The emotional charge Surrealism extended to the objects of its encounter makes itself felt as at least philosophically erotic. This charged look determines the atmosphere around the Surrealist text and its encounters--in the world of art and the world it made into art. In this attempt to make sense of the way Surrealism sees, conceals, poses, and stares at its own self and the selves of others, the author examines the decors, games, portraits, transformations, and mirrorings that establish Surrealism's links to Baroque forms of representation.
A revised edition of Whitney Chadwick’s seminal work on the women artists who shaped the Surrealist art movement. This pioneering book stands as the most comprehensive treatment of the lives, ideas, and art works of the remarkable group of women who were an essential part of the Surrealist movement. Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and Dorothea Tanning, among many others, embodied their age as they struggled toward artistic maturity and their own “liberation of the spirit” in the context of the Surrealist revolution. Their stories and achievements are presented here against the background of the turbulent decades of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s and the war that forced Surrealism into exile in New York and Mexico. Whitney Chadwick, author of the highly acclaimed Women, Art, and Society, interviewed and corresponded with most of the artists themselves in the course of her research. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, now revised with a new foreword by art historian Dawn Ades, contains a wealth of extracts from unpublished writings and numerous illustrations never before reproduced. Since this book was first published, it has acquired the undeniable status of a classic among artists, art historians, critics, and cultural historians. It has inspired and necessitated a revision of the story of the Surrealist movement.
Here are some of the most extravagant and ingenious images ever created in art and in haute couture- fruits of the love affair between fashion and Surrealism. Their relationship began in the Paris of the 1920s when Surrealist artists experimented not only with the fine arts but with photography, film and costume design.
"This multi-disciplinary and cross-generational project explores the central importance of the house within surrealism and its legacies. It brings the first surrealists together with contemporary artists, film-makers and architects. Through a strategy of accumulation and poetic contamination, each informs the other."--Back cover.
"Describes with plenty of colour how surrealism, from Rene Magritte's bowler hats to Salvador Dali's watches, was born and developed." - The Times (UK) As she did for the Modernists In Montmartre, noted art historian and biographer Sue Roe now tells the story of the Surrealists in Montparnasse. In Montparnasse begins on the eve of the First World War and ends with the 1936 unveiling of Dalí’s Lobster Telephone. As those extraordinary years unfolded, the Surrealists found ever more innovative ways of exploring the interior life, and asking new questions about how to define art. In Montparnasse recounts how this artistic revolution came to be amidst the salons and cafés of that vibrant neighborhood. Sue Roe is both an incisive art critic of these pieces and a beguiling biographer with a fingertip feel for this compelling world. Beginning with Duchamp, Roe then takes us through the rise of the Dada movement, the birth of Surrealist photography with Man Ray, the creation of key works by Ernst, Cocteau, and others, through the arrival of Dalí. On canvas and in their readymades and other works these artists juxtaposed objects never before seen together to make the viewer marvel at the ordinary—and at the workings of the subconscious. We see both how this art came to be and how the artists of Montparnasse lived. Roe puts us with Gertrude Stein in her box seat at the opening of The Rite of Spring; with Duchamp as he installs his famous urinal; at a Cocteau theatrical with Picasso and Coco Chanel; with Breton at a session with Freud; and with Man Ray as he romances Kiki de Montparnasse. Stein said it best when she noted that the Surrealists still saw in the common ways of the 19th century, but they complicated things with the bold new vision of the 20th. Their words mark an enormously important watershed in the history of art—and they forever changed the way we all see the world.
Surrealism, one of the influential movements of the 20th century, had a profound impact on all forms of culture. Containing over 350 illustrations, this book examines its impact in the wider fields of design and the decorative arts and its sometimes uneasy relationship with the commercial world.
This is the definitive study of US artist Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), positioning her as one of the most fascinating and significant creative forces to emerge from the 20th century. It provides a framework within which to consider the range and depth of Tanning's work, well beyond the better-known early surrealist works of the 1940s, and makes connections between her life experiences and thematic preoccupations. Extensively illustrated and featuring unpublished material from interviews which the author conducted with the artist between 2000 and 2009, this book will appeal to the general museum-going public as well as academics, students, curators and collectors.
Ur-Surrealist Yves Tanguy belonged to the inner circle of the 1920s Parisian avant-garde, alongside such figures as Salvador Dal', Max Ernst, and Alberto Giacometti, making essential contributions to Surrealist manifestoes, magazines, and exhibitions. Tanguy's artistic obsession was the world of imagination, of dreams and reveries, and his cryptically codified imagery continues to perplex audiences today. His paintings seem to exist in a hazy, oddly beautiful limbo dimension beyond time and space, a world at once vertiginous and calm, disturbing and breathtaking. The central focus of Yves Tanguy and Surrealism is the Surrealist mode, to which Tanguy dedicated himself like no other painter of his time, cementing the movement's place in the history of visual art. On the basis of previously unpublished documents and works, authors discuss Tanguy's otherworldly oeuvre in all its aspects--from his development as an artist to the reception of his work in the United States. With stunning reproductions in full color as well as black and white, Yves Tanguy and Surrealism is an extensive overview of the work of an artist whose forays into the creative unknown continue to resonate.
