Marcel Duchamp.  Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy, 1921, mixed media

 “Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy”1964 is an authorized replica of a 1921 original which is in Philadelphia. The original cubes were made of  marble and had to be marked “made in France” by order of French customs. This one doesn’t. The writing on the bottom has also been reversed. Selavy is a made up name. It’s C’est la vie in French. Selavy was an alter ego Duchamp adopted in 1920. In describing this unusual compilation of objects his enigmatic statement was “if one is to have a birdcage then a cuttlebone is hardly a surprise. If a temperature is being reported then a sneeze is hardly inappropriate. If the marble sugar cubes are loose then they should be confined to a cage”. Duchamp paved the way for other artists to use found objects. His spinning bicycle wheel paved the way for kinetic (moving) art. The idea being more important than the final work is the basic premise of conceptual art.  

Jean Arp.  Imaginary Animal, 1947, bronze and marble on a wood base

JEAN ARP in his surrealist sculpture, combined automatism and conscious thought like Masson. He was discharged from WWI and went to Zurich and took part in dada. From there he went to Cologne and did dada there. In 1925 he went to Paris and joined the surrealists. He left the group in 1928 but his work continued along the same lines. He came up with the idea of constellations in the 1930’s and he did a series of them. He started with a number of different elements and arranged them in different ways. His forms are always rhythmic and they seem to talk to each other. Nature is always an underlying theme and the way it grows and decays and changes. In the 30’s he began making sculpture in the round. He had a very playful side too.

“Imaginary Animal” 1947 is morphing or changing into something. The title tells us to draw our own conclusions using our imagination and experience. 

Giorgio de Chirico.  The Anguish of Departure, 1914, oil on canvas

an Italian painter, was probably the most important contemporary influence on the surrealists He started working in surrealism in 1911 and had fully developed it by 1915 before even the Dadaist began. “The Anguish Of Departure” 1913-14 the 2 figures here seem very alone and vulnerable in this huge empty space. The empty caravan isn’t a good sign either. Its being pulled away by a horse to go along with the theme of departure as does the train. Things like mystery and departure are easy to articulate, but anguish and melancholy are more difficult because they’re more pervasive in the color, in the light, and the emptiness of the scene. He said he saw the world as an “immense museum of strange things. Every object has 2 appearances. 1 (the current 1) which we nearly always see and which is seen by people in general. The other, a spectral or metaphysical appearance beheld by rare individuals in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction.

Marc Chagall.  Peasant Life, 1925, oil on canvas

MARC CHAGALL painted dreamlike worlds. Combinations of imagination and memory. He never forgot the tiny little village where he grew up and it appears in many of his paintings.

“The Flying Fish” 19??

“Peasant Life” 1925 the building is thought to be his mothers grocery store. The boy with the horse is probably him the man with the violin refers to his uncle. The fish refers to his father who worked for a herring merchant. It’s a very dreamlike representation.  

Salvador Dali.  The Transparent Simulacrum of the Feigned Image, 1938, oil on canvas

joined surrealism in 1929 with Breton for a while. He was the most well known surrealist, and identified himself as a surrealist until almost the end of his career. Breton liked him very much and saw him as a breath of new life after the split and in a 1934 lecture said that Dali has announced surrealism with an instrument of primary importance. Dali wrote a lot about the paranoid critical method (which isn’t as complicated as it sounds). It was basically a way to take images from the imagination and dreams that are irrational and make them look very real. 

“The Transparent Simulacrum of the Feigned Image” 1913 the head floating on the right is his wife. Dali called these sort of very detailed paintings “Hand Painted Dream Photographs” it incorporates a double image. The object in the middle could be a bowl with something in it, or a beach with a bay with mountains in the background. The title is also a warning. Transparent=see through, and simulacrum = something that represents something else. So according to the title nothing is real. It all relates to the world of dreams. 

Yves Tanguy.  Indefinite Divisibility, 1942, oil on canvas

 YVES TANGUEY also moved to N.Y. to escape the war. He never received any formal training and never intended to become an artist. He was a friend of Pierre Matisse (Henri’s son) since childhood. “Infinite Divisibility” 1942 it’s a very detailed and traditional painting technique. It 1^st gives us the idea that we could recognize things but for the most part the objects are a cross between organic life forms and machines or toys which makes them hover between the harmless and the ominous. Although they look harmless we don’t really know what they really are. Part of this imagery may have been inspired by growing up in Brittany where he was mesmerized by the natural formations. Maybe he was inspired by the coasts of Africa or S. America. His space is very ambiguous as well. Where’s the horizon? The shadows are also important for the mood. They don’t always match the object. He used fairly consistent colors like grays and blues accented with reds and yellows. One writer called Tanguey’s work a combo of lucidity and enigma. He never knew how his work would look like in the end and he loved the surprise of the final product. He once tried to do prep work for his paintings, but he found that it ruined the surprise.  

Max Ernst.  Age of Forests, 1926

He had no formal training and spent WWI in the German army. He co-founded the Dadaist movement in Cologne with JEAN ARP in 1916. He went to Paris in 1922 where he was with dada and then later became one of the founders of surrealism. In 1919 he saw the 1^st reproductions of de Chirico’s paintings This had a profound impact on him and his style changed completely. His paintings had a weird sense of heightened reality created by a very very precise painting technique. “Two Children Are Threatened By A Nightengale”19?? is 3 dimensional.

“Age Of Forests” 1926 he painted many paintings of forests from the 20’s to the 60’s. The painting has personal significance for him. When he was a boy his father took him hiking near where they lived in Germany. He later remembered the contradictory feelings he felt. He said the wonderful joy of hiking freely in an open space, yet at the same time the distress of being closed in on all sides by hostile trees. So for him the forest was a place of dualities. Of freedom and imprisonment, exhilaration and despair. 

Rene Magritte.  The Voice of Space, 1928, oil on canvas

Also painted with a very precise and detailed technique. He was from Brussels and moved to Paris in 1927 and became friends with many of the surrealists. He was interested in their artistic ideas but he was quiet and wasn’t very outgoing and didn’t like to draw attention to himself. He didn’t use invented forms like the other surrealists did. He felt that the world had enough stuff of its own and didn’t see the need to create any additional stuff. He wanted to give these mundane objects new life through new relationships that would make them more mysterious and poetic. He said “the mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown”. He wanted to use any means he could to establish contact between consciousness and the external world.

“The Voice Of Space” 1928 uses these metal spheres. What are these spheres? On one level air at night. The slits in the spheres reflect his obsession with concealment and they show that there may or may not be something inside but we have no idea what. It expresses Magritte’s view of the mystery of human experience which for him had no answers or explanations.  He grew up in a section of Belgium called the Black Country which had smoky gray skies which may explain certain aspects of his images. Lighting is often very ambiguous in his paintings. A white glow resembling moonlight reflects off of the spheres. But it can’t be the moon on the edges because it’s lit from the back.

Joan Miro.  Carnival of Harlequin, 1924-25, oil on canvas

JOAN MIRO spent his career searching. In 1922 he met many of the future surrealists. His work was IMMEDIATELY influenced by them. “Hermitage” 1924 a hermitage is usually isolated and he creates isolation with the high triangular mountain peaks in the distance. It’s all very poetic.

“Carnival of Harlequin” 1924 this is probably the most surrealist of his works. Harlequin was a common theater character who was often the victim of unrequited love and he often played the guitar. Here he looks sad. It’s all very joyous except for the harlequin. He said that this painting and others of the time were inspired by hallucinations brought on by hunger. He went into a sort of trance and then saw these forms. He was poor and starving (living off radishes). Miro said that he needed an emotional shock to inspire him to work. He didn’t use drugs or alcohol. He did a lot of planning and grid work before he painted he wanted everything to be perfectly balanced. He almost never did a painting from start to finish. His paintings were all over his studio in various states of progress. He wrote to the AK gallery in 1978 explaining the painting and he said “In the canvas certain elements appear that will be repeated later in other works. The ladder, an element of flight and evasion and of elevation, animals and above all insects which I have always found very interesting. The dark sphere to the right is a representation of the globe because in those days I was obsessed with 1 thing: I must conquer the world. The cat who was always by my side as I painted. The black triangle in the window represents the Eiffel tower. I tried to deepen the magical side of things”.  

Alberto Giacometti.  Invisible Object (Hands Holding the Void), 1934, bronze

Was associated with the surrealists in the 1930’s. his early work was influenced by African sculpture. Breton and Dali invited him to join the group in 1930 because they were so impressed with his work. He worked with live models early in his career.

“Invisible object (hands holding the void)” 1934 it fascinated Breton and the others. The woman is very stylized with tubular arms and legs, a long torso, and a small head with 2 different eyes one of which is based on a gas mask. She’s sitting on a kind of open chair uncomfortably. She’s confined by the rectangular form that covers her shins and rests on her feet. The most significant and complicated part of the sculpture are the hands which he had a lot of trouble getting them to exactly where he wanted them. The titles draw attention to the hands and the space between them. Giacometti never used the 2 titles together. He used 1 or the other when he exhibited it. The 2 concepts of the titles are inconsistent because if something is invisible there’s going to be a void. Some people at the time interpreted the sculpture as a representation of contradiction between being and nothingness.