Word: surrealist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Exotic Bird series, in preparation by 1975, pushed further in that direction. The odd titles, which sound like surrealist whimsy- Mysterious bird of Ulieta, or, in a sardonic little pun, Steller 's albatross- were birds' names picked from an ornithological textbook. The paintings court vulgarity every inch of the way. Their forms, based on the French curves used by architectural draftsmen, are cut from honeycombed aluminum. But they are loaded with color, blaring with the kind of greedy, apoplectic vitality. On first sight, they look as though a squad of glue-snorting graffitists had been let loose with...
...volution surréaliste did not take place, however. Surrealist man, that monster begotten by imagination upon history, failed to emerge. The scandal of the provocations died. The poetry (some of it) survived. The paintings went into museums and were hung in the houses of the rich. But there is an immense pathos and beauty in the relics, the artifacts. They are the fragments of a hope that post-modern art has lost, and may never find again...
...rituals. Surrealism became a common ground for bourgeois intellectuals agonized by the futility of their expected social roles. But it smacks of artificiality to confine either Dada or surrealism too closely to any group or period. Some of Picasso's paintings, from 1913 onward, are regarded as major surrealist icons by virtue of their aggressive, oneiric distortions, though he was never in any formal way a member of the movement...
Magpie-like, the surrealist imagination was apt to claim whatever it wanted from history, and the London exhibition records this in a number of showcases whose contents punctuate the august and predictable flow of Mirds, Dalis, Ernsts...
...essence of the surrealist enterprise - like that of the 19th century romantics - was to open new channels for the creative mind. It produced, above all, an art of subject matter - a trait transmitted to its American offspring, abstract expressionism. "Beauty will be erotic-veiled, explosive-fixed, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be at all," ran Breton's famous description of the surrealist ideal. Much of the power of surrealist rhetoric does not survive translation: its use of blasphemy, for instance, and its passionate anticlericalism were authentically shocking within France's Catholic tradition, but resemble a charade when...