Word: surrealistes
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Chagall, the surrealist, offers no signs of architectural or sculptural space in his color lithographs. His lithographs appear soft on the surface; instead of using a single line to delineate a contour, he uses several smaller strokes. His method of transformation of nature uses the surrealist and soft impression as its primary tool...
Johns' works from the last two decades at the Sackler continue some of those past interests: news-print as Surrealist collage in the Dutch Wives and the self-referentiality of reproducing his own earlier prints in the painting Untitled 1984. Critics have often noted Johns' latent interest in sensuous matter and conceptual paradox; those interests now reign supreme, as the older Johns contemplates the failure of the erotic, in addition to the link between sex and death (especially in the Tantric Details...
Marcel Duchamp, the French Surrealist, labeled as "art" a battered bottle rack, a defaced poster of the Mona Lisa and a mass-produced urinal. He perceived art all around in the vernacular world. The question pondered in THE MYSTERIES, a multimedia enchantment at Harvard's American Repertory Theater, is whether vernacular life itself -- the life of mating, domestic squabbles and old age -- can constitute a sort of art. At times the idea is posed literally, as when writer-director David Gordon places an ornate frame around actors engaged in a mock wedding. At other times the "mysteries" of creation...
...funniest. It started life as an anthropological photo of an African corn bin. This reminded Ernst of an elephant. Then he saw a swollen human figure in it -- a failed behemoth, which he associated with the absurd and nasty king of Alfred Jarry's proto-Surrealist comedy, Ubu Roi. Add to that a dirty children's rhyme he remembered from his school days, which in English would have been a limerick; it concerned an elephant in Sumatra that tried to, well, connect with its grandmother. The naked woman in the foreground foreshadows the title of Ernst's great collage-narrative...
...technical question of who "invented" collage fades to unimportance when you look at what Ernst did with it. Some Surrealist collages look as dated as Victorian screens, but his tiny, rigorous visions never do. By making realities collide, he slips you into a parallel world whose features are both precise and ineffably odd, where things are not what they seem. Ernst loved images that enumerated things: mechanical and scientific drawing, illustrations from 1900 boulevardier magazines, old catalogs. Their factual neutrality made their paradoxes weirder. Sometimes this serves mainly lyrical ends, as in the Klee-like plant-personages that rear...