SURREALISM

The Tilled Field - Joan Miro

The Tilled Field is the first of the Joan Miró’s surrealist paintings, after his period of Fauvism. His surreal
vision and vivid colorful imagination unite Catalan landscapes with its history and at the same time reflects the
current politic situation in Spain during 1920s. The mind of a spectator is overwhelmed with a strong symbolic
language that subversively represents a continuity of free spirit ideals of present and past in order to confront
the strong dictatorship of Spanish government that neglects the Catalan long lasting autonomous thought and
local complexity and beauty.

Battle of Fishes – Andre Masson

As French surrealist painter and one of the practitioners of automatic writing, André Masson was
experimenting with the painting media within the Battle of Fishes. The strong allegoric view on the human
condition, constant conflicts and World War I destruction around Europe is depicted by imagery of surreal
underwater landscape where sharp–toothed fish sadistically attack each other. The artistic method of use the
sand to toss it on canvas, to aggressively sketch and to paint directly from the tube influenced the abstract art
and Informel.

Mama Papa is Wounded - Yves Tanguy

The surreal landscape of the Yves Tanguy masterpiece Mama, Papa is Wounded is mainly influenced by the
Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and its language of symbols. In postwar Europe, along with André Breton,
Tanguy had conducted the research work on the psychiatric cases of war veterans and transposed their
statements into the modern abstract artwork. The painting name is like children’s cry and resembles broken
family relations as well as strong sexual connotation of wounded masculinity of the Father, but the real
meaning of the abstract and archetypal symbols has been never revealed and stayed enigmatic.

The Great Masturbator - Salvador Dali

The Great Masturbator is one of the earliest Salvador Dalí‘s surrealist works from the period he was fascinated
by Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and obsessed by analyzing unconscious aspects of self as well as sexual
repressed mechanism and ego structure. Therefore, painting The Great Masturbator is kind of a self-portrait,
view on a artist’s overgrown ego and its transformations, posed in dreamlike surreal landscape along with
various objects of desire – beloved Gala or desert oasis but also accompanied by paranoid fears of unknown
faceless figures and insects.

The Barbarians - Max Ernst

Prior to his affiliation to surrealism, Max Ernst was an influential Dada artist and very important artist of the
surrealism. Under the strong influence of both André Breton’s works and writings and Sigmund Freud‘s theory
of unconscious, Ernst within the painting The Barbarians explores own childhood memories, subconscious
mind as well as primitive pagan mythological and sexual symbols. His concept of barbarians as creatures of
surreal landscape is meditation on the theme of forms and forces of life, where there are under-life and super-
life species – direct analogies of freudian concept of the ego, super-ego and id, as parts of human personality.
 DADAISM

Reciting the Sound Poem “Karawane” (1916)

Artist: Hugo Ball
Artwork description & Analysis: Ball designed this costume for his performance of the sound-poem,
“Karawane,” in which nonsensical syllables uttered in patterns created rhythm and emotion, but nothing
resembling any known language. The resulting lack of sense was meant to reference the inability of European
powers to solve their diplomatic problems through the use of rational discussion, thus leading to World War I –
equating the political situation to the biblical episode of the Tower of Babel. Ball’s strange costume is meant to
further distance him from his audience and his everyday surroundings, making his speech even more foreign
and exotic. Ball described his costume: “My legs were in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, which came up to
my hips so that I looked like an obelisk. Over it I wore a huge coat cut out of cardboard, scarlet inside and gold
outside. It was fastened at the neck in such a way that I could give the impression of wing-like movement by
raising and lowering my elbows. I also wore a high, blue-and-white-striped witch doctor’s hat.”

LHOOQ (1919)
Artist: Marcel Duchamp
Artwork description & Analysis: This work is a classic example of Dada irreverence towards traditional art.
Duchamp transformed a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa (1517) painting, which had only recently been
returned to the Louvre after it was stolen in 1911. While it was already a well-known work of art, the publicity
from the theft ensured that it became one of the most revered and famous works of art: art with a capital A. On
the postcard, Duchamp drew a mustache and a goatee onto Mona Lisa's face and labeled it L.H.O.O.Q. If the
letters are pronounced as they would be by a native French speaker, it would sound as if one were saying "Elle
a chaud au cul," which loosely translates as "She has a hot ass." Again, Duchamp managed to offend
everyone while also posing questions that challenged artistic values, artistic creativity, and the overall canon.

Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919)
Artist: Hannah Höch
Artwork description & Analysis: Hannah Höch is known for her collages and photomontages composed from
newspaper and magazine clippings as well as sewing and craft designs often pulled from publications she
contributed to at the Ullstein Press. As part of Club Dada in Berlin, Hoch unabashedly critiqued German culture
by literally slicing apart its imagery and reassembling it into vivid, disjointed, emotional depictions of modern
life. The title of this work, refers to the decadence, corruption, and sexism of pre-war German culture. Larger
and more political than her typical montages, this fragmentary anti-art work highlights the polarities of Weimer
politics by juxtaposing images of establishment people with intellectuals, radicals, entertainers, and artists.
Recognizable faces include Marx and Lenin, Pola Negri, and Kathe Kollwitz. The map of Europe that identifies
the countries in which women had already achieved the right to vote suggests that the newly enfranchised
women of Germany would soon “cut” through the male “beer-belly” culture. Her inclusion of commercially
produced designs in her montages broke down distinctions between modern art and crafts, and between the
public sphere and domesticity.

Merzpicture 46A. The Skittle Picture (1921)

Artist: Kurt Schwitters
Artwork description & Analysis: This is an early example of assemblage in which two and three dimensional
objects are combined. The word "Merz," which Schwitters used to describe his art practice as well as his
individual pieces, is a nonsensical word, like Dada, that Schwitters culled from the word "commerz", the
meaning of which he described as follows: "In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the
academy was of no use to me.... Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the
fragments; and this is Merz". In his Merzpictures, which have been called "psychological collages," he
arranged found objects - usually detritus - in simple compositions that transformed trash into beautiful works of
art. Whether the materials were string, a ticket stub, or a chess piece, Schwitters considered them to be equal
with any traditional art material. Merz, however, is not ideological, dogmatic, hostile, or political as is much of
Dada art.