Download April 9 - Dada, Surrealism, and Suprematism

Dada, Surrealism, and Suprematism
AKA Dada and some more Isms
Rebekah Scoggins
Art Appreciation
April 9, 2013
Dada
• Began as protest against the horrors of WWI
• Artists and writers were from Zurich, Switzerland;
• Name Dada was an ambiguous word that they chose by plunging
a knife into the dictionary, became a collective rallying cry.
• More rebellious attitude than a cohesive style, though all artists
worked in tandem but look different
• In the eyes of the Dadaists, the destructive absurdity of war was
caused by the traditional values; they set out to overturn them
• War showed them that European culture had lost its way
• Rejected most moral, social, political, and aesthetic values
• Thought it pointless to try to find order & meaning in world where
so called rational behavior had produced chaos & destruction.
• Aimed to shock viewers into seeing the absurdity of the Western
world’s social & political situation
• All about play & spontaneity; based works on chance rather than
premeditation
Jean Arp, Untitled (Collage with
Squares Arranged According to the
Laws of Chance). 1916-1917. Dada.
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, Dada.
Marcel Duchamp, The Bicycle Wheel.
1913. Dada.
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. 1919. Dada.
Man Ray, Gift, 1921. Dada.
Man Ray. Glass Tears. 1932. Dada.
Raoul Hausmann. The Spirit of Our Time. 1919. Dada.
Hannah Höch, Cut with the
Kitchen Knife Dada Through the
Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural
Epoch of Germany, 1919-1920.
Dada.
Surrealism
• In 1920s, this group of writers & painters gathered to
protest the direction of European culture
• Thought that modern emphasis on science,
rationality, and progress was throwing the
consciousness of Europeans out of balance.
• In response, they proclaimed the importance of the
unconscious mind, of dreams, fantasies, and
hallucinations.
• Indebted to the irrationality of Dada, they also drew
heavily on the new psychology of Sigmund Freud.
• Officially launched in 1924 in Paris with the
publication of its first manifesto.
Max Ernst. Two Children Are
Threatened by a Nightingale.
1924. Surrealism.
Max Ernst. The Horde. 1927. Surrealism.
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. An Andalusian Dog. 1929.
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Surrealism.
Salvador Dalí, The Accommodations of Desire, 1929. Surrealism.
René Magritte, Portrait, 1935. Surrealism.
René Magritte, The Human
Condition, 1933. Surrealism.
Joan Miró, The Potato, 1928.
Abstract Surrealism.
Kazimir Malevich. The
Black Square. 1915.
Suprematism.
Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist
Composition: Airplane Flying.
1915. Suprematism.
Fernand Léger, The City. 1919. Modernism.
Fernand Léger, Three Women, 1921-22. Modernism.