-: April 2012

" The term ‘Dada’ first appeared in the periodical Cabaret Voltaire (June 1916), where Ball defined their activities as proving ‘that there are people of independent minds—beyond war and nationalism—who live for different ideals’. The new name signalled the more combative spirit of the first Dada Soirée (Zunfthaus zur Waag, 14 July), where Ball performed astonishing Lautegedichte (sound poems) composed from invented words, which exposed an emotive power distinct from everyday language. Tzara read his irreverent Manifeste de M. Antipyrine, which acknowledged that ‘Dada remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it’s still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colours’. Such shock tactics increasingly came to characterize their public position. During the summer sound poems by Huelsenbeck were published (Phantastische Gebete, Zurich, 1916). They were illustrated with abstract woodcuts by Arp, which showed a spontaneity centred upon chance as a governing principle. Rejecting a determining role, Arp experimented with abstract collages ‘made according to the laws of chance’, in which papers were glued where they fell, reflecting a reverence for forces outside rationalism (see also Automatism). "

OXFORD ART ONLINE

There were three different sources of D A D A. Berlin, Zurich and New York.

Zurich Dada featuring Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber and Marcel Janco

Hugo Ball wrote the Dada Manifesto in 1916. He also preformed Karawane, a spoken word performance in where he speaks in a jumble of incoherent words through a form of Abstract Poetry. The language he used as divided into abstract parts ( syllables and letters ) then rearranged to form meaningless sounds.

Tristan Tzara also worked with a form of spoken word, as preformance art was a large part of the D A D A I S T movement. Tzara was more interested in Simultaneous Poetry, which he read in different languages, rhythms, tonalities, and different people at the same time.

Additionally, Tzara invented Accidental Poetry. These are created through the clippings of newspaper, cutting an article out and carefully placing each of the words ( cut separately ) into a bag and shaking them up. The artist would then proceed to take each word out one after another and copy the words down in the order that they left the bag. The poem will resemble the artist.

Marcel Janco, Cabaret Voltaire

1916

Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber, Untitled ( Duo- Collage ) 1918

Hans Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance 1916

Sophie Taeuber, Dada Head
1920

Marcel Duchamp: Bicycle Wheel 1913

Marcel Duchamp: L.H.O.O.Q 1919

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain 1917

Raoul Hausman, The Spirit of Our time ( Mechanichal Head ) 1919

Raoul Hausmann, ABCD 1923

Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany 1919

John Heartfield, Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and Deaf: Away with the Sultifying Bandages! 1925

The Surrealists cited a wide range of precursors, ranging from the poets Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) and Count de Lautréamont (1846–70), to earlier artists such as Arcimboldo, Piranesi, Bosch, Goya, Félicien Rops, and Odilon Redon, as well as to their contemporaries Marc Chagall and Giorgia de Chirico. They were also preoccupied with Freudian psychoanalysis, and as a result concentrated initially on expressing the workings of the unconscious mind through the technique of automatism: drawing or writing executed without any conscious control. Indeed Breton's First Surrealist Manifesto (1924) defines Surrealism as ‘pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside of all aesthetic or moral preoccupations…Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of associations neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought.’

" Surrealism as ‘pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside of all aesthetic or moral preoccupations…Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of associations neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought.’

Andre Masson, Birth of Birds, 1925

Max Ernst, Two Childern are Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924

Joan Miro, Carnival of Harlequin, 1924

Salvidor Dali, Accommodations of Desire 1929

Salvidor Dali, The Persistence of Memory 1931

Salvidor Dali, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1954

René Magritte, The Human Condition 1934

Meret Oppenheim, Object ( Luncheon in Fur ) 1936

Claude Cahun, Self Portrait 1928

Pablo Picasso, Gurnica 1937

AMERICAN SCENE

A movement in American painting, beginning in the mid-1920s and culminating in the 1930s, which concentrated on realistic art with a social content. It was nationalistic and small-town in spirit, anti-modernist and anti-international, and was symptomatic of the isolationism of parts of America in the period following the First World War. Its first major painters were Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper.

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks 1942

Term used to describe scenes of typical American life painted in a naturalistic vein from c. 1920 until the early 1940s. It applies to both Regionalism and Social Realism in American painting, but its specific boundaries remain ambiguous. The phrase probably derived from Henry James’s collection of essays and impressions, The American Scene (1907), published upon James’s own rediscovery of his native land after 21 years as an expatriate. The term entered the vocabulary of fine arts by the 1920s and was applied to the paintings of Charles Burchfield during 1924.

In the two decades following World War I, American writers and artists began to look for native sources for the aesthetic and spiritual renewal of their modern technological civilization. This search engaged and activated many thoughtful and creative people in the 1920s and 1930s and resulted in that flurry of activity that Waldo Frank (1889–1967) discussed as The Rediscovery of America (1929; his personal analysis of American life). The phenomenon blossomed during the 1930s, when a generation of artists struggled to find a form and content for their art that would match their own experiences of America. Traditional boundaries of acceptable subject-matter were broadened to include the everyday lives of average Americans—farmers, office workers, window shoppers and even Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘forgotten man’. From ‘ten-cent movies’ to fertile farmscapes, factory icons or bathers at Coney Island, images of urban bustle and backwoods folk life were offered up to celebrate and define ‘the American Scene’ in words and in paint.

Dorthea Lange, Migrant Mother 1936

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110, 1954

During the 1940s, like many of his colleagues in the New York School, Motherwell remained devoted to recognizable imagery, to the expressive potential of calligraphic marks and to subject-matter of a literary and of a political nature, as in Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (gouache and oil with collage on cardboard, 1943; New York, MOMA). The abstract paintings for which he is best known, such as Elegy to the Spanish Republic XXXIV (1953–4; Buffalo, NY, Albright–Knox A.G.), one of a series of more than 140 large canvases initiated in 1949, expressed a nostalgia that he shared with many of his generation for the lost cause of the Spanish Civil War (see fig.). The works in this series typically consist of black, organic ovals squeezed by stiff, vertical bars against a white ground, retaining the unpremeditated quality of an ink sketch even when enlarged to enormous dimensions, as in the much later Reconciliation Elegy. He conceived of the shapes as elements within an almost musical rhythm, rich in associations with archetypal imagery of figures or body parts but sufficiently generalized to convey a mood rather than a specific representation.

Willem de Kooning, Woman, I, 1950-52