Metaphysical painting

style of painting that flourished mainly between 1911 and 1920 in the works of the Italian artists Giorgio De Chirico, Carlo Carrà, and Giorgio Morandi. These painters' representational but bizarre and incongruous imagery produces strange, disquieting effects on the viewer. Juxtaposing disparate objects set into deep perspectives, these works strongly influenced the Surrealists in the 1920s.

Metaphysical painting originated with De Chirico. In Munich, where he spent his youthful formative years, De Chirico was attracted to 19th-century German Romantic painting and to the works of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. The latter's search for hidden meanings beyond surface appearances and his descriptions of empty squares surrounded by arcaded buildings in the Italian city of Turin made a particularly deep impression on De Chirico; his 1915 painting “Turin Melancholy” (Carlo Frua de Angeli Collection, Milan), for example, illustrates just such a square, with unnaturally sharp contrasts of light and shadow that lend an aura of poignant but vaguely threatening mystery to the scene. Thearcades in this painting, as well as the deep perspectival space and dark-toned sky, are pictorial devices found in many of De Chirico's strange, evocative works. The enigmatic titles of his paintings contribute to their dreamlike effect: “The Nostalgia of the Infinite” (Museum of Modern Art, New York City), “The Philosopher's Conquest” (Art Institute of Chicago), and “The Soothsayer's Recompense” (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Many of De Chirico's paintings depict mannequins, as do the works done around 1917–21 by the former Futurist Carlo Carrà, who came under his influence. The two artists met in 1917, in Ferrara where, together with De Chirico's younger brother—a poet, musician, and painter known as Alberto Savinio—they formulated the rather obscure principles of the scuola metafisica (Metaphysical school). De Chirico, however, had already arrived at his Metaphysical style several years before the movement came into existence and, by 1911, had shown paintings of this nature in Paris. Other adherents to Metaphysical painting were Filippo de Pisis and Mario Sironi. The Metaphysical school proved short-lived, however, and came to an end around 1920 because of dissension between De Chirico and Carrà over who had founded the group. De Chirico'swork done after 1919 lost much of its mysterious power and eventually sank into a degraded and eccentric classicism.

DADA

nihilistic movement in the arts that flourished primarily in Zürich, Switzerland; New York City; Berlin, Cologne, and Hannover, Germany; and Paris in the early 20th century.

Several explanations have been given by various members of the movement as to how it received its name. According to the most widely accepted account, the name was adopted at Hugo Ball's Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, during one of the meetings held in 1916 by a group of young artists and war resisters that included Jean Arp,Richard Hülsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Emmy Hennings. When a paper knife inserted into a French-German dictionary pointed to the French word dada (“hobby-horse”), it was seized upon by the group as appropriate for their anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities, which were engendered by disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I. Dada did not constitute an actual artistic style, but its proponents favoured groupcollaboration, spontaneity, and chance. In the desire to reject traditional modes of artistic creation, many Dadaists worked in collage, photomontage, and found-object construction, rather than in painting and sculpture.

The movement in the United States was centred at Alfred Stieglitz's New York gallery “291,” and at the studio of Walter Arensberg and his wife, both wealthy patrons of the arts. At these locations, Dada-like activities, arising independently but paralleling those in Zürich, were engaged in by such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Morton Schamberg, and Francis Picabia. The Zürich group was concerned with issues surrounding the war, but New York Dadaists largely focused on mocking the art establishment. For instance, Duchamp's ready-mades—the most famous being Fountain (1917), a porcelain urinal—incited heated debate about the very definition of art. The New York group also collaborated on such publications as The Blind Man, Rongwrong, and New York Dada. Traveling between the United States and Europe, Picabia became a link between the Dada groups in New York, Zürich, and Paris; his Dada periodical, 391, was published in New York, Zürich, Paris, and Barcelona, Spain, from 1917 through 1924.

In 1917 Hülsenbeck, one of the founders of the Zürich group, transmitted the Dada movement toBerlin, where it took on a more political character. Among the German artists involved were Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, George Grosz, Johannes Baader, Hülsenbeck, Otto Schmalhausen, and Wieland Herzfelde and his brother John Heartfield (formerly Helmut Herzfelde, but Anglicized as a protest against German patriotism). One of the chief means of expression used by these artists wasthe photomontage, which consists of fragments of pasted photographs combined with printed messages; the technique was most effectively employed by Heartfield, particularly in his later, anti-Nazi works (e.g., Kaiser Adolph, 1939). Like the groups in New York and Zürich, the Berlin artists staged public meetings, shocking and enraging the audience with their antics. They, too, issued Dada publications: Club Dada, Der Dada, Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (“Everyman His Own Football”), and Dada Almanach. The First International Dada Fair was held in Berlin in June 1920.

Dada activities were also carried on in other German cities. In Cologne in 1919 and 1920, the chiefparticipants were Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld. Also affiliated with Dada was Kurt Schwitters of Hannover, who gave the nonsense name Merz to his collages, constructions, and literary productions. Although Schwitters used Dadaistic material—bits of rubbish—to create his works, he achieved a refined formalism that was uncharacteristic of Dada anti-art.

In Paris, Dada took on a literary emphasis under one of its founders, the poet Tristan Tzara. Most notable among the numerous Dada pamphlets and reviews was Littérature (published 1919–24), which contained writings by André Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Paul Éluard, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. After 1922, however, Dada began to lose its force.

Dada had far-reaching effects on the art of the 20th century. Its nihilistic, antirationalistic critiques of society and its unrestrained attacks on all formal artistic conventions found no immediate inheritors, but its preoccupation with the bizarre, the irrational, and the fantastic bore fruit in the Surrealist movement. Dada artists' reliance on accident and chance were later employed by the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists. Conceptual art is also rooted in Dada, forit was Duchamp who first asserted that the mental activity (“intellectual expression”) of the artist was of greater significance than the object created. Critics have even cited Dadaist influences on the punk rock movement of the 1970s.

SURREALISM

movement in visual art and literature, flourishing 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's 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 Europeanculture and politics in the past and that 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, hebelieved, could be attained by poets and painters alike.

In the poetry of Breton, Paul Éluard, Pierre Reverdy, and others, Surrealism manifested itself in a juxtaposition of words that was startling because it was determined not by logical but by psychological—that is, unconscious—thought processes. Its major achievements, however, were in the field of painting. Surrealist painting was influenced not only by Dadaism but also by the fantastic and grotesque images of such earlier painters as Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya and of closer contemporaries such as Odilon Redon, Giorgio de Chirico, and Marc Chagall. The practice of Surrealist art strongly emphasized methodological research and experimentation, stressing the work of art as a means for prompting personal psychic investigation and revelation. Breton, however, demanded firm doctrinal allegiance. Thus, although the Surrealists held a group show in Paris in 1925, the history of the movement is full of expulsions, defections, and personal attacks.

The major Surrealist painters were Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux, and Joan Miró. The work of these artists is too diverse to be summarized categorically as the Surrealist approach in the visual arts. Each artist sought his own means of self-exploration. Some single-mindedly pursued a spontaneous revelationof the unconscious, freed from the controls of the conscious mind; others, notably Miró, used Surrealism as a liberating starting point for an exploration of personal fantasies, conscious or unconscious, often through formal means of great beauty. A range of possibilities falling between the two extremes can be distinguished. At one pole, exemplified at its purest by the works of Arp, the viewer is confronted with images, usually biomorphic, that are suggestive but indefinite. As the viewer's mind works with the provocative image, unconscious associations are liberated, and the creative imagination asserts itself in a totally open-ended investigative process. To a greater or lesser extent, Ernst, Masson, and Miró also followed this approach, variously called organic, emblematic, or absolute Surrealism. At the other pole the viewer is confronted by a world that is completely defined and minutely depicted but that makes no rational sense: fully recognizable, realistically painted images are removed from their normal contexts and reassembled within an ambiguous, paradoxical, or shocking framework. The work aims to provoke a sympathetic response in the viewer, forcing him to acknowledge the inherent “sense” of the irrational and logically inexplicable. The most direct form of this approach was taken by Magritte in simple but powerful paintings such as that portraying a normal table setting that includes a plate holding a slice of ham, from the centre of which stares a human eye. Dalí, Roy, and Delvaux rendered similar but more complex alien worlds that resemble compelling dreamlike scenes.

A number of specific techniques were devised by the Surrealists to evoke psychic responses. Among these were frottage (rubbing with graphite over wood or other grained substances) and grattage (scraping the canvas)—both developed by Ernst to produce partial images, which were to be completed in the mind of the viewer; automatic drawing, a spontaneous, uncensored recording of chaotic images that “erupt” into the consciousness of the artist; and found objects.

With its emphasis on content and free form, Surrealism provided a major alternative to the contemporary, highly formalistic Cubist movement and was largely responsible for perpetuating in modern painting the traditional emphasis on content.

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