Extra Credit
Gala and the Angelus of Millet Immediately Preceding the Arrival of the Conic Anamorphoses, 1933. Salvador Dalí
"Illusionistic Surrealism" We view this painting through a door, held open by a man with a lobster on his head (the conical anamorphoses). Lobsters serve as a sexual symbol for Dali work. Above is a perfect copy of The Angelus, except notice the bleak landscape. Below, "the peasants" are repeated as a smiling Gala (Dali's wife) and a man staring at an object between them.Gala and The Angelus of Millet Before the Imminent Arrival of the Conical Anamorphoses (Full title).
Pasiphaë, 1943 Jackson Pollock
Automatism, Mythology (plus Jungian archetypes in the younger Pollock's version) Finished just after Pollock's first exhibition in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim's New York gallery, Art of This Century, Pasiphaë is the largest of the painter's mythologically themed pictures of the mid-1940s. Originally named Moby Dick, the picture was retitled before it was exhibited in 1944 when James Johnson Sweeney, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, related the story of the Cretan princess Pasiphaë who gave birth to the half-man, half-bull Minotaur. The Minotaur had been a favorite motif of Picasso and of the Surrealists (Minotaure had been the name of their literary magazine from 1933 to 1939, for which Picasso had designed the first cover). Here Pollock incorporates two sentinel-like standing figures at the left and right and a prostrate figure at center. Pollock weaves these figures into a complex field of arcane symbols and free-form abstraction, his own novel interpretation of the Surrealist practice of automatism, wherein the artist's unconscious is used to organize composition.
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonitions of Civil War, 1936. Salvador Dalí
Dalí painted this work just prior to the start of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 and said it was evidence of the prophetic power of his subconscious mind. He depicts the anxiety of the time, visually predicting the violence, horror, and doom many Spaniards felt during General Franco's later rule. Two grossly elongated and exaggerated figures struggle, locked in a tensely, gruesome fight where neither seems to be the victor. To quote Dalí, the painting shows "a vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of autostrangulation." The boiled bean referenced in the title most likely refers to the simple stew that was eaten by the poverty-ridden citizens living through this difficult time in Spain. Dalí's composition manages to express his political outrage. He would later continue to paint about politics and war in a series of works on Hitler and his agreement with Lord Chamberlain of Britain. This image also brings to mind Pablo Picasso's masterwork on a similar topic, Guernica (1937).
Jackson Pollock Going West 1934-35
Going West exemplifies many aspects of Pollock's early interests. During the 1930s, he was strongly influenced by the American Regionalism of his mentor Thomas Hart Benton, yet Going West is characterized by a dark, almost mystical quality similar to another American visionary painter Pollock admired, Albert Pinkham Ryder. The swirling forms which structure the image evoke the emotional intensity of El Greco and Van Gogh. This image of a pioneer journeying West connects Pollock's emerging style to his own origins. While the scene evokes a sort of gothic mystery, it has been suggested that it comes from a family photo of a bridge in Cody, Wyoming, where Pollock was born.
Le viol (The Rape), 1934 René Magritte
One image which appears in many of Magritte's paintings is that of his mother. He saw her fished from the river Sambre at the age of fourteen, she had committed suicide. The body was found naked apart from a nightgown which obscured only the face as it was tangled around her One of the best examples of Magritte's life in his work is in The Rape Magritte's mother was drowned when he was very young. She was discovered with her face veiled by her gown with her naked body showing. The Rape, therefore has three main attributes: 1. The woman's facial features are replaced by the torso and pelvis of a naked woman is suggestive firstly of the way males see the woman. The idea is to create a sexual image out of the woman's face, the first thing one would usually see. This is also indicated by the name of the piece 'The Rape'. 2. Secondly, it is an obvious reference to his mothers death and the way in which she died, with her face covered and her body naked. 3. Thirdly, a different idea is that one might notice that the neck and head are quite flat, almost phallic. The hair also has an unnatural appearance, perhaps that of pubic hair. This is the most striking vision and is perhaps in line with the way Magritte suggested he wanted to frighten with his paintings, to provoke. It is the rape in progress, the phallus of the face or torso, penetrating the pubic mound.
the Menaced Assassin 1927 René Magritte
Painted in 1927, it presents a macabre yet curiously tranquil murder scene. The body, described by the chief theoretician of the Brussels Surrealists Paul Nougé as 'a corpse of rare perversity', is centre-stage with a scarf draped over its neck, its head diabolically severed from the body. We see the murderer pausing to listen to the gramophone, his expression remote and malevolent. Unbeknownst to the murderer are the assailants, two bowler hated men, waiting in the wings. An obsession with violent and sadistic crime - in reality and fiction, was a key Surrealist concern.
Guernica, 1937 Pablo Picasso
Picasso expressed his outrage against war with Guernica, his enormous mural-sized painting displayed to millions of visitors at the Paris World's Fair. It has since become the twentieth century's most powerful indictment against war, a painting that still feels intensely relevant today. Much of the painting's emotional power comes from its overwhelming size, approximately eleven feet tall and twenty five feet wide. Guernica is not a painting you observe with spatial detachment; it feels like it wraps around you, immerses you in its larger-than-life figures and action. And although the size and multiple figures reference the long tradition of European history paintings, this painting is different because it challenges rather than accepts the notion of war as heroic. Picasso's painting is based on the events of April 27, 1937, when Hitler's powerful German air force, acting in support of Franco, bombed the village of Guernica in northern Spain, a city of no strategic military value. It was history's first aerial saturation bombing of a civilian population. It was a cold-blooded training mission designed to test a new bombing tactic to intimidate and terrorize the resistance. For over three hours, twenty five bombers dropped 100,000 pounds of explosive and incendiary bombs on the village, reducing it to rubble. Twenty more fighter planes strafed and killed defenseless civilians trying to flee. The devastation was appalling: fires burned for three days, and seventy percent of the city was destroyed. A third of the population, 1600 civilians, were wounded or killed. Picasso chose to paint Guernica in a stark monochromatic palette of gray, black and white. This may reflect his initial encounter with the original newspaper reports and photographs in black and white; or perhaps it suggested to Picasso the objective factuality of an eye witness report. A documentary quality is further emphasized by the textured pattern in the center of the painting that creates the illusion of newsprint. The sharp alternation of black and white contrasts across the painting surface also creates dramatic intensity, a visual kinetic energy of jagged movement.
Grace Hartigan, Giftwares, 1955.
Quilter notes "When Hartigan had used oil paint in the 1950s in New York her ideas about colour were articulated by the texture of the paint and her brushstrokes. You couldn't speak of a white or red without noticing her application of it, and the emotion was in the effort; there is often the sense you are looking at the traces of a fight. In Baltimore, Hartigan started to experiment with washes of watercolour, and black outlines. The effect seemed effortless, even casual. The colours glow, more gas than solid ... Hartigan's pleasure in perceiving colour, shape and line. Her love of Matisse is obvious. "
Doll, 1935 Hans Bellmer
The Doll is a hand-coloured black-and-white photograph of a partially dismembered life-size doll sculpture. Partly influenced by Jacques Offenbach's (1819-1880) final opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which the hero falls in love with a realistic life-size mechanical doll, Hans Bellmer built his first Doll in 1933-4 and a second in 1935, of which this is a photograph. Bellmer's first Doll was an articulated construction of wood, plaster, metal rods, nuts and bolts which represented a young girl. A disquieting sculpture, it embodied a number of qualities of the surrealist object: subversive and erotic, sadistic and fetishistic. The artist took a number of photographs of The Doll in various poses and stages of construction, ten of which were published with an accompanying text as Die Puppe in 1934. Eighteen of them were also published in the Surrealist review Minotaure in the same year (no.6, winter 1934). Soon the photographs of the Doll became as important as the sculpture itself: with their narrative function, they opened up new voyeuristic and fetishistic possibilities.
Hofmann The Gate 1959-60
The Gate was painted in 1959-60 as part of a series of works loosely devoted to architectonic volumes. Hofmann used rectangles of color to reinforce the shape of his essentially unvarying easel-painting format. Although The Gate is subjectless, Hofmann insisted that, even in abstraction, students should always work from nature in some form. With determination, a viewer can see that the complex spatial relationship established by the floating planes of color begins to resemble the gate of the title.
Thomas Hart Benton The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley 1934
The work illustrates an old Ozark folk song of the same name in which a man stabs his wife on account of her supposed infidelity, only to find out later that his suspicion was unfounded. This work is typical of Benton's devotion to sound and music-making in his painting career. Elements of Synchromism - the musical characteristics of color - are evident such as the radiant layered halo connecting the man and wife in the background, which suggests music resonating. Early works by Pollock echo the undulating forms and use of space evident here in his teacher's painting, and in fact, Pollock who was close to Benton and his family, modeled for the harmonica player in the foreground.
Self-Portrait (The White Horse Inn), 1936-37 Leonora Carrington
This painting perfectly summarizes Carrington's skewed perception of reality and exploration of her own femininity. The artist has painted herself posed in the foreground on a blue armchair, wearing androgynous riding clothes, facing outward to the viewer. 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. Carrington had been raised in an aristocratic household in the English countryside and often fought against the rigidity of her education and upbringing. This painting, with its doublings, its 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.
