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Natalia Brodskaya

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Herausgeber: Parkstone International
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

The Dada movement and then the Surrealists appeared in the First World War aftermath with a bang: revolution of thought, creativity, and the wish to break away from the past and all that was left in ruins. This refusal to integrate into the Bourgeois society lead Georg Grosz to remark of Dada, “it’s the end of-isms.” Breton asserted that Dada does not produce perspective, “a machine which functions full steam, but where it remains to be seen how it can feed itself.” Surrealism emerged amidst such feeling. These artists often changed from one movement to another. They were united by their superior intellectualism and the common goal to break from the norm. Describing Dada with its dynamic free-thinkers, and the Surrealists with their aversive resistance to the system, the author brings a new approach which strives to be relative and truthful. Provocation and cultural revolution: Dada and the Surrealists, aren’t they above all just a direct product of creative individualism in this unsettled period?

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Seitenzahl: 216

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

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Leseprobe

Author: Natalia Brodskaïa

Layout:

Baseline Co. Ltd

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyrights on the works reproduced lie with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case we would appreciate notification.

ISBN: 978-1-68325-473-7

Natalia Brodskaïa

Contents

Surrealism

Max Ernst (1891-1976)

Yves Tanguy (1900-1955)

Joan Miró (1893-1983)

André Masson (1896-1987)

René Magritte (1898-1967)

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)

Paul Delvaux (1897-1994)

List of Illustrations

Notes

René Magritte, The Liberator, 1947. Oil on canvas, 99.1 x 78.7 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

Surrealism

Giorgio De Chirico: The Catalyst Of Surrealism

The history of Surrealism maintains a beautiful legend. After a long voyage, a sailor returned to Paris. His name was Yves Tanguy. As he was riding in a bus along the Rue La Boétie, he saw a picture in the window of one of the numerous art galleries. It depicted a nude male torso against the background of a dark, phantasmal city. On a table lays a book, but the man is not looking at it. His eyes are closed. Yves Tanguy jumped out of the bus while it was still in motion and went up to the window to examine the strange picture. It was called The Child’s Brain, and was painted by the Italian Giorgio de Chirico. The encounter with the picture determined the sailor’s fate. Tanguy stayed on shore for good and became an artist, although until then he had never held either a pencil or a paintbrush in his hands.

This story took place in 1923, a year before the poet and psychiatrist André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in Paris. Like any legend, it does not claim to be exact in its details. One thing cannot be doubted: Giorgio de Chirico’s painting produced such an unforgettable impression that it became one of the sources of the art of Surrealism as it began to develop after World War I. The Child’s Brain had a wonderful effect on someone else besides Yves Tanguy, André Breton later recalled:

Riding along the Rue La Boétie in a bus past the window of the old Paul Guillaume Gallery, where it was on display, I stood up like a jack-in-the-box so I could get off and examine it close up. For a long time I could not stop thinking about it and from then on I did not have any peace until I was able to acquire it. Some years later, on the occasion of a general exhibition of de Chirico [paintings], this painting returned from my home to where it had been before (the window of Paul Guillaume), and someone else who was going that way on the bus gave himself up to exactly the same impulse, which is exactly the reaction it still provokes in me all this time after our first encounter, now that I have it again on my wall. The man was Yves Tanguy.[1]

The consistency and details of the events are not as important as the basic fact that de Chirico’s pictures had an unusual effect on the future Surrealists. The artists themselves guessed at its reasons. However, explanation became possible only with the passage of time, once the painting of European Surrealists had become an artistic legacy, and when the time arrived to render an account of it and interpret its language. The closed eyes of de Chirico’s figure were associated with the call of the Romantics and Symbolists to see the world not with the physical but with the inner eye, and to rise above crude reality. At the same time, the artist depicted his figure with a prosaic naturalism. His typical-looking face, his protruding ears, fashionable moustache, and the sparse hairs on his chin, in combination with a body which is by no means unathletic but which has filled out a bit too much, are material and ordinary. The sense of mystery and abstraction from life that the painting carried within it is made frighteningly real by this contradiction.

De Chirico’s metaphysical painting gave his contemporaries an example of the language of Surrealism. Later on, Salvador Dalí defined it as “the fixation in trompe l’oeil of images in dreams”[2]. Each of the Surrealists realised this principle in his own way; however, it is in this quality of their art, taken outside the bounds of realism, that Surrealism lies. Surrealism would never have occurred at any given moment had it not been for Giorgio de Chirico. Fate linked Giorgio de Chirico’s life to the places and the landscapes which fed his imagination. He was born in 1888 in Greece, where his father built railways. His birthplace was the town of Volo, the capital of Thessaly, from which, according to legend, the Argonauts had set out on their quest for the Golden Fleece. For the whole of his life Giorgio de Chirico retained the vivid impression of the Classical architecture of Athens.

There are recollections of Classical architecture and of the sculpture of ancient Greece in almost every one of his paintings. In Greece he received his first lessons in drawing and painting. At the age of twelve, de Chirico began to study at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Athens. At the age of sixteen, after the death of his father, he left for Italy with his mother and brother. De Chirico then discovered the wonderful Italian cities in which the spirit of the Middle Ages still survived – Turin, Milan, Florence, Venice and Verona. Together with his memories of Greece, these cities lay at the basis of his own private world, the one that he created in his painting. Later, he spent two years in Munich where he studied not only painting, but also classical German philosophy. Schopenhauer wrote:

“In order to have original, extraordinary, perhaps immortal ideas, it is enough to isolate oneself so completely from the world and from things for a few moments that the most ordinary objects and events should appear to us as completely new and unknown, thereby revealing their true essence.[3]

In Munich he saw a kind of painting which awakened the craving for mystery that lay sleeping in his soul – he got to know [Arnold] Böklin. In 1911 Giorgio de Chirico arrived in Paris and settled in the Montparnasse district, on the Rue Campagne-Première. When his paintings appeared at the Salon d’automne, the Parisian artists saw the de Chirico who would later impress them with his Brain of the Child, and who wrote: “What I hear is worth nothing, the only thing that matters is what my eyes see when they are open, and even more when they are shut.”[4]

Giorgio de Chirico turned up in the right place at the right time. For the young people of Montmartre and Montparnasse he became an inspiration and almost a prophet. In 1914 de Chirico depicted Apollinaire in profile against the background of a window. On the poet’s temple he drew a white circle. When Apollinaire went off to the front soon afterwards, he was wounded in the left temple, in the place shown in the picture. The artist had become a visionary for them, with the power to see into the future.

Giorgio de Chirico summoned to the surface what had been hidden deep within the art of the beginning of the 20th century. In the course of the following decades, the spirit of de Chirico found its way into the painting of all the Surrealist artists. References to his pictures turned up in their canvases, mysterious signs and symbols born from his imagination; the mannequins he invented prolonged their lives. However, for the seed of the art of Giorgio de Chirico to be really able to germinate, the young generation of the 20th century would have to experience a vast upheaval.

Giorgio de Chirico, Melancholia, 1912. Oil on canvas. Estorick Foundation, London.

Giorgio de Chirico, Spring in Turin, 1914. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

Giorgio de Chirico, Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire, 1914. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 81.5 x 65 cm. Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.

The War – The Stimulus For Dada

The art of Surrealism was the most direct outcome of its time. Those who created it, literary men and artists, date from the generation that was born in the last decade of the 19th century. At the start of World War I, each of them was about twenty years old. After the monstrous crimes of World War II, after the extermination of millions of people in concentration camps and the destruction of Japanese cities with the atomic bomb, previous wars seemed only like distant historical episodes. It is difficult to imagine what a disaster, and in fact what a tragedy, World War I was. The first years of the 20th century were marked by outbreaks of conflict in various parts of the world, and there was a sense that people were living on a volcano.

Nevertheless, the start of the war came as a surprise. On 28 June 1914, in the Serbian city of Sarajevo, the student Gavrilo Princip killed the Austrian Archduke.Franz Ferdinand and his wife. A war began in the Balkans. On 1 August, Germany declares war on Russia, and on the 3rd and 4th of the same month, France and Britain declared war on Germany. It was only the defeat of the Germans on the Marne from September 5 to 10 that saved Paris from destruction. At the same time, this led to a drawn-out positional war which turned into a nightmare. Many thousands of young people from every country took part in the war. And it was exactly this generation that would create the art of the 20th century and carry on from the boldest beginnings of its predecessors.

Before the war, the artistic life of Paris reveled in the most complete and entrancing freedom. The Impressionists and the masters of the period of Post-Impressionism untied artists’ hands. A sense of the barriers in art established by a tradition or a school had vanished. Young artists could permit themselves everything that was possible or impossible. In 1909, the Futurist Manifesto was published in Milan and then Paris. Its author Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote: “Our poetry is courage, audacity and revolt.” The Futurists were the first to rise up against old-fashioned art and cultural tradition. Marinetti wrote:

Down with museums and libraries! We issue this flaming manifesto as a proclamation announcing the establishment of Futurism, because we want to deliver this country from the malignant tumour on its body – from professors, archaeologists, cicerones and antiquarians... Hurry over here! Burn down the libraries! Dam the canals and sink the museums! Ha! Let the current carry off the famous paintings. Grab the pickaxes and the hammers! Destroy the walls of the venerable cities![5]

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife – Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-1920. Photomontage, collage and watercolour, 114 x 90 cm. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.

Francis Picabia, The Cacodylic Eye, 1921. Oil on canvas and photographic collage including postcards and various cuts of paper, 148.6 x 117.4 cm. Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.

Form served for them as a reflection of the swiftness of movement, of the dynamic of the new industrial world. In Russia, the artist Kazimir Malevich strove to remove the fetters of literature from art, to liberate it “from all the content in which it has been held back for thousands of years.”[6] Painting and sculpture were fully liberated from literary subjects, and only the motif remained to give a push to the assimilation of colour, form and movement. In Munich, a group of artists gathered around the journal Der Blaue Reiter, including the Russian Wassily Kandinsky. Their painting absorbed the whole richness of colour that by that moment had been opened up to the European avant-garde. In 1910, Kandinsky painted his first watercolour, in which there was nothing apart from a spot of colour and lines. The appearance of abstract painting was the natural result of such a rapid development in art. The artistic avant-garde was ruthless in its treatment of the bourgeois aesthetic. No less important was the fact that the new art was becoming international. Paris attracted all of the insurgents, all those who were finding alternatives to the traditional, much-travelled route. In Montmartre, and later in the district of the Boulevard Montparnasse, a special artistic world sprang up.

Around 1900 in Montmartre, “an uncomfortable wooden house, nicknamed the Bateau-Lavoir, housed painters, sculptors, writers, humorists, actors, laundresses, dressmakers and costermongers.”[7] The Dutchman Kees van Dongen moved in, “barefoot in sandals, his red beard accompanied by a pipe and a smile.”[8] From 1904, the Spaniard Pablo Picasso lived on the floor below with his Parisian girlfriend Fernande Olivier, while artists, sculptors and poets from Spain gathered around him. The “Fauves” from the Parisian suburb of Chatou were often seen alongside them – the giants André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. The poets Max Jacob, André Salmon and others often came into their group. The ideological inspiration of the group was Guillaume Apollinaire. He met Picasso soon after the latter’s appearance in Montparnasse, and became the most ardent defender of the Cubism Picasso had devised. In 1906, the international colony of Montmartre was reinforced by an Italian from Livorno, Amedeo Modigliani. Jews from Russia and Poland, Germans, Romanians, even emigrants from Japan and Latin America entered a variegated artistic community which the journalist from Montmartre André Varnaux wittily called “The Paris School”.

The war destroyed the picturesque world of Montmartre which in these men’s art had been an inspirational force in its own right. The war brought the ruin of all their hopes. The Parisian Germans had to return to Germany to take up arms against their friends. The French were also mobilised: some went away to the front, others, like Vlaminck, worked in munitions factories.

Drafted to the front, Apollinaire remained there only a short time – he was seriously wounded and came back to Paris on 17 March 1916. His old friends rallied round him, as well as poets and artists who were new arrivals in Montparnasse; those on the scene included Max Jacob, Raoul Dufy, Francis Karko, Pierre Reverdy, and André Breton. The black bandage which Apollinaire wore round his head after he was wounded was interpreted as a symbol of heroism. However, for many of those who surrounded the bard of the “abandoned youth”, the unbridled patriotism which had seized France was repugnant.

In 1916 in Paris, the first number of the journal SIC appeared, giving modernist poets and artists an opportunity for self-expression. It ran for three years. In 1917 a competitor to it appeared – the poet Pierre Reverdy published the journal Nord-Sud which he wanted to serve as a unifying force for Modernist literature and the visual arts. “Is it any wonder”, wrote Reverdy, “if we thought that now was a good time to rally round Guillaume Apollinaire?”[9] However, things became really lively in this circle with Tristan Tzara’s appearance in Paris. In the spring of 1917, Max Jacob announced the “advent of the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara”, and in an SIC article entitled “The Birth of Dada”, it was written that “In Zürich the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara and the artist Janko are publishing an artistic journal, whose content looks attractive. The second number of Dada will come out shortly.”[10]

Salvador Dalí, Gala and the Angelus of Millet Immediately Preceding the Arrival of the Conic Anamorphoses, 1933. Oil on wood, 24.2 x 19.2 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky), Night Sun – Abandoned Playground, 1943. Private collection.

Dada – The Cradle Of Surrealism

“Dada” – this was actually the name of a journal. But Dada was something much bigger than a journal. Dada was a coming to light of the tendencies and emotional reactions which were developing simultaneously in various countries of the world. Dada was a revolt against traditional art – the Dadaists advocated anti-art. And Dada was the cradle in which Surrealism uttered its first words, made its first movements – in short, grew and matured. The Dada movement was the first chapter of Surrealism.

It is usual to regard Zürich as the birthplace of Dada, although its adherents appeared at the same time in America as well. At this time, Switzerland was the only officially neutral country in Europe, the only tiny island of peace amid the fires of the World War. It was there that those young people who did not want to take part in the European war found refuge. Among those whom the winds of war had blown into Zürich after 1915 were the Germans Richard Huelsenbeck and Hugo Ball, the Romanians Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janko, and the Alsatian Hans Arp, and many others, including some Swiss intellectuals, joined them as well. What united them more than anything was their hatred of the existing social order, of which they saw the senseless slaughter of the war as the result. Among them were pacifists of various hues, but they did not organise anti-war demonstrations, and did not take an active part in political movements. Their protest took special forms, related only to the fields of literature, the theatre and the visual arts. They all came from bourgeois families and they were all, first and foremost, opposed to official art.

In 1916, on one of the little streets of old Zürich, the German Hugo Ball opened the Cabaret Voltaire. On 5 February, the first concert took place there. The name Dada was invented on 8 February. The godfather of the emerging movement was Tristan Tzara. Legend has it that a paper knife fell entirely accidently onto the page of a dictionary where Tristan Tzara saw this word.

DADA MEANS NOTHING, Tzara wrote in the Dada Manifesto 1918, we learn in the newspapers that the Kru negroes call the tail of a sacred cow: DADA. Brick and mother, in a certain region of Italy: DADA. Wooden horse, nurse, double affirmation in Russian and Romanian: DADA.[11]

Declaring that he was against all manifestos, Tzara wrote:

Thus DADA was born out of a need for independence, out of mistrust of the community. Those who belong to us keep their freedom. We do not acknowledge any theory. We have enough Cubists and Futurists: laboratories of formal ideas. Does one create art to make money and to stroke the nice bourgeois?[12]

The basis of Dada was its ambition to destroy all, without exception. Dada was the negation of everything: “Every hierarchy and social equation set up as our values by our valets: DADA; ... abolition of memory: DADA; abolition of archaeology: DADA; abolition of prophets: DADA; abolition of the future: DADA...” wrote Tzara.[13] His concept of freedom even extended as far as emancipation from logic: “Logic is a complication. Logic is always false. It drags the edges of notions and words away from their formal exterior towards ends and centres that are illusory. Its chains kill, enormous myriapods stifling independence.”[14]

In 1916, Tzara began to correspond with the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume, who introduced him to Max Jacob, Reverdy, and Apollinaire. Apollinaire had become as much of an idol for the leader of the Dada movement, as much of an inspiration as he had been for the Paris avant-garde, “the most lively, alert and enthusiastic of the French poets”.[15] Dadaism in Zürich was making its presence felt most strongly in literature. All the evenings at the Cabaret Voltaire were accompanied by sketches in fancy-dress, masques and productions of Dadaist plays. However, in the galleries, and even in Zürich’s biggest museum, the Kunsthaus, exhibitions were organised in which Tzara read lectures on modern art. Here, attention was focused on the Expressionists, to whom several of the members of the Zürich Dadaists belonged, and in particular on the abstract painting of Kandinsky.

The opening of the Dada Gallery, at which Tzara gave a lecture on Expressionism and Abstractionism, took place on 27 March 1917, and the following day Tzara gave a lecture on Art Nouveau. In the spring of 1917, after a long stay in America, Francis Picabia arrived in Switzerland. He composed poems that were very similar to those of Tzara. They began to correspond, feeling that they were soul mates. Picabia, inspired by the correspondence, went back to the work in drawing that he had long neglected, while Tzara busied himself enthusiastically on the journal Dada. Tzara invited Francis Picabia to the exhibition at the Kunsthaus. They spent three weeks together in Zürich in January and February of 1919. The association, and then the friendship, of Tristan Tzara and Picabia was the beginning of the contact between the Zürich Dadaists and their like-minded colleagues in Paris. On 17 January 1920, Tzara went to see Picabia in Paris, where he immediately became acquainted with André Breton, Paul Éluard and Philippe Soupault, and became involved in the events staged by the Paris Dadaists – the future Surrealists.

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky), The Nice Weather, 1939. Private collection.

Jacques Hérold, The Game, the Night, 1936. Private collection.

Dada Outside Zürich

Francis Picabia brought to Paris the discoveries of those in America who had gone down the Dadaist road. The American avant-garde knew nothing of the Dadaists of Zürich, yet they were motivated by the same nihilism that had become a generalized feature of this artistic generation. The movement for freedom in art got under way earlier there than in Europe. In 1913, an international exhibition of modern art took place in New York, now well-known under the name of the “Armoury Show”. The modernist tendencies of European painting were represented in it; in particular, Marcel Duchamp’s picture Nude Descending a Staircase, and two pictures by Picabia, Dances at the Spring and Procession to Seville, were on display – they all provoked outrage and enjoyed success. But the real explosion in the artistic life of New York was an exhibition at the Grand Central gallery in March, 1917. It was organised in the manner of the Paris Salon des Indépendants – each contributor who put in $6 had the right to show any work without the need for it to be approved. Under the invented name Richard Matt, Marcel Duchamp submitted to the exhibition an everyday enamelled urinal which he called Fountain. When the organisers refused to exhibit it, Duchamp stormed out of the exhibition’s organisational committee. In the summer of 1921, they both arrived in Paris where Dadaists from other European capitals were gathering.

Hanover and Cologne are the places where the first significant evolutions towards becoming Surrealism took place. Max Ernst lived in Cologne. Drafted into the army for the duration of the war, Ernst returned to his native Westphalia in 1919. Hans Arp came to him in Cologne, bringing with him his experience of the Zürich Dadaists. Ernst and Arp were joined by a Cologne artist and poet who was well-known under the pseudonym of Johannes Theodor Baargeld. The young Cologne intellectuals, like their counterparts in Berlin, were involved in the revolutionary movement of 1918 and 1919. Under the influence of Arp, the Cologne Dadaists preferred to confine their activity entirely within the framework of aesthetics.

The culmination of the Dadaist performances in Cologne was a scandal at the backdoor of the Winter, a beer cellar, in April 1920, when the exhibitors’ defiant behaviour irritated viewers. Police had to intervene and this meant the dissolution of the mouvement. Breton invited Max Ernst to the Dada exhibition in Paris. However, as a result of political complications, Ernst was unable to travel outside Germany, and he only met Breton, Tzara, and Éluard in the summer of 1921 when he visited Tyrol. A year later, Ernst moved to Paris where all the important figures in the Dadaist movement had come together after the war. The first shoots of Surrealism grew out of their experience.

Victor Brauner, André Breton, Óscar Domínguez, Max Ernst, Jacques Hérold, Wilfredo Lam, Jacqueline Lamba and André Masson,The Marseille Card Game, published in VVV, N°2-3, 1943. Private collection.

Dada In Paris

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