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1904-1910

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Fauvism Definition

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Tate glossary definition for fauvism: Name given to the painting of Matisse, Derain and other artists from their circle from 1905 to about 1910 characterised by strong colours and fierce brushwork

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1905-1920

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1907-1914

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Cubism definition

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Tate glossary definition for cubism: A revolutionary new approach to representing reality in art invented by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in which the artists aimed to bring different views of their subjects together in the same picture

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Expressionism Definition

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Tate glossary definition for expressionism: Refers to art in which the image of reality is distorted in order to make it expressive of the artist’s inner feelings or ideas

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1909-1914

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Futurism Definition

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Tate glossary definition for futurism: Italian art movement of the early twentieth century that aimed to capture in art the dynamism, energy and movement of the modern world

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1915-1924

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Suprematism Definition

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The first actual exhibition of suprematist paintings was in December 1915 in St Petersburg, at an exhibition called O.10. The exhibition included thirty-five abstract paintings by Kazimir Malevich, among them the famous black square on a white ground (The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) which headed the list of his works in the catalogue.

In 1927 Malevich published his book The Non-Objective World, one of the most important theoretical documents of abstract art. In it he wrote: 'In the year 1913, trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world, I took refuge in the form of the square.' Out of the 'suprematist square' as he called it, Malevich developed a whole range of forms including rectangles, triangles and circles often in intense and beautiful colours. These forms are floated against a usually white ground, and the feeling of colour in space in suprematist painting is a crucial aspect of it.

Suprematism was one of the key movements of modernist art. After the rise of Stalin from 1924 and the imposition of socialist realism, Malevich's career languished. In his last years before his death in 1935 he painted figurative pictures. In 1919 the artist El Lissitzky met Malevich and was strongly influenced by suprematism, as was the Hungarian born Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

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Tate glossary definition for suprematism: Name given by the Russian artist Kasimir Malevich to the abstract art he developed from 1913 characterised by basic geometric forms, such as circles and lines, painted in a limited range of colours

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1915-1934

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Constructivism Definition

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The constructivists believed art should directly reflect the modern industrial world. Vladimir Tatlin was crucially influenced by Pablo Picasso's cubist constructions ( Construction 1914) which he saw in Picasso's studio in Paris in 1913. These were three-dimensional still lifes made of scrap materials. Tatlin began to make his own but they were completely abstract and made of industrial materials.

By 1921 Russian artists who followed Tatlin's ideas were calling themselves constructivists and in 1923 a manifesto was published in their magazine Lef:

The material formation of the object is to be substituted for its aesthetic combination. The object is to be treated as a whole and thus will be of no discernible 'style' but simply a product of an industrial order like a car, an aeroplane and such like. Constructivism is a purely technical mastery and organisation of materials.

Constructivism was suppressed in Russia in the 1920s but was brought to the West by Naum Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner and has been a major influence on modern sculpture.

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The constructivists believed art should directly reflect the modern industrial world. Vladimir Tatlin was crucially influenced by Pablo Picasso's cubist constructions ( Construction 1914) which he saw in Picasso's studio in Paris in 1913. These were three-dimensional still lifes made of scrap materials.

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Bauhaus definition

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What Is Bauhaus Painting?

The Bauhaus art movement

Bauhaus in German literally means "construction house," and in a way, that's really all it started out as. But very quickly, the space turned into a larger movement, defined by clear aesthetic trademarks. For more, check out our index of art styles covering more specific and noteworthy movements.

So, what is Bauhaus?

BAUHAUS DEFINITION

What is Bauhaus?

The Bauhaus is a German artistic movement which lasted from 1919-1933. Its goal was to merge all artistic mediums into one unified approach, that of combining an individual's artistry with mass production and function. Bauhaus design is often abstract, angular, and geometric, with little ornamentation.

Famous Bauhaus Design Figures:

Walter Gropius

Paul Klee

Josef Albers

Marcel Breuer

Anni Albers

Herbert Bayer

Marianne Brandt

Now that we have a working definition for the movement, let's look at how it came to be.

What Is Bauhaus Architecture?

History of the Bauhaus

The Bauhaus art movement was founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany by the architect Walter Gropius. His goal was to lead a school that approached art comprehensively. Instead of having one school for painting, another for sculpture, and another for architecture, Gropius wanted to bring all of these media under the same roof so that they could inform each other.

Walter Gropius, who founded Bauhaus

In 1925, the Weimar school was forced to close and move to Dessau. While it was in Weimar where the radical approach to artistry was defined, it was in Dessau where the Bauhaus style as we know it today really came to be.

While Gropius didn't set out to create a distinct aesthetic brand - he was more interested in the process of how the art was created - his school's approach resulted in a specific style. The emphasis on mass-produced function made most works out of the Bauhaus design school abstract, modernist, and without excessive decoration.

Bauhaus architecture examples

While the school's principles grew more pronounced and distinct, the forms it took remained varied. This included artists working in typography, architecture, woodworking, set design, painting, and much more who all studied under the Bauhaus art movement roof.

By 1932, the movement had gained lots of attention. But instead of being able to capitalize on its burgeoning popularity, the school found itself beleaguered by the new Nazi government of Germany. The school briefly relocated to Berlin, but in 1933 the school was forced to close its doors.

Its impact had already grown beyond its physical campus. This video also gives a great brief history of the school and movement:

Bauhaus design explained

Even though it lasted for less than fifteen years, the movement produced a long list of well-known and influential artists.

What is Bauhaus Art Movement?

Famous Bauhaus Artists

The Bauhaus art movement comprised countless creators who massively influenced their respective fields. Let's take a look at some of the biggest names to come out of the school.

Walter Gropius

As the founder of the Bauhaus, Gropius is considered one of the most influential figures in this style of architecture. Gropius was a firm believer in the function of architecture, renouncing references to previous styles or ornamentation. His buildings, therefore, are highly modernist, geometric, and minimalist, encapsulating the Bauhaus design.

A building designed by Walter Gropius

Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer was one of the first, and youngest, Bauhaus artists. His career focused in architecture and furniture design (his Cesca Chair is especially famous). His architecture is slightly more brutalist than that of Gropius, but the influence the movement had on him is evident in all of his work.

The Cesca chair, designed by Marcel Breuer

Paul Klee

Paul Klee was a painter whose work utilized Cubism, Surrealism, and Modernism. He was key in developing the aesthetic of the Bauhaus movement artwork, working as a teacher at the school and writing one of the most important pieces of theory in the modern art movement: Writings on Form and Design Theory.

Senecio, by Paul Klee (1922)

Anni Albers

Anni Albers was a textile artist who spearheaded the movement's ideals of mixing function and art. Her textiles also utilize the geometric and modernist designs associated with the movement.

A tapestry by Anni Albers

Cinematic Influence

Bauhaus in Film

Because the Bauhaus stressed the confluence of media under one roof, it's no surprise that the style reached into film, itself an amalgamation of art forms (music, performance, photography, design, etc.).

The most immediate and obvious influence the movement had on film can be seen in production design. The sharp, geometric Bauhaus architecture is key to much of the set design in the German Expressionist movement. Take, for example, the German Expressionist crown jewel The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari:

Still from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

The seminal film of 1920 shows the beginning of the Bauhaus's cinematic influence. Sharp corners, minimal decoration: all can be found in Dr. Caligari.

This type of modernist set design with clear Bauhaus strains proliferated through the 1920's. Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) also utilizes the movement's architectural approach:

Bauhaus in Metropolis

By the 1960s, the Bauhaus was so ingrained in culture that satirical filmmaker Jacques Tati poked fun at the style in his 1967 film Playtime.

Playtime and Bauhaus Influence

The chairs, the minimalist sleek design - by the 1960s, the style had become synonymous with modernism.

Bauhaus Painting

The Bauhaus Influence

It's hard to overstate the legacy of the Bauhaus. The style and approach of the German school still influences artists, designers, and architects to this day. This video discusses the movement's influence 100 years after its birth:

The Bauhaus legacy and effects

Many of the artists and teachers at the Bauhaus had to flee Germany due to Nazi oppression. But their methods and pedagogy spread like wildfire all over the world throughout the 20th century. Walter Gropius went on to teach at Harvard; Anni Albers (and her husband Josef) moved to North Carolina to teach at Black Mountain College and had work featured at MoMA.

Although the school closed in 1933, its teachings are sprinkled over the globe, and to this day the Bauhaus style lives on, marrying art and function in everything from furniture to graphic design.

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Bauhaus - Art Movement, Style & History Explained

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The Bauhaus is a German artistic movement defined by a style is often abstract, angular, and geometric, with little ornamentation.

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1919-1933

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1917 to 1931

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De Stijl Definition

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Originally a publication, De Stijl was founded in 1917 by two pioneers of abstract art, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. De Stijl means style in Dutch. The magazine De Stijl became a vehicle for Mondrian's ideas on art, and in a series of articles in the first year's issues he defined his aims and used, perhaps for the first time, the term neo-plasticism. This became the name for the type of abstract art he and the De Stijl circle practised.

Other members of the group included Bart van der Leck, Vantongerloo and Vordemberge-Gildewart, as well as the architects Gerrit Rietveld and JJP Oud. Mondrian withdrew from De Stijl in 1923 following Van Doesburg's adoption of diagonal elements in his work. Van Doesburg continued the publication until 1931.

De Stijl had a profound influence on the development both of abstract art and modern architecture and design.

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Tate glossary definition for De Stijl: Circle of Dutch abstract artists who promoted a style of art based on a strict geometry of horizontals and verticals

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Abstract Expressionism Definition

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Introduction

The abstract expressionists were mostly based in New York City, and also became known as the New York school. The name evokes their aim to make art that while abstract was also expressive or emotional in its effect. They were inspired by the surrealist idea that art should come from the unconscious mind, and by the automatism of artist Joan Miró.

TYPES OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Within abstract expressionism were two broad groupings: the so-called action painters, who attacked their canvases with expressive brush strokes; and the colour field painters who filled their canvases with large areas of a single colour.

The action painters were led by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who worked in a spontaneous improvisatory manner often using large brushes to make sweeping gestural marks. Pollock famously placed his canvas on the ground and danced around it pouring paint from the can or trailing it from the brush or a stick. In this way the action painters directly placed their inner impulses onto the canvas.

The second grouping included Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still. They were deeply interested in religion and myth and created simple compositions with large areas of colour intended to produce a contemplative or meditational response in the viewer. In an essay written in 1948 Barnett Newmann said: 'Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ''life'', we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings'. This approach to painting developed from around 1960 into what became known as colour field painting, characterised by artists using large areas of more or less a single flat colour.

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Tate glossary definition for abstract expressionism: Term applied to new forms of abstract art developed by American painters in 1940s and 1950s, often characterized by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity

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1940-1950

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1960-1970

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Conceptual Art Definition

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1950s-1960s

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Happening Art Movement Definition

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Happenings were the forerunners of performance art and in turn emerged from the theatrical elements of dada and surrealism. The name was first used by the American artist Allan Kaprow in the title of his 1959 work 18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place on six days, 4-10 October 1959 at the Reuben Gallery, New York.

Happenings typically took place in an environment or installation created within the gallery and involved light, sound, slide projections and an element of spectator participation. They proliferated through the 1960s but gave way to performance art in which the focus was increasingly on the actions of the artist. A detailed account of early happenings can be found in Michael Kirby's 1965 book, Happenings.

Other notable creators of happenings were Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms and Robert Whitman. Jim Dine's 1960 suite of prints The Crash relates to the drawings that were props for his 1960 happening, The Car Crash.

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Tate glossary definition for happening: Happenings were theatrical events created by artists, initially in America, in the late 1950s and early 1960s

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1960s-1970s

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Yoko Ono

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Yoko Ono

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Fluxus Art Movement Definition

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Founded in 1960 by the Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus began as a small but international network of artists and composers, and was characterised as a shared attitude rather than a movement. Rooted in experimental music, it was named after a magazine which featured the work of musicians and artists centred around avant-garde composer John Cage.

The Latin word Fluxus means flowing, in English a flux is a flowing out. Fluxus founder Maciunas said that the purpose of Fluxus was to 'promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art'. This has strong echoes of dada, the early twentieth century art movement.

The first Fluxus event was staged in 1961 at the AG Gallery in New York and was followed by festivals in Europe in 1962. The major centres of Fluxus activity were New York, Germany and Japan.

Fluxus played an important role in opening up the definitions of what art can be. It has profoundly influenced the nature of art production since the 1960s, which has seen a diverse range of art forms and approaches existing and flourishing side-by-side.

Fluxus had no single unifying style. Artists used a range of media and processes adopting a 'do-it-yourself' attitude to creative activity, often staging random performances and using whatever materials were at hand to make art. Seeing themselves as an alternative to academic art and music, Fluxus was a democratic form of creativity open to anyone. Collaborations were encouraged between artists and across artforms, and also with the audience or spectator. It valued simplicity and anti-commercialism, with chance and accident playing a big part in the creation of works, and humour also being an important element.

Many key avant-garde artists in the 60s took part in Fluxus, including Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Benjamin Patterson and Emmett Williams.

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Tate glossary definition for Fluxus: An international avant-garde group or collective that was founded and flourished in the1960s but still continues today

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1916-1924

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Hannah Hoch

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Hannah Hoch

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Dada Definition

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Dada’s mockery, wit, and absurdity powerfully criticized European culture and opened new ways to make art. Revolutionary ideas by Duchamp, Ray, Hoch, Tzara+

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1924-1966

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Salvador Dali

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Surrealism Definition

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Summary of Surrealism

The Surrealists sought to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock the power of the imagination. Disdaining rationalism and literary realism, and powerfully influenced by psychoanalysis, the Surrealists believed the rational mind repressed the power of the imagination, weighing it down with taboos. Influenced also by Karl Marx, they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution. Their emphasis on the power of personal imagination puts them in the tradition of Romanticism, but unlike their forebears, they believed that revelations could be found on the street and in everyday life. The Surrealist impulse to tap the unconscious mind, and their interests in myth and primitivism, went on to shape many later movements, and the style remains influential to this today.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

André Breton defined Surrealism as "psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought." What Breton is proposing is that artists bypass reason and rationality by accessing their unconscious mind. In practice, these techniques became known as automatism or automatic writing, which allowed artists to forgo conscious thought and embrace chance when creating art.

The work of Sigmund Freud was profoundly influential for Surrealists, particularly his book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Freud legitimized the importance of dreams and the unconscious as valid revelations of human emotion and desires; his exposure of the complex and repressed inner worlds of sexuality, desire, and violence provided a theoretical basis for much of Surrealism.

Surrealist imagery is probably the most recognizable element of the movement, yet it is also the most elusive to categorize and define. Each artist relied on their own recurring motifs arisen through their dreams or/and unconscious mind. At its basic, the imagery is outlandish, perplexing, and even uncanny, as it is meant to jolt the viewer out of their comforting assumptions. Nature, however, is the most frequent imagery: Max Ernst was obsessed with birds and had a bird alter ego, Salvador Dalí's works often include ants or eggs, and Joan Miró relied strongly on vague biomorphic imagery.

Overview of Surrealism

Building upon the anti-rationalism of Dada, the Surrealists made powerful art and offered a new direction for exploration, as Max Ernst said: "creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition."

Artworks and Artists of Surrealism

Carnival of Harlequin (1924-25)

Artist: Joan Miró

Miró created elaborate, fantastical spaces in his paintings that are an excellent example of Surrealism in their reliance on dream-like imagery and their use of biomorphism. Biomorphic shapes are those that resemble organic beings but that are hard to identify as any specific thing; the shapes seem to self-generate, morph, and dance on the canvas. While there is the suggestion of a believable three-dimensional space in Carnaval d'Arlequin, the playful shapes are arranged with an all-over quality that is common to many of Miró's works during his Surrealist period, and that would eventually lead him to further abstraction. Miró was especially known for his use of automatic writing techniques in the creation of his works, particularly doodling or automatic drawing, which is how he began many of his canvases. He is best known for his works such as this that depict chaotic yet lighthearted interior scenes, taking his influence from Dutch 17 th-century interiors.

Oil on canvas - Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

The Human Condition (1933)

Artist: René Magritte

The iconic and enigmatic René Magritte's works tend to be intellectual, often dealing with visual puns and the relation between the representation of something and the thing itself. In The Human Condition a canvas sits on an easel before a curtained window and reproduces exactly the scene outside the window that would be behind the canvas, thus the image on the easel in a sense becomes the scene, not just a reproduction of the landscape. There is in effect no difference between the two as both are fabrications of the artist. The hyperrealist painting style often used by Surrealists makes the odd setup seem dreamlike.

Oil on canvas - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Mama, Papa is Wounded! (1927)

Artist: Yves Tanguy

The most pivotal moment for Tanguy in his decision to become a painter was his sighting of a canvas by Giorgio de Chirico in a shop window in 1923. The next year, Tanguy, the poet Jacques Prévert, and the actor and screenwriter Marcel Duhamel moved into a house that was to become a gathering place for the Surrealists, a movement he became interested in after reading the periodical La Révolution surréaliste. André Breton welcomed him into the group in 1925. Tanguy was inspired by the biomorphic forms of Jean Arp, Ernst, and Miró, quickly developing his own vocabulary of amoeba-like shapes that populate arid, mysterious settings, no doubt influenced by his youthful travels to Argentina, Brazil, and Tunisia. Despite his lack of formal training, Tanguy's mature style emerged by 1927, characterized by deserted landscapes littered with fantastical rocklike objects painted with a precise illusionism. The works usually have an overcast sky with a view thatseems to stretch endlessly.

Mama, Papa is Wounded depicts Tanguy's most common subject matter of war. The work is painted in a hyperrealist style with his distinctive limited color palette, both of which create a sense of dream-like reality. Tanguy often found the titles of works while looking through psychiatric case histories for compelling statements by patients. Given that, it is difficult to know if this work is relevant to his own family history as he claimed to have imagined the painting in its entirety before he began it. His brother was killed in World War I and the bleakness of the landscape may refer generally to losses suffered in the war by thousands of French families. De Chirico's influence on Tanguy's work is obvious here in his use of falling shadows and a classical torso in the landscape.

Oil on Canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Accommodations of Desire (1929)

Artist: Salvador Dalí

Painted in the summer of 1929 just after Dalí went to Paris for his first Surrealist exhibition, The Accommodations of Desire is a prime example of Dalí's ability to render his vivid and bizarre dreams with seemingly journalistic accuracy. He developed the paranoid-critical method, which involved systematic irrational thought and self-induced paranoia as a way to access his unconscious. He referred to the resulting works as "hand-painted dream photographs" because of their realism coupled with their eerie dream quality. The narrative of this work stems from Dalí's anxieties over his affair with Gala Eluard, wife of artist Paul Eluard. The lumpish white "pebbles" depict his insecurities about his future with Gala, circling around the concepts of terror and decay. While The Accommodations of Desire is an exposé of Dalí's deepest fears, it combines his typical hyper-realistic painting style with more experimental collage techniques. The lion heads are glued onto the canvas, and are believed to have been cut from a children's book.

Oil and cut-and-pasted printed paper on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Battle of Fishes (1926)

Artist: André Masson

Masson was one of the most enthusiastic followers of Breton's automatic writing, having begun his own independent experiments in the early 1920s. He would often produce art under exacting conditions, using drugs, going without sleep, or sustenance in order to relax conscious control of his art making so that he could access his unconscious. Masson, along with his neighbors Joan Miró, Antonin Artuad, and others would sometimes experiment together. He is best known for his use of sand. In an effort to introduce chance into his works, he would throw glue or gesso onto a canvas and then sand. His oil paintings were made based on the resulting shapes.

Battle of the Fishes perhaps references his experiences in WWI. He signed up to fight and after three years, was seriously injured, taking months to recover in an army hospital and spending time in a psychiatric facility. He was unable for many years to speak of the things he witnessed as a soldier, but his art consistently depicts massacres, bizarre confrontations, rape, and dismemberment. Masson himself observed that male figures in his art rarely escape unharmed. Battle of Fishes has subdued color, but the fish seem involved in a vicious battle to the death with their razor-like teeth and spilled blood. Masson believed that the use of chance in art would reveal the sadism of all creatures - an idea that he could only reveal in his art.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Object (1936)

Artist: Meret Oppenheim

Oppenheim was one of the few women Surrealists whose work was exhibited with the group. Like Giacometti she worked primarily with objects. This work, also known under the title Luncheon in Fur, with its unsettling juxtaposition of a domestic object and animality, is a quintessential example of Surrealist ideas. The artist makes strange a teacup, saucer, and spoon purchased at typical department store - objects that were familiar are made disturbingly off-putting as the viewer must imagine drinking tea from a fur-covered cup.

Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Beginnings of Surrealism

Surrealism grew out of the Dada movement, which was also in rebellion against middle-class complacency. Artistic influences, however, came from many different sources. The most immediate influence for several of the Surrealists was Giorgio de Chirico, their contemporary who, like them, used bizarre imagery with unsettling juxtapositions (and his Metaphysical Painting movement). They were also drawn to artists from the recent past who were interested in primitivism, the naive, or fantastical imagery, such as Gustave Moreau, Arnold Bocklin, Odilon Redon, and Henri Rousseau. Even artists from as far back as the Renaissance, such as Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Hieronymous Bosch, provided inspiration in so far as these artists were not overly concerned with aesthetic issues involving line and color, but instead felt compelled to create what Surrealists thought of as the "real."

The Surrealist movement began as a literary group strongly allied to Dada, emerging in the wake of the collapse of Dada in Paris, when André Breton's eagerness to bring purpose to Dada clashed with Tristan Tzara's anti-authoritarianism. Breton, who is occasionally described as the 'Pope' of Surrealism, officially founded the movement in 1924 when he wrote "The Surrealist Manifesto." However, the term "surrealism," was first coined in 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire when he used it in program notes for the ballet Parade, written by Pablo Picasso, Leonide Massine, Jean Cocteau, and Erik Satie.

Around the same time that Breton published his inaugural manifesto, the group began publishing the journal La Révolution surréaliste, which was largely focused on writing, but also included art reproductions by artists such as de Chirico, Ernst, André Masson, and Man Ray. Publication continued until 1929.

The Bureau for Surrealist Research or Centrale Surréaliste was also established in Paris in 1924. This was a loosely affiliated group of writers and artists who met and conducted interviews to "gather all the information possible related to forms that might express the unconscious activity of the mind." Headed by Breton, the Bureau created a dual archive: one that collected dream imagery and one that collected material related to social life. At least two people manned the office each day - one to greet visitors and the other to write down the observations and comments of the visitors that then became part of the archive. In January of 1925, the Bureau officially published its revolutionary intent that was signed by 27 people, including Breton, Ernst, and Masson.

Surrealism: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Surrealism shared much of the anti-rationalism of Dada, the movement out of which it grew. The original Parisian Surrealists used art as a reprieve from violent political situations and to address the unease they felt about the world's uncertainties. By employing fantasy and dream imagery, artists generated creative works in a variety of media that exposed their inner minds in eccentric, symbolic ways, uncovering anxieties and treating them analytically through visual means.

Surrealist Paintings

There were two styles or methods that distinguished Surrealist painting. Artists such as Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte painted in a hyper-realistic style in which objects were depicted in crisp detail and with the illusion of three-dimensionality, emphasizing their dream-like quality. The color in these works was often either saturated (Dalí) or monochromatic (Tanguy), both choices conveying a dream state.

Several Surrealists also relied heavily on automatism or automatic writing as a way to tap into the unconscious mind. Artists such as Joan Miró and Max Ernst used various techniques to create unlikely and often outlandish imagery including collage, doodling, frottage, decalcomania, and grattage. Artists such as Hans Arp also created collages as stand-alone works.

Hyperrealism and automatism were not mutually exclusive. Miro, for example, often used both methods in one work. In either case, however the subject matter was arrived at or depicted, it was always bizarre - meant to disturb and baffle.

Surrealist Objects and Sculptures

Breton felt that the object had been in a state of crisis since the early-19 th century and thought this impasse could be overcome if the object in all its strangeness could be seen as if for the first time. The strategy was not to make Surreal objects for the sake of shocking the middle class a la Dada but to make objects "surreal" by what he called dépayesment or estrangement. The goal was the displacement of the object, removing it from its expected context, "defamilarizing" it. Once the object was removed from its normal circumstances, it could be seen without the mask of its cultural context. These incongruous combinations of objects were also thought to reveal the fraught sexual and psychological forces hidden beneath the surface of reality.

A limited number of Surrealists are known for their three-dimensional work. Arp, who began as part of the Dada movement, was known for his biomorphic objects. Oppenheim's pieces were bizarre combinations that removed familiar objects from their everyday context, while Giacometti's were more traditional sculptural forms, many of which were human-insect hybrid figures. Dalí, less known for his 3D work, did produce some interesting installations, particularly, Rainy Taxi (1938), which was an automobile with mannequins and a series of pipes that created "rain" in the car's interior.

Surrealist Sculpture - Movement Page

Surrealist Photography

Photography, because of the ease with which it allowed artists to produce uncanny imagery, occupied a central role in Surrealism. Artists such as Man Ray and Maurice Tabard used the medium to explore automatic writing, using techniques such as double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization, the latter of which eschewed the camera altogether. Other photographers used rotation or distortion to render bizarre images.

The Surrealists also appreciated the prosaic photograph removed from its mundane context and seen through the lens of Surrealist sensibility. Vernacular snapshots, police photographs, movie stills, and documentary photographs all were published in Surrealist journals like La Révolution surréaliste and Minotaure, totally disconnected from their original purposes. The Surrealists, for example, were enthusiastic about Eugène Atget's photographs of Paris. Published in 1926 in La Révolution surréaliste at the prompting of his neighbor, Man Ray, Atget's imagery of a quickly vanishing Paris was understood as impulsive visions. Atget's photographs of empty streets and shop windows recalled the Surrealist's own vision of Paris as a "dream capital."

Dada & Surrealist Photography - Movement Page

Surrealist Film

Surrealism was the first artistic movement to experiment with cinema in part because it offered more opportunity than theatre to create the bizarre or the unreal. The first film characterized as Surrealist was the 1924 Entr'acte, a 22-minute, silent film, written by Rene Clair and Francis Picabia, and directed by Clair. But, the most famous Surrealist filmmaker was of course Luis Buñuel. Working with Dalí, Buñuel made the classic films Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930), both of which were characterized by narrative disjunction and their peculiar, sometimes disturbing imagery. In the 1930s Joseph Cornell produced surrealist films in the United States, such as Rose Hobart (1936). Salvador Dalí designed a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).

The Rise and Decline of Surrealism

Though Surrealism originated in France, strains of it can be identified in art throughout the world. Particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, many artists were swept into its orbit as increasing political upheaval and a second global war encouraged fears that human civilization was in a state of crisis and collapse. The emigration of many Surrealists to the Americas during WWII spread their ideas further. Following the war, however, the group's ideas were challenged by the rise of Existentialism, which, while also celebrating individualism, was more rationally based than Surrealism. In the arts, the Abstract Expressionists incorporated Surrealist ideas and usurped their dominance by pioneering new techniques for representing the unconscious. Breton became increasingly interested in revolutionary political activism as the movement's primary goal. The result was the dispersal of the original movement into smaller factions of artists. The Bretonians, such as Roberto Matta, believed that art was inherently political. Others, like Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning, remained in America to separate from Breton. Salvador Dalí, likewise, retreated to Spain, believing in the centrality of the individual in art.

Later Developments - After Surrealism

Abstract Expressionism

In 1936, the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged an exhibition entitled Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, and many American artists were powerfully impressed by it. Some, such as Jackson Pollock, began to experiment with automatism, and with imagery that seemed to derive from the unconscious - experiments which would later lead to his "drip" paintings. Robert Motherwell, similarly, is said to have been "stuck between the two worlds" of abstraction and automatism.

Largely because of political upheaval in Europe, New York rather than Paris became the emergent center of a new vanguard, one that favored tapping the unconscious through abstraction as opposed to the "hand-painted dreams" of Salvador Dalí. Peggy Guggenheim's 1942 exhibition of Surrealist-influenced artists (Rothko, Gottlieb, Motherwell, Baziotes, Hoffman, Still, and Pollock) alongside European artists Miró, Klee, and Masson, underscores the speed with which Surrealist concepts spread through the New York art community.

Abstract Expressionism Movement Page

Feminism and Women Surrealists

The Surrealists have often been depicted as a tightly knit group of men, and their art often envisioned women as wild "others" to the cultured, rational world. Work by feminist art historians has since corrected this impression, not only highlighting the number of women Surrealists who were active in the group, particularly in the 1930s, but also analyzing the gender stereotypes at work in much Surrealist art. Feminist art critics, such as Dawn Ades, Mary Ann Caws, and Whitney Chadwick, have devoted several books and exhibitions to this subject.

While most of the male Surrealists, especially Man Ray, Magritte, and Dalí, repeatedly focused on and/or distorted the female form and depicted women as muses, much in the way that male artists had for centuries, female Surrealists such as Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning, sought to address the problematic adoption of Freudian psychoanalysis that often cast women as monstrous and lesser. Thus, many female Surrealists experimented with cross-dressing and depicted themselves as animals or mythic creatures.

British Surrealism

Interestingly, many notable female Surrealists were British. Examples include Eileen Agar, Ithell Colquhoun, Edith Rimmington, and Emmy Bridgwater. Particular to the British interpretation of Surrealist ideology was an ongoing exploration of human relations with their surrounding natural environment and most prominently, with the sea. Alongside Agar, Paul Nash developed an interest in the object trouvé, usually in the form of items collected from the beach. The focus on the border where land meets the sea, and where rocks anthropomorphically resemble people struck a cord with British identity and more generally, with Surrealist principles of reconciling and uniting opposites.

The International Surrealist Exhibition (1936) held in London was a particular catalyst for many British artists. Headed by Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, the movement thrived in Britain, creating the international icons Leonora Carrington and Lee Miller, and also spurring on the practice of another important circle of artists surrounding Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore. Overall, the privileging of an eccentric imagination and essential rejection of standardized and rational modes of doing things resonated well from the outset. This golden period for art in general in the UK, and more specifically the legacies of British Surrealism continue to influence the country's art practice today.

Useful Resources on Surrealism

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The Surrealists unlocked images of the unconscious exploring worlds of sexuality, desire, and violence. Iconic art and ideas of Dali, Magritte, Oppenheim+

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early 1960s to late 1960s

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Carl Andre

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Carl Andre

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Minimalism Definition

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Tate glossary definition for minimalism: Extreme form of abstract art developed in the USA in the second half of the 1960s and typified by artworks made in very simple geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle