Word: surrealist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Aubusson (TIME. March 8,1948). Among the fine few, Sutherland's gawky Birds were abstract enough to look all right in wool. Stanley Spencer's cabbage-laden Gardener was both earthy and pretty, but The Garden of Fools., a soup-thin parody of medieval tapestry design by Surrealist Cecil Collins, was neither. "The fool," explained Collins brightly, "is the symbol of creative innocence embattled with the modern machine . . . The saint, the artist, the poet and the fool are one; they are the eternal virginity of spirit . . ." It seemed a woolly explanation...
...Four-Chambered Heart is just about as silly as this sounds. It piles a mountainous icing of surrealist imagery and rubbery aphorisms on a little cake of plot no bigger than a thumb. The plot: Range's psychopathic wife fakes illness to keep her weak-willed husband away from Djuna's barge; eventually she brings both of them under her spell and has them waiting on her hand & foot. Despairing Djuna decides to sink herself, lover, barge and all. At the last minute she changes her mind and dives into a dot-studded, six-page stream of consciousness...
Anybody with an ambition to write the strangest novel of 1950 will have to beat John Hawkes's first novel, The Cannibal. Written by Harvardman Hawkes at 23, The Cannibal is a dizzying surrealist vision of postwar Germany, in which, among other oddities, a monkey screams "Dark is life, dark, dark is death," a duke hacks a fox to death and invites his landlady to dine on the meat, and one-third of Germany is ruled by a solitary American...
...pretty and gay as striped candy. Charles S. Smith's Urban Landscape was contrastingly gloomy, but its gloom was of the pleasantly unreal sort that makes Poe's horror stories entertaining. As might have been expected, there was an atomic-bomb picture-an explosion in a surrealist stew cooked up by Mrs. Annabel Berry of Dallas. The fanciest fantasy in the show was a Captive Amazonian Albino, painted by M. Lewis Croissant, a Missouri engineer...