Word: dada
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SPRING OF 1920 was a hard time for Joan Miro. The young Catalan had arrived in Paris from Spain in early 1919 when pre-war intellectual and artistic conceptions, like the European balance of power, had been swept away in blood and destruction of the World War. The Dada movement was the new wave in art--but only of the moment. And Miro, though he remained somewhat aloof from its influence, would come to be acknowledged as the formal master of the surrealist movement which grew as Dada disintegrated...
...expressionist body is a scrag of mutton with big extremities, very unlike the prosperous Renaissance nudes that, however mutated, survived in Picasso and Matisse. Expressionism was an art of confession, directed against the impermeable crust of a deeply formalized society. It had few political ambitions-as German Dada did-but it did carry a strong current of social idealism. This did not show itself so much in Utopian schemes as in a vague aspiration toward spiritual improvement, salvation through sensitivity, the obverse of which was the weird consumptive eroticism of Schiele. If Schiele was the Cranach of the movement, Beckmann...
Surrealism was too volatile and too hard to define to be a system. As a viable "movement," it lasted from the end of the first World War to the end of the second-a span of nearly three decades. Like its ancestor Dada, surrealism was brought to term by young refugees in the cafes of neutral Zurich during World War I, in a clamor of theatrical high jinks, concrete-poetry recitals, chance-based collages and mock rituals. Surrealism became a common ground for bourgeois intellectuals agonized by the futility of their expected social roles. But it smacks of artificiality...
...great detail, the show is a dramatic reminder of how vital a contribution Dada and surrealism made to the modernist imagination. No painting or poetry had been so resolutely and bitterly antiauthoritarian. Dada was the child of trauma; the first World War, that cultural chasm, had revealed - in the sheer incapacity of words to convey its degree of lethal absurdity - the extent to which language itself was owned by the officer classes of Europe...
...Amin Dada, Uganda's self-appointed President for Life, addressing a crowd of supporters and newsmen: "I wanted to assure you that whatever has been said about violations of so-called human rights doesn't exist here. Since you came, how many people have you found dead...