Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [117]
ATGET (1857-1927). Hailed by Surrealists as a forefather, Eugène Atget was really the father of modern photography. Surrealists like Man Ray (and his colleague, photographer Berenice Abbott) rescued Atget from oblivion, finding a kindred spirit in his mysterious, concentrated images that have De Chirico’s deadpan quirkiness. Atget never considered himself an “art” photographer but a chronicler of Paris — its residents and street life. He took straightforward photos of subjects like iron grillwork, shop windows, and fountains. Like Duchamp with his readymades, Atget raised the mundane to the magical. Through his clean, uncluttered style and eye for the telling detail, Atget charged his most commonplace images with significance. His arresting scenes often look haunted. The bold reduction to essentials lends a hyperclarity that makes the ordinary seem extraordinary.
Man Ray, “Rayograph 1928,” 1928, MoMA, NY. Surrealist Man Ray experimented to transcend surface realism and created this witty photo-assemblage of string, cotton, and strips of paper.
CARTIER-BRESSON (b. 1908). French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson began as a Cubist painter before turning to photography in 1932. His great contribution to photojournalism is his ability to capture what he calls the “decisive moment.” More than just recording, Cartier-Bresson snaps the most intense instant of action or emotion to reveal an event’s inner meaning. “There is one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance,” he said. “Photography must seize upon this moment.” Many Cartier-Bresson photographs have a Surrealist element of the unexpected. His odd juxtapositions within the camera frame make reality seem unreal. Some of his images are so startling they seem to be the result of pure chance, but Cartier-Bresson’s odd croppings were carefully composed.
Cartier-Bresson, “Children Playing in Ruins,” 1933, Magnum, NY. A genius of timing, Cartier-Bresson captures the peak moment when movement crystalizes to convey many levels of meaning or the essence of a character.
DALI: PAINTING PARANOIA. The painter who based his technique, which he called “critical paranoia,” on exploiting his own neuroses was Salvador Dalí (1904 — 89). When Dali came to Paris in 1928 and joined the Surrealists, he had plenty of obsessions to draw on. He was terrified of insects, of crossing streets, of trains, boats, and airplanes, of taking the Métro — even of buying shoes because he couldn’t bear to expose his feet in public. He laughed hysterically and uncontrollably and carried a piece of driftwood at all times to ward off evil spirits. “The only difference between a madman and myself,” Dalí said, “is that I am not mad.”
With so rich a lode of irrational fears fueling his art, Dalí placed a canvas beside his bed, staring at it before sleep and recording what he called “hand-painted dream photographs” when he awoke. He claimed he cultivated paranoid delusions deliberately to make himself a “medium” for the irrational, but that he could snap back to control at will.
Dalí differed from Ernst and Miró in that, instead of inventing new forms to symbolize the unconscious, he represented his hallucinations with meticulous realism. His draftsmanship is so skilled it almost has a miniaturist’s precision, but he distorted objects grotesquely and placed them in unreal dream landscapes. When Dalí attended a costume party where everyone came “as their dreams,” Dalí dressed as a rotting corpse. This recurrent nightmare often appeared in his work. His most famous, “The Persistence of Memory,” shows limp watches and a strange lump of indefinable flesh. Although metallic, the watches appear to be decomposing. A fly and cluster of jewellike ants swarm over them. “With the coming of Dalí, it is perhaps the first time that the mental windows have been opened really wide,” Breton said, “so that one can feel oneself gliding up toward the wild sky’s trap.”
Dalí, “The Persistence of Memory,” 1931, MoMA, NY. Dalí used the techniques