Surrealism

1. Surrealism Exploring the Unconscious

2. Rene Magritte

5. Rene Magritte • Belgian Artist • He juxtaposed everyday objects with familiar settings to create surreal compositions. • Themes included hidden or shrouded faces and a man in a bowler hat- self portrait. • Subtle elements of surrealism

6. Joan Miro • Created unique biomorphic designs like the sun, moon and animals. • Forms progressively simplified to a visual shorthand of the artist. • Seemed like cartoons from another planet. • He wanted”to express with precision all of the golden sparks the soul gives off.”

7. Joan Miro

9. Max Ernst • Worked from memories and images from childhood. • Related back to feverish visions of childhood and tried to recreate them for art’s sake. • Invented ”frottage” or rubbings from rough surfaces that he would work into to create fantastic or monstrous imagery.

10. Max Ernst

11. “Frottage is nothing but a technical medium, in order to increase the hallucinatory abilities of the spirit, to awake visions automatically and to get rid of one’s blindness.”

12. Marc Chagall

13. Marc Chagall • Precursor to Surrealism • Used imagery from Russian folklore and Jewish life. • Insisted that he painted actual memories , not irrational dreams.

14. Marcel Duchamp • A prime mover of Surrealism and Dadaism. • Dadaism was a movement in art that protested the madness of war. • The aim of the dadaists was to cultivate the absurd. • Wanted to awaken the imagination. • Created ready-mades that lead to the question- What is art?

15. Is This Art?

17. Georgio De Chirico • Painted nightmare fantasies 15 years before the Surrealists existed. • Eerie cityscapes with dramatic light and ominous shadows. • Depersonalized figures to create the feeling of menace. • Skewed use of perspective to illustrate irrational childhood fears.

18. De Chirico

19. De Chirico