Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia is one of the artists who moved through many art movements. He moved from impressionism to cubism between 1908 and 1913 losing interest in his landscape portraits. On a trip to New York he met up with Marchel Duchamp where he embelished in the Avant-Garde movement and subsequently started to introduce modern art into western culture. After some time wasting away in New York through drug and alcohol abuse he returned to Eastern Europe and embarked on the dadaism movement. Here he met up with artists; Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon and after sometime painting under the influence of dada, he progressed into surrealism where he refound his passion for the arts.

“Artists, so they say, make fun of the bourgeoisie; me, I make fun of the bourgeoisie and the artists,” – Francis Picabia (1923)

He is a unique artist in the sense that he does to dada artists what they do to art, he mocks them and rebels against their ideologies and values.

Rene Magritte

Rene Magritte was one of the pioneers of the surrealism art movement after spending some time experimenting with abstract painting. He moved to France in 1927 just when the surrealist style was taking off. He joined in surrealist activities and “time that he developed his pictorial style, which includes figures of the ordinary world in an extraordinary order.”

This is one of Magritte’s most famous pieces of work and encapsulates what i want to explore in my essay. The caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”  translates as this is not a pipe. This is not a pipe in the sense its not what we define as a real pipe, an object you can go and pick up. It is merely a picture of a pipe, but yet we would charactirize this as a pipe because it has the aesthetic attributes of what a pipe is. This is a prime example of how surrealism blends rational with irrational. We would say its a pipe even though we know its not a real pipe. Socially this implication is used everyday, through advertising, communicating idealogical values and even social networking. If someone was to take a photo or duplicate the mona lisa in painting, we would say its the mona lisa even though it isnt actually the real painting. The principle of ready mades from dada applies here aswell, the Mona Lisa original painting was titled “Mona Lisa” and yet it isnt actually Mona Lisa at all, its Da Vinci’s painting of a person with a title “Mona Lisa”.

Argument:

With this said, when does a piece of art not use a ready-made. Whether its the subject of the art or the materials used, ready-mades influence the outcome of the final art piece.

Surrealism

Surrealism was developed by the 20th-century literary and artistic movement. The surrealist movement of visual art and literature, flourished in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past and had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published “The Surrealist Manifesto” in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike. This movement continues to flourish at all ends of the earth. Continued thought processes and investigations into the mind produce today some of the best art ever seen.

http://www.surrealist.com/

A literary and art movement, dedicated to expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and convention. Surrealism inherited its anti-rationalist sensibility from Dada, but was lighter in spirit than that movement. Like Dada, it was shaped by emerging theories on our perception of reality, the most obvious influence being Freud’s model of the subconscious.

http://www.artmovements.co.uk/surrealism.htm

My interpretation of this definition is:

“Where art becomes the canvas for the merging of the rational and irrational, the convergance of the real and surreal“