SURREALISM AND METAPHYSICAL ART Salvador Dali, Rene Magrite, Giorgio de Chrico, Jerry Uelsmann

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Salvador Dali The Persistence of Memory

Death and decay is the theme here, from the melting watches to the decay implied by the swarming ants. The monstrous fleshy creature draped across the paintings center is an approximation of Dalís own face in profile. Mastering what he called "the usual paralyzing tricks of eye-fooling," Dalí painted this work with "the most imperialist Time fury of precision," but only, he said, "to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality." There is, however, a nod to the real: The distant golden cliffs are those on the coast of Catalonia, Dalís home.

Publication Excerpt: The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999

The Persistence of Memory is aptly named, for the scene is indelibly memorable. Hard objects become inexplicably limp in this bleak and infinite dreamscape, while metal attracts ants like rotting flesh. Mastering what he called "the usual paralyzing tricks of eye-fooling," Dali painted with what he called "the most imperialist fury of precision," but only, he said, "to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality." It is the classical Surrealist ambition, yet some literal reality is included too: the distant golden cliffs are the coast of Catalonia, Dali's home.

Those limp watches are as soft as overripe cheese—indeed "the camembert of time," in Dali's phrase. Here time must lose all meaning. Permanence goes with it: ants, a common theme in Dali's work, represent decay, particularly when they attack a gold watch, and become grotesquely organic. The monstrous fleshy creature draped across the painting's center is at once alien and familiar: an approximation of Dali's own face in profile, its long eyelashes seem disturbingly insectlike or even sexual, as does what may or may not be a tongue oozing from its nose like a fat snail.

The year before this picture was painted, Dali formulated his "paranoiac-critical method," cultivating self-induced psychotic hallucinations in order to create art. "The difference between a madman and me," he said, "is that I am not mad."

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Metaphysical Art• View Related Works• |Browse Art Terms

Source: Oxford University Press

Term applied to the work of Giorgio De Chirico and Carlo Carrà before and during World War I and thereafter to the works produced by the Italian artists who grouped around them. Pittura Metafisica was characterized by a recognizable iconography: a fictive space was created in the painting, modelled on illusionistic one-point perspective but deliberately subverted. In de Chirico’s paintings this established disturbingly deep city squares, bordered by receding arcades and distant brick walls; or claustrophobic interiors, with steeply rising floors. Within these spaces classical statues and, most typically, metaphysical mannequins (derived from tailors’ dummies) provided a featureless and expressionless, surrogate human presence. Balls, coloured toys and unidentifiable solids, plaster moulds, geometrical instruments, military regalia and small realistic paintings were juxtaposed on exterior platforms or in crowded interiors and, particularly in Carrà’s work, included alongside the mannequins. In the best paintings these elements were combined to give a disconcerting image of reality and to capture the disquieting nature of the everyday.

The thinking behind this approach derived from the melancholic personalities of de Chirico and his brother, the writer and composer Alberto Savinio. It was encouraged by their reading (c. 1910) of the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer and Otto Weininger. They became interested in Nietzche’s notion of the eternal return and the circularity of time, which supported their own views about the re-enactment of myth. Their central concern was true reality (where the past recurs), which is hidden behind the reality of appearances and visible only to the ‘clearsighted’ at enigmatic moments. In his paintings de Chirico sought to unmask reality and reveal its mysterious truth. The modification of perspective and depiction of mundane objects provided the appropriate context.

Giorgio deChirico The Song of Lovehttp://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=80419

This painting brings together incongruous and unrelated objects: the head of a Classical Greek statue, an oversized rubber glove, a green ball, and a train shrouded in darkness, silhouetted against a bright blue sky. By subverting the logical presence of objects, de Chirico created what he termed "metaphysical" paintings, representations of what lies "beyond the physical" world. Cloaked in an atmosphere of anxiety and melancholy, de Chirico's humanoid forms, vacuous architecture, shadowy passages, and eerily elongated streets evoke the profound absurdity of a universe torn apart by World War I.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Rene Magritte The False Mirror

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Rene Magritte The Portraithttp://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD

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Rene Magritte was a Belgian painter, draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor, photographer and film maker. He was one of the major figures of Surrealism and perhaps the greatest Belgian artist of the 20th century. His work, while lacking the drama of conventional stylistic development, continued to be admired during the later years of his life, in spite of changes in fashion, and can be said to have continued to grow in popularity and critical esteem after his death.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Jerry Uelsmann

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Jerry Uelsmann

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Samples from Flickr

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Characteristics of Surrealism• Change of scale- i.e. large objects in a relatively small space• Objects that defy the laws of physics: objects that levitate, melt, pass through solid surfaces• Surface change: objects or people made of fur, stone, etc• Objects that transform into something else: a tree transforming to water, a person transforming to an animal

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Your Assignment:

1. Choose one of the following themes• Surrealism at school• Surrealism at home (your house, town, etc.)• A Mysterious Journey• The Human Condition (man vs. nature, loneliness, the processes of life, growth, etc.)• History out of whack (an historical event or person but altered to reflect a bizarre turn of events)2. Use a minimum of 10 different images3. Use the characteristics of surrealism to create a final image

Thursday, March 31, 2011