Dali was born in 1904 to a strict, lawyer father, and a free spirited mother. This contrasting parenting style put pressure on all of their relationships, and lead to Dali’s father to severely punish him when he didn’t agree with his actions. He enrolled at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid in 1922, where he was known as a very eccentric character because of his peculiar and unique style. He had a bit of a wild past, where he was suspended for criticizing teachers and starting a riot, as well as being arrested for supporting the Separatist movement. Dali was highly influenced by Pablo Picasso, and revered him for his unique style. His largest contribution to the movement was known as the “paranoiac-critical method,” where one would access their subconscious mind to enhance their creativity.
Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012)
Tanning was American painter, sculptor, printmaker, and writer. Her earlier works were influenced by the surrealism movement. She was raised in Illinois and later moved to Chicago followed by New York. She found the surrealist movement at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 exhibition on Dada and Surrealism. She was briefly married to a writer but in 1946 married German surrealist Mac Ernst. They lived together in France until the time of Ernst’s death where upon Tanning returned to New York and began to focus more on her career as an author.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
Francis Picabia was once known as Papa Dada. He encompassed the Dada movement in all of its diverse, surrealist, conceptual goodness.The Dada movement took off after World War I. It was thought that nationalism and rationalism fueled the war, so the Dada movement sought to mock such ideas and thoughts with innovative art styles that were birthed from expressionism, futurism, and cubism. Picabia’s works mocked conventional ideas of morality and law.
This piece is called I See Again In Memory My Dear Udnie. The piece contains very Dadaist qualities. It contains conflicting pieces of flat shapes alongside images of motion and depth. I think this piece is interesting, especially because I think it suits the abstraction, disconnect, and confusion of memories. But personally, I enjoy pieces with less up to interpretation. This level of abstraction is too high for me to make sense of it.
Duchamp was born in France in 1887 and later became a naturalized American citizen. He was a Dadaist painter, sculptor, writer, and chess player. Duchamp and three of his siblings became successful artists. He began seriously painting and drawing around the age of 14. In France he was a part of a cubist artist group with his brothers but soon discovered his work was misunderstood and not quite cubist enough when he was asked to remove his piece from one of their shows. In 1913 he entered a piece, Nude Decsending a Staircase No. 2, in the Armory Show in NYC. It raised much controversy at the time but helped get his other paintings in the show sold. It also helped him fund his move to the States shortly after WWI was declared. He was some sort of a celebrity when he arrived in New York and befriended art patrons and artists like Man Ray. Duchamp is considered to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century and his work influenced a lot of the post–World War I Western art. He’s known for being the guy who took a urinal, named it “the Fountain,” and made it art.
A German artist, Schwitters worked in both genres of Surrealism and Dada. He also worked with various media including sound, poetry, typography, graphic design, painting and sculpture. Although most famous for his collages, some of his work became the foundation for what is now called installation art. He also studied at the Dresden academy of Fine arts, alongside Otto Dix and George Grosz. During World War I, he was excused from military service due to his condition of epilepsy. However, his work did not escape unscathed from the war, and as World War I commenced, his work also became gradually darker. Random fact: he married his cousin and was also known as an ‘enemy alien’, which resulted in his internment between various camps in Scotland and England during the Nazi invasion of Norway (he had fled to Scotland). Below are two of his works:
Artist – Max Ernst
“Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.”
Max Ernst was a pioneer for both of the dada and surrealist movements. Ernst was a German born artist who never received any formal art training. He was a soldier in WWI. During the war he was traumatized and very critical of western culture. These aspects transferred into the basis of his work. Ernst was given the title of an “enemy alien” during WWII and when he arrived in the US. One of Max’s ideas he was interested in was the raw creativity and emotion from the mentally ill. He seen it was a way to tap into those emotions and creativity. Ernst applied Freud’s dream theories to his art in order to further explore himself and his creativity. This allowed him to unleash the traumas and emotions housed deep inside his unconscious. At one point, Ernst was interested in Southwest Native American Navajo art as inspiration. His subject and techniques still remain influential today; for Max serves as a foundation for those interested in art, psychology and non-conformity.
Above is Celebes (1921). Ernst based this painting on a photograph of a Sudanese bin which he refigured to look like an elephant. He aims to create the Freudian dream-like oddness by creating juxtaposition of disparate objects in a complete piece.
Hausmann was an Austrian Dadaist artist who focused on the methodology of destruction as creation. His most famous work is actually an assemblage, titled “Mechanical Head (The Spirit of our Time).” He was a writer, with a strong interest in literature and philosophy, and it seems to rub off in his work. For example, the “Mechanical Head” piece is pretty strange – a wooden head used by hairdressers glued with different everyday objects. To me, it points to ideas of materialism and personal self control. His collages are also really fascinating and modern; the disassembling notions of his art reflect the post-WWI sentiments of distress and disarray. He had a turbulent affair with extramarital fellow Dadaist Hannah Hoch – but their relationship is often credits the creation of the photo-montage.
Fun Fact: Hausmann was always on the move since he was considered a banned artist (Nazis despised Dadaism) until the end of the war, where he lived in isolation until the end of his life.
Rene Magritte’s impressionistic surrealism often incorporated objects out of normal context, giving them a new meaning. This involved the audience’s involvement in thought provoking critique. He believed the mystery of the piece played much into how it was perceived, and would caption paintings of objects as “this is not an apple” simply because it was a painting and would not be as emotionally fulfilling as an apple would be. By using juxtaposition, he contributed to the art world a perfect balance of question and suggestion. This surrealistic turn was often mimicked by others. I really like his eye piece because some say that eyes are galaxies to the soul, and my favorite work of his is an eye with a cloud iris. It is simple, yet intriguing and perplexing.
Tanguy was a French painter part of the Surrealist movement. He started painting without any formal training after he stumbled upon a painting by Giorgio de Chirico soon after finishing military service in the French Navy. He worked with nonrepresentational surrealism where he would oftentimes depict an imaginary scene with strange objects in a vast landscape. Tanguy said of his piece, “Mama, Papa is Wounded!” shown below, that he saw the image in his mind in its entirety before he started painting it. That is remarkable to me. Tanguy plunged into the bohemian lifestyle of a struggling artist during his 30s, which lead to the end of his first marriage. Later in his life he married a fellow artist, Kay Sage, after seeing her work and they spent the end of their lives together in the United States.
Joan Miró was a Spanish painter and sculptor born on April 20, 1893 in Barcelona. He originally attended business school in addition to art school at the request of his parents. He worked for two years as a clerk after college, but he abandoned his business career shortly after due to a mental and physical breakdown (I guess he didn’t like business all that much). His early art goals were to “establish means of metaphorical expression” or to depict nature in a transcendent, primitive way, as it if it were depicted by a child with the intelligence of an adult. Needless to say, his goals fit in well with the Surrealists, the group in which he joined in 1924. Miró’s works are characterized by a balance between the abstraction encouraged by the Surrealists and meticulous planning to create somewhat plausible representations of his subject matter. He also worked with a bold yet limited color palette and also limited blending of colors. One of his pieces, The Tilled Farm, is pictured below.
Leonora Carrington was a British-born Mexican artist. She became familiar with Surrealism through the book “Surrealism” (1936) given to her by her mother. Her family gave her little encouragement in pursuing an art career, but in 1947 poet Edward James bought most of her work and arranged a show for her in New York. Her work mainly depicts horses, like in her painting “Horses of Lord Candlestick” (pictured below). In 2005, Carrington’s painting Juggler was auctioned for US$713,000, setting a new record for the highest price paid at auction for a living surrealist painter.
André Breton(1896-1966)
Breton is known as the creator of the Surrealist movement and he defined it as “pure psychic automatism.” Breton grew up in France where he studied medicine and psychiatry and eventually worked in a neurological ward during World War I. It was during this time that he was exposed to others’ views of disdain for established artistic tradition, which heavily impacted Breton’s own view on art. Breton was a strong supporter of the French Communist Party and also embraced anarchism, saying that “It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognized itself.” Breton was also a very active collector of art, especially from the northwest coast of North America. Unfortunately in 1931 he experienced huge financial issues and was forced to sell most of his collection through auctions.
Tortured (
Tzara was part of the Dada art movement which evolved into Surrealism. He was more well known for his poetry and plays, however Tzara also painted and made visual arts. His works often aligned with his political ideas, as he was a strong political activist during the WWI and WWII periods in France. Although he was not as well known for his artwork, I find Tzara’s works to be incredibly interesting. I really like his dramatic use of color and impactful messages that reflect the 20th century. His style reflects the avant-garde and political nature of dada art.
Man Ray was born in America but soon moved to France and made Paris his home. He was an artist of many media, including photography, painting, sculpture, and film, but he always considered himself foremost as a painter. However, he disregarded painting’s supposed superiority over other art forms and enjoyed many forms of art. He was a Dadaist and Surrealist painter and always considered the process of making art as more important than the art work itself. A famous quote from him is, “Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.” He was also influenced by other famous Dada artists of the time, such as Marcel Duchamp. One of his most famous painting is called “Observatory Time: The Lovers.” Fun fact: the lips in this painting inspired the logo for the movie “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
painting 202 
Artist: Salvador Dali
Dali was born in 1904 to a strict, lawyer father, and a free spirited mother. This contrasting parenting style put pressure on all of their relationships, and lead to Dali’s father to severely punish him when he didn’t agree with his actions. He enrolled at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid in 1922, where he was known as a very eccentric character because of his peculiar and unique style. He had a bit of a wild past, where he was suspended for criticizing teachers and starting a riot, as well as being arrested for supporting the Separatist movement. Dali was highly influenced by Pablo Picasso, and revered him for his unique style. His largest contribution to the movement was known as the “paranoiac-critical method,” where one would access their subconscious mind to enhance their creativity.
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Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012)
Tanning was American painter, sculptor, printmaker, and writer. Her earlier works were influenced by the surrealism movement. She was raised in Illinois and later moved to Chicago followed by New York. She found the surrealist movement at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 exhibition on Dada and Surrealism. She was briefly married to a writer but in 1946 married German surrealist Mac Ernst. They lived together in France until the time of Ernst’s death where upon Tanning returned to New York and began to focus more on her career as an author.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
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FRANCIS PICABIA
Francis Picabia was once known as Papa Dada. He encompassed the Dada movement in all of its diverse, surrealist, conceptual goodness.The Dada movement took off after World War I. It was thought that nationalism and rationalism fueled the war, so the Dada movement sought to mock such ideas and thoughts with innovative art styles that were birthed from expressionism, futurism, and cubism. Picabia’s works mocked conventional ideas of morality and law.
This piece is called I See Again In Memory My Dear Udnie. The piece contains very Dadaist qualities. It contains conflicting pieces of flat shapes alongside images of motion and depth. I think this piece is interesting, especially because I think it suits the abstraction, disconnect, and confusion of memories. But personally, I enjoy pieces with less up to interpretation. This level of abstraction is too high for me to make sense of it.
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Artist: Marcel Duchamp
Duchamp was born in France in 1887 and later became a naturalized American citizen. He was a Dadaist painter, sculptor, writer, and chess player. Duchamp and three of his siblings became successful artists. He began seriously painting and drawing around the age of 14. In France he was a part of a cubist artist group with his brothers but soon discovered his work was misunderstood and not quite cubist enough when he was asked to remove his piece from one of their shows. In 1913 he entered a piece, Nude Decsending a Staircase No. 2, in the Armory Show in NYC. It raised much controversy at the time but helped get his other paintings in the show sold. It also helped him fund his move to the States shortly after WWI was declared. He was some sort of a celebrity when he arrived in New York and befriended art patrons and artists like Man Ray. Duchamp is considered to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century and his work influenced a lot of the post–World War I Western art. He’s known for being the guy who took a urinal, named it “the Fountain,” and made it art.
Nude Descending A Staircase No. 2
The Large Glass
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Artist: Kurt Schwitters
A German artist, Schwitters worked in both genres of Surrealism and Dada. He also worked with various media including sound, poetry, typography, graphic design, painting and sculpture. Although most famous for his collages, some of his work became the foundation for what is now called installation art. He also studied at the Dresden academy of Fine arts, alongside Otto Dix and George Grosz. During World War I, he was excused from military service due to his condition of epilepsy. However, his work did not escape unscathed from the war, and as World War I commenced, his work also became gradually darker. Random fact: he married his cousin and was also known as an ‘enemy alien’, which resulted in his internment between various camps in Scotland and England during the Nazi invasion of Norway (he had fled to Scotland). Below are two of his works:
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Artist – Max Ernst
“Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.”
Max Ernst was a pioneer for both of the dada and surrealist movements. Ernst was a German born artist who never received any formal art training. He was a soldier in WWI. During the war he was traumatized and very critical of western culture. These aspects transferred into the basis of his work. Ernst was given the title of an “enemy alien” during WWII and when he arrived in the US. One of Max’s ideas he was interested in was the raw creativity and emotion from the mentally ill. He seen it was a way to tap into those emotions and creativity. Ernst applied Freud’s dream theories to his art in order to further explore himself and his creativity. This allowed him to unleash the traumas and emotions housed deep inside his unconscious. At one point, Ernst was interested in Southwest Native American Navajo art as inspiration. His subject and techniques still remain influential today; for Max serves as a foundation for those interested in art, psychology and non-conformity.
Above is Celebes (1921). Ernst based this painting on a photograph of a Sudanese bin which he refigured to look like an elephant. He aims to create the Freudian dream-like oddness by creating juxtaposition of disparate objects in a complete piece.
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Artist: Raoul Hausmann
Hausmann was an Austrian Dadaist artist who focused on the methodology of destruction as creation. His most famous work is actually an assemblage, titled “Mechanical Head (The Spirit of our Time).” He was a writer, with a strong interest in literature and philosophy, and it seems to rub off in his work. For example, the “Mechanical Head” piece is pretty strange – a wooden head used by hairdressers glued with different everyday objects. To me, it points to ideas of materialism and personal self control. His collages are also really fascinating and modern; the disassembling notions of his art reflect the post-WWI sentiments of distress and disarray. He had a turbulent affair with extramarital fellow Dadaist Hannah Hoch – but their relationship is often credits the creation of the photo-montage.
Fun Fact: Hausmann was always on the move since he was considered a banned artist (Nazis despised Dadaism) until the end of the war, where he lived in isolation until the end of his life.
Psychogramm, 1917
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Rene Magritte’s impressionistic surrealism often incorporated objects out of normal context, giving them a new meaning. This involved the audience’s involvement in thought provoking critique. He believed the mystery of the piece played much into how it was perceived, and would caption paintings of objects as “this is not an apple” simply because it was a painting and would not be as emotionally fulfilling as an apple would be. By using juxtaposition, he contributed to the art world a perfect balance of question and suggestion. This surrealistic turn was often mimicked by others. I really like his eye piece because some say that eyes are galaxies to the soul, and my favorite work of his is an eye with a cloud iris. It is simple, yet intriguing and perplexing.
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Yves Tanguy (1900-1955)
Tanguy was a French painter part of the Surrealist movement. He started painting without any formal training after he stumbled upon a painting by Giorgio de Chirico soon after finishing military service in the French Navy. He worked with nonrepresentational surrealism where he would oftentimes depict an imaginary scene with strange objects in a vast landscape. Tanguy said of his piece, “Mama, Papa is Wounded!” shown below, that he saw the image in his mind in its entirety before he started painting it. That is remarkable to me. Tanguy plunged into the bohemian lifestyle of a struggling artist during his 30s, which lead to the end of his first marriage. Later in his life he married a fellow artist, Kay Sage, after seeing her work and they spent the end of their lives together in the United States.
Mama, Papa is Wounded!
Indefinite Invisibility
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Artist: Joan Miró
Joan Miró was a Spanish painter and sculptor born on April 20, 1893 in Barcelona. He originally attended business school in addition to art school at the request of his parents. He worked for two years as a clerk after college, but he abandoned his business career shortly after due to a mental and physical breakdown (I guess he didn’t like business all that much). His early art goals were to “establish means of metaphorical expression” or to depict nature in a transcendent, primitive way, as it if it were depicted by a child with the intelligence of an adult. Needless to say, his goals fit in well with the Surrealists, the group in which he joined in 1924. Miró’s works are characterized by a balance between the abstraction encouraged by the Surrealists and meticulous planning to create somewhat plausible representations of his subject matter. He also worked with a bold yet limited color palette and also limited blending of colors. One of his pieces, The Tilled Farm, is pictured below.
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Leonora Carrington was a British-born Mexican artist. She became familiar with Surrealism through the book “Surrealism” (1936) given to her by her mother. Her family gave her little encouragement in pursuing an art career, but in 1947 poet Edward James bought most of her work and arranged a show for her in New York. Her work mainly depicts horses, like in her painting “Horses of Lord Candlestick” (pictured below). In 2005, Carrington’s painting Juggler was auctioned for US$713,000, setting a new record for the highest price paid at auction for a living surrealist painter.
Horses of Lord Candlestick:
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André Breton(1896-1966)
Breton is known as the creator of the Surrealist movement and he defined it as “pure psychic automatism.” Breton grew up in France where he studied medicine and psychiatry and eventually worked in a neurological ward during World War I. It was during this time that he was exposed to others’ views of disdain for established artistic tradition, which heavily impacted Breton’s own view on art. Breton was a strong supporter of the French Communist Party and also embraced anarchism, saying that “It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognized itself.” Breton was also a very active collector of art, especially from the northwest coast of North America. Unfortunately in 1931 he experienced huge financial issues and was forced to sell most of his collection through auctions.
Tortured (
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Artist: Tristan Tzara (1896-1963)
Tzara was part of the Dada art movement which evolved into Surrealism. He was more well known for his poetry and plays, however Tzara also painted and made visual arts. His works often aligned with his political ideas, as he was a strong political activist during the WWI and WWII periods in France. Although he was not as well known for his artwork, I find Tzara’s works to be incredibly interesting. I really like his dramatic use of color and impactful messages that reflect the 20th century. His style reflects the avant-garde and political nature of dada art.
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Artist: Man Ray
Man Ray was born in America but soon moved to France and made Paris his home. He was an artist of many media, including photography, painting, sculpture, and film, but he always considered himself foremost as a painter. However, he disregarded painting’s supposed superiority over other art forms and enjoyed many forms of art. He was a Dadaist and Surrealist painter and always considered the process of making art as more important than the art work itself. A famous quote from him is, “Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.” He was also influenced by other famous Dada artists of the time, such as Marcel Duchamp. One of his most famous painting is called “Observatory Time: The Lovers.” Fun fact: the lips in this painting inspired the logo for the movie “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
http://www.cromos.com.co/sites/default/files/styles/img_760x490/public/images_gallery/0f040c0719997f61105eb21a2bec925d.jpg?itok=SGt6aana
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