Classic Colors: Surrealism
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Beginning in Paris in the 1920’s, and quickly spreading influence across the globe, the surrealist movement was filled with unexpected thought and beauty. One of the best aspects of the movement was the ability of the work to catch the viewer off guard, warping common perception, and the use of some very unexpected color palettes.
Giorgio de Chirico: Love Song |
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 An early example of the surrealist style, though it was painted ten years before the movement was “founded” by André Breton in 1924. It depicts an outdoor architectural setting similar to other works by de Chirico at this time. This time however, the main focus is a small wall on which is mounted a Greek sculpted head and a surgeons glove. Below it is a green ball. On the horizon is the outline of a locomotive, an image that recurs several times during this period of de Chirico’s career. |
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Giorgio de Chirico: The disquieting Muses |
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 De Chirico is best known for the paintings he produced between 1909 and 1919, his metaphysical period, which are memorable for the haunted, brooding moods evoked by their images. At the start of this period, his subjects were still cityscapes inspired by the bright daylight of Mediterranean cities, but gradually he turned his attention to studies of cluttered storerooms, sometimes inhabited by mannequin-like hybrid figures. Later in his life De Chirico abandoned the metaphysical style and started painting more realistically. |
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Max Ernst: L’Ange du Foyer
Ernst developed a fascination with birds that was prevalent in his work. His alter ego in paintings, which he called Loplop, was a bird. He suggested this alter-ego was an extension of himself stemming from an early confusion of birds and humans. He said his sister was born soon after his bird died. Loplop often appeared in collages of other artists’ work, such as Loplop presents André Breton.
Max Ernst: The Elephant Celebes |
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 Possibly the most famous of Ernst’s early surrealist works and “undoubtedly the first masterpiece of Surrealist painting in the De Chirico tradition”. It combines the vivid, dreamlike atmosphere of Surrealism with the collage aspects of Dada. Giorgio de Chirico was an inspiration for the early Surrealists, and Celebes’ palette and spatial construction show his influence. The painting also attempts to apply Dada’s collage effects to simulate different materials. |
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Max Ernst: The Wood
Ernst was haunted by the atmosphere of forests and by the birds which inhabit them. Here, the herring-bone effect of the trees and the grainy sky reveal his technique of grattage. Layers of paint were applied to the canvas, which was pressed against a sheet of stamped metal and a rough plank and scraped.
Salvador Dali: Dream Caused by the Flight… |
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 Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. The painting depicts a woman (Gala) sleeping while sunbathing naked during a calm day on rocks floating over the sea, possibly at Port Lligat. An elephant with incredibly long, extremely thin legs walks across the sea’s horizon while carrying an obelisk. Near the woman float two drops of water and a small pomegranate. From a larger pomegranate comes a fish that spews a tiger from which comes another tiger, while in front of that second tiger a bayonet points at the woman. |
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Salvador Dali: The Disintegration of…
The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, An oil on canvas re-creation of the artist’s famous 1931 work The Persistence of Memory, and measures a diminutive 25.4 × 33 cm. In this version, the landscape from the original work has been flooded with water. Disintegration depicts what is occurring both above and below the water’s surface. The landscape of Cadaqués is now hovering above the water. The plane and block from the original is now divided into brick-like shapes that float in relation to each other, with nothing binding them, the tree from which the soft watch hangs being similarly segmented. The hands of the soft watches float above their dials, with several pointed objects resembling rhinoceros horns floating in parallel formations encircling the watches. The distorted human visage from the original painting is beginning to morph into another of the strange fish floating above it.
René Magritte: The Treachery of Images
Famous for its inscription Ceci n’est pas une pipe, French for this is not a pipe. The painting is not a pipe, but rather an image of a pipe. As Magritte himself commented: “The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe,’ I’d have been lying!”
Yves Tanguy: Multiplication of the Acres
Tanguy had a habit of being completely absorbed by the current painting he was working on. This way of creating artwork may have been due to his very small studio which only had enough room for one wet piece.
Through his friend Jacques Prévert, in around 1924 Tanguy was introduced into the circle of surrealist artists around André Breton. Tanguy quickly began to develop his own unique painting style, giving his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1927.
Yves Tanguy: Reply to Red
Yves Tanguy’s paintings have a unique, immediately recognizable style of nonrepresentational surrealism. They show vast, abstract landscapes, mostly in a tightly limited palette of colors, only occasionally showing flashes of contrasting color accents. Typically, these alien landscapes are populated with various abstract shapes, sometimes angular and sharp as shards of glass, sometimes with an intriguingly organic look to them, like giant amoebae suddenly turned to stone.
Joan Miro: La Leçon de Ski
His work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. Miró was the first artist to develop automatic drawing as a way to undo previous established techniques in painting, and thus, with Andre Masson, represented the beginning of Surrealism as an art movement. However, Miró chose not to become an official member of the Surrealists in order to be free to experiment with other artistic styles without compromising his position within the group. He pursued his own interests in the art world, ranging from automatic drawing and surrealism, to expressionism and Color Field painting.
Joan Miro: The Tilled Feild
Miró’s oft-quoted interest in the assassination of painting is derived from a dislike of bourgeoise art of any kind, used as a way to promote propaganda and cultural identity among the wealthy. Specifically, Miró responded to Cubism in this way, which by the time of his quote had become an established art form in France. He is quoted as saying I will break their guitar, referring to Picasso’s paintings, with the intent to attack the popularity and appropriation of Picasso’s art by politics.
Four-dimensional painting is a theoretical type of painting Miró proposed in which painting would transcend its two-dimensionality and even the three-dimensionality of sculpture.
Images and artist information from Wikipedia
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