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112-451: Lobster Telephone (also known as Aphrodisiac Telephone ) is a Surrealist object , created by Salvador Dalí in 1936 for the English poet Edward James (1907–1984), a leading collector of surrealist art. In his 1942 book The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí , Dalí wrote teasingly of his demand to know why, when he asked for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, he was never presented with

224-415: A Surrealist Manifesto . Each claimed to be successors of a revolution launched by Appolinaire. One group, led by Yvan Goll consisted of Pierre Albert-Birot , Paul Dermée , Céline Arnauld , Francis Picabia , Tristan Tzara , Giuseppe Ungaretti , Pierre Reverdy , Marcel Arland , Joseph Delteil , Jean Painlevé and Robert Delaunay , among others. The group led by André Breton claimed that automatism

336-418: A boiled telephone. The work is a composite of an ordinary working telephone and a lobster made of plaster . It is approximately 15 × 30 × 17 cm (6 × 12 × 6.6 inches) in size. This is a classic example of a Surrealist object, made from the conjunction of items not normally associated with each other, resulting in something both playful and menacing. Dalí believed that such objects could reveal

448-592: A bottle rack, and was active in the Society of Independent Artists . In 1917 he submitted the now famous Fountain , a urinal signed R. Mutt, to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition but they rejected the piece. First an object of scorn within the arts community, the Fountain has since become almost canonized by some as one of the most recognizable modernist works of sculpture. Art world experts polled by

560-487: A brightly colored rag are more necessary expressions than those of some ass who seeks to immortalize himself in oils in finite parlors. The groups in Germany were not as strongly anti-art as other groups. Their activity and art were more political and social, with corrosive manifestos and propaganda, satire, public demonstrations and overt political activities. The intensely political and war-torn environment of Berlin had

672-463: A component in the visual arts (though it had been initially debated whether this was possible), and techniques from Dada, such as photomontage , were used. The following year, on March 26, 1926, Galerie Surréaliste opened with an exhibition by Man Ray. Breton published Surrealism and Painting in 1928 which summarized the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the 1960s. The first Surrealist work, according to leader Breton,

784-404: A controversial Dada exhibition in 1920 which focused on nonsense and anti-bourgeois sentiments. Cologne's Early Spring Exhibition was set up in a pub, and required that participants walk past urinals while being read lewd poetry by a woman in a communion dress. The police closed the exhibition on grounds of obscenity, but it was re-opened when the charges were dropped. Like Zürich, New York City

896-713: A dramatic impact on the ideas of Berlin Dadaists. Conversely, New York's geographic distance from the war spawned its more theoretically driven, less political nature. According to Hans Richter , a Dadaist who was in Berlin yet "aloof from active participation in Berlin Dada", several distinguishing characteristics of the Dada movement there included: "its political element and its technical discoveries in painting and literature"; "inexhaustible energy"; "mental freedom which included

1008-433: A grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone; I do not understand why champagne is always chilled and why on the other hand telephones, which are habitually so frightfully warm and disagreeably sticky to the touch, are not also put in silver buckets with crushed ice around them. (...)" "Telephone frappé, mint coloured telephone, aphrodisiac telephone, lobster-telephone, telephone sheathed in sable for

1120-618: A group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara's and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the words "da, da," meaning "yes, yes" in the Romanian language. Another theory says that

1232-470: A late-comer into an originating force. Dada emerged from a period of artistic and literary movements like Futurism , Cubism and Expressionism ; centered mainly in Italy, France and Germany respectively, in those years. However, unlike the earlier movements Dada was able to establish a broad base of support, giving rise to a movement that was international in scope. Its adherents were based in cities all over

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1344-521: A mad, scandalous ballet called Parade . First performed by the Ballets Russes in 1917, it succeeded in creating a scandal but in a different way than Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps had done almost five years earlier. This was a ballet that was clearly parodying itself, something traditional ballet patrons would obviously have serious issues with. Dada in Paris surged in 1920 when many of

1456-475: A mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely related to the world of dreams. The Spanish playwright and director Federico García Lorca , also experimented with surrealism, particularly in his plays The Public (1930), When Five Years Pass (1931), and Play Without a Title (1935). Other surrealist plays include Aragon's Backs to the Wall (1925). Gertrude Stein 's opera Doctor Faustus Lights

1568-460: A name chosen to protest the treatment of Jews in his native Romania), who exchanged letters, poems, and magazines with Guillaume Apollinaire , André Breton , Max Jacob , Clément Pansaers , and other French writers, critics and artists. Paris had arguably been the classical music capital of the world since the advent of musical Impressionism in the late 19th century. One of its practitioners, Erik Satie , collaborated with Picasso and Cocteau in

1680-427: A preference for cake or cherries, to fill a void. The shock and scandal the movement inflamed was deliberate; Dadaist magazines were banned and their exhibits closed. Some of the artists even faced imprisonment. These provocations were part of the entertainment but, over time, audiences' expectations eventually outpaced the movement's capacity to deliver. As the artists' well-known "sarcastic laugh" started to come from

1792-405: A protest "against this world of mutual destruction". According to Hans Richter Dada was not art: it was " anti-art ". Dada represented the opposite of everything which art stood for. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics , Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend. Additionally, Dada attempted to reflect onto human perception and

1904-580: A rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus, such elements as collage were introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling juxtapositions as revealed in Pierre Reverdy 's poetry. And—as in Magritte's case (where there is no obvious recourse to either automatic techniques or collage)—the very notion of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation in and of itself. Surrealism was meant to be always in flux—to be more modern than modern—and so it

2016-473: A revolution launched by Apollinaire. One group, led by Yvan Goll , consisted of Pierre Albert-Birot , Paul Dermée , Céline Arnauld , Francis Picabia , Tristan Tzara , Giuseppe Ungaretti , Pierre Reverdy , Marcel Arland , Joseph Delteil , Jean Painlevé and Robert Delaunay , among others. The other group, led by Breton, included Aragon, Desnos, Éluard, Baron, Crevel, Malkine, Jacques-André Boiffard and Jean Carrive, among others. Yvan Goll published

2128-591: A schism between art and politics through his counter-surrealist art-magazine DYN and so prepared the ground for the abstract expressionists. Dalí supported capitalism and the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco but cannot be said to represent a trend in Surrealism in this respect; in fact, he was considered, by Breton and his associates, to have betrayed and left Surrealism. Benjamin Péret, Mary Low, Juan Breá, and Spanish-native Eugenio Fernández Granell joined

2240-536: A sculpture." The piece is in line with the scatological aesthetics of Duchamp's neighbour, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven . In an attempt to "pay homage to the spirit of Dada" a performance artist named Pierre Pinoncelli made a crack in a replica of The Fountain with a hammer in January 2006; he also urinated on it in 1993. Picabia's travels tied New York, Zürich and Paris groups together during

2352-578: A short-lived Dutch Dada magazine called Mécano (1922–23). Another Dutchman identified by K. Schippers in his study of the movement in the Netherlands was the Groningen typographer H. N. Werkman , who was in touch with van Doesburg and Schwitters while editing his own magazine, The Next Call (1923–6). Two more artists mentioned by Schippers were German-born and eventually settled in the Netherlands. These were Otto van Rees, who had taken part in

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2464-405: A work entitled, Explicatif bearing the word Tabu . In the same year Tzara staged his Dadaist play The Gas Heart to howls of derision from the audience. When it was re-staged in 1923 in a more professional production, the play provoked a theatre riot (initiated by André Breton ) that heralded the split within the movement that was to produce Surrealism . Tzara's last attempt at a Dadaist drama

2576-434: Is Golden , later Surrealists, such as Paul Garon , have been interested in—and found parallels to—Surrealism in the improvisation of jazz and the blues . Jazz and blues musicians have occasionally reciprocated this interest. For example, the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition included performances by David "Honeyboy" Edwards . Surrealism as a political force developed unevenly around the world: in some places more emphasis

2688-507: Is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life. The movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games, discussed

2800-445: Is better to adopt surrealism than supernaturalism, which I first used" [ Tout bien examiné, je crois en effet qu'il vaut mieux adopter surréalisme que surnaturalisme que j'avais d'abord employé ]. Apollinaire used the term in his program notes for Sergei Diaghilev 's Ballets Russes , Parade , which premiered 18 May 1917. Parade had a one-act scenario by Jean Cocteau and was performed with music by Erik Satie . Cocteau described

2912-508: Is likely that Dada's catalyst was the arrival in Zürich of artists like Tzara and Janco. The name Cabaret Voltaire was a reference to the French philosopher Voltaire , whose novel Candide mocked the religious and philosophical dogmas of the day. Opening night was attended by Ball, Tzara, Jean Arp , and Janco. These artists along with others like Sophie Taeuber , Richard Huelsenbeck and Hans Richter started putting on performances at

3024-516: Is only natural, after all, that they keep pace with scientific and industrial progress. (Apollinaire, 1917) The term was taken up again by Apollinaire, both as subtitle and in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias: Drame surréaliste , which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. World War I scattered the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and in the interim, many became involved with Dada, believing that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought

3136-694: Is seen as the founder of the Dada movement. The Dadaist movement included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art and literary journals . Passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. Key figures in the movement included Jean Arp , Johannes Baader , Hugo Ball , Marcel Duchamp , Max Ernst , Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven , George Grosz , Raoul Hausmann , John Heartfield , Emmy Hennings , Hannah Höch , Richard Huelsenbeck , Francis Picabia , Man Ray , Hans Richter , Kurt Schwitters , Sophie Taeuber-Arp , Tristan Tzara , and Beatrice Wood , among others. The movement influenced later styles like

3248-601: The Ballets Russes , would create a decorative form of Surrealism, and he would be an influence on the two artists who would be even more closely associated with Surrealism in the public mind: Dalí and Magritte. He would, however, leave the Surrealist group in 1928. In 1924, Miró and Masson applied Surrealism to painting. The first Surrealist exhibition, La Peinture Surrealiste , was held at Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. It displayed works by Masson, Man Ray , Paul Klee , Miró, and others. The show confirmed that Surrealism had

3360-697: The Cabaret Voltaire (housed inside the Holländische Meierei bar in Zürich) co-founded by poet and cabaret singer Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball . Some sources propose a Romanian origin, arguing that Dada was an offshoot of a vibrant artistic tradition that transposed to Switzerland when a group of Jewish modernist artists, including Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco , and Arthur Segal settled in Zürich. Before World War I, similar art had already existed in Bucharest and other Eastern European cities; it

3472-559: The Manifeste du surréalisme , 1 October 1924, in his first and only issue of Surréalisme two weeks prior to the release of Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme , published by Éditions du Sagittaire, 15 October 1924. Goll and Breton clashed openly, at one point literally fighting, at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, over the rights to the term Surrealism. In the end, Breton won the battle through tactical and numerical superiority. Though

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3584-664: The POUM during the Spanish Civil War . Breton's followers, along with the Communist Party , were working for the "liberation of man". However, Breton's group refused to prioritize the proletarian struggle over radical creation such that their struggles with the Party made the late 1920s a turbulent time for both. Many individuals closely associated with Breton, notably Aragon, left his group to work more closely with

3696-413: The left-wing and far-left politics . The movement had no shared artistic style , although most artists had shown interest in the machine aesthetic . There is no consensus on the origin of the movement's name; a common story is that the artist Richard Huelsenbeck slid a paper knife randomly into a dictionary, where it landed on "dada", a French term for a hobby horse . Others note it suggests

3808-538: The logic , reason , and aestheticism of modern capitalism and modern war. To develop their protest, artists tended to make use of nonsense , irrationality , and an anti-bourgeois sensibility. The art of the movement began primarily as performance art, but eventually spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage , sound poetry , cut-up writing , and sculpture. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent toward violence, war, and nationalism and maintained political affinities with radical politics on

3920-464: The second World War , Enrico Donati , Vinicius Pradella and Denis Fabbri became involved as well. Though Breton admired Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and courted them to join the movement, they remained peripheral. More writers also joined, including former Dadaist Tristan Tzara , René Char , and Georges Sadoul . In 1925 an autonomous Surrealist group formed in Brussels. The group included

4032-460: The 1930s many Surrealists had strongly identified themselves with communism. The foremost document of this tendency within Surrealism is the Manifesto for a Free Revolutionary Art , published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera , but actually co-authored by Breton and Leon Trotsky . However, in 1933 the Surrealists' assertion that a " proletarian literature " within a capitalist society

4144-413: The 1948 ballet Paris-Magie (scenario by Lise Deharme ), the operas La Petite Sirène (book by Philippe Soupault) and Le Maître (book by Eugène Ionesco). Tailleferre also wrote popular songs to texts by Claude Marci, the wife of Henri Jeanson, whose portrait had been painted by Magritte in the 1930s. Even though Breton by 1946 responded rather negatively to the subject of music with his essay Silence

4256-498: The Cabaret Voltaire and using art to express their disgust with the war and the interests that inspired it. Having left Germany and Romania during World War I , the artists arrived in politically neutral Switzerland. They used abstraction to fight against the social, political, and cultural ideas of that time. They used shock art , provocation, and " vaudevillian excess" to subvert the conventions they believed had caused

4368-593: The Communists. Surrealists have often sought to link their efforts with political ideals and activities. In the Declaration of January 27, 1925 , for example, members of the Paris-based Bureau of Surrealist Research (including Breton, Aragon and Artaud, as well as some two dozen others) declared their affinity for revolutionary politics. While this was initially a somewhat vague formulation, by

4480-533: The Dadaist period. For seven years he also published the Dada periodical 391 in Barcelona, New York City, Zürich, and Paris from 1917 through 1924. By 1921, most of the original players moved to Paris where Dada had experienced its last major incarnation. The French avant-garde kept abreast of Dada activities in Zürich with regular communications from Tristan Tzara (whose pseudonym means "sad in country,"

4592-540: The Dutch surrealist photographer Emiel van Moerkerken came to Breton, he did not want to sign the manifesto because he was not a Trotskyist. For Breton being a communist was not enough. Breton denied Van Moerkerken's pictures for a publication afterwards. This caused a split in surrealism. Others fought for complete liberty from political ideologies, like Wolfgang Paalen , who, after Trotsky's assassination in Mexico, prepared

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4704-731: The French Dora Maar , the American Man Ray , the French/Hungarian Brassaï , French Claude Cahun and the Dutch Emiel van Moerkerken . The word surrealist was first used by Apollinaire to describe his 1917 play Les Mamelles de Tirésias ("The Breasts of Tiresias"), which was later adapted into an opera by Francis Poulenc . Roger Vitrac 's The Mysteries of Love (1927) and Victor, or The Children Take Over (1928) are often considered

4816-494: The Great War. The Dadaists believed those ideas to be a byproduct of bourgeois society that was so apathetic it would wage war against itself rather than challenge the status quo : We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the tabula rasa . At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short,

4928-491: The Lights (1938) has also been described as "American Surrealism", though it is also related to a theatrical form of cubism . In the 1920s several composers were influenced by Surrealism, or by individuals in the Surrealist movement. Among them were Bohuslav Martinů , André Souris , Erik Satie , Francis Poulenc , and Edgard Varèse , who stated that his work Arcana was drawn from a dream sequence. Souris in particular

5040-416: The Paris group announced: We Surrealists pronounced ourselves in favour of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and defined our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the colour question. Dada Dada ( / ˈ d ɑː d ɑː / ) or Dadaism

5152-438: The Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy , while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness. As Dalí later proclaimed, "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad." Beside the use of dream analysis, they emphasized that "one could combine inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects." Breton included

5264-559: The Swiss native Sophie Taeuber , would remain in Zürich into the 1920s. "Berlin was a city of tightened stomachers, of mounting, thundering hunger, where hidden rage was transformed into a boundless money lust, and men's minds were concentrating more and more on questions of naked existence... Fear was in everybody's bones" – Richard Hülsenbeck Raoul Hausmann , who helped establish Dada in Berlin, published his manifesto Synthethic Cino of Painting in 1918 where he attacked Expressionism and

5376-542: The abolition of everything"; and "members intoxicated with their own power in a way that had no relation to the real world", who would "turn their rebelliousness even against each other". In February 1918, while the Great War was approaching its climax, Huelsenbeck gave his first Dada speech in Berlin, and he produced a Dada manifesto later in the year. Following the October Revolution in Russia , by then out of

5488-465: The art critics who promoted it. Dada is envisioned in contrast to art forms, such as Expressionism, that appeal to viewers' emotional states: "the exploitation of so-called echoes of the soul". In Hausmann's conception of Dada, new techniques of creating art would open doors to explore new artistic impulses. Fragmented use of real world stimuli allowed an expression of reality that was radically different from other forms of art: A child's discarded doll or

5600-515: The audience, the provocations of Dadaists began to lose their impact. Dada was an active movement during years of political turmoil from 1916 when European countries were actively engaged in World War I, the conclusion of which, in 1918, set the stage for a new political order. There is some disagreement about where Dada originated. The movement is commonly accepted by most art historians and those who lived during this period to have identified with

5712-496: The avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including Surrealism , nouveau réalisme , pop art , and Fluxus . Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond with the outbreak of World War I. For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, which many Dadaists believed were

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5824-658: The ballet as "realistic". Apollinaire went further, describing Parade as "surrealistic": This new alliance—I say new, because until now scenery and costumes were linked only by factitious bonds—has given rise, in Parade , to a kind of surrealism, which I consider to be the point of departure for a whole series of manifestations of the New Spirit that is making itself felt today and that will certainly appeal to our best minds. We may expect it to bring about profound changes in our arts and manners through universal joyfulness, for it

5936-584: The best examples of Surrealist theatre, despite his expulsion from the movement in 1926. The plays were staged at the Theatre Alfred Jarry , the theatre Vitrac co-founded with Antonin Artaud , another early Surrealist who was expelled from the movement. Following his collaboration with Vitrac, Artaud would extend Surrealist thought through his theory of the Theatre of Cruelty . Artaud rejected

6048-410: The boudoirs of sirens with fingernails protected with ermine, Edgar Allan Poe telephones with a dead rat concealed within, Boecklin telephones installed inside a cypress tree (and with an allegory of death in inlaid silver on their backs), telephones on the leash which would walk about, screwed to the back of a living turtle ... telephones ... telephones ... telephones ..." Dalí produced four examples of

6160-532: The cabaret closed down, Dada activities moved on to a new gallery, and Hugo Ball left for Bern. Tzara began a relentless campaign to spread Dada ideas. He bombarded French and Italian artists and writers with letters, and soon emerged as the Dada leader and master strategist. The Cabaret Voltaire re-opened, and is still in the same place at the Spiegelgasse 1 in the Niederdorf. Zürich Dada, with Tzara at

6272-498: The chaotic nature of society. Tristan Tzara proclaimed, "Everything is Dada, too. Beware of Dada. Anti-dadaism is a disease: selfkleptomania, man's normal condition, is Dada. But the real Dadas are against Dada". As Hugo Ball expressed it, "For us, art is not an end in itself ... but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in." A reviewer from the American Art News stated at

6384-423: The color version of his lobster telephone, currently displayed as part of the four following collections: Dalí also produced an off-white version of his telephone. The six examples are displayed as following: Surrealism Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise , unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur . However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of

6496-424: The conflict of the war upon the world. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued. During the war, André Breton , who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud 's psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from shell-shock . Meeting

6608-596: The development of collage and abstract art would inform the movement's detachment from the constraints of reality and convention. The work of French poets, Italian Futurists , and German Expressionists would influence Dada's rejection of the correlation between words and meaning. Works such as Ubu Roi (1896) by Alfred Jarry and the ballet Parade (1916–17) by Erik Satie would be characterized as proto-Dadaist works. The Dada movement's principles were first collected in Hugo Ball 's Dada Manifesto in 1916. Ball

6720-468: The first words of a child, evoking a childishness and absurdity that appealed to the group. Still others speculate it might have been chosen to evoke a similar meaning (or no meaning at all) in any language, reflecting the movement's internationalism . The roots of Dada lie in pre-war avant-garde. The term anti-art , a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 to characterize works that challenge accepted definitions of art. Cubism and

6832-669: The helm, published the art and literature review Dada beginning in July 1917, with five editions from Zürich and the final two from Paris. Other artists, such as André Breton and Philippe Soupault , created "literature groups to help extend the influence of Dada". After the fighting of the First World War had ended in the armistice of November 1918, most of the Zürich Dadaists returned to their home countries, and some began Dada activities in other cities. Others, such as

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6944-588: The idea of the startling juxtapositions in his 1924 manifesto, taking it in turn from a 1918 essay by poet Pierre Reverdy , which said: "a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be−the greater its emotional power and poetic reality." The group aimed to revolutionize human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects. They wanted to free people from false rationality, and restrictive customs and structures. Breton proclaimed that

7056-542: The idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination according to the Hegelian Dialectic . They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse . Freud's work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to

7168-574: The influence of Miró and the drawing style of Picasso is visible with the use of fluid curving and intersecting lines and colour, whereas the first takes a directness that would later be influential in movements such as Pop art . Giorgio de Chirico, and his previous development of metaphysical art , was one of the important joining figures between the philosophical and visual aspects of Surrealism. Between 1911 and 1917, he adopted an unornamented depictional style whose surface would be adopted by others later. The Red Tower (La tour rouge) from 1913 shows

7280-492: The influences on Surrealism, examples of Surrealist works, and discussion of Surrealist automatism. He provided the following definitions: Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. Encyclopedia: Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism

7392-458: The line used to divide Dada and Surrealism among art experts is the pairing of 1925's Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person (Von minimax dadamax selbst konstruiertes maschinchen) with The Kiss (Le Baiser) from 1927 by Max Ernst. The first is generally held to have a distance, and erotic subtext, whereas the second presents an erotic act openly and directly. In the second

7504-402: The machinations of Picabia, re-cast Dada's history. Dada's European chroniclers—primarily Richter, Tzara, and Huelsenbeck—would eventually become preoccupied with establishing the pre-eminence of Zürich and Berlin at the foundations of Dada, but it proved to be Duchamp who was most strategically brilliant in manipulating the genealogy of this avant-garde formation, deftly turning New York Dada from

7616-452: The main route toward a higher reality. But—as in Breton's case—much of what is presented as purely automatic is actually edited and very "thought out". Breton himself later admitted that automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and other elements were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of visual artists in the movement forced the issue, since automatic painting required

7728-415: The majority of Western theatre as a perversion of its original intent, which he felt should be a mystical, metaphysical experience. Instead, he envisioned a theatre that would be immediate and direct, linking the unconscious minds of performers and spectators in a sort of ritual event, Artaud created in which emotions, feelings, and the metaphysical were expressed not through language but physically, creating

7840-535: The most." Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault . They began experimenting with automatic writing —spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault continued writing evolving their techniques of automatism and published The Magnetic Fields (1920). By October 1924, two rival Surrealist groups had formed to publish

7952-478: The movement was Paris , France. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, impacting the visual arts , literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory. The word surrealism was first coined in March 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire . He wrote in a letter to Paul Dermée : "All things considered, I think in fact it

8064-609: The musician, poet, and artist E. L. T. Mesens , painter and writer René Magritte , Paul Nougé , Marcel Lecomte , and André Souris . In 1927 they were joined by the writer Louis Scutenaire . They corresponded regularly with the Paris group, and in 1927 both Goemans and Magritte moved to Paris and frequented Breton's circle. The artists, with their roots in Dada and Cubism , the abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky , Expressionism , and Post-Impressionism , also reached to older "bloodlines" or proto-surrealists such as Hieronymus Bosch , and

8176-528: The name "Dada" came during a meeting of the group when a paper knife stuck into a French–German dictionary happened to point to 'dada', a French word for ' hobbyhorse '. The movement primarily involved visual arts , literature , poetry , art manifestos , art theory , theatre , and graphic design , and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. The creations of Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray, and others between 1915 and 1917 eluded

8288-550: The originators converged there. Inspired by Tzara, Paris Dada soon issued manifestos, organized demonstrations, staged performances and produced a number of journals (the final two editions of Dada , Le Cannibale , and Littérature featured Dada in several editions.) The first introduction of Dada artwork to the Parisian public was at the Salon des Indépendants in 1921. Jean Crotti exhibited works associated with Dada including

8400-444: The philosophical movement first and foremost (for instance, of the "pure psychic automatism " Breton speaks of in the first Surrealist Manifesto), with the works themselves being secondary, i.e., artifacts of surrealist experimentation. Leader Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. At the time, the movement was associated with political causes such as communism and anarchism . It

8512-424: The poetic undercurrents, but also to the connotations and the overtones which "exist in ambiguous relationships to the visual images." Because Surrealist writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize their thoughts and the images they present, some people find much of their work difficult to parse. This notion however is a superficial comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton's initial emphasis on automatic writing as

8624-474: The postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path... [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization... In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege." To quote Dona Budd's The Language of Art Knowledge , Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of the First World War . This international movement was begun by

8736-799: The precursors of Surrealism. Examples of Surrealist literature are Artaud's Le Pèse-Nerfs (1926), Aragon's Irene's Cunt (1927), Péret's Death to the Pigs (1929), Crevel's Mr. Knife Miss Fork (1931), Sadegh Hedayat 's the Blind Owl (1937), and Breton's Sur la route de San Romano (1948). La Révolution surréaliste continued publication into 1929 with most pages densely packed with columns of text, but which also included reproductions of art, among them works by de Chirico, Ernst, Masson, and Man Ray. Other works included books, poems, pamphlets, automatic texts and theoretical tracts. Early films by Surrealists include: Famous Surrealist photographers are

8848-446: The quarrel over the anteriority of Surrealism concluded with the victory of Breton, the history of surrealism from that moment would remain marked by fractures, resignations, and resounding excommunications, with each surrealist having their own view of the issue and goals, and accepting more or less the definitions laid out by André Breton. Breton's 1924 Surrealist Manifesto defines the purposes of Surrealism. He included citations of

8960-796: The root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity—in art and more broadly in society—that corresponded to the war. Avant-garde circles outside France knew of pre-war Parisian developments. They had seen (or participated in) Cubist exhibitions held at Galeries Dalmau , Barcelona (1912), Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin (1912), the Armory Show in New York (1913), SVU Mánes in Prague (1914), several Jack of Diamonds exhibitions in Moscow and at Moderne Kunstkring , Amsterdam (between 1911 and 1915). Futurism developed in response to

9072-626: The secret desires of the unconscious. Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual connotations for Dalí. The telephone appears in certain paintings of the late 1930s such as Mountain Lake ( Tate ); further, the lobster appears in drawings and designs, usually associated with erotic pleasure and pain. For the 1939 New York World's Fair , Dalí created a multi-media experience entitled Dream of Venus , which consisted in part of dressing live nude models in "costumes" made of fresh seafood, an event photographed by Horst P. Horst and George Platt Lynes . A lobster

9184-543: The so-called Dutch Dada campaign in 1923, where van Doesburg promoted a leaflet about Dada (entitled What is Dada? ), Schwitters read his poems, Vilmos Huszár demonstrated a mechanical dancing doll and Nelly van Doesburg (Theo's wife), played avant-garde compositions on piano. Van Doesburg wrote Dada poetry himself in De Stijl , although under a pseudonym, I.K. Bonset, which was only revealed after his death in 1931. 'Together' with I.K. Bonset, he also published

9296-416: The so-called primitive and naive arts. André Masson 's automatic drawings of 1923 are often used as the point of the acceptance of visual arts and the break from Dada, since they reflect the influence of the idea of the unconscious mind . Another example is Giacometti's 1925 Torso , which marked his movement to simplified forms and inspiration from preclassical sculpture. However, a striking example of

9408-400: The sponsors of the 2004 Turner Prize , Gordon's gin, voted it "the most influential work of modern art". As recent scholarship documents, the work is still controversial. Duchamp indicated in a 1917 letter to his sister that a female friend was centrally involved in the conception of this work: "One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as

9520-575: The stark colour contrasts and illustrative style later adopted by Surrealist painters. His 1914 The Nostalgia of the Poet (La Nostalgie du poète) has the figure turned away from the viewer, and the juxtaposition of a bust with glasses and a fish as a relief defies conventional explanation. He was also a writer whose novel Hebdomeros presents a series of dreamscapes with an unusual use of punctuation, syntax, and grammar designed to create an atmosphere and frame its images. His images, including set designs for

9632-427: The term Dada at the time, and " New York Dada " came to be seen as a post facto invention of Duchamp. At the outset of the 1920s the term Dada flourished in Europe with the help of Duchamp and Picabia, who had both returned from New York. Notwithstanding, Dadaists such as Tzara and Richter claimed European precedence. Art historian David Hopkins notes: Ironically, though, Duchamp's late activities in New York, along with

9744-644: The theories of Surrealism, and developed a variety of techniques such as automatic drawing . Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage , grattage and decalcomania . Soon more visual artists became involved, including Giorgio de Chirico , Max Ernst , Joan Miró , Francis Picabia , Yves Tanguy , Salvador Dalí , Luis Buñuel , Alberto Giacometti , Valentine Hugo , Méret Oppenheim , Toyen , and Kansuke Yamamoto . Later, after

9856-410: The time that "Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, a "reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide". Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of

9968-450: The traditionalist basis for museum art. New York Dada lacked the disillusionment of European Dada and was instead driven by a sense of irony and humor. In his book Adventures in the arts: informal chapters on painters, vaudeville and poets Marsden Hartley included an essay on " The Importance of Being 'Dada'   ". During this time Duchamp began exhibiting " readymades " (everyday objects found or purchased and declared art) such as

10080-548: The true aim of Surrealism was "long live the social revolution, and it alone!" To this goal, at various times Surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism . In 1924, two Surrealist factions declared their philosophy in two separate Surrealist Manifestos. That same year the Bureau of Surrealist Research was established and began publishing the journal La Révolution surréaliste . Leading up to 1924, two rival surrealist groups had formed. Each group claimed to be successors of

10192-603: The walls of the Nazi's Entartete Kunst exhibition in 1937. Despite high ticket prices, the exhibition lost money, with only one recorded sale. The Berlin group published periodicals such as Club Dada , Der Dada , Everyman His Own Football , and Dada Almanach . They also established a political party, the Central Council of Dada for the World Revolution . In Cologne , Ernst, Baargeld, and Arp launched

10304-433: The war, Hannah Höch and George Grosz used Dada to express communist sympathies. Grosz, together with John Heartfield , Höch and Hausmann developed the technique of photomontage during this period. Johannes Baader , the uninhibited Oberdada, was the "crowbar" of the Berlin movement's direct action according to Hans Richter and is credited with creating the first giant collages, according to Raoul Hausmann . After

10416-755: The war, the artists published a series of short-lived political magazines and held the First International Dada Fair , 'the greatest project yet conceived by the Berlin Dadaists', in the summer of 1920. As well as work by the main members of Berlin Dada – Grosz, Raoul Hausmann , Hannah Höch , Johannes Baader , Huelsenbeck and Heartfield – the exhibition also included the work of Otto Dix , Francis Picabia , Jean Arp, Max Ernst , Rudolf Schlichter , Johannes Baargeld and others. In all, over 200 works were exhibited, surrounded by incendiary slogans, some of which also ended up written on

10528-400: The whole prevailing order. Ball said that Janco's mask and costume designs, inspired by Romanian folk art, made "the horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events" visible. According to Ball, performances were accompanied by a "balalaika orchestra playing delightful folk-songs." Often influenced by African music , arrhythmic drumming and jazz were common at Dada gatherings. After

10640-413: The work of various artists. Dada subsequently combined these approaches. Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality . For example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as

10752-433: The world including New York, Zürich, Berlin, Paris and others. There were regional differences like an emphasis on literature in Zürich and political protest in Berlin. Prominent Dadaists published manifestos, but the movement was loosely organized and there was no central hierarchy. On 14 July 1916, Ball originated the seminal Dada Manifesto . Tzara wrote a second Dada manifesto, considered important Dada reading, which

10864-411: The young writer Jacques Vaché , Breton felt that Vaché was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry . He admired the young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, "In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud , with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau , with Lautréamont , but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe

10976-420: Was Les Chants de Maldoror , and the first work written and published by his group of Surréalistes was Les Champs Magnétiques (May–June 1919). Littérature contained automatist works and accounts of dreams. The magazine and the portfolio both showed their disdain for literal meanings given to objects and focused rather on the undertones; the poetic undercurrents present. Not only did they give emphasis to

11088-476: Was Trotskyist , communist , or anarchist . The split from Dada has been characterised as a split between anarchists and communists, with the Surrealists as communist. Breton and his comrades supported Leon Trotsky and his International Left Opposition for a while, though there was an openness to anarchism that manifested more fully after World War II. Some Surrealists, such as Benjamin Péret , Mary Low, and Juan Breá, aligned with forms of left communism . When

11200-677: Was a better tactic for societal change than those of Dada, as led by Tzara, who was now among their rivals. Breton's group grew to include writers and artists from various media such as Paul Éluard , Benjamin Péret , René Crevel , Robert Desnos , Jacques Baron , Max Morise , Pierre Naville , Roger Vitrac , Gala Éluard , Max Ernst , Salvador Dalí , Luis Buñuel , Man Ray , Hans Arp , Georges Malkine , Michel Leiris , Georges Limbour , Antonin Artaud , Raymond Queneau , André Masson , Joan Miró , Marcel Duchamp , Jacques Prévert , and Yves Tanguy , Dora Maar As they developed their philosophy, they believed that Surrealism would advocate

11312-557: Was a refuge for writers and artists from the First World War. Soon after arriving from France in 1915, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia met American artist Man Ray . By 1916 the three of them became the center of radical anti-art activities in the United States. American Beatrice Wood , who had been studying in France, soon joined them, along with Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven . Arthur Cravan , fleeing conscription in France,

11424-488: Was also in New York for a time. Much of their activity centered in Alfred Stieglitz 's gallery, 291 , and the home of Walter and Louise Arensberg . The New Yorkers, though not particularly organized, called their activities Dada, but they did not issue manifestos. They issued challenges to art and culture through publications such as The Blind Man , Rongwrong , and New York Dada in which they criticized

11536-455: Was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had spread to New York City and a variety of artistic centers in Europe and Asia. Within the umbrella of the movement, people used a wide variety of artistic forms to protest

11648-481: Was associated with the movement: he had a long relationship with Magritte, and worked on Paul Nougé 's publication Adieu Marie . Music by composers from across the twentieth century have been associated with surrealist principles, including Pierre Boulez , György Ligeti , Mauricio Kagel , Olivier Messiaen , and Thomas Adès . Germaine Tailleferre of the French group Les Six wrote several works which could be considered to be inspired by Surrealism , including

11760-572: Was given the caption 'NEW YORK DREAM - MAN FINDS LOBSTER IN PLACE OF PHONE'. In the Dictionnaire Abrégé du Surréalisme of 1938, Dalí contributed an entry under 'TÉLÉPHONE APHRODISIAQUE' which is accompanied by a small drawing of a telephone, its receiver replaced by a lobster surrounded by flies. A similar drawing is printed in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí which contains the following: "I do not understand why, when I ask for

11872-657: Was his " ironic tragedy " Handkerchief of Clouds in 1924. In the Netherlands the Dada movement centered mainly around Theo van Doesburg , best known for establishing the De Stijl movement and magazine of the same name. Van Doesburg mainly focused on poetry, and included poems from many well-known Dada writers in De Stijl such as Hugo Ball , Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters . Van Doesburg and Thijs Rinsema  [ nl ] (a cordwainer and artist in Drachten ) became friends of Schwitters, and together they organized

11984-817: Was impossible led to their break with the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, and the expulsion of Breton, Éluard and Crevel from the Communist Party. In 1925, the Paris Surrealist group and the extreme left of the French Communist Party came together to support Abd-el-Krim , leader of the Rif uprising against French colonialism in Morocco . In an open letter to writer and French ambassador to Japan, Paul Claudel ,

12096-551: Was influenced by the Dada movement of the 1910s. The term "Surrealism" originated with Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917. However, the Surrealist movement was not officially established until after October 1924, when the Surrealist Manifesto published by French poet and critic André Breton succeeded in claiming the term for his group over a rival faction led by Yvan Goll , who had published his own surrealist manifesto two weeks prior. The most important center of

12208-563: Was natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new challenges arose. Artists such as Max Ernst and his surrealist collages demonstrate this shift to a more modern art form that also comments on society. Surrealists revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont , and for the line "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", and Arthur Rimbaud , two late 19th-century writers believed to be

12320-621: Was on artistic practices, in other places on political practices, and in other places still, Surrealist praxis looked to supersede both the arts and politics. During the 1930s, the Surrealist idea spread from Europe to North America, South America (founding of the Mandrágora group in Chile in 1938), Central America , the Caribbean , and throughout Asia, as both an artistic idea and as an ideology of political change. Politically, Surrealism

12432-410: Was published in 1918. Tzara's manifesto articulated the concept of "Dadaist disgust"—the contradiction implicit in avant-garde works between the criticism and affirmation of modernist reality. In the Dadaist perspective modern art and culture are considered a type of fetishization where the objects of consumption (including organized systems of thought like philosophy and morality) are chosen, much like

12544-401: Was used by the artist to cover the female sexual organs of his models. Dalí often drew a close analogy between food and sex . In Lobster Telephone , the crustacean's tail, where its sexual parts are located, is placed directly over the mouthpiece. In 1935, Dalí was commissioned by the magazine American Weekly to execute a series of drawings based on his impressions of New York. One drawing

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