1920's in Europe and Russia

Notes 

surrealism

• Surrealism- came from people that started the Dada movement.
• It started in Paris and this became the main centre of the movement.
• The movement eventually spread across the world effecting visual arts and even language in some countries.
• Dali became huge within the surrealist movement.
• the surrealists believed in being irrational and they liked to challenge their thought processes.
• Freud's theories of dream analysis, free association and the unconscious was very important to the surrealists as it helped them to develop new methods of freeing their minds. 
• Surrealism tried to be random but it also tried to make sense from the nonsense in the art.
• Max Ernst combined human form with buildings.
• People always try to interoperate surrealist art but its subjective to the artist and the viewer because its random and doesn't really have any logic behind it.  
• Rene Magritte liked the idea of painting things to look real (trompe l'oeil)
• a lot of metaphores were used within surrealism that link to sexuallity.
• Art was where the idea of euphemisms started. 
• Joan Miro created bizarre representations of animals that looked pretty abstract.
• Salvador Dali uses similar forms throughout his work.
• Dali also used found objects to create his images (lobster telephone) 
• Hans Bellmer created creepy distorted forms of women.
• Man ray created surrealist photography- at the time that he created his images it was ground breaking as nothing like this had aver been done or seen before. 
• In the 70's and 80's surrealism wasnt as shocking as it once was and it began to be used in advertising quite a lot (Guiness advertisement)

The Bauhaus- Germany

• a school of design established in Weimar in 1919 by WalterGropius, moved to Dessau in 1926, and closed in 1933 as aresult of Nazi hostility.
• Started off with Expressionism- very angular, geometric work.
• A few years later it moved away from expressionism and moved on to more modern ideas. 
• in 1924 the Bauhaus was forced to close but the school re opened in  Dessau.   

Revolutionary soviet Russia 

• Russian constructivist created a lot of propaganda art- iconic red army, white army poster.
• El Lizzitsky Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. 1919
• Gustav  Klutsis created images using collage and bright colours 
• constructivist art represented building things up for example buildings, communities ect.
• There was no boundaries between design and art they crossed over a lot at this time and the same art was often used for a lot of different purposes.
• Photography in constructivism was very angular and a lot of strange angles were used to photograph buildings. This was because of smaller cameras.

Research task

Research Surrealism and Sexuality in 1920s Art,  Photography and Film

In the 1920's surrealism was a new movement forming from the Dada movement. The surrealist movement was all about artist's creating strange random images that would never be seen in real life. André Breton was a surrealist artist that created a lot of surrealist art that often included elements of human form with other strange imagery (figure 1.) The art that was created was linked very closely to Sigmund Freud's psychological theories of dream analysis of dream analysis, free association and the unconscious.

Central to this concept were the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Which Andre Breton adapted to suit his own purposes. He regarded Freud's findings as the fortuitous re discovery of the power of dreams and imagination that had lain hidden behind the purely rational outlook that predominated at the time. [1]   

André Breton, The lamp smokes but the Nile reeks (La lampe fume mais le nil empeste), 1937

Salvador Dali was one of the main artists within this movement as his work was so put there and unique to any other art before this movement. He was also very successful because he created art across all areas as he created paintings, films and sculptures. Everything that he did in life even down to his moustache style screamed surrealism. He saw the world very differently to what the average person might, this becomes clear by looking at his paintings. Dali created a lot of art that referenced more of a sexual theme for example his painting 'The great masterbater,' (Image 2) as the title suggests, the painting has sexual content. The image is quite confusing because it isn't obvious that the image has sexual themes at first glance but upon further inspection you realise what the image is actually showing . 

... an array of odd and sometimes disturbing images began to appear in his work. Many of the paintings had shocking sexual images that are interpreted as indicating Dali's fear and shame regarding sex and sexual relations. [2]

Salvador Dali, The Great Masturbator, 1929

Surrealism also spanned out across different creative areas and the photographers started to experiment with creating surrealist images. Obviously this was a lot different to painting because with photography you are photographing real life and not just creating an image from your head. Because of this photographers had to think more outside of the box so they started they started to create surrealist images with the help of props and different camera settings. Man Ray created a lot of different surrealist photographs in his life. One of his photographs called Ingres' violin (Figure 3) shows a woman with the illusion of a carved back.  This was revolutionary at the time because nothing like this had ever been done within photography. 

...the photograph confuses the usual status and conventions of a photographic image with respect to reality. It introduces fantasy. Any range of techniques can be used to produce disruptions of a conventional photographic signifier, with the camera (lens shifts, focal plane and angles of view, uses of lighting ect.)[3]

(Figure 3) Man Ray, Ingres' violin, 1924

[1] C Klingsöhr-Leroy, Surrealism, Taschen, p 7
[2] M Elsohn Elsohn Ros, Salvador Dalí and the Surrealists: Their Lives and Ideas, 21 Activities, 2003. P 50
[3] D Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent, I.B.Tauris, 2004.
 P 29.