Dada and Surrealism (pictures to come later)

Thesis: Both radical new looks at artwork, Dada and Surrealism made themselves very apparent during and following World War I and displayed a restlesness mainly in Europe and North America.


I. Dada

• Founded in Zurich in 1916 by a group of refugees from WWI
• Name is based on the nonsensical quality of the art
• Ironically held a no-nonsense artistic aim: to protest the madness of war without the use of artistic resaon and respect of the establishment
• Main strategy: to denounce and shock
• More serious purpose was to awaken imagination
• Jean Arp: Founder of Dada, and collagist, who believed that "everything that comes into being or is made by man is art"
• Kurt Schwitters: German collagist, created "merz" (a collage made up of a collection of non-art materials)
• Dada dissolved into anarchy in 1922

II. Surrealism

• Power of the unconscious
• Began as a literary movement in 1920's and 1930's
• Godfather of the movement: poet, Andre Breton
• Grew from Freudian free-association and dream analysis
• Experimenting with automatism (a form of creating without conscious control) to tap into "unconcious imagery"
• 2 forms: improvised art/total loss of conscious control (Miro), realistic techniques to present the hallucinatory (Dali)
• Miro - Surrealist who practiced total loss of conscious control to get the proper blurred imagery associated with this movement
• Ernst - both Dadaist and Surrealist
• Dali - realistic technique user to present the hallucinatory (paintings often disturbing)
• Magritee - Similar to Dali in how disturbing the art was --> often a result of his being terrified of many normal things on Earth