Dada and Surrealism

Dada

An early 20th-century art movement that rejected traditional art through absurdity, chance, and anti-art actions, responding to the trauma of World War I.

• Born during World War I

• Questions museums, authorship, and taste

• Embraces absurdity, chance, provocation

• Paves the way for Conceptual Art

Readymades

Readymades are ordinary, mass-produced objects that an artist chooses and presents as art, without changing them, to challenge traditional ideas of skill, beauty, and what counts as art.

Marcel Duchamp – Bicycle Wheel (1913)
A bicycle wheel mounted on a stool; one of the first readymades.

• Ordinary object declared art

• No aesthetic transformation

• Focus on idea, not skill

• Questions “What is art?”

Marcel Duchamp – Fountain (1917)

• Most famous readymade

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven & Morton Schamberg – God (1917)

Marcel Duchamp – L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)

Dada Collage & Photomontage

Max Ernst – The Word (Woman-Bird) (1921)

• Collage from found imagery

• Dreamlike, irrational forms

• Chance and association

• Bridge from Dada to Surrealism

Hannah Höch – Cut with the Kitchen Knife… (1919–20)

• Political photomontage

• Fragmented modern identity

• Feminist and anti-authority

Surrealism

an early–mid 20th-century art movement that sought to unlock the unconscious mind through dream imagery, automatism, and irrational juxtapositions, influenced by Freud’s theories.

• Followed Dada, but constructive

• Explores dreams, the unconscious, the uncanny

• Aims at a “higher reality”

• Mix of automatism and illusionistic painting

Automatism

making art without planning, letting the unconscious decide what appears.

André Masson – Automatic Drawing (1924)

• Drawing without conscious control

• Direct access to unconscious

• Spontaneous line

• Anti-rational process

André Masson – Battle of Fishes (1926)

• Automatic drawing developed into painting

• Sand and mixed media

• Violent, primal imagery

• Chance meets intention

Exquisite Corpse

a Surrealist game where multiple artists create a single image or text collaboratively, each adding a part without seeing the others

Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró & Man Ray – Untitled (Exquisite Corpse) (1926–27)

• Collaborative game

• Each artist works blindly

• Unexpected imagery

• Collective unconscious

Uncanny Objects

Meret Oppenheim – Object (1936)

• Fur-covered cup and saucer

• Familiar made disturbing

• Tactile unease

• The uncanny

Salvador Dalí – Lobster Telephone (1938)

• Absurd object combination

• Sexual symbolism

• Humor + discomfort

• Surreal juxtaposition

Surrealist Painting

Salvador Dalí – The Persistence of Memory (1931)

• Melting clocks

• Dream time

• Hyper-realistic style

René Magritte – Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1929)

• Challenges representation

• Conceptual thinking

Max Ernst – Leonora in the Morning Light (1940)

• Mythical transformation

• Personal symbolism

• Dream narrative

• Surreal identity

Leonora Carrington – Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) (1939)

• Female identity

• Personal mythology

• Dream logic

Surrealism in Mexico

Frida Kahlo – The Two Fridas (1939)

• Split identity

• Personal symbolism

• Pain and psychology

• Surrealism + autobiography

Remedios Varo – Harmony (1956)

• Alchemy and science

• Surrealism in design and advertising

Edward James – Las Pozas, Mexico (1940s)

• Surrealist architecture

• Dream environment

• Nature + fantasy