Lecture Notes

What is Surrealism? Emotions, Love, Fantasy, Dreams

Privileging the fantasy element in art;

Dada: Proto-Surrealism. 1916 Zurich: collaborators include Hugo Ball (German actor and playwright); Jean Arp (Alsatian artist); Tristan Tzara (Rumanian poet); Marcel Janco (Rumanian artist); and Richard Huelsenbeck (a German poet).

The works of Picasso and Apollinaire (and Paris) as well as Marinetti and Italian Futurism as influences.

Marcel Duchamp: the “Ready-Mades” (even today the exhibition for found objects and junk etc.)

Francis Picabia: congenital anarchist and Dadaist in spirit, subverting with wit all pretension in art.

1919 spread of Dada after the war.

Initiators drawn to Paris and the foundation of Surrealism as a movement in 1921.

Surrealism

Highly organized group of writers and artists rallied around André Breton in 1924, based their works on Breton’s interpretations of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories (and Breton and Freud’s friendship): stimulating the unconscious and its illimitable productivity of dreamlike and fantastic images.

Salvador Dali; Joan Miro; André Masson; Giorgio de Chirico (Greece b 1888)

Dali and Luis Bunuel, Un Chien Andalou (1929)

Rene Magritte

Duchamp

The nude; analytical trends in science and art: cubism

Virgin-bride-whore (the stereotype and marriage)

Machines

The bride

The bride stripped bare

(against the retinal; towards the verbal; delay; glass; obscurity)

Books

Andre Breton, Surrealism and Painting. Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: MFA, 2002.

---. Communicating Vessels. Trans. Mary Anne Caws. Lincoln and London: Bison Books, 1990.

Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” One Way Street and Other Writings. London: Verso, 1979.

Glen Macleod, “The Visual Arts,” in Michael Levenson, ed. Modernism: A Reader. Cambridge: CUP, 1999.

Peter Nicholls. Modernism(s): A Literary Guide. London: Macmillan, 1995.

Herschel B. Chip, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics. Berkeley: University of California, 1968.

Richard Brettell. Modern Art 1851-1929: Capitalism and Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Dawn Ades, Neil Cox and David Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999.

Dawn Ades, Salvador Dali. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1982.

Suzi Gablik, Magritte. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985.

Carsten-Peter Warncke, Picasso. London: Taschen, 2003.

Websites

http://www.bway.net/~monique/history.htm

http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/~malek/Surrealism/

Dada

http://www.peak.org/~dadaist/English/Graphics/texts.html

http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/

Breton

http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/whatsurr.html

Dali and Magritte

http://www.virtualdali.com/#galleryEarly1

http://www.dali-gallery.com/html/dali1024.php

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/magritte.html

Duchamp

http://www.understandingduchamp.com/scalable.html