Word: surrealistic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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They seem packed with elbows, thighs and groins, but these images-which, in the hands of a mere surrealist-minded painter, could have turned the surface into a charnel house-are sublimated by de Kooning's classical instincts to a generalized sense of the body that matches, in a terse way, the muscular rakings of his brush...
...AUTOBIOGRAPHY My Last Sigh, Luis Bunuel, the father of the surrealist cinema, remarks that the one unifying principle of his first film, "Un Chien D'andalou," was that "no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted." In telling his life story, Bunuel likewise rejects interpretation. His memoirs are a rambling collection of disparate reveries, images, jokes, each of them entirely absorbing. Bunuel does not draw upon these to form conclusions of any sort, to make aesthetic judgements or to evaluate the importance of various events in the development...
What we glean of a family history suggests an atmosphere of caprice and superfluity conducive to the formation of a surrealist temperament. Bunuel's father, a successful businessman whom Bunuel describes as a man of extreme leisure ("the only thing my father would carry in the street was his elegantly wrapped jar of caviar"), seems to have had a surrealist's sense of humor. Bunuel grew up in "a very large and bourgeois apart-grew up in "a very large and bourgeois apart-10 balconies and took up the entire second floor of the building." While this spawning ground...
...after the opening of his first film, "Un Chien D'andalou," written in conjunction with Salvador Dali, that Bunuel was admitted to the Surrealist group. During the opening, Bunuel hid behind the screens, his pockets full of stones "to throw at the audience in case of disaster...
...most part limited to specific personalities. Thus Bunuel focuses less on the creative theories of the group than on their fascinating social energies--the excommunications and other rites. The principal weapon of their revolution, he says, was scandal; this is how the bourgeois revolts against the bourgeois. The Surrealist attack "on the notion of work, that cornerstone of bourgeois civilization, as something sacrosanct," and the Surrealist distrust of the rational may lie behind Bunuel's refusal to evaluate the Surrealist's work...