Art of the 20th Century. Dorothea Eimert
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Название: Art of the 20th Century
Автор: Dorothea Eimert
Издательство: Parkstone International Publishing
Жанр: Иностранные языки
Серия: Art of the 20th Century
isbn: 978-1-78525-930-2, 978-1-78160-235-5
isbn:
Paying homage to psychological automatism, the Surrealist manifesto included a guide to automatic writing. Max Ernst wanted to reply to the writers with the ‘automatic painting’ of equal standing. He wanted give wings to his own meditative and hallucinatory powers. He randomly put sheets of paper on some floorboards, did rubbings of the wood with a soft pencil and was astounded by their darkness and delicate semidarkness. He was surprised by the sudden intensification of his visions when contemplating the rubbings. In the same manner, he experimented with a whole range of materials. Frottage was born. The first 34 pencil frottages, titled Histoire Naturelle, appeared in 1926.
The frottage technique revealed itself to be the equivalent to automatic writing. Max Ernst remarked that with the frottage technique, all the conscious influences such as reason and taste were switched off. Moreover, the active participation of the author, in this case the artist, was reduced to a minimum. The sketches were the result of suggestions and transmutations that spontaneously reveal themselves, corresponding to hypnotic visions. The character of the materials in question, for example wood, is lost. In 1925, Max Ernst began experiments with using the frottage technique in painting. With a variant technique, grattage, Max Ernst produced paintings full of threatening monsters, gloomy woods and sleeping cities in the moonlight. In 1935 he created the series Airplane Devouring Gardens and, in 1936, Jungles. Between 1939 and 1945, he created important works like Europe after the Rain, The Eye of Silence, and the series Microbes. However, in 1939 he was interned as a German citizen in France at the camp Les Milles. He was able to immigrate to New York. There, he again created sculptural works. He returned to France in 1953, and, at the Biennale in Venice, he won the Grand Prize for painting. For this he was expelled from the Surrealist movement.
Max Ernst was one of the most exciting painters of his time. Dieter Wyss wrote in 1950:
Like no other painter before him, he illuminated the backdrop of human life… It would not be exaggerated to place him in the same row with the greats of painting like Hieronymus Bosch, Matthias Grünewald, and El Greco. He penetrated the riddle-like worlds of the creative and unconscious.
The Spaniard, Salvador Dali, mined the repertoire for his paintings from his readings of psychiatric and psychoanalytical literature. According to Bréton, he gave Surrealism ‘a wonderful weapon, his critical-paranoid method as a morning gift.’ Dali almost neurotically asserted sexuality in his paintings. He depicted monstrosities with a cold and precise exactitude. His themes were the sadistic, the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, the exaggerated and scenes of horrific fantasy. It is not clear what was intuition and what was calculated speculation with an eye towards to fashionable society. His countryman, Joan Miró, introduced him in 1928 to the circle of Parisian Surrealists. Influenced by his reading of The Intepretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, after 1930 he developed his ‘paranoid-critical activities.’
My method consists of spontaneously explaining the irrational ideas that grow out of mad associations by delivering a critical interpretation of the phenomenon. Sceptical clairvoyance assumes the role of a photographic developer.
Salvador Dalí, The Temptation of St Anthony, 1946.
Oil on canvas, 89.5 × 119.5 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.
René Magritte, Temps menaçant, 1929. Oil on canvas, 54 × 73 cm.
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
The Belgian, René Magritte did not look for his subjects in the unconscious. In his paintings, he depicted unreal situations involving objects and phenomenon. These assume the identity of the other. In this manner, a subject can become transparent. Bodies can dissolve in air. Proportions can be distorted, a cloud can be inside a doorframe, and a birdcage can become a part of the human body. Everything is interchangeable. The paintings of de Chirico inspired his first Surrealistic works. He lent the elements of his paintings the characteristics of a faithful copy. They are painted in a chilly distanced fashion. They are set in a scene and enter into absurd dialogues, as for instance, why should a statue not bleed? A window pane not be landscape and so on?
Yves Tanguy created dream landscapes, whose scenes seem unreal and monotonous. Things are strewn about as if following choreographic directions. With loud colours, he shows their contours and vividness in realistic terms. Their long shadows give the illusion of a silent cosmos. He creates a subjective world in his art, manifested by a feeling of emptiness, loneliness, and endlessness. Werner Schmalenbach reacted to the 1942 painting Absent Lady saying, ‘It is as if the relics of a long ago epoch on earth, the ossified remains of a long extinct life form, had survived in an eternity, empty and free of all human existence.’
Joan Miró, came to Paris in 1919 and became acquainted with Picasso, signing the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto. He worked together with Max Ernst on stage decorations for the ballet. He was strongly influenced by the paintings of Paul Klee.
Miró said, ‘[T]he poets that Masson introduced me to were of greater interest to me than the painters whom I met in Paris. I lost myself in them for nights on end… The result of this reading was that step-by-step I began to distance myself from Realism until after 1925, when I almost exclusively painted hallucinations. Hunger was a great source of hallucinations. For a long time I tried to sit there and look at the empty walls of my studio as I attempted to exorcise these faces onto paper and canvas.
Starting with automatic drawings, Miró developed a hieroglyphic style. His figuration displays its mastery in the abstract unintentional and in the interplay of the coincidental. At the beginning of the 1920s, he painted metamorphoses of objects, deformed them, and placed them in unusual relationships to one another. Space became a flat, two-dimensional painting surface in which all objects lived in harmony next to one another. In the middle of the 1920s, he invented a type of visual alphabet of emotions with his spontaneous splashes, stains, and flourishes. A painting style was created that had a compact expressive power and a balanced lyrical equilibrium between the symbols.
The American, Arshile Gorky, introduced Surrealist elements into the informal world of objects. He led the way to the psychological automatism of Action Painting among the young generation of American artists. Via Surrealism, the Frenchman, Henri Michaux, found his way to doing his drawings while in a state of intoxication.
Pierre Roy from France, Paul Delvaux from Belgium, and the Oscar Dominguez from Spain also developed a Surrealistic painting style. Among the Parisian Surrealists who exhibited together in 1925–1926 were, in addition to Max Ernst, Yves Tinguy, Joan Miró, André Masson, and Pablo Picasso. There was also Hans Arp, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia, who had, like Max Ernst, originally been Dada artists. Robert Sebastian Matta and Wilfredo Lam, from Chile and Cuba, respectively, were for some time close to Surrealism. Richard Oelze created landscapes with amorphic structures and utilised a technique that was similar to frottage. Among the younger generation, one notes Fantastic Painting in the works by Hans Bellmer.
Yves Tanguy, Absent Woman, 1942. Oil on canvas,
115 × 89.5 cm. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
Joan Miró, Portrait of a Spanish Dancer, 1921.
Oil on canvas, 65 × 56 cm. Musée National Picasso, Paris.
Paul Delvaux, Entry into СКАЧАТЬ