Surrealism

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Magritte 'The Threatened Assassin' (1926-7)

Description

  • Sexual murder, stage set up with two men framing door, space for viewer to look in
  • Nude with towel on divan, decapitated, blood trickles, man stands to leave by phonograph
  • Three men look in, gaze meets viewers, we feel threatened voyeuristic 
  • Hyper-realism- recognisable objects/characters = unease

Context

  • Sadist crime interested Surrealists, Breton: 'beauty must be convulsive or not at all'
  • Breton: 'women are the most disturbing and mysterious' - primal desire of men in suits
  • Megaphone replays scream, dead woman common motif due to drowing of Magritte's mother

Influences

  • Fantomas, pulp fiction of Allain and Souvestre, mise en scene from 1912 film
  • Violent, ****** poetry of Nouge- describes the man in the painting
  • 'Murderous Corpse' film 1913 had same dectective placing
  • Murder case of Henry Landrew who killed women for money
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Dali 'The Great Masturbator' (1929)

Description

  • Distorted human face (based on Catalonian rocks), nude rises from it (Gala), fantasy
  • Mouth near male crotch, waist down, cuts on knees, limpness juxtaposed with lion's tongue
  • Ants swarm on grasshoppers abdonmen, adult and child in landscape and egg (fertility)

Context

  • Confliction towards sex, father has left explicit photos of diseases, saw sex as decay
  • Freudian dream logic, concept of Eros and Thantos, only safety in masturbation
  • Loctus links to fear of castrastion, female bites off male's head in sex

Style

  • Realistic style to de-rail reality, irrational juxtaposition of odd objects together
  • Hallucinatory and irrational 'concrete irrationality', and aesthetic of 'convulsive beauty'
  • Hiernoymus Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delights'
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Miro 'Catalan Landscape: The Hunter' (1923)

Description

  • Stick figure of hunter, triangle head, smokes pipe, heart and genitals, holds rabbit and gun
  • Catalan and French flags cross, balanced by Spanish, squiggly poo juxtaposed by triangle
  • Stretched out fish, tries to eat insect, pees as it flies away, everything eating, eaten or excretes
  • Central eye- source of creative imagery, everything symbol e.g. tress just circle and leaf

Style 

  • Unconcious imaginings, stream of conscience, automatic, child-like and made up
  • Flat, lack of depth, repeated forms, abstract vision rather than realism of other Surrealists
  • Emphasis on process- dream painting not a painted dream

Context

  • Jung's work on origin of symbols, linked to Freud, symbols imbedded in culture - meaningful
  • Microscopic biology, links with scientists, Motherwell: 'breathes erocitism with freedom, grace'
  • Sard- Spanish dance, nostalgia for childhood, champions naive e.g. Cheval's 'Palais Ideal'
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