Futurism Dada Surrealism week eight Read chapters 21 and 22 Futurism What is Futurism? • Primarily Italian artists • Style peaked just before WWI (1914-1917) • Inspired by Cubism, with its multiple views of objects, introducing the element of time into painting • The Futurists built on these developments to add a sense of speed and motion; depicting shapes in motion was an essential principal of Futurism • The Futurists celebrated modernity and the machine • Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote the Initial Manifesto of Futurism: “the world’s splendor has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed...a roaring motorcar...is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace.” Nike of Samothrace, Hellenistic Greece, Late 3rd c. b.c. Futurism Subject: The Nude represents a figure walking through space and also downward, responding to gravity. Artist: Duchamp was not necessarily a Futurist, but this work anticipates Futurism in both style and intent. This work was not recieved well by the art establishment at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, where it was first seen by the public. Style: • Inspired by the simultaneous views of Cubism, the Nude depicts the added dimension of motion. • adopts the limited palette of Analytic Cubism • Also inspired by sequential photography, incremental movements are recorded in sucession on the same canvas. Lasting impact: • This painting was revolutionary in that it introduced repetition and rhythm as a principle in painting Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912 Futurism Unique Forms of Continuity in Space embodies the chief Futurist principle— depicting objects in motion. This principle had been sucessfully introduced in painting, and with Unique Forms, now also to sculpture. • Not necessarily, about the figure, but about the motion of the figure. • The figure disappears behind its movement. • Muscles flare in space to create a sense of velocity and forward motion. Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, bronze Futurist, 1913 Futurism Subject: Easily decoded scene of a figure walking a dog on a leash. Style: Repeated stacked shapes describe movement in the dogs’s feet, tail and leash. Stacked style is a common device to describe motion in cartoons. Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash 1912 Futurism Subject: A vibrant, crowded dance hall in Paris. Bal Tabarin records the great variety of glimpses and mental impressions that comprise a single event. Style: Kaleidoscopic impressions of different points in space and time—not a single, static view. • no fixed locations or objects; only fleeting glimpses of colors and impressions of motion. • Severini called these abbreviated notations of visual impressions “hieroglyphs.” Gino Severini, Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin, Futurism, 1912 Futurism Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Le Bal Bullier, 1913 size: 12’ across Subject: Le Bal Bullier is a dance hall in Paris. Dancers glide across a ballroom floor—across a 12’ wide canvas. Style: • Flattened shapes are rendered in shallow space • Repetition gives impression of sequential movement of couples dancing horizontally across the picture plane. Sonia Delaunay-Terk also designed clothes and textiles with a similar sensibility to repeated shapes and blocks of color. Dada What is Dada? • Dada is a nonsense word picked at random, reflecting Dada principles often guided by automatism and the element of chance. • Dada originated in Zurich by a group of artists and intellectuals that opposed WWI. They met at the Cabaret Voltaire, hosting boisterous performance art. • Jean Arp: “While the thunder of guns rolled in the distance, we sang, painted, glued and composed for all our worth. We were seeking an art that would heal mankind from the madness of the age.” • Dada is not a specific style, but works created by individuals that held a similar worldview. • Dada peaked in the years before and during WWI (1910-1913), and dissipated by 1924. • Altered objects: Dada works are often found objects rendered ironic or useless through alterations • Dada tends toward the absurd; an art reflects the irrational values of a world driven by senseless wars • Dada was an important force in Graphic Design, introducing experimental elements in typography Marcel Duchamp, The Fountain, 1917 Dada Further reading on The Fountain: http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3671180/ The Fountain is a urinal which was Duchamps-Fountain-The-practical-joke-that- launched-an-artistic-revolution.html signed “R.Mutt” and submitted for the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917 in New York City. The Fountain was rejected by the committee, even though the rules stated that all works would be accepted by artists who paid the fee. Duchamp knew it would be rejected, so he staged a mock parade in protest. Style: • found object, which Duchamp called “Readymades” Intent: • mocks the art establishment • reflects a belief art that had lost its way Man Ray, Cadeau, replica of lost 1921 original, painted flat iron with row of tacks glued to bottom. • This utilaritarian object is rendered useless and absurd, even dangerous. Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (“she has a hot backside”), altered postcard, 1919. • Swipes at traditional standards of beauty in art. • Irreverence toward an iconic work of art questions why we consider certain works to be great to begin with. Surrealism What is Surrealism? • Peaked in the 1920s, though continued for several decades • Subject matter is often fantasy and dreams • Subjects with meanings that are often disconnected from the natural world • Inspired by Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, marked by a fascination with the subconscious and the unconscious worlds • Andre Breton wrote the Surrealist Mainfesto in 1924 in Paris, defining the movement’s purpose. • The great achievement of Surrealism was its radical choices for artistic subject matter—artists were free paint any subject Surrealism DeChirico pioneered “metaphysical Giorgio De Chirico, Mystery and Melancholoy of a Street, painting.” Hidden realities were 1914 revealed by strange juxtapositions. An Italian from Turin, De Chirico’s paintings contain numerous references to classical art and architecture, but these classical references are rendered ambiguous and mysterious. Characteristics: • classical references, peppered by anachronisms (clock, train in SoothSayers Recompense) • silent monuments occupy vast open spaces • piazzas empty of people • otherworldly, strange and silent reality • long eerie shadows fall across silent spaces Giorgio De Chirico, The Soothsayer’s Recompense, 1913 Surrealism Dali’s style is characterized by such precisely rendered objects that they betray the viewer’s sense that the scene is a fantasy. Dali paints his nightmares, rendered in a highly illusionistic and academic style. Working in a style known as “Representational Surrealism,” Dali’s illusionistic style makes the unreal seem real. The Persistence of Memory evokes the point at which time ends. Limp watches drape across unnatural elements while a lonely tree sprouts from solid rock. Ants swarm while a humanoid creature has expired dead on the ground. A disconnected plane hovers near a shoreline leading to a barren island that Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931 interrupts an interminable horizon. The meaning of this collection of disconnected elements is open to interpretation. hyperlink: Salvador Dali documentary, 1986 (1 hour, 15 min.) Surrealism Magritte’s work is characterized by visul puns and surprising juxtapositions of objects rendered in an illusionistic style. René Magritte discouraged the temptation to psychoanalyze his work. He discouraged those who tried to ascribe meanings that were not there. Magritte held a dim existential worldview and he saw his paintings as relief from the drab melancholoy of existence. Though his images are surprising and refreshing, his colors often remain drab. René Magritte, Le Portrait, 1935 René Magritte, Treachery of Images, 1928 “This is not a pipe.” —”If this is not a pipe, then what is it?” “It is a painting, of course!” In the treachery of images, images compete with words and the images always win. Surrealism Joan Miro was a practitioner of “Abstract Surrealism.” He embraced automatic drawing and the element of chance to Joan Miro, Woman Haunted by the Passage of the Bird-Dragonfly Oman of Bad News, 1938 guide his work. Miro often cut shapes and randomly scattered them to begin a composition, then connected the shapes with outlines. As objects suggested themselves as he worked, he infilled these shapes with color. Birds, figures and other creatures materialized as bio- morphic, amoeba-like shapes. The meaning of these shapes is not always explained, not even to the artist. Joan Miro, Painting, 1933 Surrealism Max Ernst, during his Surrealist period, often employed found objects and cut images in his work, making for paintings with sculptural aspects. The confusion between painting and sculpture create space that is both irrational and ambiguous. In Two Children, Ernst challenges the western tradition since the Renaissance that paintings are a window on to a deeper three dimensional space. • The illusionistic space established by the perspective of the fence is hijacked by the actual three dimensions of the building with the overhanging roof. • The gate and the purple button violate the boundaries of the picture and its frame as well as the boundaries between real and illusionistic space. • The poetic text at the bottom further dislocates meaning from mage—the viewer can’t decipher the connection between word and image. Max Ernst, Two Children are Threatened by a Nightengale, 1924 hyperlink: Max Ernst and the Surrealist Revolution, part 1 (8 min.), BBC Surrealism Influenced by his childhood as a Jew from a small Russian village, Chagall’s work is characterized by strong spiritual overtones as well as memories of peasant life and simple pleasures. The Birthday, 1915 Chagall and his first wife Bella Chagall’s style is often kaleidoscopic, with figures and images that occupy the picture plane in the manner of a collage, floating in space independent of gravity and perspective. “What counts is art, painting, a kind of painting that is quite different from what everyone makes it out to be.