Essay Choice - Surrealism

I've decided to use Surrealism as my design movement for my essay due to it appealing to me. The fact that  the whole design movement centres around the impossible seems appropriate because in a game anythings possible. The paintings created by various artists including Salvador Dali and the German painter Max Ernst appeal to me more than the traditional artwork of more famous artists such as Edvard Munch and Pablo Picasso because I personally find them more visually appealing this is possibly due to myself being born into more modern and colourful world visually when it comes to artwork. Computers were revolutionizing the way people lived and worked as I was growing up, a new medium was born that was available to artists to create new modern pieces of digital work. Digitally created graphics and artwork tends to be colourful and non sequitur much like Surrealism so I believe finding common ground between both is the reason I much prefer the artwork of Surrealism over much more celebrated works from alternate movements. Surrealism isn't exclusive to the visual arts, literature features heavily in surrealism, and theatre, film and music do also but in a lower capacity, but my preference is the visual arts aspect of it

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. It developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory. The movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games, discussed the theories of Surrealism, and developed a variety of techniques such as automatic drawing. Automatic drawing was developed as a means of expressing the subconscious. In automatic drawing, the hand is allowed to move randomly across the paper without any planning or thought being applied beforehand.

World War II created havoc not only for the general population of Europe but especially for the European artists and writers that opposed Fascism, and Nazism. Many important artists fled to North America, and relative safety in the United States. The art community in New York City in particular was already grappling with Surrealist ideas and several artists like Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Roberto Matta, converged closely with the surrealist artists themselves. During the 1940s Surrealism's influence was also felt in England and America. Mark Rothko took an interest in biomorphic figures, and in England Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Paul Nash used or experimented with Surrealist techniques. However, Conroy Maddox, one of the first British Surrealists whose work in this genre dated from 1935, remained within the movement, and organized an exhibition of current Surrealist work in 1978 in response to an earlier show which infuriated him because it did not properly represent Surrealism. Maddox's exhibition, titled Surrealism Unlimited, was held in Paris and attracted international attention.

There is no clear consensus about the end, or if there was an end, to the Surrealist movement. Some art historians suggest that World War II effectively disbanded the movement. However, art historian Sarane Alexandrian (1970) states, "the death of André Breton in 1966 marked the end of Surrealism as an organized movement."

Modernism Moodboard

Art Deco Moodboard

Modernism

Modernism the term, tends to describes the modernist movement in the arts, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I, were among the factors that shaped Modernism. Many modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art. Arguably the most paradigmatic motive of modernism is the rejection of the obsolescence of tradition and its reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms.

By 1930, Modernism had entered popular culture and The New Yorker magazine began publishing new and modern ideas by young writers and humorists like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, E. B. White, S. J. Perelman, and James Thurber, among others. Modern ideas in art appeared in commercials and logos, the famous London Underground logo, designed by Edward Johnston in 1919, being an early example of the need for clear, easily recognizable and memorable visual symbols.

 In abstract painting during the 1950s and 1960s several new directions like hard-edge painting and other forms of geometric abstraction began to appear in artist studios and in radical avant-garde circles as a reaction against the subjectivism of abstract expressionism. Pop Art is derived from Modernism and is possibly the most famous variation of it in visual art terms. The most famous Pop Art artists being Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol and their works such as Campbell Soup Cans and Whaam!.

Dada

Dada was an art movement in the early twentieth century. It began in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly after. Dada is quoted to have been 'born out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War 1'. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestoes, art theory, theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated on anti-war politics. Dada was not confined to the visual and literary arts; its influence reached into sound and music. Kurt Schwitters developed what he called sound poems, while Francis Picabia and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes composed Dada music performed at the Festival Dada in Paris.


One of the most famous artists associated with the Dada art movement is French artist Marcel Duchamp. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art. The dadaists imitated the techniques developed during the cubist movement through the pasting of cut pieces of paper items, but extended their art to encompass items such as transportation tickets, maps, plastic wrappers, etc. to portray aspects of life, rather than representing objects viewed as still life. Photomontages were also a popular form of Dada art, using scissors and glue rather than paintbrushes and paints to express their views of modern life through images presented by the media.


While broad, the movement was unstable. By 1924 in Paris, Dada was melding into surrealism, and artists had gone on to other ideas and movements, including surrealism, social realism and other forms of modernism. Some theorists argue that Dada was actually the beginning of postmodern art.

Art Deco

Art deco is a design movement that rose to prominence in the mid 1930's but actually started a decade prior in Paris.  Art deco is most commonly recognized for its architecture and interior design, but also had influences in industrial design, fashion and jewelry, as well as visual arts such as painting, film and graphics design. It embraced influences from many different styles of the early twentieth century, including neoclassical, constructivism, cubism, modernism and futurism, many art deco works drew inspiration from ancient Eqyptian and Aztec forms. It is based on mathematical geometric shapes but other popular themes include trapezoidal, zigzagged and jumbled shapes.

One of the most famous and earliest examples of art deco architecture is the Chrysler Building in New York, the Empire State building is also a good example. New York, Chicago, and Detroit have many surviving art deco buildings. An example closer to home is the former Daily Express building in Manchester built midway through the 1930's.

During the summer of 1969, the popular art historian Bevis Hillier conceived organizing an exhibition named Art Deco at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts which then took place in 1971. Interest in art deco increased further with the publication of his book a year later - The World of Art Deco, a record of the exhibition.

Art deco slowly lost patronage in the West after becoming mass-produced, when it began to be derided as gaudy and presenting a false image of luxury. A resurgence of interest in art deco began during the 1960's, and then again during the 1980's with the graphic design. Its association with "film noir" and 1930's glamour resulted in its use for advertisements for jewelry, fashion and toiletries even today.