Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [114]
ARP: GAME OF CHANCE. In his work, Arp (1887-1966) exploited the irrational. He discovered the principle of random collage by accident, when he tore up a drawing and threw the pieces on the floor. Admiring the haphazard pattern the scraps formed, Arp began to make “chance” collages. “We declared that everything that comes into being or is made by man is art,” said Arp. He constantly experimented to evolve new forms. His characteristic works include playful, egglike shapes that suggest living creatures. Arp stated his aim: “To teach man what he had forgotten: to dream with his eyes open.”
SCHWITTERS: A MATTER OF MERZ. German collagist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) also subverted accepted concepts. When asked, “What is art?” he replied, “What isn’t?” Schwitters cruised the streets of Hanover scouring gutters for discarded junk like bus tickets, buttons, and shreds of paper. He then combined this refuse into assemblages he called “merz.” Arp and Schwitters used these “nonart” materials instead of oil on canvas “to avoid any reminder of the paintings which seemed to us to be characteristic of a pretentious, self-satisfied world,” Arp said.
By 1922, Dada — admittedly “against everything, even Dada” — dissolved into anarchy. Its contribution was to make art less an intellectual exercise and more a foray into the unpredictable.
SURREALISM: POWER OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. Two years later a direct offspring of Dada, Surrealism, was born. Surrealism, which flourished in Europe and America during the twenties and thirties, began as a literary movement, fostered by its godfather, poet André Breton. It grew out of Freudian free-association and dream analysis. Poets and, later, painters experimented with automatism — a form of creating without conscious control — to tap unconscious imagery. Surrealism, which implies going beyond realism, deliberately courted the bizarre and the irrational to express buried truths unreachable by logic.
Surrealism took two forms. Some artists, like Spanish painter Joan Miró and German artist Max Ernst, practiced improvised art, distancing themselves as much as possible from conscious control. Others, like the Spaniard Salvador Dali and Belgian painter René Magritte, used scrupulously realistic techniques to present hallucinatory scenes that defy common sense.
MIRO: THE JOY OF PAINTING. “Miró may rank,” said Surrealist guru André Breton, “as the most surrealist of us all.” Joan Miró (1893-1983) consistently tried to banish reason and loose the unconscious. Working spontaneously, he moved the brush over the canvas drawing squiggles in a trancelike state or slapped on paint in a creative frenzy intensified by hunger, since he could afford only one meal a day. His goal, he said, was “to express with precision all the golden sparks the soul gives off. ”
Miró invented unique biomorphic signs for natural objects like the sun, moon, and animals. Over the years these forms were progressively simplified into shorthand pictograms of geometric shapes and amoebalike blobs — a mixture of fact and fantasy. “Miró could not put a dot on a sheet of paper without hitting square on the target,” the Surrealist sculptor Giacometti said.
DARK SHADOWS
De Chirico, “The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street,” 1914, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Kunstmuseum, Basel. Hailed by the Surrealists as their precursor, Italian painter Giorgio De Chirico (pronounced KEY ree coh; 1888-1978) was painting nightmare fantasies fifteen years before Surrealism existed. Drawing on irrational childhood fears, De Chirico is known for his eerie cityscapes with empty arcades, raking light, and ominous shadows. The skewed perspective and nearly deserted squares inhabited by tiny, depersonalized figures project menace. In fact, with these paintings as his best evidence, De Chirico was exempted from military service as mentally unstable. On on early self-portrait he inscribed, “What shall I love if not the enigma?”
Miró, “Dutch Interior II,” c. 1920, Guggenheim collection, Venice. Miró improvised geometric shapes and biomorphic forms