosiveness” (292-293). “Women artists dismissed male romanticizing of nature as female and nurturing (or female and destructive)
and replaced it with a more austere and ironic vision” (293). “Surrealism constructed women as magic objects and sites on which to
project male erotic desire. They recreated themselves as beguiling personalities, poised uneasily between the worlds of artifice and
nature, or the instinctual life. The duality of the Mexican Frida Kahlo’s life (1907-54)… invests her painting with a haunting complexity
and a narrative quality which disturbs in its ambiguity” (294). “For Kahlo, as for other women artists associated with the Surrealists,
painting became a means of sustaining a dialogue with inner reality. Surrealism sanctioned personal exploration for both men and
women; in doing so, it legitimized a path familiar to many women and gave new artistic form to some of the conflicts confronting women
in early twentieth-century movements” (296).
29
UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism
Study Guide
R Rene Magritte. The Treason of Images, 1928-29
dislocation of meaning and image/ interest in the ordinary
1. In contrast to Dali, Rene Magritte (1898-1967) “has been called the invisible man
among the Surrealists. George Melly, in he script for a BBC film on Magritte, wrote: ‘He is
a secret agent; his object is to bring into disrepute the whole apparatus of bourgeois
reality. Like all saboteurs, he avoids detection by dressing and behaving like everybody
else’. Thanks perhaps to the artist’s anonymity, the works of Magritte have had gradual
but overwhelming impact, like a glacial flow. After years of sporadic study at the Brussels
Academy of Fine Arts, Magritte, like Tanguy, was shocked into realizing his destiny when
in 1922 he saw a reproduction of De Chircio’s 1914 painting The Song of Love. In 1926
he emerged as an individual artist with a style based on that of De Chirico” (Arnason
294).
2. “The perfect symbol (except that Magritte disliked attributions of specific symbolism) for
his approach is the painting entitled The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images. It portrays a
briar pipe so meticulously that it might serve as a tobacconist’s trademark. Beneath,
rendered with comparable precision, is the legend Ceci n’est pas une pipe (‘This is not a pipe’). This delightful work confounds pictorial
reality. A similar idea is embodied in The False Mirror: the eye as a false mirror when it views the white clouds and blue sky of nature.
This might be another statement of the artist’s faith, for The False Mirror introduces the illusionistic theme of the landscape that is a
painting, not nature. The problem of real space versus spatial illusion is as old as painting itself, but here it is imaginatively treated.
Magritte’s studies include many variations of the theme, the simplest of which shows an easel with a painted canvas in front of a
window” (295).
3. “Surrealist paintings tend to be object based. In order to discredit and destabilize perceived normality, Surrealist artists manipulated
recognizable objects, blurring the boundary between the real of the imaginary. Thus, Magritte’s The Treason of Images confronts the
viewer with an illusionistic pipe. At the same time, the picture’s caption denies that it is a pipe. A brief moment of disorientation ensues
until the contradiction is resolved- it is not a pipe, but rather a painting of a pipe. Neither the image nor the caption is lying to the
viewer. The painting does, however, act out the warning implied by its title: the image is so illusionistic that it is treacherous, making us
‘see’ something (a real pipe) that is not really there. Perhaps even real pipes are treacherous. The painting makes us doubt that we can
rely on our perception of things. A notion of objects as untrustworthy is of course central to Surrealism: the marvelous, the dream and
the unconscious mind are all places of incipient metamorphosis where objects, symbols of irrational desires, are subject to sudden
mutation” (Bradley 41).
4. “In the midst of a movement which specialized in provocations, attention-grabbing stunts, political embroilments, sexual scandals,
ruptures of friendship, and fervid half-religious crises, Magritte seemed uncommonly phlegmatic. He lived in respectable Brussels, and
stayed married to the same woman, Georgette Berger, till his death; by the standards of the Paris art world in the thirties, he might as
well have been a grocer. Yet this stolid enchanter possessed one of the most remarkable imaginations of the twentieth century.
Magritte’s work serves its modern audience rather as the sultans of Victorian narrative painting, the Friths and Poynters and AlmaTademas, served theirs- as a source of stories. Modern art has been well supplied with myth makers, from Picasso to Barnett Newman.
But it had few masters of the narrative impulse, and Magritte was its fabulist-in-chief. His images were stories first, paintings second,
but the paintings were not slices of life or historical scenes. They were snapshots of the impossible, rendered in the dullest and most
literal way: vignettes of language and reality locked in mutual cancellation. As a master of puzzle-painting, Magritte had no equal, and
his influence on the formation of images- and on how people interpret them- has been very wide” (Hughes, The Shock of the New 243).
5. “In 1923, Corbusier reproduced- in Towards an Architecture, as an emblem of plain functional design- a pipe. Five years later,
Magritte painted his riposte to Corbusier’s single-level rationalism in The Treason of Images, 1928-9. ‘This is not a pipe’. But if not, then
what is it? A painting, the painting answers; a sign that denotes an object and triggers memory. The phrase, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’,
has become one of the catch-lines of modern art, a condensed manifesto about language and the way meaning is conveyed, or blocked,
by symbols. No painter had ever made the point that ‘A painting is not what it represents’ with such epigrammatic clarity before.
Corbusier’s pipe, as redone by Magritte, was the hole in the mirror of illusion, a passage into a quite different world where things lose
their names or, keeping them, change their meanings. At one border, Magritte’s field of action touched on philosophy; at the other,
farce” (243-244). “With his dry, matter-of-fact technique, slowly acquired and without the least trace of the ‘natural’ painter to enliven
it, Magritte painted things so ordinary that they might have come from a phrasebook: an apple, a comb, a cloud, a hat, a birdcage, a
street of prim suburban houses. There was not much on this list that an average Belgian, around 1935, would not have seen or used in
the course of an average day. Magritte’s poetry was inconceivable without the banality through, and on, which it worked. If they did
not have a reportorial air, a denial of fantasy built into their very style, his paintings would be far less eloquent. And if his art had
confined itself to the administration of shock, it would have been as short-lived as any other Surrealist ephemera. But his concerns lay
deeper. They were with language itself, transposed into pictorial representation. Magritte was obsessed by the hold that language has
on what it describes. When (in The Use of Words, 1928) he labeled two virtually identical and amorphous blobs of paint ‘Mirror’ and
‘Woman’s Body’, he was not simply making a joke about narcissism, but showing the extreme tenuousness of signs” (244).
6. “Drawing on a rich source of ideas…, he wanted to prompt a though process in the viewer, at the end of which his understanding of
the world would have changed. For Magritte, painting was primarily an ‘art of thinking’. With his confusing pictures, the painter called
the relationship between appearance and reality, between painting and depiction, into the consciousness- an idea, incidentally, that
was picked up once again by the artists of the 60s, when Jasper Johns called a painting of the American flag, Is it a flag or is it a
painting?” (Krausse 104).
30
UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism
STUDY GUIDE
S Rene Magritte. The Castle in the Pyrenees, 1959
real space vs. spatial illusion/ painting technique used to suspend belief/ power of juxtapositioning
1. “Magritte’s work before 1930 demonstrates two distinct tendencies, one toward the revelation of the
psyche and the other toward surprising alterations of ordinary situations, often featuring unusual
juxtapositions or changes in scale. It was in this latter mode that Magritte specialized after 1930, largely
because he felt that it had a greater potential for public good” (Stokstad 1088). In so many of Magritte’s
works, “the painting’s charm lies not simply in this visual and verbal puzzle but in the presentation itself;
the beautifully simple, abstract design and the artist’s way of subtly heightening reality while ultimately
denying its plausibility” (Janson 799).
2. “Although there were traces of Magritte’s fascination with rocks before and after, the period of his great
imaginative productivity which concentrated on the process of petrification and on the properties of stone
was the 1950s. It might be termed the artist’s ‘Stone Age’… A change occurred in 1953-54, with the
disappearance of somber tones and an atmosphere of oppression. In 1958-59 particularly, Magritte was
obsessed by the volume and weight of enormous rocks, but he altered the laws of gravity and disregarded
the weight of matter; for instance, he had a rock sink or rise, or had it rest near a sleeping person”
(Hammacher 116). “To his vision of a castle on a rock floating above the sea Magritte gave the title The
Castle in the Pyrenees, apparently a play on the French expression ‘chateaux en Espagne’- equivalent to
‘castles in the air’. Magritte painted this work in blues, grays, and off-white, in that cool, finished manner by
which he made the imaginary look real” (116).
T Joan Miró. The Harlequin’s Carnival, 1924-5
automatism/ lugubrious (gloomy) human (with mustache)/ whimsical, floating biomorphic shapes/
adolescent humor
1. “From his early youth, Joan Miró, the son of a Catalan goldsmith and clocksmith, showed signs
of a taste for drawing. In 1907 he began business school, but at the same time he took courses at
the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. In 1911 he fell gravely ill and went to a farm owned by his
family in Catalonia to recover. There he resolved to become a painter. Attracted by Fauvism and
Cubism, he frequented the Gali academy in Barcelona (where he met the Dadaist painter Picabia),
but in 1919 he set out for Paris. There he became friendly with Picasso and other members of the
avant-garde, notably the Surrealists, whom he soon joined. This was a decisive step. Maintaining
that painting had been in a period of decadence ever since the prehistoric art of the Lascaux caves,
Miró’s motto became: ‘Assassinate painting!’ He began to use new materials such as metal, string,
and wood, and to invent a playful, fantastic universe free of all constraint. Andre Breton, despite
his admiration for DeChirico, considered Miró, a painter-poet, as ‘the most Surrealist of us all’. In
fact, Miró’s inventive forms (most of which derive from either stains or arabesque lines), their freedom, his sense of spatial play, and his
use of letters and words in his ‘picture poems’ result in an art of great singularity” (Govignon 247).
2. “Miró’s paintings of 1924-7 worked at an almost frenzied pitch of invention. By then his bestiary was in full session, and in works
like The Harlequin’s Carnival, 1924-5, he became the heir to the Romanesque sculptors with their bestiaries and demons, even to
Hieronymus Bosch himself. Later, Miró claimed that the hallucinations brought on by hunger and staring at the cracks in the plaster
during those lean Paris years helped to loosen his imagery, as mescaline might. But the creatures that swarm and buzz in The
Harlequin’s Carnival are too consistent to be entirely the product of reverie, for they emerge from the very specific, dense, and playful
sense of nature that only a rural childhood can give. This bawdy animism of Miró’s, expressed with a sharp, quizzical line that springs
and chirrups like a grasshopper in Catalan dust, is a matter of detail and observation: getting the nose in and keeping it there (The
word ‘Miró’, one is reminded, in Spanish means ‘he saw’. )” (Hughes, Shock of the New 235).
3. “Harlequin’s Carnival, one of the first Surrealist pictures, takes place within the suggested confines of a room. The perspective of the
window opening on the night gives an odd inversion of space. A wild party, rages inside, where only the human being is lugubrious, an
elegantly mustached man with a long-stemmed pipe, staring sadly at the spectator. Surrounding him is every sort of animal, beastie, or
organism, all having a fine time. There is no specific symbolism, simply a brilliant, fantastic imagination that has been given full rein.
Certain favorite motifs recur in a number of paintings- the ladder with the ubiquitous ear, the eye, the man with the pipe, the arrowbird- but the salient points of Miró’s art are not iconographical or structural. One element is fantastic humor, of which he, Klee, Arp,
and slightly later, Alexander Calder are the modern masters. The other salient point is the vividness of Miró’s unreal world. His
organisms and animals, even his inanimate objects, all rendered as flatly abstract, biomorphic shapes, have an eager vitality that
makes them more real to us than the crowds we pass daily” (Arnason 278). “Influenced by Catalan folk art, in his later works Miró
developed poetic, symbolic abbreviations of suggestive form and color, which conceal a wealth of meanings. His paintings hover
between figuration and abstraction; the flowing curves of his lines, little stars, circles and suns prompt fantasy and dreaming. The
works are full of poetry and wit; they live off the colorfulness and the vitality of the lines. The picture elements seem to communicate
with one another, to dance with one another” (Krausse 105). “ ‘I do not differentiate between painting and poetry,’ Miró once said. The
term ‘lyrical abstraction’, sometimes applied to, say, the painting of Kandinsky, indeed seems to be particularly apt for Miró” (104).
31
UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism
STUDY GUIDE
U Frida Kahlo. Self-Portrait with Thorny Necklace, 1940, oil on canvas
Frida Kahlo/ Diego Rivera/ a life of pain and illness/ a wreath of thorns with a dead hummingbird/ a cat
and a monkey
1. “A number of women, Meret Oppenheim among them, were associated with the Surrealist
movement. Today the best known is Frida Kahlo (1910-1954), who was first discovered by the
poet Andre Breton during a visit to Mexico in 1938 and then rediscovered in recent years by
feminist art historians. She owes her reputation as much to her troubled life as to her work, for
they are inseparable. Her paintings are frankly autobiographical. However they are presented in
such enigmatic terms and are so full of personal meaning that the exact circumstances must be
known in order to understand their content. Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace is similar to
traditional Mexican religious images. It was painted in 1940, when her tempestuous marriage to
the painter Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was interrupted by divorce for a year. The necklace, an
allusion to the crown of thorns worn by Christ during the Passion, is a symbol of her humiliation.
From it hangs a dead hummingbird, a traditional amulet worn in Mexico by people seeking love.
On her shoulders are two demons in the guise of the artist’s pets: death, who appears as a black
cat, and the devil, seen as a monkey. She is shown as a martyr to love hoping for a resurrection
like the Lord’s, as signified by the butterflies overhead. In context, it seems likely that Kahlo was
thinking of suicide” (Janson 800).
2. “Married to the painter Diego Rivera, Frida lived at the center of events. It was a period cultural
renewal, more a philosophical than a political renewal. The so-called Mexican renaissance, on
which Rivera himself had the most formative influence, cannot of course be compared to the European one- in Italy, for example. The
revolution that had taken place in the preceding years, even before the Russian Revolution, was also a different, entirely Mexican affair.
There was no revolutionary Marxist or socialist theory here. The Communist Part was formed only after the revolution. Zapata hoped
for a return to the pre-Columbian form of land distribution and the Aztec form of village organization, for a resurrection of a period that
is much less distant in the past for Mexico than the period of the Romans and Greeks is for Europeans” (von Waberer 8). “Compared
with the monumentality of Diego’s immense frescoes, Frida’s work is small in format, but it addressed the same concerns with which
her husband and her period were so passionately involved. She did this in her own way. She lived in the shadow of a painter and
ideologist, but never measured herself against him. His influence in her work is visible, but her influence on his art, an influence that
is much more subtle, can also be recognized. Having personally experienced the end of the violent revolution herself, she still firmly
believed in the necessity of changing social and political structures in Mexico. Her nationalist and anti-imperialist views shape her
paintings’ message” (9).
3. “Her father, a photographer, the son of Hungarian Jews from the German town of Baden-Baden, had married her mother, who was of
Indian and Spanish extraction, in Mexico. Shortly afterward, they traveled together throughout the country, to photograph the ruins of
Aztec temples. Frida, who as a child contracted polio, which left her right leg permanently weakened, suffered a serious accident at the
age of eighteen that changed her life. The school bus she was traveling in was rammed by a streetcar, and a piece of iron tore into her
pelvis and back. She would struggle with the effects of this accident and the pain it caused for the rest of her life. During the time she
had to spend in hospital, she began to draw and paint. She joined the Communist Party and, through the photographer Tina Modotti,
met Diego Rivera, whose paintings she had admired since she was a girl. They were married in 1929. Frida was twenty-two and Diego
forty-two. After ten years of marriage, they became divorced, following a long separation, but they later remarried. They both had
extramarital love affairs, some of Frida’s being with women, but she found Diego’s violent love affairs, including one with her younger
sister, more and more difficult to bear. Diego and Frida were nevertheless famous as a couple. They formed the focus of an intellectual
circle, and their Blue House, where they lived, attracted visitors and like-minded people from all over the world. Trotsky, too, spent
some of his period in exile in their house” (10-11).
4. “During the early part of their marriage, Frida accompanied Diego on many journeys to America, but later she could no longer
manage this. All her life she suffered from the injuries caused by the accident. She had to wear plaster jackets, underwent countless
operations, and was often confined to bed for months on end. She was in constant pain. Against her doctors’ advice, she tried to have a
child, and suffered repeated miscarriages. Her illness meant that she was more and more noticeably thrown back on her own resources,
and she was forced to withdraw more and more into an inner, private sphere. She painted obsessively and uninterruptedly, often while
lying in bed or while hospitalized. To begin with, she gave her paintings away to friends, with no thought of selling them. Andre Breton,
who visited her in 1938, ‘recognized’ her as a surrealist, a label she did not agree to. ‘I paint my reality’, she said. Breton nevertheless
arranged for her first exhibition in New York in 1939 with Julien Levy, which was an immense success. During the 1940s, she taught
students, who became known as Los Fridos. In the 1950s, her health increasingly deteriorated. In 1953, one of her legs had to be
amputated. She died in 1954. The last photograph of her shows her in a wheelchair at a demonstration against CIA interference in the
Guatemalan presidential election” (11-12).
5. “Frida lived in this cosmos of her own creation very much as a part of it. She wore Mexican folk costume and pre-Columbian jewelry,
and combed her hair to match, adorning it with ribbons and scarves. Even when she was in the United States, she wore this Indian
‘masquerade’, which Rivera liked to see her in, and she was amused to find herself influencing American fashion and appearing in
Vogue. But even this disguise, and the eccentricity associated with it, was part of her artistic and political message. She stylized
herself and her surroundings in the same way she stylized the still life, plants, and objects in her paintings, made them symbols of an
attitude to life, and created a world in which to embed herself and her private story” (13). “Like folk art painters, she is little concerned
in her paintings with proportion and perspective, and devotes loving attention to even the tiniest details” (14).
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