Dada, Surrealism, and SuprematismAKA 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.