Word: surrealists
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...movements, Dada and surrealism. From them, most subsequent avant-gardes have sprung. Cubist paintings by Georges Braque now look about as threatening as a pastoral scene by Nicolas Poussin. But most of the "radical" gestures in these dying years of the avant-garde have emerged from Dada or surrealist precedents. The swarm of prototypes is so thick that when a Los Angeles body artist, a few years ago, created an "event" by shooting a pistol at a jet aircraft passing over Venice Beach, not even that lonely gesture of narcissistic aggression could be called original. Had not André Breton...
...Dadaists and surrealists were the last of the real avantgarde, not because they were "great" artists but because they were the last men to believe that art and poetry could change the objective conditions of life. Dada promised, in the words of its mercurial chatterbox poet, Tristan Tzara, "to destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social organization; to sow demoralization everywhere." A surrealist declaration, issued in Paris in 1925, announced: "Surrealism ... is a means of total liberation of the mind and of everything resembling it. We are determined to create a revolution...
...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...