DADA & SURREALIST ART by William S. Rubin. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1968.

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DADA & SURREALIST ART

William S. Rubin

William S. Rubin: DADA & SURREALIST ART. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1968. First edition.  Large quarto. Pale lilac cloth decorated in white. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Black endpapers. 525 pp. 60 tipped in color plates. 791 black and white illustrations. Multiple paper stocks. Jacket lightly age toned with mild sun fading . Partially erased ink gift inscription on FEP. Remainder stamp to lower edge. Book design by Nai Y. Chang.  Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A very good copy in a very good dust jacket.

10 x 12 hard cover book with 525 pages and 851 illustrations, 60 full color tipped-in plates. Fine press production and tipped-in plates make this quite the production – they truly don’t make them like this anymore. William S. Rubin was the Chief Curator of the Painting and Sculpture Collection at The Museum of Modern Art.

  • Preface and Acknowledgments
  • PART I: Dada
  • PART II: The Background of Surrealist Painting
  • PART III: The Heroic Period of Surrealist Painting (1924-29)
  • PART IV: The Surrealism of the Thirties
  • PART V: Surrealism in Exile
  • Epilogue
  • Notes
  • Documentary Illustrations
  • Chronology
  • Lists of Illustrations
  • Bibliograohy
  • Index
  • Photographic Credits

Artists include Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Christian Schad, Morton L. Schamberg, Joseph Stella, Marcel Janco, Wassily Kandinsky, Augusto Giacometti, Jean Arp, Hans Richter, Viking Eggelng, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, Johannes Baader, Paul Citroen, Max Ernst, Baargeld, Kurt Schwitters, John Heartfield, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, René Magritte, Salvador Dali, Alberto Giacometti, André Breton, Oscar Dominguez, Marcel Jean, Méret Oppenheim, Joseph Cornell, Pablo Picasso, Hans Bellmer, E. L. T. mesens, Kurt Seligmann, Victor Brauner, Paul Delvaux, Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Matta, Wilfredo Lam, and Arshile Gorky among others.

Dada, the early 20th century movement that reacted against the materialism of the time and the horrors of World War I, and Surrealistic which developed in the early 20th-century out of the nihilistic ferment of Dada inspired by Freudian explorations of the unconscious. A sampling of objects, paintings and sculpture created since World War II indicates the artistic heritage of these movements, both in the continuing work of older artists and in the work of later generations.

Dada, appearing almost simultaneously among artists and intellectuals in New York, Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Hanover and Paris during the second decade of the century, was described by its leaders as an anti-art movement, an intellectually oriented nihilism toward art, primarily anti-Cubism.

In New York the leaders of Dada were Marcel Duchamp, Francis Plcabia and Man Ray. "Marcel Duchamp was the principal pioneer of Dada. In a period when painting had assumed deep conviction as a way of life, Duchamp gave it up in the midst of success as 'not a goal to fill an entire lifetime.' Emerging from the Cubist context of Parisian painting in 1912, he shortly sacrificed paints, brushes, and canvas almost entirely to create an *anti-art' of 'Readymade’ objects and images on glass. By 1920 he had become an 'engineer' and, after 'incompleting' the Large Glass three years later, he retired to a life of chess, punctuated occasionally by the creation of ironic machines, and environmental installations for Surrealist exhibitions.

Picabia came to New York in I9I7 to visit the Armory show. Like Duchamp, he worked out of the context of Cubism, but in a less sophisticated manner. These include examples of his finest "machine" images, Paroxyme de la Douleur (I9I5) and Machine Tourneg Vite (1916-1917) work that reflects his "black humor," and pictures in which found objects are used as collage elements, such as the hairpins that serve as eyes and matches that represent hair in The Match Woman II (I920).

Man Ray, a young American painter, often replaced the traditional painter's brush with an air brush and also created ready-mades such as Gift, a flatiron with tacks. In the 20's he became known for Rayographs, photographs made without a camera by placing objects on or near sensitized paper that was then exposed directly to the light.

In Zurich, where the term Dada was coined in 1916, it was primarily associated with the pioneering work of Arp where accident and automatism were used to challenge inherited assumptions of style and to suggest the possibility that experience dredged from the unconscious could be given expression in graphic form.

Arps most important works of this period were wood reliefs: "The forms of the Portrait of Tzara and Enak's Tears, while describing nothing specifically, multiply associations to physiological and botanical processes, to sexuality, and, through their very ambiguity, to humor.

The Berlin group of Dadaists was particularly interested in typography which it exploited in a daring and inventive way. Their most significant contribution was the elaboration of the "photomontage," actually a photo-collage. "One could attack the bourgeoisie with distortions of its own communications imagery. The man on the street would be shocked to see the components of familiar, realistic photography used to turn his world topsy-turvy, and the familiar lettering of his newspapers and posters running amok."

Many of the essentials of Surrealism — the experimentation with automatism,accident, biomorphism, and found objects within the framework of an overriding comittment to social revolution — had been present in Dada to some degree, but in a chaotic state. These were systematized within the Freud-inspired dialectic of Surrealism. Automatism led to the biomorphic abstractions of Andre Masson and Joan Miro, the fixing of dream images influenced Rene Magritte and Salvador Dall, while Max Ernst — the "complete Surrealist" — oscillated between them.

''The first year of Surrealist painting following the publication of the manifesto (1924) had witnessed the total dominance of the automatism so emphasized in its text. But late in 1925 the Belgian painter Rene Magritte, under the influence of de Chirico renewed 'dream image’ illusionism, and about a year later Tanguy adapted the biomorpholgy of Arp and Miro to the same spatial theater." The prosaic style Magritte established in I925 remained essentially the same to the end of his life.

Not until Dali burst upon the scene in 1929, however, did this form of Surrealist painting become dominant. Dali’s first mature works came in I929, "in a series of brilliant small pictures whose hallucinatory intensity he was never to surpass. In some of these, The Lugubrious Game, for example, the photographic realism of the painted passages is indistinguishable from those parts of the surface which are actually collaged bits of photographs and color engravings. In equating his painting technique with the verisimilitude and surface finish of photography, Dali here brought full circle the 'perversion’ of collage that was initiated by Ernst.

Just as pioneer Surrealist painting depended on Cubism for its point of departure so Surrealist sculpture presupposed the art of Picasso, Brancusi and Lipchitz. Out of these sources, and out of the morphologies and technical devices they themselves had used earlier, Arp, Giacomettl and Ernst produced a body of sculpture that may be defined as Surrealist, including Giacometti’s extraordinary and prophetic Cage.

In their attempt to go "beyond painting" many Dada and Surrealist artists experimented with "automatic" techniques which put a premium on chance, accident, and improvisation. Automatism was given a central role in the definition of Surrealism that Breton offered in his first Surrealist manifesto and became a central tenet of Surrealist thought and action. The spontaneity fostered by automatic techniques helped challenge assumptions of style and habits of the hand, and was felt to enable the artist to render experiences dredged more deeply from the unconscious than prevailing art practices seemed to allow.

As used by the Surrealists, decalcomania was a technique in which gouache was spread on a sheet of paper on which another sheet was then laid; by pressing here and there, and then peeling off the second sheet, effects were produced that suggested exotic flora, mineral deposits, spongy growths. The fantasies generated by this technique, which was first exploited by Oscar Dominguez, recommended it to other Surrealists; and since this way of image-making required no technical ability, it was immediately adopted by the poets as well as the painters. In order to achieve more defined images, Dominguez and Marcel Jean experimented with the use of stencils in conjunction with decalcomania, but it was only with Ernst’s adaptation of the technique to oil painting that the poetic possibilities of decalcomania were realized as significant art.

Among Surrealist techniques that exploited the mystique of accident was a collective game of words or images called the "cadavre exquis" — exquisite corpse. It was based on an old parlor game in which each of several people would write a phrase on a piece of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of the phrase, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution. The game got its name from the results of an initial playing, "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau" (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine). The Surrealists adapted the word game to drawing, and even collage, by assigning a section of the body to each player, though Surrealist principles of metaphoric displacement led to images that only vaguely resembled the human form.

Automatic drawing was the graphic counterpart to Freudian free association, Arp began to draw with no preconceived subject in mind, but as the lines emerged on the paper, they provoked associations with human forms and with plant and animal life. But the artists never accepted "automatic" impulses as adequate in themselves; some form of editing and rearranging always followed, Arp's improvisation was less rapid than that of Masson and Miro’s Masson's vigorous automatism was exposed first in drawings, then in the sand paintings which he drew directly with paint squeezed from a specially constructed tube, Miro more easy going automatism led to a group of paintings, the most remarkable of which is the very large Birth of the World in the next gallery. It was "by such pure psychic automatism," wrote Andre Breton "that (Miro) might pass for the most surrealist of us all. Of course, pure automatism, like pure accident, is inimical to art and Miro himself noted that the later stages of such pictures were "carefully calculated.” — Museum of Modern Art Press Release, March 21, I968

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