test 2

Femme/Enfant

(Woman/Child)

Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait with Cropped Hair, 1943

- androgynous figure -this gesture as a confrontational response to Rivera's demand for a divorce, revealing the artist's injured sense of female pride and her self-punishment for the failures of her marriage. -the cropped hair also presents a nuanced expression of the artist's identity. She holds one cut braid in her left hand while many strands of hair lie scattered on the floor. The act of cutting a braid symbolizes a rejection of girlhood and innocence, but equally can be seen as the severance of a connective cord (maybe umbilical) that binds two people or two ways of life -the act of cutting off her braids, she rejects some aspect of her former identity.

Eugène Atget, Passage du Grand-Cerf, c. 1910

-Albumen silver print

Lee Miller, Nude bent forward, 1930

-the nude is presented as a modernist sculpture: armless, legless, and with an upended backside that suggests a profound reorientation of the human body - deployed the camera's potential to render anatomy disquieting while avoiding the offering of sexual titillation.

Fascist Masculinity

-traditional -stuck to core family values -men make money -wife is an object -loves the governent

The Uncanny

-uncomfortable +unfamiliar things to the human mind

Surrealist object

objects combined to challenge reason and summon unconscious, poetic, and symbolic associations; typically mundane, mostly mass-produced objects and/or materials combined to created new resonances when arranged in unprecedented and provocative configuration; an object with "symbolic function" [Ray, Oppenheim]

Surrealist Women

- Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning, sought to address the problematic adoption of Freudian psychoanalysis that often cast women as monstrous and lesser. Thus, many female Surrealists experimented with cross-dressing and depicted themselves as animals or mythic creatures.

Commodity Fetishism (Marx)

-"Commodity fetishism" is a term coined by Karl Marx and refers to the collective belief that it is natural and inevitable to measure the value of things with money. -He uses it as a critique of capitalism -using it as a way to show how the value and meaning of objects are being "fetishized" or elevated to a higher level of importance through being commoditized. -Commodities are produced through human labor and market exchange, and Marx argues that economists often lose sight of the value of human labor as they value it merely as a way to create economic value in commodities. Thus the value of human labor - an aspect of humanity - has become a commodity in itself and a good example of the excessive commodification in society under a capitalist commodity culture. -Advertising contributes to "commodity fetishism" as it attempts to inform, persuade and sell products to consumers through developing brand and product identities. It ties sign values to brands and products, separating them from their original meaning and signifying the product/ brand's new meaning. This fetishizes both the original meaning of the sign and of the product, which no longer is a representation of the human element required to produce it, but reduced to a superficial construction of brand/ product identity. -In Karl Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism is the perception of the social relationships involved in the production, not as relationships among people, but as economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

-American writer of experimental novels, poetry, essays, operas, and plays. In Paris during the 1920s she was a central member of a group of American expatriates, known as the "Lost Generation," that included Ernest Hemingway. Her works include Three Lives (1908), Tender Buttons (1914), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). -literary style is typified by repetition and disjuncture -known for handling language in a philosophical way, as in her famous sentence "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," or her meditation on the implications of the statement "I am I because my little dog knows me" in The Geographical History of America.

Socialist Realism (USSR)

-Artistic style whose goal was to promote socialism by showing Soviet life in a positive light -the theory of art, literature, and music officially sanctioned by the state in some Communist countries by which artistic work was supposed to reflect and promote the ideals of a socialist society. -maintained the naturalistic style - supported artists of technical skill -Started: 1922 -Ended: mid-1980s

Hans Bellmer, Plate from La Poupée, 1936. Gelatin silver print

-Bellmer began creating and photographing these disturbing dolls in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany. Many have interpreted them as acts of political defiance against the ideals and social norms promoted by the Nazis, and expressions of the personal outrage he felt towards his father, who joined the Nazi party. Bellmer himself stated, "If the origin of my work is scandalous, it is because for me, the world is a scandal."

Romaine Brooks, Self-Portrait, 1923

-Brooks envisioned her modernity as an artist and a person. -The modulated shades of gray, stylized forms, and psychological gravity exemplify her deep commitment to aesthetic principles. -The shaded, direct gaze conveys a commanding and confident presence, an attitude more typically associated with her male counterparts. -The riding hat and coat and masculine tailoring recall conventions of aristocratic portraiture while also evoking a chic androgyny associated with the post--World War I "new woman." -Brooks's fashion choices also enabled upper-class lesbians to identify and acknowledge one another.

what do you want from me

-Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1928 -Two heads, coupled in a monstrous union - Siamese twins generated by the camera - confront and struggle with each other. One face is alert, anxious, sympathetic: it looks out of the picture, towards the world, wanting to participate in it. The other head is turned inwards, towards its twin, and we catch only one hooded eye in a face that seems drugged, disconnected, vampiric. The shaven heads add to the sense of strangeness, of pathology. We might be looking at a picture in an old medical textbook. This is a violent image of a self divided, with the "normal" woman on the left haunted, preyed on, and somehow chastised by her nocturnal twin.

The Dream

-Freud (1900) considered dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious as it is in dreams that the ego's defenses are lowered so that some of the repressed material comes through to awareness, albeit in distorted form. Dreams perform important functions for the unconscious mind and serve as valuable clues to how the unconscious mind operates.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

-German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism -Jewish-German philosopher, critic, and theorist. -An open critic of fascism. -Operated in Germany, Paris, and Moscow. -Committed suicide on the French-Spanish border while fleeing the Nazis in 1940.

Arno Breker, Readiness, 1939

-German architect and sculptor who is best known for his public works in Nazi Germany, where they were endorsed by the authorities as the antithesis of degenerate art.

Women of the Left Bank by Shari Benstock

-Jane Marcus hails it as "the first serious literary history of the period and its women writers, making along the way no small contribution to our understanding of the relationships between women artists and their male counterparts, from Henry James to Hemingway, Joyce, Picasso, and Pound -An exploration of the lives and works of some two dozen American, English, and French women whose talent shaped the Paris expatriate experience in the early twentieth century.

Trauma (Hal Foster)

-October in 1996 as Obscene, Abject, Traumatic -surrealist art is informed from past traumas and the three types of fantasy, seduction, parental sex and castration -trauma is realized later in memory when a second event reminds you of the initial. He believes that it is not the original horrendous act that happened that causes trauma as its happening, but something that causes you to remember that act. The article states that an initial event happens at a young age but cannot be remembered by the child. The memory then becomes pathogenic but only if it is revived from another event that the now sexual subject associated with the first. This event memory is recorded and repressed. This is why it is the memory, and not the event, that becomes traumatic.

Varvara Stepanova, Designs for sports clothes, 1923

-Russian artist Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958) designed a unisex sports uniform with a striking geometric design that accentuated the movement of the athlete. -Stepanova's design was part of an experimental Russian art movement, constructivism, that aspired to no less than the revolution of society. -The constructivists' abstract, geometric compositions were not created to explore space and material in a gallery but instead became models for new industrial designs. Artists used their skills and imagination for architecture, urban space, clothing, graphics and social activism.

Alexandr Rodchenko

-Russian artist, sculptor, photographer, and graphic designer. -influential founder of the Constructivist movement -He first viewed it as a source of preexisting imagery, using it in montages of pictures and text, -later he began to take pictures himself and evolved an aesthetic of unconventional angles, abruptly cropped compositions, and stark contrasts of light and shadow

Rodchenko's Model for a Worker's Club at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, 1925

-The 1925 international Exhibition of Decorative Arts and Modern Industry in Paris was an opportunity for the Soviet government to showcase its cultural achievements on an international stage. -Constructivism was a collective enterprise, which thrived on the sharing of ideas and collaboration between different disciplines. -Rodchenko and his colleagues were increasingly marginalised and Socialist Realism was endorsed as the sole approved artistic style of the Soviet Union.

Val-de-Grâce Hospital

-The present-day hospital was built in the 1970s and completed in 1979. It has a capacity of 350 beds, in various specialties. The hospital is accessible to military personnel in need of medical aid as well as to any person with health coverage under the French social security system. It is famous for being the place where the top officials of the French Republic generally get treated for ailment.

the gradiva

-The woman who walks has become a modern 20th-century mythological figure, from the novella Gradiva by the German writer Wilhelm Jensen, as she has sprung out of the imagination of a fictional character she may be considered unreal twice over. -"THE WOMAN WHO WALKS" OR "SHE WHO ADVANCES."

Surrealism and Gender

-The women of surrealism were imaginative, bold and quite remarkable in different ways. These women were very active in surrealism even before the1924 in Paris appearance of the first manifesto of surrealism continues to illuminate and expand their artistic influence to date. This research paper highlights the quality, diversity, vitality and range of the female participants in the surrealist movement. -The surrealists acknowledge the contribution of women to the surrealist movement and at times celebrate them but the women do not receive such recognition outside the Surrealist movement for their significant contribution. -The challenge, success and achievements of the women of the Surrealism movement are of great importance not only to the movement but also to the genuine seekers of inspiration, knowledge and a better world.

Surrealism

-a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images. -2 kinds: oneiric/dream-like and automatism -1920-1966

Alberto Giacometti, Woman with her Throat Cut, 1932

-a tangle of bronze bones or limbs lying in a violent heap. -a writhing, spiked figure intended to be placed directly on the floor, ensnaring viewers like a booby trap).

oneiric/dream-like

-artist relied on their own recurring motifs arisen through their dreams or/and unconscious mind. At its basic, the imagery is outlandish, perplexing, and even uncanny, as it is meant to jolt the viewer out of their comforting assumptions

Surrealist Masculinities

-critique the artists and writers of the surrealism movement on how they have explored gender and sexuality and how that connects to their masculinity(artistically, economically, politically, and socially) to the leaders of the bourgeois republic. social and economic barriers were around when the surrealists were alive to produce their masculinity. -rebellious teenagers -still didn't respect a woman but used them as an aesthetic

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931

-depicts the fluidity of time as a series of melting watches -distinction between hard and soft objects highlights Dalí's desire to flip reality lending to his subjects characteristics opposite their usually inherent properties, an un-reality often found in our dreamscapes. -They are surrounded by a swarm of ants hungry for the organic processes of putrefaction and decay of which Dalí held unshakable fascination. -Because the melting flesh at the painting's center resembles Dalí, we might see this piece as a reflection on the artist's immortality amongst the rocky cliffs of his Catalonian home.

Paranoid-Critical Method (Salvador Dali)

-developed by Salvador Dalí in the early 1930s. ... The technique consists of the artist invoking a paranoid state (fear that the self is being manipulated, targeted or controlled by others).

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

-founder of psychoanalysis, a controversial theory about the workings of the unconscious mind - he believed that our most basic desires are selfish and sexual, but we "sublimate" these desires, or redirect them in socially acceptable ways.

Claude Cahun

-french woman who used a pen name, self-portraits interested in issues of gender and often appeared as a man - The surrealist photographer whose work explored gender identity and the subconscious mind. -Moore and Cahun moved to Jersey, an island off the coast of Normandy, where they, disguised as non-Jews, they produced and distributed anti-Nazi propaganda. After being caught, imprisoned, and sentenced to death, they successfully escaped such a fate when Jersey was liberated by allies in 1945. - Cahun is considered to be a ground-breaking artist who fully embraced her gender fluidity long before the term came into use.

The New Woman (Paris)

-highlights the political, social, and artistic lives of the renowned lesbian and bisexual Modernists, including Colette, Djuana Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Beach, and many more. -enlightening account of women who between wars found their self and their own voice in Paris -Female (many of them lesbian) artists, writers, photographers, designers, and adventurers settled in Paris between the wars. They embraced France, some developed an ex-pat culture, and most cherished a way of life quite different than the one left behind. Archival footage, music, paintings, literature, and interviews with folks who were there. Berenice Abbott, Gisele Freund, Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Colette, Janet Flanner and others. In addition, Matisse, Picasso, Hemingway, and James Joyce.

Fyodor Reshetnikov, Comrade Stalin and a Girl, 1952

-iconography -pictured next to Mary holding jesus -putting him on the pedestal of religion as he is like god and needs to be worshipped

unconscious mind

-level of the mind in which thoughts, feelings, memories, and other information are kept that are not easily or voluntarily brought into consciousness - Here lie the processes that are the real cause of most behavior. Like an iceberg, the most important part of the mind is the part you cannot see. - Freud (1915) found that some events and desires were often too frightening or painful for his patients to acknowledge, and believed such information was locked away in the unconscious mind. This can happen through the process of repression.

Man Ray, Untitled, from Minotaur, 1936

-made up of the torso of a nude woman's body. The minotaur in greek mythology is kept imprisoned in a labyrinth on the island of crete, cretan youth were sacrificed to it. The minotaur and his labyrinth were another potent symbol for the surrealist due to the minotaur collapsing the human and animal instincts. symbols of the unconscious mind and also the bestial nature or those instincts within every human. They want to liberate suppressed repressed instincts. it is familiar but is made to be unfamiliar, we see this other imagery in it, dual imagery, makes you doubt what you are looking at. The figure of the woman is also very important to the surrealist she is a well spring or muse of creativity because she herself is irrational and emotional. She symbolizes the unconscious and irrational as well. Her body is creating the head of a monster with her nipples as the eyes and her arms its horns, beauty and monstrosity are made into one, suggesting they are projections of our own desires

Salvador Dalí, The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, 1933

-photomontage that represents how artists who were part of the Surrealist movement adapted photography and collage (both still relatively new media) to their interest in exploring unconscious states of mind, dreams, fantasies -Dali is interested in unconscious phenomena, however, he is also looking back to an interest in expression and emotion evident already in classical sculpture and seventeenth-century Baroque works like those of Bernini.

Nadja (Andre Breton)

-published in 1928. -The novel is an account of the author's relationship with a woman named Nadja, over a period of ten days. -Andre Breton, believes that knowing who he is may only be determined by knowing whom he "haunts." -Breton places great importance on coincidences. -She is eventually committed to a sanitarium. Breton does not believe that being in a sanitarium makes much difference to Nadja. He feels that he did not notice anything especially alarming about her behavior when he was with her. Breton yearns to connect with her again. - a non-linear structure and making heavy use of improbable coincidences, Nadja balances a realistic core relationship with narrative aspects that highlight its artificial, fictional structure -he has gone over their time together so often in his head that it no longer seems like something that really happened to him. It is only after he has distanced himself from the events in this way that he is able to write them down. This explanation connects the two halves of the novel by demonstrating how the story of Andre and Nadja is an extended example of the disconnect and distance Andre feels in his dealings with other people.

Giorgio DeChirico, the Enigma of a Day, 1914

-quiet, enigmatic, strangely simplified scenes of old towns - the enigma is the relationship between the real and the unreal -he kinds of haunted streets we might encounter in dreams. They are backdrops for pregnant symbols or even, at times, for collections of objects that resemble still lifes. - disordered collections of symbols -recognized that the clash of the past and present produced strange effects - suggesting sorrow, disorientation, nostalgia - and some of the most powerful qualities in his work

Leonora Carrington - Self Portrait - 1938

-summarizes Carrington's skewed perception of reality and exploration of her own femininity. -She extends her hand toward a female hyena, and the hyena imitates Carrington's posture and gesture, just as the artist's wild mane of hair echoes the coloring of the hyena's coat. Carrington frequently used the hyena as a surrogate for herself in her art and writing; she was apparently drawn to this animal's rebellious spirit and its ambiguous sexual characteristics. In the window in the background, a white horse (which may also symbolize the artist herself) gallops freely in a forest. A white rocking horse in a similar position appears to float on the wall behind the artist's head, a nod to the fairytales of the artist's early childhood. -ts transformations, and its contrast between restriction and liberation, seems to allude to her dramatic break with her family at the time of her romance with Max Ernst. The distorted perspective, enigmatic narrative, and autobiographical symbolism of this painting demonstrate the artist's attempt to reimagine her own reality.

Picasso, Gertrude Stein, 1905

-the portrait Picasso painted of her is a riveting and compelling characterization, and a tribute to her importance for him at this turning point of his career. -Stein was a formidable-looking woman - strong-featured, short, sturdy and heavy - and a formidable personality. A mutual fascination developed. In painting her Picasso needed to suggest the force of her character and mind as well as to describe her arresting appearance, and his almost fanatical concentration is suggested in her description of his stance as he worked

"Profane Illuminations"

-the process by which sometimes but not always aided by dreams or hashish, a person perceives the most ordinary, overlooked objects of everyday reality as uncanny, supernatural, and irrational -surrealism ability to disorient and estrange through profane illumination and made it a potentially explosive catalyst for social revolution defamiliarizing you to modern times

Frottage/grattage

-the technique or process of taking a rubbing from an uneven surface to form the basis of a work of art The practice of touching or rubbing against the clothed body of another person in a crowd as a means of obtaining sexual gratification. -A drawing made from a rubbing of an interesting surface -The technique was invented by surrealist artist Max Ernst. Having prepared a canvas using grattage, Ernst would then work back into the painting, responding to the unexpected marks and shapes created by the texture. -In Ernst's Forest and Dove the trees appear to have been created by scraping over the backbone of a fish. -Grattage, a French word which translates as 'scraping', was developed from another similar technique used by Ernst called frottage.

Constructivist Object

-think IKEA -functional -multiple uses -made to last -The constructivists believed art should directly reflect the modern industrial world. -Constructivism was suppressed in Russia in the 1920s -By 1921 Russian artists who followed Tatlin's ideas were calling themselves constructivists and in 1923 a manifesto was published in their magazine Lef -Constructivism encouraged a new focus on the tangible and material aspects of art, and its experimental spirit was encouraged by a belief that art had to match the revolutionary transformations then taking place in Russian politics and society.

Man Ray, Anatomies, c. 1930

-use of unusual lighting and darkroom techniques emphasizes their artificiality -The capacity of desire to transform reality is evoked

Exquisite Corpse

A game in which each participant takes turns writing or drawing on a sheet of paper, folds it to conceal his or her contribution, then passes it to the next player for a further contribution. The game gained popularity in artistic circles during the 1920s, when it was adopted as a technique by artists of the Surrealist movement.

Germaine Dulac, The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1927/28

Conflicts between a clergyman (Alex Allin) and a soldier (Genica Athanasiou) symbolically examine the effects of conformity and authority on society.

Psychoanalysis

Freud's theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts; the techniques used in treating psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious tensions

Andre Breton

[1896-1966] -French writer, poet, and surrealist theorist, and are best known as the main founder of surrealism. -His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as pure psychic automatism. -Poet and member of Dada movement -Worked with military psychiatric patients during WWI. -Met Freud in 1921. -Wrote the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. -Believed in art as anti-war protest. -Was a member of the French Communist Party

automatism

a method of art-making in which the artist suppresses conscious control over the making process, allowing the unconscious mind to have great sway. Early 20th-century Dadaists, such as Hans Arp, made some use of this method through chance operations.

Ancient Roman relief of Gradiva,

reproduction bought by Freud in the Vatican Museum, Rome, in 1901.