Word: surrealists
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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...
...death last week of Joan Miró, at 90, was a vivid reminder of the antiquity of modernism. The old surrealist, whose work was once so startling to received taste (a half-century ago, you did not give paintings titles like Two Figures Standing Before a Pile of Excrement without offending someone), received the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church; his death was attended by the priests whom surrealism, a profoundly Catholic movement, once despised. Miró was the last of the great modernist inventors, if you concede that neither Salvador Dali nor Marc Chagall, both still alive...
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...