Being With (Etre Avec) 1946 Surrealism Oil on canvas The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
‘Being With (Etre Avec)’ is one of Matta’s ‘Social Morphology’ works and represents a direct response to the horrors of WW2. Matta’s expression in the menacing mechanical contraptions and the contorted, violated humanoid figures reflects his deep dismay.
Roberto Matta 1911-2002
Roberto Matta Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Modern Art Born: 11 November 1911, Santiago, Chile Nationality: Chilean Died: 23 November 2002, Civitavecchia, Italy
Matta was one of Chile’s best-known artists. He is a seminal figure of the abstract expressionist and surrealist art of the 20th -century
Battle of Germany 1944 Surrealism Oil on canvas Imperial War Museums, UK
The last painting completed by Nash while he was employed by the War Artist’s Advisory Commission, ‘Battle of Germany’ is a sequel to his ‘Battle of Britain’ painting (1941). Using reports from crews participating in German air raids, Nash painted a German city under attack.
Paul Nash 1889-1946
Paul Nash Surrealism Born: 11 May 1889, London, England Nationality: British Died: 11 July 1946, Bournemouth, England
Nash was a surrealist painter, war artist, photographer, writer, and designer of applied art. Among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the 20th century, Nash played an important role in the evolution of Modernism in English art
The Alcove An Interior With Three Women by Leonor Fini
The Alcove: An Interior with Three Women 1939 Surrealism Oil on canvas Collection of the Edward James Foundation, Sussex, UK
‘The Alcove: An Interior with Three Women’ features a dimly lit interior with three women. The women at the front, attired in battle dress, is a portrait of Leonora Carrington.
Leonor Fini 1907-1996
Leonor Fini Surrealism, Magic Realism, Symbolism Born: 30 August 1907, Buenos Ares, Argentina Nationality: Argentine-Italian Died: 18 January 1996, Paris, France
Fini was a surrealist painter, designer, illustrator, and author best known for her depictions of powerful and erotic women
Battle of Britain 1941 Surrealism Oil on canvas Imperial War Museums, UK
Nash painted ‘Battle of Britain’ during the battle itself capturing the parched countryside and the trails of airplanes in the sky, both those still flying and those falling and burning. The Luftwaffe is shown advancing in formation whilst RAF aircraft break up these forces in the centre of the painting.
Paul Nash 1889-1946
Paul Nash Surrealism Born: 11 May 1889, London, England Nationality: British Died: 11 July 1946, Bournemouth, England
Nash was a surrealist painter, war artist, photographer, writer, and designer of applied art. Among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the 20th century, Nash played an important role in the evolution of Modernism in English art
We are making a new world 1918 Surrealism Oil on canvas Imperial War Museums, UK
Following Nash’s WW1 service he returned with many watercolors and pastel sketches depicting landscapes he had seen. ‘We are making a new world’ is one of Nash’s first oil paintings from his drawing ‘Sunrise, Inverness Copse’ (1918) It depicts the war-torn Western Front with the trees burned and the ground scarred and undulated by shell holes.
Paul Nash 1889-1946
Paul Nash Surrealism Born: 11 May 1889, London, England Nationality: British Died: 11 July 1946, Bournemouth, England
Nash was a surrealist painter, war artist, photographer, writer, and designer of applied art. Among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the 20th century, Nash played an important role in the evolution of Modernism in English art
War 2003 Surrealism Pastel on paper aluminium Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom
Reminiscent of Rego’s earlier pollical collages, ‘War’ is a flurry of chaotic activity of absurd characters, part human and part creature, playing out a scene of tragedy. In an unreal space, neither inside nor outside, the image is unsettling with a woman holding an injured child, while two more children are seen pleading and crying in the foreground. The figures wear rabbit masks erasing their identity as a sad result of war
Paula Rego 1935-2022
Paula Rego Surrealism, School of London, Feminist Art Born: 26 January 1935, Lisbon, Portugal Nationality: Portuguese-British Died: 8 June 2022, London, UK
Rego was a visual artist, considered the preeminent female artist of the late 20th and early 21st century. She is best known for her paintings and prints based on storybooks. Rego’s style evolved from abstract to representational and she favoured pastels over oils. Her work often reflected feminism
Pincushion to Serve as Fetish 1965 Sculpture Velvet, plastic funnel, metal pins, sawdust, and wool Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom
‘Pincushion to Serve as Fetish’ is an early example of Tanning’s sculptures, A funnel, sawdust, and wool are covered in black velvet and stuck with pins. An open end resembles an orifice whilst the form appears like a strange sea creature.
Dorothea Tanning 1910-2012
Dorothea Tanning Surrealism, Installation Art, Proto-Feminist Artists, Modern Sculpture Born: 25 August 1910, Illinois, USA Nationality: American Died: 31 January 2012, New York, USA
Tanning was a painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet. Art pervades much of Tanning’s life; her images, objects, and texts have become worthwhile art and her very presence transformed photographs and moments in time to make them more artistic. The whirlwind energy that followed Tanning as a person is found in her brushstrokes. Tanning’s complete oeuvre is dominated by her unstoppable life force characteristics. Her ideas were too big for rural Illinois so Tanning left for Chicago and then New York. In New York, she found both the style and company that she identified as a Surrealist. She also married Max Ernst. Tanning meticulously depicted her own dreams throughout her long career. This psychological exploration of self continued as her work developed into a more abstract and sculptural
Scylla 1938 Surrealism Oil on board Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom
‘Scylla’ is Colquhoun’s most important work. The canvas is dominated by two vertical rocks rising out of clear water. Both phallic and feminine the painting situates Colquhoun’s work within the surrealist movement in its widest sense.
Ithell Colquhoun 1906-1988
Ithell Colquhoun Surrealism Born: 9 October 1906, Shillong, India Nationality: British Died: 11 April 1988, Cornwall, England
Colquhoun was a painter, occultist, poet, and author. In the 1930s she was part of the British Surrealist Group but was expelled when she refused to renounce her connection with occult groups
Painted when Fini was 79 years old, ‘Retour de Voyage’ portrays the artist sitting in peace in front of an oriental screen. Her hair is wrapped in a halo-like headdress with her shoulders and hands accentuated in the Italian Mannerist tradition.
Leonor Fini 1907-1996
Leonor Fini Surrealism, Magic Realism, Symbolism Born: 30 August 1907, Buenos Ares, Argentina Nationality: Argentine-Italian Died: 18 January 1996, Paris, France
Fini was a surrealist painter, designer, illustrator, and author best known for her depictions of powerful and erotic women
Landscape from a Dream 1936-38 Surrealism Oil on canvas Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom
‘Landscape from a Dream’ is considered as the culmination of Nash’s personal response to Surrealism. Completed after Nash visited the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 it is inspired by the Surrealists’ fascination with Freud as well as their theories surrounding the power of dreams.
Paul Nash 1889-1946
Paul Nash Surrealism Born: 11 May 1889, London, England Nationality: British Died: 11 July 1946, Bournemouth, England
Nash was a surrealist painter, war artist, photographer, writer, and designer of applied art. Among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the 20th century, Nash played an important role in the evolution of Modernism in English art
Eclipse of the Sunflower 1945 Surrealism Oil on canvas – British Council Collection
‘Eclipse of the Sunflower’ depicts two sunflowers, one lying dead and withered, and the other drifting high in the position of the sun. The sunflower in the sky is healthy yet about to be eclipsed as the flower head has become detached from the stem, suggesting the painting is a representation of looming death and the moment the soul leaves the body.
Paul Nash 1889-1946
Paul Nash Surrealism Born: 11 May 1889, London, England Nationality: British Died: 11 July 1946, Bournemouth, England
Nash was a surrealist painter, war artist, photographer, writer, and designer of applied art. Among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the 20th century, Nash played an important role in the evolution of Modernism in English art
La Guardiana del Huevo Negro 1955 Surrealism Oil on canvas
‘La Guardiana del Huevo Negro’ portrays a cloaked woman sitting alone in an arid desert balancing a black egg upon her lap. She is the keeper, guardian, and protector of the egg. Fini reveals her interest in notions of divinity and the mystical powers of womanhood.
Leonor Fini 1907-1996
Leonor Fini Surrealism, Magic Realism, Symbolism Born: 30 August 1907, Buenos Ares, Argentina Nationality: Argentine-Italian Died: 18 January 1996, Paris, France
Fini was a surrealist painter, designer, illustrator, and author best known for her depictions of powerful and erotic women
Dancing Ostriches 1995 Surrealism Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium Saatchi Gallery, London, UK
‘Dancing Ostriches’ is part of a series of paintings created by Rego in which she depicts muscular, stocky women stretching and preparing for a ballet performance. The ‘Ostriches’ are all dressed in black continuing Rego’s interest in the opposing states of innocence and experience, of life and death
Paula Rego 1935-2022
Paula Rego Surrealism, School of London, Feminist Art Born: 26 January 1935, Lisbon, Portugal Nationality: Portuguese-British Died: 8 June 2022, London, UK
Rego was a visual artist, considered the preeminent female artist of the late 20th and early 21st century. She is best known for her paintings and prints based on storybooks. Rego’s style evolved from abstract to representational and she favoured pastels over oils, Her work often reflected feminism
Etre Cible Nous Monde 1958 Surrealism Oil on canvas Private Collection
‘Etre Cible Nous Monde’ (Our Earth is a Target) exemplifies Matta’s work of the mid-1950s with a cosmic landscape dominated by a machine. The imagery and title suggest the paranoia and fear of the atomic age
Roberto Matta 1911-2002
Roberto Matta Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Modern Art Born: 11 November 1911, Santiago, Chile Nationality: Chilean Died: 23 November 2002, Civitavecchia, Italy
Matta was one of Chile’s best-known artists. He is a seminal figure of the abstract expressionist and surrealist art of the 20th -century
Cassiopeia 1 1960 Surrealism Wood, metal, paper, glass, box construction Estate of Joseph Cornell
Dedicated to one of Cornell’s primary interests, outer space, ‘Cassiopeia 1’ reveals a darker mood than many of his other works. The box focuses on the constellation placed beside an image of Taurus on the right and Orion on the left. A moon-like ball rests on two thin metal bars positioned vertically in the walls of the box. The central comic image suggests depth and makes the viewer feel they are looking through a window into another world.
Joseph Cornell 1903-1972
Joseph Cornell Surrealism, Assemblage Born: 24 December 1903, New York, USA Nationality: American Died: 29 December 1972, New York, USA
Cornell was a visual artist and filmmaker. He was one of the pioneers of assemblage, Cornell was an avant-garde experimental filmmaker influenced by the Surrealists. He was largely a self-taught artist who would improvise his own original style with cast-off and discarded artifacts. For most of his life, Cornell lived in relative isolation caring for his mother and disabled brother, however, he remained aware of and in contact with his contemporary artists
Familiar Objects 1928 Surrealism Oil on canvas Private Collection
‘Familiar Objects’ confronts the viewer with five men each responding to a random object. Characteristic of Magritte the portraits are bland with indistinct features, expressions, and clothes. However, the objects are unique and command the attention away from the figures staring at them
René Magritte 1898-1967
René Magritte Surrealism, Modern Art, Dada Born: 21 November 1898, Lessines, Belgium Nationality: Belgian Died: 15 August 1967, Schaerbeek, Belgium
Magritte was a surrealist artist best known for his portrayals of familiar objects in unfamiliar contexts that provoke questions about the nature and boundaries of reality as representation, Magritte’s imagery has been influential in other movements such as Pop Art, Minimalist Art, and Conceptual Art
Empire of Light 1953-54 Surrealism Oil on canvas The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy
A work that exemplifies the sort of simple paradox that characterizes Magritte’s work, ‘The Empire of Light’ depicts a dusk scene with a streetlamp glowing peacefully beneath cheerful white clouds in a baby-blue sky. An unnerving juxtaposition despite both elements of night and day being calming and lovely in their own right.
René Magritte 1898-1967
René Magritte Surrealism, Modern Art, Dada Born: 21 November 1898, Lessines, Belgium Nationality: Belgian Died: 15 August 1967, Schaerbeck, Belgium
Magritte was a surrealist artist best known for his portrayals of familiar objects in unfamiliar contexts that provoke questions about the nature and boundaries of reality as representation, Magritte’s imagery has been influential in other movements such as Pop Art, Minimalist Art, and Conceptual Art
Ulu’s Pants 1952 Surrealism Oil and tempera on panel Private Collection
Hybrid characters inhabit the labyrinth world of ‘Ulu’s Pants’ revealing Carrington’s nostalgia for Celtic mythology she learned as a child, as well as various other cultural traditions from her time in Mexico. The disconcerting figures in the foreground are arranged in a static row as if in a performance of a play. An egg is guarded at the lower right corner by a strange red-headed figure. Carrington was concerned with continuous renewal through self-discovery incarnated by the shape-shifting figures in the foreground and by the far-off creatures searching for a pathway through the maze.
Leonora Carrington 1917-2011
Leonora Carrington Surrealism Born: 6 April 1917, Lancashire, England Nationality: British Died: 25 May 2011, Mexico City, Mexico
Carrington was an artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. For most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving members of the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. She was a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s
Rose of the Four Winds 1950 Surrealism Oil on canvas Minneapolis Institute of Arts. USA
‘Rose of the Four Winds’ depicts the hard architecture of a tower dominating a steely grey and purple sky. The ground is covered in a congestion of boulders, pebbles, and bones. The interplay of these elements is foreboding and apocalyptic, reminiscent of bombed-out cities
Yves Tanguy 1900-1955
Yves Tanguy Surrealism, Biomorphism Born: 5 January 1900, Paris France Nationality: French Died: 15 January 1955, Connecticut, USA
Tanguy was a quintessential Surrealist. Socially eccentric he was known to eat spiders as a party trick, Tanguy was best known for his misshapen rocks and molten surfaces that lent definition to aesthetic Surrealism. Tanguy was self-taught; however, he was an extremely talented artist, painting a hyper-real world with exacting precision. His landscapes, a high-octane blend of fiction and fact, captured the attention of Salvador Dali, Mark Rothko, and numerous other important Surrealist artists and thinkers. Carl Gustav Jung used a canvas by Tanguy to illustrate his theory of the collective unconscious
The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) by Leonora Carrington
The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) 1947 Surrealism Tempera on wood panel Private Collection
Themes of transformation and metamorphosis and the divine feminine form a significant force in Carrington’s work. “The Giantess” depicts a monumental female figure clothed in a red dress and a green cape towering above a forest. To geese are emerging from beneath the cape and delicate animal figures and shapes are delineated on her gown. The giantess is protecting the universal symbol of new life, an egg, that is clasped in her hands.
Leonora Carrington 1917-2011
Leonora Carrington Surrealism Born: 6 April 1917, Lancashire, England Nationality: British Died: 25 May 2011, Mexico City, Mexico
Carrington was an artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. For most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving members of the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. She was a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s
The Enigma of William Tell 1933 Surrealism Oil on canvas Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
The legend of William Tell is of a man forced to put an apple on the head of his son and shoot an arrow through it. Dali takes this age-old tale further with a Freudian twist. In this painting, the man is holding a baby who has a lamb chop on its head. Here the twist plays out as the man is about to eat the child and the birds await the leftovers in the corner. Dali had a stormy relationship with his family which is often hinted at in his paintings. “The Enigma of William Tell” is a prime example of how dreams process persistent dilemmas in our lives through wild symbolism and subconscious representations.
Salvador Dali 1904-1989
Salvador Dali Surrealism, Surrealist Sculpture, Biomorphism, Assemblage Born: 11 May 1904, Catalonia, Spain Nationality: Spanish Died: 23 January 1989, Catalonia, Spain
Dali was a surrealist artist known for his technical skill, precision draftsmanship, and the striking and often bizarre nature of his images. Initially influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance he became increasingly interested in Cubism and the avant-garde movements of the time. By the late 1920s, he joined the Surrealist group of artists and became one of its leading exponents
Double Sitting 1988 Painting Synthetic Polymer Paint on Board and Paint on Formica The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
Primarily a sculptor, Artschwager created paintings throughout his career exploring the same combinations of pictorialism, surrealism, and abstraction as in his sculptures. “Double Sitting” depicts an unsettling interior space that doesn’t make sense. A panelled floor unites two walls leading off in different directions. Projecting out of the wall two chair-like forms create an illusion of space. The elongated perspective of the floor and the mirrored walls give the work an uneasy quality similar to the distorted surrealism of Dorothea Tanning.
Richard Artschwager 1923-2013
Richard Artschwager Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Minimalism, Installation Art Born: 26 December 1923, Washington, DC, USA Nationality: American Died: 9 February 2013, New York, USA
Artschwager was a painter, illustrator, and sculptor, often associated with Pop Art, Conceptual, Art, and Minimalism. Along with his wife, Ann, he lived and worked in New York City
Self-Portrait 1937-38 Surrealism Oil on canvas The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
This self-portrait is an exemplification of Carrington’s skewed perception of and exploration of her own femininity. She has placed herself on a blue armchair attired in androgynous riding clothes directly facing the viewer. She is reaching out to a female hyena which is imitating her pose and gesture in an analogous way that the artist’s wild mane of hair echoes the colouring of the animal.
Leonora Carrington 1917-2011
Leonora Carrington Surrealism Born: 6 April 1917, Lancashire, England Nationality: British Died: 25 May 2011, Mexico City, Mexico
Carrington was an artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. For most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving members of the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. She was a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s
Sculpture to be Lost in the Forest 1932 Surrealist Sculpture Bronze Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom
Rooted in Arp’s fascination with the psychological processes of growth and death, “Sculpture to Lost in the Forest” suggests some sort of landscape whilst evoking associations the shift and change as the viewer looks at the work. An example of Arp’s ability to balance abstraction with allusion the forms are constantly in flux and morphing.
Hans Arp 1886-1966
Hans Arp Dada, Surrealism, Surrealist Sculpture, Biomorphism Born: 16 September 1886, Strasbourg, Alsace Nationality: French-German Died: 7 June 1966, Basel, Switzerland
Arp was a sculptor, painter, and poet best known as a Dadaist and abstract artist
Marcel Duchamp Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Conceptual Art, Kinetic Art Born: 28 July 1887, Normandy, France Nationality: French Died: 2 October 1968, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Duchamp was a painter, sculptor, writer, and chess player whose work is most often associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; Duchamp is regarded as one of the three artists who defined the revolutionary development of the plastic arts in the first decades of the 20th century. Duchamp’s developments in painting and sculpture had an enormous impact on 20th-century art. By challenging the notion of what is art with his readymades, Duchamp is one of few artists that changed the course of art history. He sent shock waves across the art world that are still rippling today.
Duchamp challenged and changed art history in a way few artists did, by challenging the notion of what is art with his first readymades that sent shockwaves through the art world that are still felt today. Duchamp’s preoccupation with the mechanisms of human sexuality and desire and his fondness of wordplay aligns his work with Surrealism, although Duchamp refused to be affiliated with any specific art movement. His insistence art should be driven by ideas above all else earnt Duchamp recognition as the father of Conceptual Art. His refusal to follow art conventions and a deep fear of repetition led to Duchamp producing relatively few works in his short career, and ultimately, he retired from the art world to spend his later years playing chess
Nude Descending, 1912. Oil on canvas – The Philadelphia Museum of Art: Collection of Louise and Walter Arenberg. USA
Duchamp coined the term ‘readymade’ to designate mass-produced everyday objects taken out of context and promoted to the status of a piece of art by the choice of the artist. A category of art that was a performative act as much as it was about style. ‘Readymade’ had far-reaching implications as to what can be considered an object of art.
Rejecting the purely visual and what he referred to as ‘retinal pleasure,’ Duchamp favoured an intellectual and concept-driven approach to art, artmaking, and art viewing. However, he remained committed to the study of perspective and optics that underpinned his experiments with kinetics and kinetic devices reflecting the representations of motion and machines common to both the Futurist and Surrealist artists of the time
Duchamp’s work is characterized by his tongue-in-cheek wit and subversive humour rife with innuendo. He formed puns out of everyday phrases and expressions that he conveyed visually. It is the linguistic dimension of his work that paved the way for Conceptual art.
Raised in Normandy in a family of artists, Duchamp’s father was mayor of Blainville and his mother raised the seven children and painted landscapes portraying the French countryside. Family time consisted of playing chess, painting, reading, and playing music. One of Duchamp’s earliest works, “Landscape at Blainville (1902) which he painted at aged 15, reflected his love of Claude Monet/ He was close to his two older brothers, and after they left home to become artists, Duchamp joined them in Paris to study painting at the Académie Julian. His brother, Jacques, supported him during his studies, and Duchamp’s earned an income as a cartoonist.
Early 1900s Paris was the ideal place for Duchamp to get acquainted with modern trends in art and painting. He studied Fauvism, Cubism, and Impressionism as well as the innovative approaches to structure and colour. He favoured the Cubist concept of reordering reality instead of simply representing it. Paintings such as “Nude Descending a Staircase” (1912) illustrated Duchamp’s ideas of machinery and its connection to the movement of the human body through space. Duchamp also subscribed to the avant-garde ideals of the artist as an anti-academic and felt an affinity to artists such as Odilon Redon. From the early stages of his career, Duchamp was drawn to the Symbolistic allure of mystery such as women as the elusive femme fatale, sexual identity, and desire which eventually led him towards Dad and Surrealism.
3 Standard Stoppages. 1913-14. Mixed media – The Museum of Modern Art, New York. USA
By 1911 Duchamp met Francis Picabia and the following year attended a theatre adaption of Raymond Roussel’s “Impressions d’Afrique” with Picabia and Guillaume Apollinaire. The experience made a deep impression on Duchamp and led to his interest in cross-genre pollination which influenced the artist to develop an eclectic approach to art creation.
Duchamp emigrated to New York in 1915 and created several readymades. By signing them, Duchamp laid claim to found objects such as a snow shovel, a bicycle wheel, or even a urinal. Objects tied loosely but symbolically to themes such as desire, childhood memories, and erotica all designed to show the absurdity of the practice of canonizing avant-garde art. During 1948 to 1923 Duchamp devoted his time to planning and creating one of his two major works “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even or The Large Glass.” An installation of machinery wedged between glass panels was his first rejection of the painterly obsession with pleasing the eye.
As the Surrealist movement became popular in France, Duchamp travelled between Paris and New York participating in printed textual projects, sculptural installations, and collaborative works in all mediums with the Surrealists. Duchamp always kept a distance from groups – and the politics they came with. As such he was never truly part of the Surrealist or Dada groups,
L.H.O.O.Q, 1919. Collotype – Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Nederlands
In 1920, Duchamp in an alternative female persona, Rose Selavy, in order to explore fully the ideas of sexual identity. He continued making his readymades and exhibited the famous “Bottle Rack” series in 1936. However, he secluded himself from the wider art world and kept to a tight-knit group of artists, including Man Ray, who photographed Duchamp throughout his life. For more than twenty years Duchamp worked in complete secrecy on his second masterwork, “Etant Donnes” a sexualized and elaborate diorama, Duchamp shunned the public eye, preferring to play chess with select guests until his death in 1968
Following his withdrawal from the art world, Duchamp remained an influential, if passive, presence in New York avant-garde circles until he was rediscovered by the Neo-Dadaists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in the 1950s. Duchamp welcomed an association with Dada, many years after the group’s demise, without conforming to the politics and issues of group dynamics.
Duchamp insisted that art is an expression of the mind rather than the eye or the hand which attracted Minimalists and Conceptual artists alike. It ushered in a new era where the seminal concept of the mass-produced readymade was seized upon not only by Andy Warhol and other Pop artists who claim Duchamp as their founding father but also by Fluxus, Arte Povera, and Performance artists due to its performative aspects.
Duchamp’s criticism of art institutions made him a cult figure for generations of artists refusing to go down the path of the conventional, commercial art career. The theoretical thrust of Duchamp’s eclectic and limited output accounts for his continuing impact on successive 20th and 21st-century avant-garde movements and individual artists alike.
La Boite-en-Valise, 1935-41. Mixed media – Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge, MA, USA
Resources
The Duchamp Effect by Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon
Artist: Dora Maar Born: 22 November 1907, Tours, France Nationality: French Movements: Surrealism, Dada and Surrealist Photography, Photomontage Died: 16 July 1997, Paris, France
Maar was a talented photographer and made work that developed quickly from acute poetic realism to Surrealist manipulations. She made images out of her own emotional interior and her desire to escape from it. Maar abandoned photography because Picasso insisted photographers were painters waiting to be released. Between 1935-45 she was in love with Picasso and became a muse for other artists as well as a practicing painter herself. Maar suffered a breakdown after separating from Picasso and recovered through the help of Jacques Lacan, the famous psychiatrist. She moved from Paris to rural Provence and in later life painted abstract landscapes and melancholic still life. A recluse, she became a devoted Catholic. Living in the shadow of Picasso she never returned to photography, the medium which exulted in her exquisite and unusual talent.
After the Rain, 1933. Photograph
Maar’s most surrealistic photographs examine recurring motifs such as hair, shells, shadows, and spirals. The images are disturbing, foreboding, and macabre. An invaluable documenter of the lives of other artists, Maar famously photographed Picasso as he completed Guernica and other female Surrealist artists. Marr surrounded the women in darkness to focus on their defiant and seductive characteristics, exposing uneasy aspects of the human subconscious.
In Picasso’s ‘The Weeping Woman’ series of portraits of Maar, she is depicted with two faces made up of a collection of sharp and violent lines. The paintings exemplify anxiety in love and the potential of harm caused by a destructive and toxic relationship. Maar’s later career was sadly tainted by her tumultuous affair with Picasso and stands as a warning to others.
Maar was born Henrietta Theodora Markovich in Tours, France. Her father was a Croatian architect; her mother was French and raised in the Catholic faith. She spent most of her childhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where her father was working on several projects. She read in English and spoke Spanish and French fluently. Naturally left-handed but her parents and teachers had forced her to use her right hand for writing, eating, and conducting daily affairs. She always used her left hand to draw and paint.
Maar returned to Paris to study painting in 1925. She attended the École des Arts Décoratifs, Académie Julien, and Académie da Passy. She also spent time studying with the Cubist André Lhote. She abandoned painting for photography and studied at the École de Photographie de la Ville de Paris. It was at this time she shortened her name and became Dora Maar.
Untitled, 1934. Gelatin silver print Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France
The French set designer and photographer Pierre Kéfer noticed Maar’s talents and around 1930 asked to share his studio in Neuilly. They worked together on advertising, portraits, and fashion photography. Maar also depicted nudes for erotic publications, posed for artists such as Man Ray, and took photographs for the books of art critic, historian, and Louvre curator, Germain Bazin.
Maar began associating with some of the most prominent intellectuals in Europe at the time. She considered the advertising photographer and director of a French weekly newspaper, Louis-Victor Emmanuel Sougez, as her mentor. With Henri Cartier-Bresson, she studied photography and he encouraged her to become a photojournalist. Driven by Sougez, Maar’s exploration of photography deepened. She opened her own studio at 29 Rue d’Astorg when the Kéfer-Maar studio closed.
Maar worked from her studio through the early to mid-1930s and began creating some of her most well-known Surrealist photographs. She immersed herself in the Surrealist circles and was admired by the leading poets and artists of the movement. Many of her photographic portraits from the 1930s were included in Paul Eluard’s Le Temps Déboirde (1947).
A committed and active leftist, Maar joined and supported anti-Fascist political groups, including Contre-Attaque, Masses, and Octobre. Wearing her passions and beliefs on her sleeve she was known to be inclined to stormy, reactionary outbursts.
Pére Ubu, 1936. Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
Picasso and Maar met on a movie set in 1935, although Picasso did not recall the encounter. Maar engineered a meeting with Picasso the following year by sitting at a table at the Café de Deux Magots, knowing the artist was a frequent patron. She played a game involving stabbing a small knife between her fingers and Picasso watched as she occasionally jabbed her fingers and small drops of blood appeared on her lacy black gloves. This enchanted the narcissistic artist and led to a tempestuous love affair between the two. Picasso painted Maar many times and she became renowned as the model for the Weeping Woman canvases made between 1937 and 1944. Most of these portraits appeared tortured and distorted.
Despite the dysfunction between Maar and Picasso, she was the only person Picasso permitted in his studio while he was working on ‘Guernica’, his 1937 groundbreaking painting. Maar extensively photographed the piece, was the model for the woman with the lamp, and painted a few brushstrokes on the canvas. The Guernica series of photographs were among the last of Maar’s photographic work as she followed Picasso who convinced her painting was a superior medium.
Maar’s relationship with Picasso deteriorated along with her mental health. Picasso left for Francoise Gilot and Maar was sent to St. Anne’s Hospital for electroshock therapy. The Neo-Freudian psychiatrist, Jacques Lacon, took over her care. Under his reluctant guidance, Maar turned to religion, and following experiments with Buddhism and the occult she became a fervent Roman Catholic. She became reclusive but began to focus on painting. Maar concentrated on still life and landscapes creating a large body of work in the remaining decades of her life. Maar divided her time between Paris and Ménerbes, eventually living full-time in the latter. She was devout for the rest of her life and most people in Ménerbes only saw her when she went to church services.
Rue d’Astorg, 1936. Gelatin silver print
In 1990 the final exhibition of Maar’s work before her death was held at the 1900-2000 gallery in Paris. At this time, Maar was a dedicated follower of the auction results for the works of Picasso and lived off the sales of the ones in her possession at the end of her life. Maar passed away in 1997. She kept everything that Picasso had given her, no matter how bizarre, strange, or grim; including paintings, newspaper cuttings, and sketches on random pieces of paper. Following her death, Maar’s collection was sold at auction, worth millions of dollars which were given to distant relatives as she had never married nor had children
Bird Bath 1974 Surrealism Colour serigraph on paper Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California, USA
Carrington added portrayals of older women to her visual vocabulary of repeated settings and figures late in her career. In “Bird Bath” the structure in the background recalls Crookhey Hall, Carrington’s childhood home. In the foreground, an older woman dressed in black sprays red paint onto a surprised-looking bird. The large basin of water and a clean white cloth held by her assistant allude to the Christian ritual of baptism.
Leonora Carrington 1917-2011
Leonora Carrington Surrealism Born: 6 April 1917, Lancashire, England Nationality: British Died: 25 May 2011, Mexico City, Mexico
Carrington was an artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. For most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving members of the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. She was a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s
Young Virgin 1954 Surrealism Oil on canvas Private Collection
Demonstrating Dali’s style of exaggerating the representation of the female form within an abstracted background this painting is undoubtedly focused on sexual allusion. Overtly phallic rhinoceros horns, and form the components of the central buttock, and the disparate images threatening it. The title of the painting reinforces Dali’s conflicting views of women as mysterious objects of power, fear, and seduction.
Salvador Dali Surrealism, Surrealist Sculpture, Biomorphism, Assemblage Born: 11 May 1904, Catalonia, Spain Nationality: Spanish Died: 23 January 1989, Catalonia, Spain
Salvador Dali 1904-1989
Dali was a surrealist artist known for his technical skill, precision draftsmanship, and the striking and often bizarre nature of his images. Initially influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance he became increasingly interested in Cubism and the avant-garde movements of the time. By the late 1920s, he joined the Surrealist group of artists and became one of its leading exponents.
Rock – Ploumanac’h 1985 Surrealism Watercolour, bodycolor, chalks, pen, and ink Private Collection
“Rock – Ploumanac’h” portrays a cluster of rocks against a background of blue sea and green sky. Created by Agar in the last years of her life it is based on a work from her much better-known set of photographs of Brittany’s Ploumanac’h coastline taken while she was on holiday with her partner Joseph Bard in 1936.
Eileen Agar Surrealism, Modern Photography, Performance Art Born: 1 December 1899, Buenos Aries, Argentina Nationality: British-Argentinian Died: 7 November 1991, London, UK
Eileen Agar 1899-1991
Agar was a painter and photographer most often associated with the Surrealist movement. As with many female artists of the time, Agar has often been defined by the male company she associated with rather than her creative output. She was one of the most adventurous and influential Surrealist artists in Britain, with a prolific working energy that she sustained well into her eighties. Agar’s free-flowing practice through painting, photography, sculpture, and collage was diverse yet bound together by her emphasis on the germinal power of the imagination
Un Chien Andalou 1927 Surrealism 35mm Film The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
Dali had acquired an education in art by the age of 24 and was inspired by Picasso to practice his own interpretation of Cubism and utilize Surrealist ideas and concepts in his paintings. It was also at this time he joined with Luis Buñuel, a film director, to create something radically new – a film that veered from the traditional narrative into dream logic, lack of plot, non-sequential scenes, and free association. Recreating an ethereal setting, “Un Chien Andalou” presents images in montaged clips that jostle reality and tap the unconsciousness, shocking the viewer awake and even soliciting feelings of discomfort as if in a nightmare. The film was a sensation and gained Dali entrance to the most creative group of Parisian artists of the time, the Surrealists. “Un Chien Andalou” is recognised as the first Surrealist film and remains in prominent in the canon of experimental filmmaking.
Salvador Dali 1904-1989
Salvador Dali Surrealism, Surrealist Sculpture, Biomorphism, Assemblage Born: 11 May 1904, Catalonia, Spain Nationality: Spanish Died: 23 January 1989, Catalonia, Spain
Dali was a surrealist artist known for his technical skill, precision draftsmanship, and the striking and often bizarre nature of his images. Initially influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance he became increasingly interested in Cubism and the avant-garde movements of the time. By the late 1920s, he joined the Surrealist group of artists and became one of its leading exponents
Great Masturbator 1929 Surrealism Oil on canvas Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain
A depiction of a shoreline scene similar to Dali’s home in Catalonia with a large, distorted face at its centre. A nude female representing Dali’s muse Gala rises from the head symbolizing the male fantasy conjured when engaging in the activities suggested by the painting’s title. Her position suggests impending fellatio while he is cut and bleeding at the knees signifying a stifled sexuality and may represent Dali’s lifelong phobia of female genitalia. The painting also includes the motifs of a grasshopper as a beacon of sexual anxiety, ants symbolising decay and death, and an egg to represent fertility.
Salvador Dali 1904-1989
Salvador Dali Surrealism, Surrealist Sculpture, Biomorphism, Assemblage Born: 11 May 1904, Catalonia, Spain Nationality: Spanish Died: 23 January 1989, Catalonia, Spain
Dali was a surrealist artist known for his technical skill, precision draftsmanship, and the striking and often bizarre nature of his images. Initially influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance he became increasingly interested in Cubism and the avant-garde movements of the time. By the late 1920s, he joined the Surrealist group of artists and became one of its leading exponents
In Voluptas Mors 1951 Surrealism Gelatin silver print
The viewer initially sees a skull but a deeper observation of “In Voluptas Mors” reveals seven female nudes. Dali’s precision in the sketch for this piece took the photographer Philippe Halsman over three hours to realize. It is an excellent example of Dali’s many and various experiments with optical illusion and visual perception. One can either see a skull or seven nudes but not both at the same time.
Salvador Dali 1904-1989
Salvador Dali Surrealism, Surrealist Sculpture, Biomorphism, Assemblage Born: 11 May 1904, Catalonia, Spain Nationality: Spanish Died: 23 January 1989, Catalonia, Spain
Dali was a surrealist artist known for his technical skill, precision draftsmanship, and the striking and often bizarre nature of his images. Initially influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance he became increasingly interested in Cubism and the avant-garde movements of the time. By the late 1920s, he joined the Surrealist group of artists and became one of its leading exponents
Head of Dylan Thomas 1960-62 Surrealism Oil and acrylic on board Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom
“Head of Dylan Thomas” Agar used the profile-portrait style composed n white flowing lines on a canvas filled with abstract motifs to render an impression of the neo-Romantic poet and close friend of the artist. Thomas was a key figure in literary surrealism and the free compositional style of this work is perhaps a homage to the free spirit of the man himself.
Eileen Agar 1899-1991
Eileen Agar Surrealism, Modern Photography, Performance Art Born: 1 December 1899, Buenos Aries, Argentina Nationality: British-Argentinian Died: 7 November 1991, London, UK
Agar was a painter and photographer most often associated with the Surrealist movement. As with many female artists of the time, Agar has often been defined by the male company she associated with rather than her creative output. In reality, she was one of the most adventurous and influential Surrealist artists in Britain, with a prolific working energy that she sustained well into her eighties. Agar’s free-flowing practice through painting, photography, sculpture, and collage was diverse yet bound together by her emphasis on the germinal power of the imagination.
Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse by Eileen Agar
Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse 1936 Surrealism Mixed media including cork, paint, lobster shell, fish bones, coral, and artificial flowers Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK
“Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse” is formed from a painted blue cork basket, topped with a variety of found objects including natural debris with a maritime theme. One of a number of works by Agar, created throughout her life, in which Surrealist principles of composition are taken beyond the canvas to applied design. Created in 1936 the hat came into the public awareness when Agar wore it for an interview with James Laver on the tv show “The Eye of the Artist” in 1948. The piece applies the principles of Surrealist bricolage to fashion design overrunning the conceptual and formal limits of fashion in the process; the hat becomes something other than just a hat. It stands as one of the iconic pieces of Surrealist fashion design.
Eileen Agar 1899-1991
Eileen Agar Surrealism, Modern Photography, Performance Art Born: 1 December 1899, Buenos Aries, Argentina Nationality: British-Argentinian Died: 7 November 1991, London, UK
Agar was a painter and photographer most often associated with the Surrealist movement. As with many female artists of the time, Aga has often been defined by the male company she associated with rather than her creative output. In reality, she was one of the most adventurous and influential Surrealist artists in Britain, with a prolific working energy that she sustained well into her eighties. Agar’s free-flowing practice through painting, photography, sculpture, and collage was diverse yet bound together by her emphasis on the germinal power of the imagination.
Artist: Yves Tanguy Born: 5 January 1900, Paris France Nationality: French-American Movements: Surrealism, Bio-morphism Died: 15 January 1955, Connecticut, USA
Tanguy was a quintessential Surrealist. Socially eccentric he was known to eat spiders as a party trick, Tanguy was best-known for his misshapen rocks and molten surfaces that lent definition to aesthetic Surrealism. Tanguy was self-taught; however, he was an extremely talented artist, painting a hyper-real world with exacting precision. His landscapes, a high-octane blend of fiction and fact, captured the attention of Salvador Dali, Mark Rothko, and numerous other important Surrealist artists and thinkers. Carl Gustav Jung used a canvas by Tanguy to illustrate his theory of the collective unconscious.
Mama, Papa is Wounded by Yves Tanguy, 1927. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
The symbolism is personal, reflecting Tanguy’s obsession with childhood memories, hallucinations, psychotic episodes, and dreams. It defies interpretation, evoking a range of associations to engage the viewers’ mental and emotional imagination. Like the other Surrealists, Tanguy was occupied by dreams and the unconscious, however, his naturalistic precision set him apart with his depictions of the mind and its contents. More vividly than any artist before Tanguy imagined and portrayed the unconscious as a place. In his landscapes, he struck a balance between realism and fantasy with objects seemingly hovering in mid-air naturally, His manipulations of scale and perspective combined with keen observation of the natural world contributed to the hallucinatory effect of his paintings.
Born into a maritime family, Tanguy’s father was a sea captain and the family lived at the Ministere de la Marine in the Place de La Concorde. Childhood summers were spent in Brittany, and the seas, skies, and stones of the Finistère coasts appear in his mature work. Tanguy dealt with some hard blows in his early life – the deaths of his father in 1908 and his brother in the First World War. His mother moved to Locronan, Finistère, and Tanguy stayed in Paris to complete his education. In his teens, he made friends with Pierre Matisse, the son of Henri Matisse, whose support and encouragement was crucial to his artistic career. Tanguy was expected by his family to join the Merchant Navy and he worked on cargo ships between South America and Africa from 1918-1919. In 1920 he was conscripted into the French Army in Tunis, where he met the poet Jacques Prévert.
Disillusioned with convention after his release from the army, Tanguy and Prévert adopted a bohemian lifestyle in Montparnasse. They moved in with writer Marcel Duhamel and their home at 54 rue du Château became a spot for informal gatherings of artists and writers. The intense yet aimless period of Tanguy’s life came to an abrupt halt in 1923, with the chance encounter that changed his life. While passing a gallery in Pari, he saw de Chirico’s Le Cerveau de L’enfant in the window and the experience he felt from the picture was electrifying and he promptly decided to become a painter. Other sources of Tanguy’s early inspiration included Hieronymus Bosch, Paulo Uccello, and Lucas Cranach, Renaissance masters whose luminous colour and perspective, Tanguy learned to emulate.
Indefinite Divisibility by Yves Tanguy, 1942. Oil on canvas. Albright – Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, USA
Tanguy was introduced to the poet and author of the Surrealist Manifesto André Breton in 1924, and in 1925 attended the first Surrealist exhibition. From this point, Tanguy became a passionate believer and with his startling blue eyes and proto-punk hair, he became something of a Surrealist mascot. Among the most loyal members of the Surrealist movement, Tanguy was contributing to manifestos, magazines, and exhibitions. In 1927 Tanguy’s first solo exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue that sang the praises of the artist’s skillful distortions as the ultimate in Surrealist expression.
The aim of the Surrealists was confrontation, and early reactions to Tanguy’s work were sometimes violent. In 1930, his early works were exhibited at a Paris screening of Dali and Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or. Due to the film’s sex and violence a riot ensued with three of Tanguy’s paintings being slashed to pieces. However, despite this adversity, Tanguy continued to love cinema and take inspiration from its ability to capture motion. He also illustrated Surrealist literature, including La Vie Immediate (Paul Eluard, 1932). Tanguy signed the second Manifest Surrealiste in 1930, and the collective letter of 1934 to expel Dali from the group due to his pro-Hitler stance.
Rose of the Four Winds by Yves Tanguy, 1950. Oil on canvas. Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut, USA
Tanguy had fame and money by the mid-1930s and his reputation in continued to grow around the world, however, he saw wealth and prestige as objectionable and unimportant. Tanguy was often observed rolling banknotes into balls and throwing them at the patrons of cafés and bars when he was drunk. During a passionate affair with Peggy Guggenheim, he told her money confused him and he wished he had not got so much of it. The affair ended when he met Kay Sage, the Surrealist painter who became his wife. Tanguy and Sage moved to America in 1939 to paint and travel and married in Reno, Nevada in 1940.
Tanguy’s painting ‘Time and Again’ was featured in Matisse’s famous Artists en Exil exhibition in 1942. Other artists included Andre Breton, Ossip Zadkine, Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, and Eugene Berman, all of whom had fled the Second World War. Tanguy’s reputation continued to grow with exhibitions at the gallery of Pierre Matisse in 1943-45 and a joint exhibition with Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of the Century in 1944. Tanguy and Sage settled in Connecticut, painting daily and reviewing each other’s work. His relationship with Breton deteriorated due to the latter’s resentment of Tanguy’s fame. Ultimately Breton denounced Tanguy as ‘bourgeois’ and demanded that Pierre Matisse also break with him, infuriating Tanguy it created a mutual enmity lasting years.
Multiplication of the Arcs by Yves Tanguy, 1954. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
On becoming an American citizen, Tanguy travelled throughout the American West, regularly visiting Arizona and his fellow surrealists-in-exile, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst. Influenced by the awesome scale of the red rocks, the blinding sunlight, and the drama of Ernst’s cement and metal sculptures the Southwest environment and the reality if the American machine-age are reflected in the mechanical, metallic, and angular forms characterizing his work of during this period. Tanguy returned to Europe for the first time in 1953 and held exhibitions in Rome, Milan, and Paris. He also visited his sister and his beloved coasts of Brittany.
The Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut held a joint exhibition of Tanguy’s and Sage’s work. Despite the interconnectedness of their work, both craved artistic independence and insisted that their work be displayed in separate galleries. Tanguy gave little insight into his work processes, often declining to discuss either his technical methods or his ideologies. His friends characterized him as a loner in later life, however, he still enjoyed Surrealist games. Shortly before his death, he starred in an art film by Hans Richter that focussed on chess pieces, Tanguy played the Black Knight. With Duchamp as the White King and Jaqueline Matisse as the White Queen. Tanguy died suddenly from a cerebral haemorrhage on 15 January 1955
Indefinite Divisibility 1942 Surrealism Oil on canvas Albright – Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo Albright – Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, USA
“Indefinite Divisibility” juxtaposes bowls collecting water with anthropomorphic shadows cast by the form beside it to present the viewer with conflicting shapes vying for their attention. Dreams and everyday objects merge with the three-dimensional objects seemingly about to topple to the ground. In this piece, Tanguy’s intent was to express not communicate, to trigger sensations not explain.
Yves Tanguy
Yves Tanguy Surrealism, Biomorphism Born: 5 January 1900, Paris France Nationality: French Died: 15 January 1955, Connecticut, USA
Tanguy was a quintessential Surrealist. Socially eccentric he was known to eat spiders as a party trick, Tanguy was best-known for his misshapen rocks and molten surfaces that lent definition to aesthetic Surrealism. Tanguy was self-taught; however, he was an extremely talented artist, painting a hyper-real world with exacting precision. His landscapes, a high-octane blend of fiction and fact, captured the attention of Salvador Dali, Mark Rothko, and numerous other important Surrealist artists and thinkers. Carl Gustav Jung used a canvas by Tanguy to illustrate his theory of the collective unconscious
Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 1970-73 Installation Fabric, wool, synthetic fur, cardboard, and Ping-Pong balls Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
Tanning’s only large-scale installation, “Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202” was created for a retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1974. Two flesh pink torsos are climbing up the walls, ripping through the wallpaper, whilst others spout limbs from the furnishing. The room presents an intense feeling of confinement with the human presence merging with inanimate objects, suggesting a state of boredom or a desire to disappear.
The work points to the possibility of physical violence as experienced by women and the mental struggle of that trauma. Victoria Carruthers, an art historian, suggests Tanning was inspired by a popular song from her childhood that contained the lyrics –
In room two hundred and two The walls keep talkin’ to you I’ll never tell you what they said So turn out the light and come to bed
Dorothea Tanning
Dorothea Tanning Surrealism, Installation Art, Proto-Feminist Artists, Modern Sculpture Born: 25 August 1910, Illinois, USA Nationality: American Died: 31 January 2012, New York, USA
Tanning was a painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet. Art pervades much of Tanning’s life; her images, objects, and texts have become worthwhile art and her very presence transformed photographs and moments in time to make them more artistic. The whirlwind energy that followed Tanning as a person is found in her brushstrokes. Tanning’s complete oeuvre is dominated by her unstoppable life force characteristics. Her ideas were too big for rural Illinois so Tanning left for Chicago and then New York. In New York, she found both the style and company that she identified as a Surrealist. She also married Max Ernst. Tanning meticulously depicted her own dreams throughout her long career. This psychological exploration of self continued as her work developed into the more abstract and sculptural.
Nue Couchée 1969-70 Sculpture Cotton textile, cardboard, 7 table tennis balls, wool and thread Tate, London, UK
A sculptural piece, Nue Couchée introduces Tanning’s weighty, contorted, and headless figures. The work stands in defiant subversion to the languid reclining female sitter of classical painting, confronting outdated fantasy projections of the female body by presenting a woman entangled by complex and invisible interior psychic forces.
Dorothea Tanning
Dorothea Tanning Surrealism, Installation Art, Proto-Feminist Artists, Modern Sculpture Born: 25 August 1910, Illinois, USA Nationality: American Died: 31 January 2012, New York, USA
Tanning was a painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet. Art pervades much of Tanning’s life; her images, objects, and texts have become worthwhile art and her very presence transformed photographs and moments in time to make them more artistic. The whirlwind energy that followed Tanning as a person is found in her brushstrokes. Tanning’s complete oeuvre is dominated by her unstoppable life force characteristics. Her ideas were too big for rural Illinois so Tanning left for Chicago and then New York. In New York she found both the style and company that she identified as a Surrealist. She also married Max Ernst. Tanning meticulously depicted her own dreams throughout her long career. This psychological exploration of self continued as he work developed into the more abstract and sculptural.
Birthday 1942 Surrealism Oil on canvas Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, USA
A seminal work for Tanning, ‘Birthday’ saw her noticed by artists such as Max Ernst, and placed her strong individuality on the artistic map whilst introducing the motifs that would recur throughout her career. Painting herself in the foreground of a room that recedes into an endless passage of infinite open doors her costume is entwined with nature and culture with her open blouse reflecting the aristocratic in silk and lace and her skirt flowing with seaweed foliage. A winged lemur sits next to her feet, a symbolic association between night and the spirit world and a symbol of the unconscious released in dreams.
Dorothea Tanning
Dorothea Tanning Surrealism, Installation Art, Proto-Feminist Artists, Modern Sculpture Born: 25 August 1910, Illinois, USA Nationality: American Died: 31 January 2012, New York, USA
Tanning was a painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet. Art pervades much of Tanning’s life; her images, objects, and texts have become worthwhile art and her very presence transformed photographs and moments in time to make them more artistic. The whirlwind energy that followed Tanning as a person is found in her brushstrokes. Tanning’s complete oeuvre is dominated by her unstoppable life force characteristics. Her ideas were too big for rural Illinois so Tanning left for Chicago and then New York. In New York she found both the style and company that she identified as a Surrealist. She also married Max Ernst. Tanning meticulously depicted her own dreams throughout her long career. This psychological exploration of self continued as her work developed into the more abstract and sculptural
Père Ubu 1936 Surrealism Gelatin silver print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
One of the most iconic photographs of the Surrealist movement, Père Ubu attained fame after its inclusion at the London International Surrealist Exhibition. It is a somewhat bizarre and disquieting figure taking up the entire plane of the picture. An animal of sorts, with a flat angular head, and elephantine ears, curved limbs and a tapered appendages. General consensus is it is an armadillo foetus but Maar, maintain the mystery, never confirmed that.
Dora Maar
Dora Maar Surrealism, Dada and Surrealist Photography, Photomontage Born: 22 November 1907, Tours, France Nationality: French Died: 16 July 1997, Paris, France
Maar was a talented photographer and made work that developed quickly from an acute poetic realism to Surrealist manipulations. She made images out of her own emotional interior and her desire to escape from it. Maar abandoned photography because Picasso insisted photographers were painters waiting to be released. Between 1935-45 she was in love with Picasso and became a muse for other artists as well as practicing painter herself. Maar suffered a breakdown after separating from Picasso and recovered through the help of Jacques Lacan, the famous psychiatrist. She moved from Paris to rural Provence and in later life painted abstract landscapes and melancholic still life. A recluse, she became a devoted Catholic. Living in the shadow of Picasso she never returned to photography, the medium which exulted her exquisite and unusual talent
Nude Descending A Staircase 1912 Surrealism Oil on canvas Philadelphia Museum of Art: Collection of Louise and Walter Arenberg, USA
The painting met with an unfavourable response at the Salon des Indépendants, dominated by Cubist avant-garde who objected to its Futurist leanings. However, it enjoyed a succes de scandale at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. Nude Descending a Staircase is an early exercise in painting cinematically and along with ‘Passage from Virgin to Pride’ marks the end of Duchamp’s painting career.
Marcel Duchamp Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Conceptual Art, Kinetic Art Born: 28 July 1887, Normandy, France Nationality: French Died: 2 October 1968, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Duchamp was a painter, sculptor, writer, and chess player whose work is most often associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; Duchamp is regarded as one of the three artists who defined the revolutionary development in the plastic arts in the first decades of the 20th century. Duchamp’s developments in painting and sculpture had an enormous impact on 20th century art. By challenging the notion of what is art with his readymades, Duchamp is one of few artists that changed the course of art history. He sent shock waves across the art world that are still rippling today
Noyer Indifférent 1929 Surrealism Oil on canvas Privately owned
The provenance of Noyer Indifférent exemplifies the reciprocal play between Surrealism and psychoanalysis. Freud’s protégé, Carl Jung, an important influence on the Surrealists, purchased the work in 1929, when Tanguy was barely known. Jung described the painting as an archetypal sign of the heavens connecting with extra-terrestrial phenomena.
Yves Tanguy
Yves Tanguy Surrealism, Biomorphism Born: 5 January 1900, Paris France Nationality: French Died: 15 January 1955, Connecticut, USA
Tanguy was a quintessential Surrealist. Socially eccentric he was known to eat spiders as a party trick, Tanguy was best-known for his misshapen rocks and molten surfaces that lent definition to aesthetic Surrealism. Tanguy was self-taught; however he was an extremely talented artist, painting a hyper real world with exacting precision. His landscapes, a high-octane blend of fiction and fact, captured the attention of Salvador Dali, Mark Rothko and numerous other important Surrealist artists and thinkers. Carl Gustav Jung used a canvas by Tanguy to illustrate his theory of the collective unconscious
La Joconde aux Cles (Mona Lisa with Keys) 1930 Surrealism Oil on canvas Musée National Fernand Léger, Biot, France
One of Lèger’s most experimental canvases, La Jaconde aux Cles is one of the few in which the influence of Surrealism is revealed. Without support, the depicted objects float in space as in the works of Joan Miro. The bizarre juxtaposition of the objects is further evidence of the influence of Surrealism, despite the objects being chosen due to their lack of relation to on another. Lèger considered the painting a success and kept it for himself.
Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger Cubism, Purism, Interwar Classicism Born: 4 February 1881, Argentan, France Nationality: French Died: 17 August 1955, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
Léger built his reputation as a Cubist but his style varied from decade to decade between figuration and abstraction and showing a wide range of influential sources. He worked in a variety of media including paint, film, ceramic, theatre and dance sets, print, glass, and book arts. Despite his style variations, his work was consistently graphic with a leaning towards primary colours, pattern, and bold shape and form
I Saw Three Cities 1944 Surrealism Oil on canvas Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey, USA
A desolate, geometric landscape dominated by a tail, cloaked guardian in the foreground. The human figure is composed of a central pole and swirling drapery. Fluid and animated drapery gives a feeling of movement and wind blowing through the fabric made figure contrasting with the extreme stillness of the landscape. The landscape, depicted by simple shape, mainly triangular and rectangular, forms
Kay Sage Surrealism Born: 25 June 1898, New York, USA Nationality: American Died: 8 January 1963, Connecticut, USA
Sage was a Surrealist artist and poet. She was a member of the Golden Age and Post-War periods of surrealism. Sage is best known for her artistic works of an architectural nature
Maar turned to paining as an exclusive media after Picasso encouraged her to give up photography. Even after their relationship ended she continued to [paint preferring still-life landscape, with the latter becoming more and more abstract. By the time Maar was painting landscapes such as ‘Paysage’ she had was almost totally withdrawn from the art scene and rarely talked of her paintings, insisting they speak for themselves.
Dora Maar Surrealism, Dada and Surrealist Photography, Photomontage Born: 22 November 1907, Tours, France Nationality: French Died: 16 July 1997, Paris, France
Maar was a talented photographer and made work that developed quickly from an acute poetic realism to Surrealist manipulations. She made images out of her own emotional interior and her desire to escape from it. Maar abandoned photography because Picasso insisted photographers were painters waiting to be released. Between 1935-45 she was in love with Picasso and became a muse for other artists as well as practicing painter herself. Maar suffered a breakdown after separating from Picasso and recovered through the help of Jacques Lacan, the famous psychiatrist. She moved from Paris to rural Provence and in later life painted abstract landscapes and melancholic still life. A recluse, she became a devoted Catholic. Living in the shadow of Picasso she never returned to photography, the medium which exulted her exquisite and unusual talent
Henry Ford Hospital 1932 Surrealism Oil on canvas Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City, Mexico
Many of Kahlo’s paintings from the early 1930s relate to religious ex-voto paintings of which she and Rivera possessed a large collection ranging over several centuries. Ex-votos paintings are a gesture of gratitude for salvation, a granted prayer or an averted disaster and are left at shrines and in churches. Generally painted on small-scale metal panels they depict the event and include the Virgin or saint to whom they are offered. In ‘Henry Ford Hospital’ Kahlo uses the ex-voto format but places herself centre stage, rather than recording a miracle deed of a saint. Kahlo paints her own story seemingly the work is not a thanks to the lord but an act of defiance, questioning why he brings her pain.
Frida Kahlo Naïve art, Modern art, Surrealism, Magical Realism, Symbolism, Naturalism, Primitivism, Social realism, Cubism Born: 6 July 1907, Mexico City, Mexico Nationality: Mexican Died: 13 July 1954, Mexico City Mexico
The small pins that pierce Kahlo’s skin reveal that she still hurts following illness and accident and her signature tear reveals the ongoing battel with the subsequent psychological overflow. Typical of Kahlo, the use of visual symbolism of physical and psychological pain in an attempt to understand suffering. Prior to Kahlo the language of grief, death, and self, had been explored by some male artists, notably Goya and Munch, but it had not been dissected by a woman. Kahlo entered an existing language, and expanded it to make it her own. By exposing her own body in a broken and bleeding state Kahlo opened the viewer from the inside out to explain human behaviour. Throughout her career, she repeated motifs to create and articulate a means of discussing the most complex aspects of female identity
Artist: Frida Kahlo Born: 6 July 1907, Mexico City, Mexico Nationality: Mexican Movement: Naïve art, Modern art, Surrealism, Magical Realism, Symbolism, Naturalism, Primitivism, Social realism, Cubism Died: 13 July 1954, Mexico City, Mexico
The small pins that pierce Kahlo’s skin reveal that she still hurts following illness and accident and her signature tear reveals the ongoing battel with the subsequent psychological overflow. Typical of Kahlo, the use of visual symbolism of physical and psychological pain in an attempt to understand suffering. Prior to Kahlo the language of grief, death, and self, had been explored by some male artists, notably Goya and Munch, but it had not been dissected by a woman. Kahlo entered an existing language, and expanded it to make it her own. By exposing her own body in a broken and bleeding state Kahlo opened the viewer from the inside out to explain human behaviour. Throughout her career, she repeated motifs to create and articulate a means of discussing the most complex aspects of female identity.
Frieda and Diego Rivera, 1931, oil on canvas. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Following repeated miscarriages, she used Surrealism to ask the question to what extent does motherhood or its absence impact on female identity, irreversibly altering the meaning of maternal subjectivity. Umbilical symbolism often in the form of ribbons, it becomes clear Kahlo is connected to all that surrounds her, and she is a ‘mother’ without children. She worked obsessively with self-portraiture reflecting on her deep interest in identity, particularly her mixed German-Mexican heritage as well as in her roles as artist, lover and wife.
Kahlo used religious symbolism throughout her work. She appears as the Madonna with her fur babies, the Virgin Mary cradling her husband, the painter Diego Rivera, Saint Sebastian, a prophet and as the martyred Christ-figure recalling her accident when she was impaled on a metal bar.
Henry Ford Hospital, 1932, oil on canvas. Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City, Mexico
Prior to Kahlo women who had tried to communicate or express the wildest and deepest of emotions were labelled hysterical or insane – while men were aligned with the melancholic creative type. Remaining artistically active and productive allowed Kahlo that women can be melancholy rather than depressed, and these terms are not gendered.
Kahlo was at La Cas Azul in Coyocan, Mexico City. Her father was a German immigrant and her mother of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry. Kahlo was raised in a strict religious home. Her mother’s rigid, religious fanaticism affected Kahlo’s childhood deeply. At the age of six, Kahlo suffered from polio; her recovery isolated her from other children and left her with permanent damage to one leg causing her to walk with a limp. She was close to her father after her illness and he enrolled her at the German College in Mexico City where she read the writing of European philosophers such as Goethe and Schopenhauer. Kahlo’s lifelong interest in her mixed roots provided her approach to both life and art.
Weeping Coconuts (Cocos gimientes), 1951, oil on board. Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Kahlo was sexually abused and forced to leave the German College. The Mexican Revolution and the Minster of Education had changed national policy on education and from 1922 girls were admitted to the National Preparatory School and Kahlo was one of the first 35 girls admitted. She studied botany, medicine, and social sciences. Academically excellent she became interested in Mexican culture and politically active.
In 1922 Diego Rivera was painting the Creation mural in the amphitheatre of Kahlo’s school. Upon seeing his work, she experienced an infatuation and fascination that she would explore later in life. In 1923 Kahlo fell in love with Alejandro Gomez Arias and they were romantically involved until 1928. The pair were together when on the way home from school in 1925, when they were both involved in a bus accident, for Kahlo it was near fatal. She suffered multiple fractures throughout her body. He was hospitalized and bound in a plaster corset for a month then bedridden at home for many more months. During her recovery, she abandoned her medical pursuits due to her medical circumstances and turned her focus to art.
What the Water Gave Me, 1938, oil on canvas. Private collection
During her convalescence at home Kahlo’s parents made her a special easel, gave her paints, and set a mirror above her head so that she could paint self-portraits. She spent hours confronting her existential questions raised by her trauma. Drawing from the acute pictorial realism from her father’s photographic portraits she approached her portraits with the same psychological intensity. Kahlo was well enough to leave her bedroom by 1927 and re-kindled her relationship with the Cachuchas group which had become more political. She joined the Mexican Communist Party and familiarized herself with the artistic and political circles in Mexico City. She became friends with Tina Modotti, a photojournalist, and the Cuban revolutionary Julio Mella. In June 1928 Kahlo was introduced to Diego Rivera, one of Mexico’s most famous artists. He was impressed with the honesty and originality of her painting and assured her of her talent. The two began a romantic relationship and were married in 1929. The couple moved to Cuernavaca in the rural state of Morelos and Kahlo devoted herself to her painting.
From the early 1930s, Kahlo’s work had evolved into a more assertive Mexican identity, influenced by her exposure to the modernist indigenist movement in Mexico and eagerness to preserve Mexican culture during the rise of fascism in Europe. Distancing herself from her Germanic roots she changed her name from Frieda to Frida and took to wearing traditional Tehuana dress. During the early 1930s Kahlo and Rivera lived in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York whilst Rivera was creating various murals. Kahl also completed seminal works including Self Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States and Frieda and Diego Rivera. While in San Francisco she met Dr. Leo Elosser, a surgeon who became her closest medical advisor until her death.
The Broken Column, 1944, oil on Masonite. Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City, Mexico
After the unveiling of Rivera’s controversial mural for the Rockefeller Center, New York, the couple returned to Mexico. They moved to a house in San Angel made up of two separate wings joined by a bridge, an appropriate set up as their relationship was under immense strain. Kahlo had numerous health issues and at this time Rivera had an affair with her younger sister which, understandably, hurt Kahlo more than her husband’s other infidelities. Kahlo was also having extramarital liaisons, including the Hungarian photographer, Nickolas Muray.
While separated from Diego, after he had an affair with her sister, Kahlo was living in her own flat away from San Angel. She had a short relationship with the Japanese – American sculptor. Isamu Noguchi. Both socially and politically conscious they remained friends until Kahlo’s death.
Kahlo joined the Fourth International (a communist organization) in 1936 and used La Casa Azul as a meeting place for international intellectuals, artists, and activists. She offered the house to the exiled Russian Leon Trotsky and his wife to use as a residence once they were granted asylum in Mexico.
The Wounded Deer, 1946, oil on Masonite. Private Collection
In 1938, during a visit to Mexico City, André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, was enchanted with Kahlo’s paintings, and wrote to the art dealer, Julien Levy, who invited Kahlo to hold her first solo exhibition in New York. Kahlo travelled to the USA without Rivera and caused a media sensation with her colourful and exotic, but traditional Mexican costumes. Her exhibition was a success. Kahlo enjoyed some months socializing in New York. In early 1939 Kahlo sailed to Paris to exhibit with the Surrealists in Europe. That exhibition was not as successful, Kahlo returned to New York to unsuccessfully continue a love affair. She then returned to Mexico City and requested a divorce from Rivera.
Kahlo returned to La Casa Azul after her divorce. She also moved away from smaller paintings and began working with much larger canvases. Kahlo and Rivera remarried I 1940, and as Kahlo’s health deteriorated their relationship became less turbulent. Between 1940-56 Kahlo often had to wear supportive back corsets to help with her spinal problems, as well as suffering from skin infections and syphilis. Her father died in 1941, exacerbating her depression and her health. Often housebound, Kahlo found pleasure in surrounding herself by animals and in tending the garden at La Casa Azul.
The Two Fridas, 1939, oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City, Mexico
Throughout the 1940s Kahlo’s work grey in notoriety and acclaim and was included in several group shows in the US and in Mexico. Her work was included in Women Artists at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery, New York, in 1943. The same year. Kahlo accepted a teaching position at a painting school in Mexico City and acquired some devoted students with whom she undertook some mural commissions. Kahlo continued to struggle making a living with her art but received a national prize for her painting Moses in 1945 and The Two Fridas painting sold to the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1947. Meanwhile, her health continued to deteriorate. In 1950 she had complicated surgery to straighten her spine which sadly failed and from then onwards was confined to a wheelchair.
Kahlo continued painting in her final years and also continued her political activism, including protesting nuclear testing by Western powers. She exhibited one final time in 1953 at Lola Alvarez Bravo’s gallery, her first and only solo exhibition in Mexico. Kahlo was brought to the opening in an ambulance, with her four-poster bed placed in the centre of the gallery so she could be there for the duration of the opening event. Kahlo died at La Casa Azul in 1954.
Nightview, New York 1932 Surrealism Gelatin silver print Collection of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, USA
In this 1932 photograph by Abbott the white lights in the buildings and headlights of cars contrast starkly with the solid structures of the buildings that dominate the city. Abbot captured New York at night as a representation of the emergence of the modern city.
Berenice Abbott Straight Photography, Dada and Surrealist Photography, Modern Photography Born: 17 July 1898, Ohio, USA Nationality: American Died: 9 December 1991, Maine, USA
Abbot was a photographer particularly known for portraits and documentary photographs which stressed the communicative and educational value of the photographic print. She followed a realist vision in her photographs recording history and her own experience to potentially inspire change in her audience., purposely facilitating interaction between photographer, photograph, and the viewer. Her realistic approach to photography originated in her career as a portrait photographer in Paris and the photographic realism of Eugène Atget. Following eight years working in Paris, Abbot moved to New York in 1929 and began to document the modern transformation of the city.
Mama, Papa is Wounded! 1927 Surrealism Oil on Canvas Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
The vast space, pale palette, and dark shadows cast by airborne objects in the eerie light evoke a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Typical of the correlation between words and images in Surrealism, the title does nothing to clarify the meaning of the work, in fact it complicates it. Tanguy researched case studies of psychiatric patients for statements that could be used for ideas for pictures and titles. Interpretations suggest that ‘Mama, Papa is Wounded!’ referred to the violence of World War 1 and the heightened anxiety that followed. However, the work remains enigmatic and open to viewer interpretation in its refusal to reveal its secrets and reflecting the intentional ambiguity of Surrealist symbolism.
Yves Tanguy Surrealism, Biomorphism Born: 5 January 1900, Paris France Nationality: French Died: 15 January 1955, Connecticut, USA
Tanguy was a quintessential Surrealist. Socially eccentric he was known to eat spiders as a party trick, Tanguy was best-known for his misshapen rocks and molten surfaces that lent definition to aesthetic Surrealism. Tanguy was self-taught; however he was an extremely talented artist, painting a hyper real world with exacting precision. His landscapes, a high-octane blend of fiction and fact, captured the attention of Salvador Dali, Mark Rothko and numerous other important Surrealist artists and thinkers. Carl Gustav Jung used a canvas by Tanguy to illustrate his theory of the collective unconscious
Maar travelled to various places in Europe ii the early 1930s working as a photojournalist, and she also began taking her own pictures. Her focus on street scenes and glimpses of isolated city life, these works are melancholic and quietly piquant. ‘After the Rain’ depicts a mother and child walking along a slick pavement next to a high wall with their backs to the camera. The shot is framed in a sharp diagonal with the pavement stretching into the back of the image and the figures almost at its end. The shadows of leafy trees are projected on to the wall and puddles of rainwater gleam,
Dora Maar Surrealism, Dada and Surrealist Photography, Photomontage Born: 22 November 1907, Tours, France Nationality: French Died: 16 July 1997, Paris, France
Maar was a talented photographer and made work that developed quickly from an acute poetic realism to Surrealist manipulations. She made images out of her own emotional interior and her desire to escape from it. Maar abandoned photography because Picasso insisted photographers were painters waiting to be released. Between 1935-45 she was in love with Picasso and became a muse for other artists as well as practicing painter herself. Maar suffered a breakdown after separating from Picasso and recovered through the help of Jacques Lacan, the famous psychiatrist. She moved from Paris to rural Provence and in later life painted abstract landscapes and melancholic still life. A recluse, she became a devoted Catholic. Living in the shadow of Picasso she never returned to photography, the medium which exulted her exquisite and unusual talent
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