SURREALISM

• The id is the core of human personality…a
• teeming mass of urges and desires…the need to avoid pain and seek pleasure. If not controlled these animal urges lead to chaotic and violent societies. Freud conceived of a super-ego section of the mind that inputs information from the family, school, and church that civilizes the individual, thereby creating a buffer against these
• urges originating in the id, and allowing the conscious to have some control over behavior.

• consciousness
• didn't reject western
• aesthetics didn't promise a cure to society
• reasserts the
• invincibility of artistic genius
• tap into raw impulse,
• desire, ad fears that Freud claimed were seated in the unconscious
• mind

• writing
• created exquisite
• corpse through old parlor game

Breton, Hugo, Knutson and Tzara - 1930

Exquisite Corpse-

“The exquisite Corpse will drink the young wine.”

coined the term of a surrealist practice-

• literary and artistically chance, randomness, and
• coincidence was the basis of intensive study

• surrelaism- automatism “dictation of thought without control of
• the mind (Arps, Ernst, Miro)
• close to abstraction
• but recognizable imagery is resent
• The other direction of
• surrealism is presenting meticulous detail, recognizable scenes and
• objects taken out of their normal context, distorted and combined in
• fantastic ways as they may be seen in dreams (dali)

Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale

• Max Ernst
• 1924

Dada/surrealist influence

• Dream landscape with 2 girls
• one collapsed on the ground, the other running and brandishing a knife
• they are frightened by a tiny bird

a figure on top the house clutches a yough girl and seems to reacg for the door knob that is on the frame

1925- Ernst became a full fledged surrealist participant

• The School of Paris describes, not an art movement
• or a learning institution, but instead is more indicative of the
• importance of Paris as a center of Western art in the early decades of
• the 20th century.

"Painting"

• Joan Miro: SURREALIST
• 1933

appears non-figurative but many observers have found a images emerge of animals

abstract organic shapes are perhaps closest to the biomorphic inventions of Arp

" The Persistance of Memory"

• Salvador Dali
• 1931

Is a denial of every twentieth century experiment in abstract organization

minitaturist techniqu (only a foot wide)

sour greens and yellow, unusual context, unnatural attributes, an unexpected scale

Dali obsessed with morphing hard and soft

"Soft Construction with Boiled Beans"

• Salvador
• Dali

1936

premontions of civil war

psychological torment and physical suffering

figure pulls iteself apart, while other body parts lay on the ground with beans

he refused to condemn hitler, he reacts to fascism with charateristic self interest.

"The Human Condition"

• Rene Magritte
• 1933

capacity for irony, uncanny invention, deadpan realism was appreciate in his art

an open window with an easel that completes the landscape

real space versus spatial illusion

outside ourselves even though it is only a mental representation of it that we experiance inside ourselves.

"The Rape The Lovers"

• Rene Magritte
• 1934

Freudian reperitoire of sexual anxiety and erotic interst

womans nude limbless torso androgynous face

sexual violence announced in title

toothed vagina

"Luncheon in Fur"

• Meret Oppenheim
• 1936

Three Women at the Spring

• Picasso
• 1921

“Guernica”

• Picasso
• 1937

• atorcities of the Spanish Civil War
• General Franco is a turnip headed monster
• the bull a symbol of resurgent Spain