EXPRESSIONISM- NEO-PLASTICISM (De Stijl)- SURREALISM

04.12.2012

ART IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY:

Week 9

Expressionism

In Germany, a group known as Expressionists insisted art should express the artists feelings rather than images of the real world. The belief that the artist could directly convey some kind of inner feeling- - emotional or spiritual- - through art was a fashionable idea in German artistic and intellectual circles at the beginning of the twentieth century. Artists had been encouraged to ‘break free’ from civilized constraints and Academic conventions and somehow express themselves more freely; these ideas are fundamental to what we call German ‘Expressionist’ art. From 1905 to 1930, Expressionism the use of distorted, exaggerated forms and colors for emotional impact dominated German art. This subjective trend, which is the foundation of much twentieth century art, began with Van Gogh, Gauguin and Munch in the late nineteenth century, and continued with Belgian painter James Ensor (1860-1849), and Austrian painters Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Egon Schiele (1890- 1918), and Oscar Kokoschka (1886-1980). But it was in Germany, with two separate groups Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, the Expressionism reached maturity.

Die Brücke: Founded in 1905 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880- 1938)

Der Blaue Reiter: Founded in Munich around 1911 by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944).

1 04.12.2012

DIE BRÜCKE (BRIDGE): BRIDGING THE GAP

• Die Brücke founded by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880- 1938) • Members include Ernst Ludwig in 1905. Kirchner (1880–1938), Erich • The aim was to sieze avantgarde spirit. Heckel (1883–1970), and Emil • Members believed their work would be a “bridge” to the Nolde (1867–1956). future. • Its credo is: “to attract all revolutionary and fermenting • Unlike the French avant-garde, elements is the purpose implied in the name Brücke.” Expressionists privilege the • Dissolved in 1913 artist's inner emotional state, • Artists lived and worked communally, first in Dresden then in focusing on the anxieties of Berlin, producing intense anguished pictures with harshly modern life and taboo subjects distorted forms and clashing colors. such as sexuality, expressed in bright, unnatural colors and • Their major contribution was a revival to the graphic arts, distorted forms. especially woodcut. • Their major subject was the sickness of the soul. • The means to express this sickness were dramatic arrangement of black and white contrasts, crude forms, and jagged lines in woodcuts.

Die Brücke artists attempt to challenge or rework the constrictions of the culture in which they lived:

 Influence of Friedrich Nietzsche: Existentialist philosopher who challenged bourgeois norms of aesthetics, religion, etc., urged the creative power of the individual in forms of expression and meaning (writings span c. 1870 and 1880s). For Nietzsche ‘modernity’ (the modern world) was decadent and needed to be overcome by the creative individual.  Notion of the ‘Obermensch’ (‘Superman’) who has overcome the powers of decadence. Note: Nietzsche addresses his remarks solely to men, whom he sees as agents of cultural change.  Die Brücke probably took their name from Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) in which he writes of man’s spirit as the bridge to freedom.  The Brücke associated rebellion against bourgeois commercial values with the ‘primitive’.

‘Expressionist’ meant:  crude unfinished brushwork,  distorted colors and forms,  sense of the artist’s genuine physical and emotional involvement with both the subject and the medium ,  rejection of sophistication in favor of achieving a ‘direct’ expression.

2 04.12.2012

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Street, Berlin (1913), one of a series on this theme, depicting prostitutes In 1905, Kirchner, along with Bleyl and two other architecture students, Commentary on contemporary urban life Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel, founded the artists group Die and its institutions as decadent, Berlin Brücke ("The Bridge"). From then on, he committed himself to art. The street scenes with their dandies and group aimed to eschew the prevalent traditional academic style and find prostitutes, images of the modern city as the source of the consumption of human a new mode of artistic expression, which would form a bridge (hence the souls and fermentation of anxiety name) between the past and the present. They responded both to past artists, as well as contemporary international avant-garde movements. As part of the affirmation of their national heritage, they revived older media, particularly woodcut prints. Their group was one of the seminal ones, which in due course had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the 20th century and created the style of Expressionism. The group met initially in Kirchner's first studio. Bleyl described it as:

“that of a real bohemian, full of paintings lying all over the place, drawings, books and artist’s materials — much more like an artist’s romantic lodgings than the home of a well- organised architecture student.”

Marzella (1909–10)

The group composed a manifesto (mostly Kirchner's work) in 1906, which was carved on wood and asserted a new generation, "who want freedom in our work and in our lives, independence from older, established forces.” They continued:

‘With faith in progress and in a new generation of creators and spectators we call together all youth. As youth, we carry the future, and want to create for ourselves freedom of life and of movement against the long-established older forces. We claim as our own everyone who reproduces that which drives him to creation with directness and authenticity.’ Self-Portrait as a Soldier (1915)

Kirchner. Self-Portrait with Model. 1910

3 04.12.2012

The ‘modernity’ of Kirchner’s paintings also defined by their overt sexuality, which was seen as part of free self- expression. Bourgeois culture viewed the open sexuality of prostitutes, dancers, etc. as deviant and decadent. This was compounded by Kirchner’s (and others) association of ‘natural’ sexuality with African culture ie. Kirchner used African models in his studio. The affinity between ideas of : nature/female versus culture/male Kirchner. Nude. c. 1910

Kirchner. Bathers at Moritzburg. 1909 THE ‘PRIMITIVE’: • the idea of the ‘barbarian’ or the ‘primitive’ • an idea which would have a lasting presence in modernist discourse • connotations of untamed, direct expression, as opposed to a ‘civilized’ Westernism.

CRITICISM OF MODERN LIFE, RETURN BACK TO ‘PRIMITIVE’

Kirchner. Self-Portrait as Soldier. 1915 •general disillusionment with the war common amongst avant-garde groups as a direct result of the decadence of bourgeois society

Erich Heckel

Erich Heckel was one of the charter members of Die Brücke. Their meetings took place in a former butcher shop and Heckel served as Treasurer and Secretary responsible for its organization. He was a close friend of Karl Schmidt- Rottluff who he met in high school in 1901. Both studied architecture at the Technical Academy in Dresden but left their studies after founding Die Brucke. In 1909, he took a long sojourn to Italy. In the Fall of 1911, Die Brucke moved to Berlin where they met most of the painters of the avant-garde but in 1913, the group disbanded.

Girl with High Hat (Mädchen mit hohem Hut) Erich Heckel (German, 1883-1970) 1913. Drypoint, plate: (25 x 20.2 cm); sheet: (38.9 x 32.4 cm).

4 04.12.2012

After seeing the Futurist exhibition in April 1912, Heckel's style became Prismatic, organized in a series of triangular planes.

His specialty was interior scenes that express melancholy and loneliness.

His subjects are usually outsiders like circus performers and madmen in anxious or fearful situations.

•The idea that the true Expressionist artist was spontaneous (unhampered by the weight of tradition and propriety); then he could access his true inner feelings and responses. •German Expressionism often associated with the idea of the ‘primitive’, in the sense that the ‘primitive’ was considered to be closer to unmediated expression and more ‘authentic’ than the civilized. •Also the idea of ‘nature/culture’, with ‘nature’ being direct, unfettered, instinctual, non-intellectual, anti-civilized, and ‘culture’ being civilization, rationality, repression. •The primitive was particularly worked out in representations of the ‘other’ ie. Africans, Polynesians etc. and in ‘Woman’.

Portrait of a Man (Männerbildnis) (1919). Erich Heckel (German, 1883-1970) Woodcut, composition: (46.2 x 32.4 cm); sheet (irreg.): (61.6 x 50.8 cm).

Emil Nolde

Die Brücke artists invited Nolde to join their group in 1906. Although he remained an active member for only one year, Nolde stayed in close touch with Die Brücke.

These younger Expressionists encouraged Nolde’s preference for bright colors and free brushwork, and his boldly carved woodcuts date from his contact with the group.

However, Nolde’s first series of intensely original and technically experimental etchings, Fantasies (1905, e.g. Joy of Living) exerted a strong counter- influence on Die Brücke’s graphic art.

In his paintings such urban subjects as bars and theatre scenes alternate with brooding seascapes and landscapes. In 1909–13 he completed a series of religious paintings, including the Last Supper (1909), Pentecost (1909) and a nine-part polyptych entitled the Life of Christ (1912).

Head with Pipe (Self Portrait) (1907) Lithograph

5 04.12.2012

In 1910 Nolde’s Pentecost , which depicts the mask-like faces of Christ and the Apostles crowned by the flame of the Holy Spirit, became the centre of a row that split the Berlin Secession—one of the most advanced exhibiting societies in Pentecost, Emil Nolde, 1910. Germany up until that time, which Nolde had joined in 1908. Nolde’s primitivist treatment of this religious subject, rendered in glowing colors and bold, Expressionist brushwork, found little favor among the older members of the society, who had grown up in the Impressionist school. When Pentecost and the works of most other younger artists were rejected, Nolde attacked the leadership and principles of the Secession in an open letter to its President, Max Liebermann, whereupon he was expelled from the association.

At the same time he celebrated the spirit of paganism in a pair of highly charged, Dionysian dance scenes: Dance around the Golden Calf (1910) and Candle Dancers (1912).

6 04.12.2012

Until 1912 he exhibited alongside other rejected artists in the Neue Sezession in Berlin. He also produced woodcuts of religious subjects (e.g. Prophet, 1912; Seebüll, Stift. Nolde).

PROPHET Woodcut. 1912. Signed in pencil lower right Emil Nolde. On firm wove paper. One of the icons of German Expressionist printmaking. A particularly well-balanced printed impression. Size : 320 x 225 mm (406 x 336 mm)

SCHIFFE Woodcut. 1906. Signed in pencil lower right and dated Emil Nolde 06. Brilliant, deep black impression, on chamois laid paper. Scarce. Size: 297 x 202 mm (364 x 233 mm)

Portrait of a Young Woman and a Child Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia

7 04.12.2012

Portrait of a Man, ca.1926 Portrait of a Young Girl, 1913-14

DER BLAUE REITER (BLUE RIDER): COLOR ALONE

• A breakthrough to pure abstraction. • Dissolved in 1914 • Most outstanding artists of the group were: – Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), and Paul Klee (1879-1940).

Wassily Kandinsky

• The Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky moved to Munich to study painting in 1896. • There, he became one of the founding members of Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), a loose association of artists formed in 1911 to promote a new art, one that would reject the materialist world in favor of the world of emotion and the spirit. • In accordance with his belief in the primacy of the inner, spiritual world, Kandinsky's art was abstract, meant to express our preconscious selves, before the intervention of reason. • By dematerializing the external appearance of his subject, without eliminating all visual reference to it, he could reveal the subject's essence. • Kandinsky often used musical terminology to describe his work, and in the subtitle of this painting, the word improvisation suggests "a largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of inner character, the nonmaterial nature."

8 04.12.2012

The specific source for the imagery in The Garden of Love is most likely the biblical story of Paradise and the Garden of Eden, one of several Old and New Testament themes addressed by the artist. The imaginary landscape revolves around a large yellow sun in the center of the composition, which pulses with rays of red. The garden is occupied by three abstract pairs of embracing figures: a reclining couple above the sun, another at the lower right, and a third, smaller pair seated at the left. Surrounding them are several animals—certainly a snake and perhaps a grazing horse and sleeping dog. Kandinsky, who was a master The Garden of Love (Improvisation Number 27), 1912 watercolorist, successfully Wassily Kandinsky (French, born Russia, 1866–1944) achieved a similar effect in Oil on canvas 47 3/8 x 55 1/4 in. (120.3 x 140.3 cm) this oil painting.

 The composition of Small Pleasures is centered round two hills, each crowned by a citadel.  On the right-hand side is a boat with three oars which is riding a storm under a forbidding black cloud.  A fiery sun flashes out wheels of color.  The actual interpretation of these elements has been the subject of much controversy.  In an unpublished essay on the painting written by Kandinsky in June 1913, Kandinsky writes of the 'joyfulness' of execution.  It is legitimate to see the work as a celebration of Kandinsky's style during this period, as affirming the spiritual and practical pleasures he manifestly derived from painting; he speaks of Small Pleasures , 1913; Oil on canvas, 110 x 120.6 cm 'pouring a lot of small pleasures on to the canvas'.

9 04.12.2012

 While giving the impression of heavenly chaos, Small Pleasures is obviously not the product of pure spontaneity. The various modes of paint application, and the complexity of pigment selection and mixing are enormous. The way colors are washed and blurred together, and seldom contained by bounding lines is typical of Kandinsky's work at this time.

 The predominantly curvilinear aspect of the work, however, is undermined by the angular geometry of the citadel, perhaps presaging Kandinsky's Bauhaus style.

 There are few monochrome patches in the composition, underlining the local scale of execution, and part of Small Pleasures , 1913; Kandinsky's pleasure in the work Oil on canvas, 110 x 120.6 cm was his reflection on a number of minor technical achievements.

• Kandinsky, himself an accomplished musician, once said “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” • The concept that color and musical harmony are linked has a long history, intriguing scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton. • Kandinsky used color in a highly theoretical way associating tone with timbre (the sound's character), hue with pitch, and saturation with the volume of sound. • He even claimed that when he saw color he heard music.

Contrasting Sounds 1924; Oil on cardboard, 70x49.5cm; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

10 04.12.2012

Composition VIII , 1923; Oil on canvas, 140 x 201 cm; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) Transverse Line, 1923 141 x 202 cm Oil on canvas Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf

11 04.12.2012

Franz Marc

• Franz Marc was a pioneer in the birth of abstract art at the beginning of the twentieth-century. • The Blaue Reiter group put forth a new program for art based on exuberant color and on profoundly felt emotional and spiritual states. • It was Marc's particular contribution to introduce paradisiacal imagery that had as its dramatis personae a collection of animals, most notably a group of heroic horses.

Deer in the Woods II , 1912 ; Oil on canvas, 110.5 x 80.5 cm; Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich

Fighting Forms , 1914 Oil on canvas, 91 x 131 cm; Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich

12 04.12.2012

Paul Klee

• Swiss painter, draughtsman, printmaker, teacher and writer. • Klee’s work forms a major contribution to the history of 20th- century art. • He is associated most commonly with the Bauhaus school in Weimar and Dessau. He is regarded as a major theoretician among modern artists and as a master of humor and mystery. • In much of his work, he aspired to achieve a naive and untutored quality, but his art is also among the most cerebral of any of the 20th century. Klee’s wide-ranging intellectual curiosity is evident in an art profoundly informed by structures and themes drawn from music, nature and poetry.

• Klee was born on December 18, 1879, in Switzerland, the second child of Hans Klee, a German music teacher, and a Swiss mother. His training as a painter began in 1898 when he studied drawing and painting in Munich for three years. • By 1911, he had returned to that city, where he became involved with the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), founded by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in 1911. • Klee and Kandinsky became lifelong friends, and the support of the older painter provided much-needed encouragement. • Until then, Klee had worked in relative isolation, experimenting with various styles and media, such as making caricatures and Symbolist drawings, and later producing small works on paper mainly in black and white. His work was also influenced by the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and the abstract translucent color planes of Robert Delaunay. • Klee a was one of the many modernist artists who wanted to practice what he called "the pure cultivation of the means" of painting—in other words, to use line, shape, and color for their own sake rather than to describe something visible. That priority freed him to create images dealing less with perception than with thought, so that the bird in this picture seems to fly not in front of the cat's forehead but inside it–the bird is literally on the cat's mind. Stressing this point by making the cat all head, Klee concentrates on thought, fantasy, appetite, the hungers of the brain. One of his aims as an artist, he said, was to "make secret visions visible."

13 04.12.2012

In 1914, Klee visited Tunisia. The experience was the turning point in his life and career. The limpid light of North Africa awakened his sense of color. During his stay, Klee gradually detached color from physical description and used it independently, which gave him the final needed push toward abstraction.

The view of the mosque in Hammamet with Its Mosque (1914) demonstrates Klee's path toward abstraction.

Hammamet with Its Mosque, 1914 Paul Klee (German, born Switzerland, 1879–1940) Watercolor and pencil on paper

He was so overwhelmed by the intense light in Tunisia that he wrote:

"Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter."

After Tunisia , he built up compositions of colored squares that have the radiance of the mosaics he saw on his Italian sojourn. The watercolor Red and White Domes (1914; Collection of Clifford Odets, New York City) is distinctive of this period.

Red and White Domes , 1914; Watercolor and body color on Japanese, vellum mounted on cardboard, 14.6 x 13.7 cm; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf

14 04.12.2012

By 1915, he had turned his back to nature and never again painted after the model. With abstracted forms and merry symbols, he expressed the most diverse subjects drawn from his imagination , poetry, music, literature , and his reaction to the world around him.

Miraculous Landing, or the "112!", 1920 Paul Klee (German, 1879–1940) Watercolor, transferred printing ink, pen, and ink on paper A boat of the type of Noah's Ark—the "112"—is moored to a boathouse. The face of the girl in the left window is expressionless; her eyes are closed. Perhaps this "miraculous landing" exists only in her imagination.

Tale à la Hoffmann, 1921 Watercolor, pencil, and transferred printing ink on paper, bordered with metallic foil The abstraction of the Hoffman’s story “Golden Pot” written in 1814.

Abstract Trio, 1923, Paul Klee (German, 1879–1940) –the three forms might represent the abstract sound patterns of three voices or three instruments. An accomplished violinist himself, music played a great role in Klee's life. His favorite composers were Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. (Watercolor and transferred printing ink on paper, bordered with gouache and ink)

15 04.12.2012

His subjects reveal his impish humor and his Ghost Chamber with the Tall bent toward the fantastic and the meditative. Door (New Version), 1925 Always preoccupied with the ring of words, titles played a major part in his work. Whether ironic, In the early 1920s, Klee painted poetic, irreverent, deadpan, flippant, or a series of ghost chambers with melancholic, his titles set up the perspectives eerie lines of perspective that from which he wanted the works to be seen. reduce everything to skeletal transparency. As Klee rarely used perspective, he applied it in these works—always interiors— solely to show its delusive effects, a theory he relayed to his students in his Bauhaus lectures on the subject in November 1921. He demonstrates that perspective can be playful in this watercolor of an orange room cluttered with black wire utensils and with a tall violet door from which seemingly radiate the black perspectival lines.

Adam and Little Eve, 1921 In this watercolor, Klee somewhat expanded the story of the creation of man. His Eve, after growing from Adam's rib, stays right there. She also remains a child. Evchen ("Little Eve") looks like a schoolgirl with flaxen hair tied in a braid. Adam is a broad-faced, grown man who sports earrings and a mustache. By placing the figures against a shallow ground with a reddish curtain, Klee seems to set the oddly matched pair on a puppet-theater stage.

In 1920, Walter Gropius invited Klee to join the faculty of the Bauhaus. A school of architecture and industrial design operating first in Weimar (1919–25) and then Dessau (1925–32), it also included the study of arts and crafts. Nearly half of Klee's some 10,000 works (mainly small-scale watercolors and drawings on paper) were produced during the ten years he taught at the Bauhaus, and they vary widely. Some relate to the subject of his courses, to his preoccupation with the relationship of colors, such as Static-Dynamic Gradation, produced in 1923.

Static-Dynamic Gradation, 1923 Paul Klee (German, 1879–1940)

While teaching at the Bauhaus, first in Weimar (1919–25) and then in Dessau (1925–32), Klee created many works that related to the subject of his courses. This watercolor reflects the artist's preoccupation with color relationships. Here, outer dark colors surround pure luminous ones in the center. In this work Klee devised a systematic movement, progressing from dark-hued brownish squares, which he dubbed "static," toward the clear-colored ones, which he called "dynamic" by virtue of the contrasts they offer.

16 04.12.2012

In the same year, Klee painted Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor, which, with its humor and grotesque fantasy, may strike many viewers as the quintessential "Klee."

Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor, 1923 Paul Klee (German, 1879–1940) Watercolor and transferred printing ink on paper, bordered with ink 15 1/4 x 11 in. (38.7 x 27.9 cm)

Imaginary beasts float within a transparent ventriloquist who appears to be all belly—except, of course, for a pair of legs, tiny arms, and a sort of head without a mouth. The little creatures inside the ventriloquist might symbolize the odd noises and voices that seem to emanate from him. The moor is indicated by the background grid of warm earth colors that turns dark toward the center and against which the figure, as part of this grid, stands out like a light-colored bubble in clear reds and blues. As if attracted by the animal sounds above him, a stray fish is about to enter a net dangling from the lower part of the ventriloquist's anatomy— perhaps to join the menagerie within.

Cat and Bird Paul Klee (German, born Switzerland. 1879-1940) 1928. Oil and ink on gessoed canvas, mounted on wood, (38.1 x 53.2 cm).

The cat is watchful, frighteningly so, but it is also calm, and Klee's palette too is calm, in a narrow range from tawny to rose with zones of bluish green. This and the suggestion of a child's drawing lighten the air. Believing that children were close to the sources of creativity, Klee was fascinated by their art, and evokes it here through simple lines and shapes: ovals for the cat's eyes and pupils (and, more loosely, for the bird's body), triangles for its ears and nose. And the tip of that nose is a red heart, a sign of the cat's desire.

17 04.12.2012

Highway and Byways , 1929; Oil on canvas, 32 5/8 x 26 3/8 in; Collection Christoph and Andreas Vowinckel

Clarification, 1932 Paul Klee Oil on canvas (70.5 x 96.2 cm)

In October 1931, Klee began teaching at the Düsseldorf Academy. He felt much at ease in that city, his well-being reflected in his adaptation of a pointillistic, loose mosaic style.

But Klee's merry "Pointillism" was different from the method of Georges Seurat and his followers, who broke down the imagery of their paintings into tiny dots of pure color.

Klee's works, rather, seem "built up" with row upon row of blocklike units of color chosen without regard to optical laws. In Clarification, due to the very small size of the dots of color, the foreground turns into a transparent screen through which the background is visible. Klee divided the ground into large areas of buff and grays, over which he drew the brown geometric design and the green crescent. Then he covered the entire surface with thousands of tiny color dots in even horizontal rows.

18 04.12.2012

Ad Parnassum, 1932; Oil on canvas, 100 x 126 cm

Klee believed that: nature was characterized by the permutation and movement of fundamental units of construction. He wanted to achieve an equivalent way of working in painting. In addition to his interest in the natural world, interested also in the theories of both color and music, Klee worked on the basis of units of construction taken from nature. Klee tried to create linear improvisations which he likened to the melody of the work. Klee evolved a system of color organization in which all the colors of the spectrum were conceived of as moving around a central axis dominated by the three pigmentary colors - red, yellow and blue. From 1923 Klee created a series of imaginative color constructions which he called 'magic squares' in which he applied his theories. This series came to a conclusion in 1932 with Ad Parnassum.

Klee’s imaginative color constructions are named as 'magic squares' by him. The end of this series was 1932 Ad Parnassum:

 Klee likened each element in the painting to a theme in a polyphonic composition.  He defined polyphony as 'the simultaneity of several independent themes'.  In addition, each artistic element in Ad Parnassum is itself a distillation of several ideas and personal experiences.  For example, the graphic element illustrates the gate to Mount Parnassus, the home of Apollo and the Muses, and also may refer to the Pyramids which Klee saw in 1928, and to a mountain near Klee's home.

Detail...

19 04.12.2012

From 1931 to December 1933, Klee taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. When the National Socialists declared his art "degenerate" in 1933, Klee returned to his native Bern. Personal hardship and the increasing gravity of the political situation in Europe are reflected in the somber tone of his late work. Lines turn into black bars, forms become broad and generalized, scale larger, and colors simpler, as in Comedians' Handbill (1938) or Angel Applicant (1939).

Angel Applicant, 1939

It seems doubtful that this angel applicant, resembling the offspring of a bulldog and a Halloween mask, will ever reach heaven.

Comedians' Handbill, 1938

In tune with the motto "the medium is the message," Klee designed this handbill on a sheet of newspaper that he had covered with caramel- colored gouache. Correcting here and there the figures' contours, he filled the spaces between them with bone-colored gouache. Touches of white and pink gouache add animation. Here in these thick-stemmed, black pictographs, Klee makes his abbreviated black figures from the previous year even thicker. Leaping into our vision as boldly as an advertisement, these signs symbolize syncopated movement, frolicking creatures, and stick figures.

Expressionist Architecture

• Expressionist architecture was an architectural movement that developed in Europe during the first decades of the 20th century in parallel with the expressionist visual and performing arts. • The term "Expressionist architecture" initially described the activities of the German, Dutch, Austrian, Czech and Danish avant-garde from 1910 until 1924. Subsequent redefinitions extended the term backwards to 1905 and also widened it to encompass the rest of Europe. Today the meaning has broadened even further to refer to architecture of any date or location that exhibits some of the qualities of the original movement such as; distortion, fragmentation or the communication of violent or overstressed emotion. • The style was characterized by an early-modernist adoption of novel materials, formal innovation, and very unusual massing, sometimes inspired by natural biomorphic forms, sometimes by the new technical possibilities offered by the mass production of brick, steel and especially glass. Many expressionist architects fought in World War I and their experiences, combined with the political turmoil and social upheaval that followed the German Revolution of 1919, resulted in a utopian outlook and a romantic socialist agenda. Economic conditions severely limited the number of built commissions between 1914 and the mid 1920s, resulting in many of the most important expressionist works remaining as projects on paper, such as Bruno Taut's Alpine Architecture and Hermann Finsterlin's Formspiels. Ephemeral exhibition buildings were numerous and highly significant during this period. Scenography for theatre and films provided another outlet for the expressionist imagination, and provided supplemental incomes for designers attempting to challenge conventions in a harsh economic climate.

20 04.12.2012

CHARACTERISTICS: Expressionist architecture was individualistic and in many ways eschewed aesthetic dogma, but it is still useful to develop some criteria which defines it. Though containing a great variety and differentiation, many points can be found as recurring in works of Expressionist architecture, and are evident in some degree in each of its works: • Distortion of form for an emotional effect. • Subordination of realism to symbolic or stylistic expression of inner experience. • An underlying effort at achieving the new, original, and visionary. • Profusion of works on paper, and models, with discovery and representations of concepts more important than pragmatic finished products. • Often hybrid solutions, irreducible to a single concept. • Themes of natural romantic phenomena, such as caves, mountains, lightning, crystal and rock formations. As such it is more mineral and elemental than florid and organic which characterized its close contemporary Art Nouveau. • Utilizes creative potential of artisan craftsmanship. • Tendency more towards the gothic than the classical. Expressionist architecture also tends more towards the Romanesque and the rococo than the classical. • Though a movement in Europe, expressionism is as eastern as western. It draws as much from Moorish, Islamic, Egyptian, and Indian art and architecture as from Roman or Greek. • Conception of architecture as a work of art.

The major permanent extant landmark of Expressionism is Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower in Potsdam.

Einstein Tower in Potsdam-Berlin by Erich Mendelsohn 1919-22

Erich Mendelsohn's small, but powerfully modeled tower, built to symbolize the greatness of the Einsteinian concepts, was also a quite functional house. It was designed to hold Einstein's own astronomical laboratory... Mendelsohn was after a completely plastic kind of building, moulded rather than built, without angles and with smooth, rounded corners. He needed a malleable material like reinforced concrete, which could be made to curve and create its own surface plasticity, but due to post- war shortages, some parts had to be in brick and others in concrete. So the total external effect was obtained by rendering the surface material. Even so, this 'sarcophagus of architectural Expressionism' is one of the most brilliantly original buildings of the twentieth century." — Dennis Sharp. Twentieth Century Architecture: a Visual History. p65.

21 04.12.2012

Photo of Section- Model

Basement floor plan

Ground floor plan Interior view

Upper floor plans

Detail from Stairs

22 04.12.2012

TWA Building in New York City by Eero Saarinen1956-62

23 04.12.2012

TWA Building in New York City by Eero Saarinen1956-62

24 04.12.2012

De Stijl (1817-1831)

• While German Expressionists wallowed in angst, a Dutch group of Modernists led by painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) tried to eliminate emotion from art.

• Called De Stijl, which means “The Style,” this movement of artists and architects advocated a severe art of pure geometry.

• Among those associated with De Stijl were: – the architects: Rietveld, Oud, van t’Hoff and van Eesteren – the painters: Mondrian , Vander Leck, and Huzsar – and the sculptor, Vantongerloo.

• De Stijl was one of the formative factors in the developments of ‘twenties and ‘thirties in architecture, product and graphic design, and in painting and sculpture.

• De Stijl is an international and Dutch phenomenon related to Art Nouveau, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism and the Bauhaus.

Piet Mondrian: Harmony of Opposites

The goal: “to create a precise, mechanical order , lacking in the natural world.”

LINING UP: Mondrian based his style on lines and rectangles. Theorizing that straight lines do not exist in nature, he decided to use straight lines exclusively to create an art of harmony and order — qualities conspicuously missing from the world. When De Stijl was transferred to architecture, it would supposedly bring all chaotic forces into line, achieving a balance of opposites as in the Cross. For Mondrian, - Vertical lines represent vitality - Horizontal lines represent tranquility. - The point where two lines crossed in right angle was the point of “dynamic equilibrium.” Piet Mondrian was the main creator and the most important proponent of geometric abstract language in Holland. Along with other members of the De Stijl group, Mondrian's work was intended to convey "absolute reality," construed as the world of pure geometric forms underlying all existence and related according to the vertical-horizontal principle of straight lines and pure spectral colors. Intention: to convey “absolute reality”→ the world of pure → the vertical-horizontal geometric forms principle of straight lines and pure spectral colors.

25 04.12.2012

Mondrian termed his geometric style, as "Neoplasticism.” He further developed this style between 1915 and 1920. In 1920, he published his manifesto "Le Néoplasticisme" and for the next two-and-a-half decades, he continued to work in his characteristic geometric style. His style:  eliminated all references to the real world, and  posited on the geometric division of the canvas through black vertical and horizontal lines of varied thickness, complemented by blocks of primary colors, particularly blue, red, and yellow. Similar compositional principles underlie the work of the De Stijl artists, who applied them with slight formal modifications to achieve their independent, personal expression.

Mondrian’s most famous works are his paintings made up of pure red, yellow, and blue, as well as black and white, but for a while he used shades of gray as well, and even his lines were dark gray instead of pure black.

Over time, though, his artwork became cleaner and more simple. Strong fields of color dominated his paintings, separated by thick black lines and sections of pure white.

Then white itself became the focus, along with a judicious use of accent colors (still primaries, however) and the same black lines to break up the space.

26 04.12.2012

Mondrian then began experimenting with double and triple lines, crisscrossing his canvases with more black than ever before. That experimentation eventually led to a major adjustment on his part—do you see anything different in the next painting? Here, Mondrian painted smaller squares of color in between a few of his double lines, without any black bounding their edges. And although it might not jump off the screen to us, unbounded color was a serious departure for Mondrian, indicating a big change of direction for him.

Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue, 1921, by Piet Mondrian

This is Mondrian's expression of going back to basics: vertical and horizontal lines and only the three basic colors.

It actually culminated in Mondrian’s last and greatest works, which he made near the end of his life after moving to New York.

Trafalgar Square, by Piet Mondrian

vertical and horizontal lines and only the three basic colors, but this time there is also unbounded fields of color.

27 04.12.2012

Broadway Boogie Woogie Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872-1944) 1942-43. Oil on canvas, 50 x 50" (127 x 127 cm). Given anonymously As you can see, Mondrian completely emptied his canvas of any black lines, using instead squares of pure color to separate and delineate the larger blocks of white in the painting. It would have been interesting to see Mondrian’s style continue to evolve, especially since he’d just made such a big stylistic change—but unfortunately he died shortly after completing Broadway Boogie Woogie, in 1944.

Escaping to New York after the start of World War II, Mondrian delighted in the city's architecture, and, an adept dancer, was fascinated by American jazz, particularly boogie–woogie. He saw the syncopated beat, irreverent approach to melody, and improvisational aesthetic of boogie– woogie as akin to his own "destruction of natural appearance; and construction through continuous opposition of pure means—dynamic rhythm."

Broadway Boogie Woogie Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872-1944) 1942-43. Oil on canvas, 50 x 50" (127 x 127 cm). Given anonymously Mondrian's aesthetic doctrine of Neo-Plasticism restricted the painter's means to the most basic kinds of line—that is, to straight horizontals and verticals—and to a similarly limited color range, the primary triad of red, yellow, and blue plus white, black, and the grays between. But Broadway Boogie Woogie omits black and breaks Mondrian's once uniform bars of color into multicolored segments. Bouncing against each other, these tiny, blinking blocks of color create a vital and pulsing rhythm, an optical vibration that jumps from intersection to intersection like the streets of New York. At the same time, the picture is carefully calibrated, its colors interspersed with gray and white blocks in an extraordinary balancing act. Mondrian's love of boogie-woogie must have come partly because he saw its goals as analogous to his own: "destruction of melody which is the destruction of natural appearance; and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means—dynamic rhythm."Bands of stuttering chromatic pulses, paths of red, yellow, and blue interrupted by light gray suggest the city's grid and the movement of traffic, while the staccato vibration of colors evokes the syncopation of jazz and the blinking electric lights of Broadway.

28 04.12.2012

Revision: De Stijl and Mondrian

De Stijl: “The Style” Mondrian: Neoplasticism • The major contribution of De Stijl to art was its • For Mondrian, “Art systematically eliminates the derive towards absolute abstraction, without world of nature and man.” any reference whatsoever to objects in nature. • He wanted art as mathematical as possible, a blueprint for an organized life. • The goal was to “create a precise, mechanical order lacking in the natural world.” • He restricted himself to black lines forming rectangles. • The elements of the Modern world was • He used only the primary colors of red, yellow abstracted to the intersecting mesh of vertical and blue, and three noncolors: gray, black and and horizontal lines and planes, dyed in white. primary colors. • By carefully calculating the placement of those • This style was an advocation toward a severe elements, Mondrian counterpointed competing art of pure geometry. rhythms to achieve “a balance of unequal but equivalent oppositions.” • When De Stijl was transferred to architecture, it • He made grid paintings. brought all the two dimensional meshing system into a three-dimensionality, forming a • He was the artist who opposed the cult of chaotic togetherness of 2D Neoplasticism with subjective feeling. 3D identically systematized mesh. • His style, Neoplasticism, became a symbol of Modern art.

Surrealism

Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early '20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious. Officially consecrated in Paris in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by the poet and critic André Breton (1896–1966), Surrealism became an international intellectual and political movement. Breton, a trained psychiatrist, along with French poets Louis Aragon (1897–1982), Paul Éluard (1895–1952), and Philippe Soupault (1897–1990), were influenced by the psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the political ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883). Using Freudian methods of free association, their poetry and prose drew upon the private world of the mind, traditionally restricted by reason and societal limitations, to produce surprising, unexpected imagery. The cerebral and irrational tenets of Surrealism find their ancestry in the clever and whimsical disregard for tradition fostered by Dadaism a decade earlier. Surrealist poets were at first reluctant to align themselves with visual artists because they believed that the laborious processes of painting, drawing, and sculpting were at odds with the spontaneity of uninhibited expression. However, Breton and his followers did not altogether ignore visual art. They held high regard for artists such as Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Francis Picabia (1879–1953), and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) because of the analytic, provocative, and erotic qualities of their work. For example, Duchamp's conceptually complex Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23; Philadelphia Museum of Art) was admired by Surrealists and is considered a precursor to the movement because of its bizarrely juxtaposed and erotically charged objects.

29 04.12.2012

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–23 Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887–1968) Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels; (277.5 x 175.9 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art

Duchamp's break with traditional methods of artistic production is powerfully evident in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915– 23), an object that can be characterized as both painting and sculpture.

Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust are sandwiched between two panes of glass with five glass strips and BRIDE aluminum foil layered on top.

The Bride occupies the top panel, while her Bachelors are BACHELORS imprisoned on the lower glass pane. This lower region is a registry of different mechanical devices, such as a coffee grinder, that Duchamp imaginatively forged together. The new mechanism thus produced was to be a literal lovemaking machine, though one that would never function satisfactorily.

With his trademark wit, Duchamp paralleled the sexual frustration aroused within the work to the frustration his audience would experience when first confronted with this truly original work of art. The nature of The Large Glass is that of a machine organism, suggesting anatomical diagrams of the respiratory, circulatory, digestive, or reproductive systems of higher mammals.

 Characteristic of Duchamp's "mechanomorphic" style, this work reflects his distinctive technique of grafting machine forms onto human activity.  Thus, while he portrays traditional symbols of inviolable purity, such as the marriage indicated by the title, he destroys any sense of convention by presenting them as elaborate systems of anatomical BRIDE plumbing.  While the Bride is the stimulant that enables an BACHELORS illuminating gas to give form to the Bachelors, according to the artist's notes, the construction on the surface does not function as a mechanistic device.  Duchamp is working with an imaginative contraption that relies on systematic relations between the different components, and yet they are fundamentally unable to actually produce anything.  Ultimately, the viewer's frustration with the impossibility of contact between the Bride and her Bachelors becomes a metaphor for the thwarted dynamic between the males and female he has created.

30 04.12.2012

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box), September 1934 Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887–1968) Box containing collotype reproductions on various papers, Overall: 33 x 28.3 x 2.5 cm

Containing one color plate, ninety- three notes, and photographs and facsimiles by Duchamp, the green- flocked cardboard box—produced in an edition of 320—provides valuable insight into how Duchamp developed and arrived at his legendary mechanomorphic style. Though each Green Box is organized in no particular order, there is an obsessive and disciplined quality to this project, due to Duchamp's insistence that he himself reproduce each edition by hand.

Duchamp viewed the contents of The Green Box as more than a mere guide to understanding The Large Glass. Put differently, The Green Box was not a key to unlocking the secrets of The Large Glass but, rather, a verbal version of the graphic masterpiece. For Duchamp, The Large Glass represented a compilation of his ideas rendered visually; The Green Box was thus the verbal complement.

Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912 Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887–1968) Oil on canvas; 58 x 35 in. The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection (1950-134-59) Philadelphia Museum of Art © Succession Marcel Duchamp, 2001, ARS, NY

With this representation of the female nude in successive forms of movement, Duchamp drastically limited his palette to gold and beige tones. The fracturing of the body, the density of mechanistic forms, and the visualization of movement on the canvas reveal the extent to which he was influenced by the Futurists, as well as the photography of Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and the emerging art of the cinema. Negatively received by the Parisian avant-garde, Duchamp was forced to withdraw Nude from the Salon des Indépendants. The Salon jury objected not only to the work's subject but also its title, which Duchamp refused to change. Challenging a sacred motif of traditional painting, the Nude's mechanistic approach to the female body was perceived as a crude transgression, perversely transporting an icon of art history into the modern-day reality of a culture dependent on mechanized systems of production. The Nude marks a transition point in Duchamp's career, as he moved to Munich in the wake of its rejection and never again produced another painting in this conventional format. His departure can be seen as the launch of a nomadic lifestyle that would characterize his entire life.

31 04.12.2012

The Fountain by R. Mutt by Marcel Duchamp Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946) Published in Blind Man, no. 2 (May 1917) Gelatin silver print; (11 x 17.9 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art

A landmark exhibition of contemporary art is made at New York City's Grand Central Palace in 1917. Any artist could submit to this open exhibition, the only requirement was to pay a $6 entry fee.

Entering under a false name, Duchamp submitted a urinal signed "R. Mutt (1917)" and labeled it Fountain. Not only was the pseudonym a clever remark on both "Mott Works," the company that manufactured this industrial product, and the popular cartoon strip "Mutt and Jeff," but also, the strategic placement of the signature necessitated that the urinal be presented on its back in order to allow the artist's name to be viewed. The shock of seeing Fountain on a platform cannot be overestimated. The intrusion of this industrial object into the sacred space of the gallery was certainly controversial, but due to the fact that the object itself presented such rude and distasteful connotations that was inappropriate for the exhibition, Fountain was rejected by the organizers. Although Duchamp himself was on the organizing committee, this rejection had effectively demonstrated the limits of the American avant-garde, and forced a reconsideration of their self-styled boldness and radicalism.

With his provocative gesture, Duchamp had decontextualized the urinal from its practical function, though his manipulation of its position seemed to draw even more attention to its traditional usage, and consequently provided a discomforting experience for the viewer. As the legacy of Fountain, contemporary art is grounded in the notion that artists may utilize the resources of everyday life to produce their works, and are no longer bound by the perimeters of the easel, the canvas, or other traditional modes of production.

32 04.12.2012

The Potato, 1928 Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893–1983) Oil on canvas (101 x 81.6 cm)

Born in the Spanish province of Catalonia in 1893, Joan Miró was deeply influenced by his country's native landscape and artistic heritage. During the early part of his career, he lived in Paris, where he was associated with the French Surrealists and its practitioners, but he returned to settle in Spain after World War II. This deliberate remove from the center of the art world is symptomatic of Miró's independence, a temperament that would mark his art as well as his life. Mining the possibilities of free invention encouraged by Surrealism, Miró developed a style that drew from highly personalized and psychological references. Often beginning with a recognizable starting point, Miró transformed his subjects through whimsical color and free play with form. The Potato is emblematic of Miró's poetic riffs on reality. It takes as its subject a gigantic female figure who stretches her arms wide, against a blue sky and above a patch of earth—perhaps a potato field. The billowing white shape of the figure is attached to a red post in the center of the composition like a scarecrow on a pole. Miró surrounded his merry "potato-earth-woman" with fanciful decorative objects, some of which are "earthy" and some not. The figure has one brown-and-black breast that "squirts" a long, black, winding thread, as elfin creatures flutter in the sky around her. At the left, a red and yellow "butterfly-woman" takes flight from her brown banana-like nose as other creatures climb a ladder—one of The Potato of 1928 by Miró uses organic forms and Miró's favorite motifs. Beyond the earthiness of the subject, the painting's twisted lines to create an imaginative world of title appears to be derived from the representation of an actual, recognizable potato—the small, brown, oval object with three tendrils fantastic figures. growing out of its upper edge, which is lodged in the woman's forehead.

Photo: This Is the Color of My Dreams, 1925 Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893–1983) Oil on canvas (96.5 x 129.5 cm)

Between 1924 and 1927, Miró created a group of paintings that are radically different from his earlier work. Known as peinture- poésie, these canvases, with broad and loosely brushed fields of color, are animated by just a few enigmatic signs. They are linked to his association, in the early 1920s, with the poets who later joined the Surrealist movement. The poets were the friends of his neighbor, the painter André Breton. The present work, with its simple composition, is the most evocative of these works. Only three elements float on the white empty canvas: the word "Photo," the patch of blue, and the sentence "ceci est la couleur de mes rêves" (this is the color of my dreams). The black letters sit on faint, barely visible pencil lines that serve as guides for their sizes, as in a child's writing primer. When asked by the writer Georges Raillard about the meaning of the word "Photo," Miró said, "I started with the idea of a photo—I don't remember at all what photo it was. I neither did a collage nor a reproduction of it. I simply painted the word 'photo.'"

33 04.12.2012

The Birth of the World, 1925 Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983) Oil on canvas, (250.8 x 200 cm). MoMA

Here Miró applied paint to an unevenly primed canvas in an unorthodox manner—pouring, brushing, and flinging—so that the paint soaked into the canvas in some places while resting on the surface in others. On top of this relatively uncontrolled application of paint, he added schematic lines and shapes planned in preparatory studies. The bird or kite, shooting star, balloon, and figure with white head may all seem somehow familiar, yet their association is illogical. Miró once said that The Birth of the World describes "a sort of genesis," an amorphous beginning out of which life may take form.

Untitled, 1973 Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983) Lithograph, Sheet and Comp. (89.8 x 61.0 cm). MoMA

The Escape Ladder, 1940 Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983) Gouache, watercolor and ink on paper, (40.0 x 47.6 cm). MoMA

34 04.12.2012

Nude Standing by the Sea, 1929 Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) Oil on canvas (129.9 x 96.8 cm)

Although never an official member of the Surrealists, despite Breton's efforts to coopt him, Picasso nevertheless participated in many of their exhibitions and activities in Paris. His work between 1926 and 1939 has been called surrealist because of its fanciful imagery and sexually charged motifs, but despite many shared features, Picasso's desire to interpret the real world was at odds with Surrealism's imaginary inner-generated visions. Here, he was inspired by bathers on a beach that he had previously sketched, painted, and sculpted in Cannes (1927) and Dinard (1928). In these earlier works, as in this 1929 painting, Picasso ultimately transforms the human figure into a strange mutated being, part geometric masonry, part inflated balloon. The features of the female physique metamorphose into one another—the rounded buttocks also suggesting breasts, the pointed breasts suggesting sharp teeth, and the horizontal slit, a reference to both navel and genitals. The overall effect is conflicted, showing both monumentality and vulnerability, sensuality and cold detachment, as if two different sensibilities inhabit this figure. Such imagery may have been a reflection of the artist's own anguished love life at the time. Married to Olga Khokhlova since 1918, he had been having an affair with a beautiful young teenager, Marie-Thérèse Walter, since the summer of 1927, which would last through the 1930s.

In 1927, the Belgian artist René Magritte (1898–1967) moved from Brussels to Paris and became a leading figure in the visual Surrealist movement. Influenced by de Chirico's paintings between 1910 and 1920, Magritte painted erotically explicit objects juxtaposed in dreamlike surroundings. His work defined a split between the visual automatism fostered by Masson and Miró (and originally with words by Breton) and a new form of illusionistic Surrealism practiced by the Spaniard Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), the Belgian Paul Delvaux (1897–1994), and the French-American Yves Tanguy (1900–1955). In The Eternally Obvious, Magritte's artistic display of a dismembered female nude is emotionally shocking.

The Eternally Obvious, 1948 René Magritte (Belgian, 1898–1967) Oil on canvas laid on board (182.9 x 40.6 cm)

Magritte painted the body of a naked blonde model, cut from the canvas the body's five choicest bits, surrounded them in gold frames, and reassembled the figure with blank spaces in between on a sheet of glass. This work is a variant of the artist's famous, same-titled prototype from 1930 for which his wife Georgette posed. In that earlier work, Georgette's face is seen in three-quarter view, she stands in a contrapposto stance, and her body is not as rigidly aligned frontally as in this later work, for which the artist chose a younger model with firmer breasts. Magritte plays tricks with our perception in these "picture-objects," whose fame—that of the earlier version—coincided with its role in the cult of the Surrealist object in the 1930s. Although the body is truncated, we automatically fill in the missing areas and see a "complete" nude woman, never mind that her arms and hands are missing.

35 04.12.2012

Edward James was an eccentric poet, collector, and patron of both Dalí and Magritte. In 1937, when Magritte visited James in London, he painted a vertical version of his 1929 canvas, On the Threshold of Liberty to install in the stairwell; he also photographed his host and patron in front of the painting. The photographic description is so close to the painter's realistic style, and James is so close to the painting, that he seems to stand on the threshold—evidently unaware that the potential liberty before him is threatened by the heavy artillery at his side.

Edward James in Front of On the Threshold of Liberty, 1937 Réné Magritte (Belgian, 1898–1967) Gelatin silver print (10.8 x 16.7 cm)

Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe), Rene Magritte (Paris, 1928–29) Oil on canvas, 25 in × 37 in, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

36 04.12.2012

The Accommodations of Desire, 1929, by Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904–89) Oil and cut-and-pasted printed paper on cardboard (22.2 x 34.9 cm) The Spanish-born artist Salvador Dalí was officially allied with Surrealism from 1929 to 1941, and even after that his work continued to reflect the influence of Surrealist thought and methodology. His flamboyance, flair for drama and self-promotion, and hyperactive imagination reinvigorated the group and its public popularity. Dalí, who was given to hallucinations and paranoiac visions, cultivated these outrageous subjects for his paintings, rendering them so meticulously that they were unsettling in their clinical matter-of- factness. Such pictures exemplified the Surrealist preoccupation with dreams and the unconscious. Painted in the summer of 1929, The Accommodations of Desire is a small gem that deals with the twenty-five-year-old Dalí's sexual anxieties over a love affair with an older, married woman. The woman, Gala, then the wife of Surrealist poet Paul Éluard, became Dalí's lifelong muse and mate. In this picture, which Dalí painted after taking a walk alone with Gala, he included seven enlarged pebbles on which he envisioned what lay ahead for him: "terrorizing" lions' heads (not so "accommodating" to his "desire" as the title of the painting facetiously suggests), as well as a toupee, various vessels (one in the shape of a woman's head), three figures embracing on a platform, and a colony of ants (a symbol of decay). Dalí did not paint the lions' heads but, rather, cut them out from what must have been an illustrated children's book, slyly matching the latter's detailed style with his own. These collaged elements are virtually indistinguishable from the super-saturated color and painstaking realism of the rest of the composition, startling the viewer into questioning the existence of the phenomena recorded and of the representation as a whole.

In 1929, Dalí moved from Spain to Paris and made his first Surrealist paintings. He expanded on Magritte's dream imagery with his own erotically charged, hallucinatory visions. In The Accommodations of Desire of 1929, Dalí employs Freudian symbols, such as ants, to symbolize his overwhelming sexual desire. In 1930, Breton praised Dalí's representations of the unconscious in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism. They became the main collaborators on the review Minotaure (1933–39), a primarily Surrealist-oriented publication founded in Paris.

Time is the theme here, from the melting watches to the decay implied by the swarming ants. The monstrous fleshy creature draped across the paintings center is an approximation of Dalís own face in profile. Mastering what he called "the usual paralyzing tricks of eye-fooling," Dalí painted this work with "the most imperialist fury of precision," but only, he said, "to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality." There is, however, a nod to the real: The distant golden cliffs are those on the coast of Catalonia, Dalís home. The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989) Dalí: Painting and Film June 29–September 15, 2008 Oil on canvas, (24.1 x 33 cm).

37 04.12.2012

Madonna, 1958 Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904–1989) Oil on canvas (225.7 x 191.1 cm)

Dalí's paintings feature intellectual puzzles and visual ambiguities, and his style is marked by superrealistic illusionism that is used to describe completely unrealistic, fanciful subjects. Madonna is one of several works Dalí made after 1941 that uses classical imagery as the basis for Surrealist invention. Here, he paints two different simultaneous subjects with a profusion of gray and pink dots: a Madonna and Child based on Raphael's Sistine Madonna (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, after 1513), and a large ear, whose ridged interior surface is defined by the presence of these two figures. Each motif is designed to come into focus at a different distance. At close range, the painting looks completely abstract; from about six feet away, it reveals the Madonna and Child; and from fifty feet, it is what the artist called "the ear of an angel." To the left of the main images is a trompe-l'oeil detail of a red cherry suspended on a string from a torn and folded piece of paper; its shadow is cast onto another piece of paper bearing the signature of the artist.

The Doll, 1934–35 Hans Bellmer (French, born Silesia, 1902-75) Gelatin silver print (29.5 x 19.4 cm); MET

Bellmer's obsession with dolls—his endless fabrication, reconstitution, and photographic presentation of them—was an effort to construct objects that would articulate his tortured desires in material form. The bizarre, robotic temptress in this negative print has an eerie electric aura. To love her, one would have to have, as the Surrealist poet Pierre Reverdy wrote, a "short circuit in the heart- system."

38 04.12.2012

The Barbarians, 1937 Max Ernst (French, born Germany, 1891–1976) About 1937, Ernst, a former Dadaist, began Oil on cardboard (24 x 33 cm); MET to experiment with two unpredictable processes called decalcomania and grattage. Decalcomania is the technique of pressing a sheet of paper onto a painted surface and peeling it off again, while grattage is the process of scraping pigment across a canvas that is laid on top of a textured surface. He used a combination of these techniques in The Barbarians of 1937. This composition of sparring anthropomorphic figures in a deserted postapocalyptic landscape exemplifies the recurrent themes of violence and annihilation found in Surrealist art.

He first coupled birds and windblown, animals in a series of small works entitled The Horde (1927), and he resumed the theme in 1935 in a series of even smaller paintings called The Barbarians, to which the present one belongs. In his biography of the artist, John Russell identified these creatures as expressions of Ernst's fearful anticipation of the impending devastation in Europe during World War II. In this small painting, a gigantic, malevolent-looking bird couple marches forward with seemingly mile-long strides. The dark female leads the way as her male companion turns to look at the strange animal—perhaps their offspring—clinging to his left arm. In the far distance, a tiny woman holds onto some undefined winged being. The strange patterns on the bodies of the main figures, which evoke fossils or geological formations, are the result of grattage (scraping). In this technique, the artist coated the canvas, or in this case, a piece of cardboard, with layers of paint and while it was still wet pressed it against objects that left imprints on the surface. Afterward, he used a brush to touch up the forms thus created, or scraped away layers of pigment.

Between 1919 and 1920, Max Ernst was one of the most enthusiastic leaders of the Dada movement in Cologne. Before long, he attracted the attention of André Breton, who in 1921 organized an exhibition in Paris of Ernst's collages. By 1922, Ernst had moved to the French capital, and never again worked in his native country. In 1924, in Paris, the thirty-three-year-old artist became one of the founding members of the Surrealist group.

Ernst's Surrealist paintings are steeped in Freudian metaphor, private mythology, and childhood memories. One of his major themes centered on the image of the bird, which often incorporated human elements. Although some of these birds look benign, their mere presence appears to be ominous.

39 04.12.2012

In The Satin Tuning Fork, Tanguy fills an illusionistic space The Satin Tuning Fork, 1940 Yves Tanguy (American, born France, 1900– with unidentifiable, yet sexually suggestive, objects rendered 1955) with great precision. The painting's mysterious lighting, long Oil on canvas (99 x 81.3 cm); MET shadows, deep receding space, and sense of loneliness also recall the ominous settings of de Chirico. Paris in 1925, By 1927, the self-taught Tanguy had found his Tanguy had met André Breton and joined the Surrealist group. own personal style and acquired amazing His ensuing friendship with the older poet proved decisive for technical skill. From then until his death in Tanguy. Breton served as both mentor and advocate. Until 1955, he focused on the same dreamlike Tanguy's departure for the United States in 1939, he remained subject—an imaginary landscape, deserted deeply devoted to Breton; Breton in turn regarded Tanguy as except for various fantastical rocklike objects, rendered with precise illusionism. one of the purest painters among the Surrealists. Usually filled with an overcast sky, the plain below stretches toward infinity without an exact horizon line.

Uncanny vistas , biomorphic objects

Tanguy's style varied little throughout the years. Even his move to the United States had little effect on his work, although it would bring about important changes in his personal life. In New York, he joined the American Surrealist painter Kay Sage (1898–1963), and they married in 1940, the year of this painting. The long phallic form in the center of the composition may in fact reference this new relationship.

In Paris, the Chilean-born painter Matta worked for the modernist architect Le Corbusier (1935–37), and in 1936 became officially associated with André Breton's Surrealist group, including Salvador Dalí, Gordon Onslow-Ford, and Yves Tanguy. Relocating to the United States between 1939 and 1948, he, along with many older European artists who sought refuge there on the eve of World War II, also brought their avant-garde ideas, which greatly influenced younger American artists. The nascent Abstract Expressionist group, in particular, was curious to experiment with Surrealist techniques and imagery. Matta, who was the same age as these artists, befriended several (including Robert Motherwell and Arshile Gorky), and ironically, although he was extremely influential, his own work never achieved the same level of recognition afforded his American contemporaries. Within a few years, he returned to Europe, via Chile, where he continued to make phantasmagorical compositions for the rest of his life.

40 04.12.2012

Being With (Être Avec), 1946 Matta (Roberto Matta Echaurren) (Chilean, 1911–2002) Oil on canvas (221 x 457.2 cm); MET Matta's enormous mural-size canvas Being With (Être Avec) was painted in 1946 while he was living in New York. The composition is a complex labyrinth of architectural structures seen from various perspectives and primitive humanoid figures contorted unnaturally and exploding with sexual exhibitionism. Such imagery certainly drew from his earlier familiarity with architectural design and Surrealist irrationality.

His paintings and drawings of the mid- to late 1940s, such as Being With (Être Avec), which he called "social morphologies," attempted to address the broader societal crisis that the artist felt he was part of (or "being with"). This shift in outlook, and the introduction of figurative and narrative elements into his paintings (no matter how fantastic they appear), eventually led to Matta's alienation from the Surrealist group.

The organized Surrealist movement in Europe dissolved with the onset of World War II. Breton, Dalí, Ernst, Masson, and others, including the Chilean artist Matta (1911–2002), who first joined the Surrealists in 1937, left Europe for New York. The movement found renewal in the United States at Peggy Guggenheim's (1898–1979) gallery, Art of This Century, and the Julien Levy Gallery. In 1940, Breton organized the fourth International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City, which included the Mexicans Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) and Diego Rivera (1886–1957) (although neither artist officially joined the movement). Surrealism's surprising imagery, deep symbolism, refined painting techniques, and disdain for convention influenced later generations of artists, including Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) and Arshile Gorky (1904–1948), the latter whose work formed a continuum between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.

41 04.12.2012

Revision: Surrealism The Power of Unconscious

• It began as a literary movement, fostered Surrealism took two forms: by its godfather André Breton. – Joan Miró and Max Ernst practiced • It grew out of Freudian free-association improvised art, distancing and dream analysis. themselves as much as possible • Poets, and later painters, experimented from conscious control. with automatism: a form of creating – Salvador Dalí and René Magritte without conscious control— to tap used thoroughly realistic techniques unconscious imaginary. to present hallucinatory scenes that • Surrealism implies going beyond realism. defy common sense. • It deliberately courted the bizarre and the irrational to express buried truths IMPROVISATIONAL DEPICTIONS OF unreachable by logic. UNCONSCIOUSNESS, DREAM WORLD...

42 04.12.2012

43 04.12.2012