I recently found myself in a heated debate with a good friend of mine over that subject I’m always banging on about,
“What is Art?”
She remained unconvinced that a piece of found art such as Duchamp’s “Fountain” or, to some extent, Damien Hirst’s “Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” could be considered art.
The main crux of her argument was that it showed no skill or artistic merit to just place an urinal on a stand or place a shark in formaldehyde. It takes skill to place paint on a canvas and represent what the artist sees embodied with their spirit. Her equation for art.
It always saddens me when peoples minds are narrowed by this sense that art must involve the use of motor skill or hand eye coordination, when most of the magic that is to be found in art is cerebral. The greatest art I know is from creative minds not necessarily great painters. Dali, of course, being the best of both worlds.
Artists are not simply Draftsmen who create images for us to look at. Illustrators do this every day so that we know what a block of flats is going to look like or so that the menu we are holding has an interesting floral design on the front, but artists, true artists, grab you by the imagination, by the psyche and they shake you.
A piece of work like “fountain” takes an object you know and makes you question it. What it can mean or represent in a different environment. It is as if it takes on a new shape and a new life becoming an alien relic or a mysterious memory you can’t quite place your finger on.
That piece in particular has been one I have loved for many years. It sang to me, Made me see that art isn’t just about canvas or sculpture, but so much more. The world is Duchamp’s canvas and this simple every day object his paint.
Although I like Hirst’s work less than Duchamp’s it is still as much brilliant art as anything by Leonardo Da Vinci or Monet. I sometimes think that arguments, like my friends, seem to rely too much on the sentiment “If I don’t like it, then it isn’t art.”
I recently sat and watched the front window of a cafe opposite my local. There with all the different faces, the swirling steam, the reflections of cars on the glass.
That is as much art to me but I’ve yet to see an artist put their name to it.
Tuesday, 8 July 2008
Monday, 14 January 2008
Salvador Dali
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres.
Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Salvador Dalí's artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture, and photography. He collaborated with Walt Disney on the unfinished Academy Award-nominated short cartoon Destino, which was completed and released posthumously in 2003. He also collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on the dream sequence from his 1945 film Spellbound.
Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to a self-styled "Arab lineage," claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.
Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an affinity for doing unusual things in order to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork. The purposefully sought notoriety led to broad public recognition and many purchases of his works by people from all walks of life.
Early life
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, was born on May 11, 1904, at 8:45 a.m. GMT in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà region, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain.[7] Dalí's older brother, also named Salvador (b. October 12, 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on August 1, 1903. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinary approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors. When he was five, Dalí was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation, which he came to believe. Of his brother, Dalí said, "…[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He "was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute."
Dalí also had a sister, Ana María, who was three years younger. In 1949 she published a book about her brother, Dalí As Seen By His Sister. His childhood friends included future FC Barcelona footballers Sagibarbá and Josep Samitier. During holidays at the Catalan resort of Cadaqués, the trio played football together.
Dalí attended drawing school. In 1916, Dalí also discovered modern painting on a summer vacation to Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris. The next year, Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Figueres in 1919.
In February 1921, Dalí's mother died of breast cancer. Dalí was sixteen years old; he later said his mother's death "was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her… I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul." After her death, Dalí's father married his deceased wife's sister. Dalí did not resent this marriage, as some think, because he had a great love and respect toward his aunt.
Madrid and Paris
In 1922, Dalí moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students' Residence) in Madrid and studied at the Academia de San Fernando (School of Fine Arts). A lean 1.72 m (5 ft. 7¾ in.)-tall dandy, Dalí already drew attention as an eccentric, wearing long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings, and knee breeches in the fashion style of the English aesthetes of the late 19th century. But his paintings, in which he experimented with Cubism, earned him the most attention from his fellow students. In these earliest Cubist works, he probably did not completely understand the movement, since his only information on Cubist art came from a few magazine articles and a catalog given to him by Pichot (there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time).
In 1924, the still-unknown Salvador Dalí illustrated a book for the first time. It was the Catalan poem "Les bruixes de Llers" ("The Witches of Llers") by his friend and schoolmate, poet Carles Fages de Climent.
Dalí also experimented with Dada, which influenced his work throughout his life. At the Residencia, he became close friends with (among others) Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel, and poet Federico García Lorca. The friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, but Dalí fearfully rejected the erotic advances of the poet.
Dalí was expelled from the Academia in 1926, shortly before his final exams, when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough to examine him. His mastery of painting skills is well documented by that time in his flawlessly realistic Basket of Bread, which was painted in 1926. That same year, he made his first visit to Paris, where he met with Pablo Picasso, whom young Dalí revered. Picasso had already heard favorable things about Dalí from Joan Miró. Dalí did a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and Miró over the next few years as he developed his own style.
Some trends in Dalí's work that would continue throughout his life were already evident in the 1920s. Dalí devoured influences from many styles of art and then produced works ranging from the most academically classic—evidencing a familiarity with Raphael, Bronzino, Francisco de Zurbaran, Vermeer, and Velázquez to the most cutting-edge avant garde, sometimes in separate works and sometimes combined. Exhibitions of his works in Barcelona attracted much attention along with mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from critics.
Dalí grew a flamboyant moustache, which became iconic of him; it was influenced by seventeenth-century Spanish master painter Diego Velázquez.
1929 through World War II
In 1929, Dalí collaborated with surrealistic film director Luis Buñuel on the short film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog). His main contribution was in helping Buñuel write the script for the film. Dalí later claimed to have been more heavily involved in the filming of the project, but this is not substantiated by contemporary accounts. Also that year, in August, he met his muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, a Russian immigrant eleven years his senior who was married at the time to surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In the same year, Dalí had important professional exhibitions and officially joined the Surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris (although his work had already been heavily influenced by surrealism for two years). The Surrealists hailed what Dalí called the Paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity.
Meanwhile, Dalí's relationship with his father was close to rupture. Don Salvador Dalí y Cusi strongly disapproved of his son's romance with Gala and his connection to the Surrealists as a bad influence on his morals. The last straw was when Don Salvador read in a Barcelona paper that his son had recently exhibited in Paris a drawing picturing the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ with the provocative saying, "Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait." Outraged, Don Salvador demanded that his son recant publicly. Dali refused—perhaps for fear of expulsion from the Surrealist group—and was violently thrown out of his paternal home on December 28, 1929. His father told him that he would disinherit him and that he should never set foot in Cadaquès again. Some say that, upon hearing the bad news, an enraged Dalí handed his father a condom with his own sperm inside, saying, "Take that. I owe you nothing anymore!" The following summer, Dalí and Gala would rent a small fisherman's cabin in a nearby bay at Port Lligat. He bought the place, and over the years enlarged it little by little, building his much beloved villa by the sea.
In 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory. Sometimes called Soft Watches or Melting Clocks[citation needed], the work introduced the surrealistic image of the soft, melting pocket watch. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches debunk the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic, and this sense is supported by other images in the work, such as the wide expanding landscape and the ants and fly devouring the other watches.
Dalí and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were married in 1934 in a civil ceremony (they remarried in a Catholic ceremony in 1958).
Dalí was introduced to America by art dealer Julian Levy in 1934, and the exhibition of Dalí's works (including Persistence) in New York created an immediate sensation. Social Register listees feted him at a specially organized "Dalí Ball." He showed up wearing a glass case (containing a brassiere) on his chest. In 1936, Dalí took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition. His lecture, entitled Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques, was delivered wearing a deep-sea diving suit. He had arrived carrying a billiard cue and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds, and had to have the helmet unscrewed as he gasped for breath. He commented that "I just wanted to show that I was 'plunging deeply' into the human mind."
According to Luis Buñuel, Dalí and Gala went to a masquerade party in Chicago dressed as the Lindbergh baby and the kidnapper. The uproar in the press was so great that Dalí apologized. When he returned to Paris, the Surrealists put him on trial for apologizing for a surrealist act.
André Breton accused Dalí of defending the "new" and "irrational" in the "the Hitler phenomenon," but the artist quickly rejected this claim, saying, "I am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention." However, when Francisco Franco came to power in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Dalí's support of the new regime, among other things, eventually resulted in his purported expulsion from the Surrealist group. this, Dalí retorted, "I myself am surrealism." André Breton coined the anagram "avida dollars" (for Salvador Dalí), which more or less translates to "eager for dollars," by which he referred to Dalí after the period of his expulsion. The surrealists henceforth spoke of Dalí in the past tense, as if he were dead. At this stage, his main patron was the very wealthy Edward James. The Surrealist movement and various members thereof (such as Ted Joans) would continue to issue extremely harsh polemics against Dalí until the time of his death and beyond.
Edward James helped the young Salvador Dalí emerge into the art world by purchasing many works and supporting him financially for two years. They became good friends, and James is featured in Dalí's painting Swans Reflecting Elephants. They also collaborated on two of the most enduring icons of the Surrealist movement: the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa.
"During this period, Dalí never stopped writing," wrote Robert and Nicolas Descharnes. In 1941, he drafted a film scenario for Jean Gabin called Moontide. He wrote catalogs for his exhibitions like that at the Knoedler Gallery (in New York City in 1943), where he expounded, "Surrealism will at least have served to give experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at automatizations have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system. ... Today's laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their paroxysm in the psychological signification of the current use of the college." He also wrote a novel (published in 1944) about a fashion salon for automobiles. This got a drawing by Edwin Cox in The Miami Herald, showing him dressing an automobile in an evening gown.
In 1940, as World War II started in Europe, Dalí and Gala moved to the United States, where they lived for eight years. After the move, Dalí returned to the practice of Catholicism. In 1942, he published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. An Italian friar, Gabriele Maria Berardi, claimed to have performed an exorcism on Dalí while he was in France in 1947.[ The friar's estate contained a sculpture of Christ on the cross, which Dalí had given his exorcist to thank him. The sculpture was discovered in 2005, and two Spanish experts in surrealism confirmed that there were adequate stylistic reasons to believe the sculpture was made by Dalí.
Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Salvador Dalí's artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture, and photography. He collaborated with Walt Disney on the unfinished Academy Award-nominated short cartoon Destino, which was completed and released posthumously in 2003. He also collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on the dream sequence from his 1945 film Spellbound.
Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to a self-styled "Arab lineage," claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.
Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an affinity for doing unusual things in order to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork. The purposefully sought notoriety led to broad public recognition and many purchases of his works by people from all walks of life.
Early life
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, was born on May 11, 1904, at 8:45 a.m. GMT in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà region, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain.[7] Dalí's older brother, also named Salvador (b. October 12, 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on August 1, 1903. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinary approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors. When he was five, Dalí was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation, which he came to believe. Of his brother, Dalí said, "…[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He "was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute."
Dalí also had a sister, Ana María, who was three years younger. In 1949 she published a book about her brother, Dalí As Seen By His Sister. His childhood friends included future FC Barcelona footballers Sagibarbá and Josep Samitier. During holidays at the Catalan resort of Cadaqués, the trio played football together.
Dalí attended drawing school. In 1916, Dalí also discovered modern painting on a summer vacation to Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris. The next year, Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Figueres in 1919.
In February 1921, Dalí's mother died of breast cancer. Dalí was sixteen years old; he later said his mother's death "was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her… I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul." After her death, Dalí's father married his deceased wife's sister. Dalí did not resent this marriage, as some think, because he had a great love and respect toward his aunt.
Madrid and Paris
In 1922, Dalí moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students' Residence) in Madrid and studied at the Academia de San Fernando (School of Fine Arts). A lean 1.72 m (5 ft. 7¾ in.)-tall dandy, Dalí already drew attention as an eccentric, wearing long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings, and knee breeches in the fashion style of the English aesthetes of the late 19th century. But his paintings, in which he experimented with Cubism, earned him the most attention from his fellow students. In these earliest Cubist works, he probably did not completely understand the movement, since his only information on Cubist art came from a few magazine articles and a catalog given to him by Pichot (there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time).
In 1924, the still-unknown Salvador Dalí illustrated a book for the first time. It was the Catalan poem "Les bruixes de Llers" ("The Witches of Llers") by his friend and schoolmate, poet Carles Fages de Climent.
Dalí also experimented with Dada, which influenced his work throughout his life. At the Residencia, he became close friends with (among others) Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel, and poet Federico García Lorca. The friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, but Dalí fearfully rejected the erotic advances of the poet.
Dalí was expelled from the Academia in 1926, shortly before his final exams, when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough to examine him. His mastery of painting skills is well documented by that time in his flawlessly realistic Basket of Bread, which was painted in 1926. That same year, he made his first visit to Paris, where he met with Pablo Picasso, whom young Dalí revered. Picasso had already heard favorable things about Dalí from Joan Miró. Dalí did a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and Miró over the next few years as he developed his own style.
Some trends in Dalí's work that would continue throughout his life were already evident in the 1920s. Dalí devoured influences from many styles of art and then produced works ranging from the most academically classic—evidencing a familiarity with Raphael, Bronzino, Francisco de Zurbaran, Vermeer, and Velázquez to the most cutting-edge avant garde, sometimes in separate works and sometimes combined. Exhibitions of his works in Barcelona attracted much attention along with mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from critics.
Dalí grew a flamboyant moustache, which became iconic of him; it was influenced by seventeenth-century Spanish master painter Diego Velázquez.
1929 through World War II
In 1929, Dalí collaborated with surrealistic film director Luis Buñuel on the short film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog). His main contribution was in helping Buñuel write the script for the film. Dalí later claimed to have been more heavily involved in the filming of the project, but this is not substantiated by contemporary accounts. Also that year, in August, he met his muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, a Russian immigrant eleven years his senior who was married at the time to surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In the same year, Dalí had important professional exhibitions and officially joined the Surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris (although his work had already been heavily influenced by surrealism for two years). The Surrealists hailed what Dalí called the Paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity.
Meanwhile, Dalí's relationship with his father was close to rupture. Don Salvador Dalí y Cusi strongly disapproved of his son's romance with Gala and his connection to the Surrealists as a bad influence on his morals. The last straw was when Don Salvador read in a Barcelona paper that his son had recently exhibited in Paris a drawing picturing the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ with the provocative saying, "Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait." Outraged, Don Salvador demanded that his son recant publicly. Dali refused—perhaps for fear of expulsion from the Surrealist group—and was violently thrown out of his paternal home on December 28, 1929. His father told him that he would disinherit him and that he should never set foot in Cadaquès again. Some say that, upon hearing the bad news, an enraged Dalí handed his father a condom with his own sperm inside, saying, "Take that. I owe you nothing anymore!" The following summer, Dalí and Gala would rent a small fisherman's cabin in a nearby bay at Port Lligat. He bought the place, and over the years enlarged it little by little, building his much beloved villa by the sea.
In 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory. Sometimes called Soft Watches or Melting Clocks[citation needed], the work introduced the surrealistic image of the soft, melting pocket watch. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches debunk the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic, and this sense is supported by other images in the work, such as the wide expanding landscape and the ants and fly devouring the other watches.
Dalí and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were married in 1934 in a civil ceremony (they remarried in a Catholic ceremony in 1958).
Dalí was introduced to America by art dealer Julian Levy in 1934, and the exhibition of Dalí's works (including Persistence) in New York created an immediate sensation. Social Register listees feted him at a specially organized "Dalí Ball." He showed up wearing a glass case (containing a brassiere) on his chest. In 1936, Dalí took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition. His lecture, entitled Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques, was delivered wearing a deep-sea diving suit. He had arrived carrying a billiard cue and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds, and had to have the helmet unscrewed as he gasped for breath. He commented that "I just wanted to show that I was 'plunging deeply' into the human mind."
According to Luis Buñuel, Dalí and Gala went to a masquerade party in Chicago dressed as the Lindbergh baby and the kidnapper. The uproar in the press was so great that Dalí apologized. When he returned to Paris, the Surrealists put him on trial for apologizing for a surrealist act.
André Breton accused Dalí of defending the "new" and "irrational" in the "the Hitler phenomenon," but the artist quickly rejected this claim, saying, "I am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention." However, when Francisco Franco came to power in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Dalí's support of the new regime, among other things, eventually resulted in his purported expulsion from the Surrealist group. this, Dalí retorted, "I myself am surrealism." André Breton coined the anagram "avida dollars" (for Salvador Dalí), which more or less translates to "eager for dollars," by which he referred to Dalí after the period of his expulsion. The surrealists henceforth spoke of Dalí in the past tense, as if he were dead. At this stage, his main patron was the very wealthy Edward James. The Surrealist movement and various members thereof (such as Ted Joans) would continue to issue extremely harsh polemics against Dalí until the time of his death and beyond.
Edward James helped the young Salvador Dalí emerge into the art world by purchasing many works and supporting him financially for two years. They became good friends, and James is featured in Dalí's painting Swans Reflecting Elephants. They also collaborated on two of the most enduring icons of the Surrealist movement: the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa.
"During this period, Dalí never stopped writing," wrote Robert and Nicolas Descharnes. In 1941, he drafted a film scenario for Jean Gabin called Moontide. He wrote catalogs for his exhibitions like that at the Knoedler Gallery (in New York City in 1943), where he expounded, "Surrealism will at least have served to give experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at automatizations have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system. ... Today's laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their paroxysm in the psychological signification of the current use of the college." He also wrote a novel (published in 1944) about a fashion salon for automobiles. This got a drawing by Edwin Cox in The Miami Herald, showing him dressing an automobile in an evening gown.
In 1940, as World War II started in Europe, Dalí and Gala moved to the United States, where they lived for eight years. After the move, Dalí returned to the practice of Catholicism. In 1942, he published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. An Italian friar, Gabriele Maria Berardi, claimed to have performed an exorcism on Dalí while he was in France in 1947.[ The friar's estate contained a sculpture of Christ on the cross, which Dalí had given his exorcist to thank him. The sculpture was discovered in 2005, and two Spanish experts in surrealism confirmed that there were adequate stylistic reasons to believe the sculpture was made by Dalí.
Saturday, 17 November 2007
Rene Magritte
Life
Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, in 1898, the eldest son of Léopold Magritte, a tailor, and Adeline, a milliner. He began lessons in drawing in 1910. In 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water. The image of his mother floating, her dress obscuring her face, may have influenced a 1927–1928 series of paintings of people with cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants, but Magritte disliked this explanation. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels for two years until 1918. In 1922 he married Georgette Berger, whom he had met in 1913.
Magritte worked as an assistant designer in a wallpaper factory, and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926 when a contract with Galerie la Centaure in Brussels made it possible for him to paint full-time. In 1926, Magritte produced his first surreal painting, The Lost Jockey (Le jockey perdu), and held his first exhibition in Brussels in 1927. Critics heaped abuse on the exhibition. Depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris where he became friends with André Breton, and became involved in the surrealist group.
When Galerie la Centaure closed and the contract income ended, he returned to Brussels and worked in advertising. Then, with his brother, he formed an agency, which earned him a living wage.
Surrealist patron Edward James allowed Magritte, in the early stages of his career, to stay rent-free in his London home and paint. James features in two of Magritte's pieces, Le Principe du Plaisir (The Pleasure Principle) and La Reproduction Interdite.
During the German occupation of Belgium in World War II he remained in Brussels, which led to a break with Breton. At the time he renounced the violence and pessimism of his earlier work, though he returned to the themes later.
His work was exhibited in the United States in New York in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospective exhibitions, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992.
Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on August 15, 1967 and was interred in Schaarbeek Cemetery, Brussels.
Popular interest in Magritte's work rose considerably in the 1960s, and his imagery has influenced pop, minimalist and conceptual art. In 2005 he came ninth in the Walloon version of De Grootste Belg (The Greatest Belgian); in the Dutch language version he was 18th.
A consummate technician, his work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe "This is not a pipe" (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. (In his book This Is Not a Pipe French philosopher and critic Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox.)
Magritte used the same approach in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an internal caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. In these Ceci n'est pas works, Magritte points out that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself - we cannot smoke tobacco with a picture of a pipe.[citation needed]
His art shows a more representational style of surrealism compared to the "automatic" style seen in works by artists like Joan Miró. In addition to fantastic elements, his work is often witty and amusing. He also created a number of surrealist versions of other famous paintings.
René Magritte described his paintings by saying,
My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, "What does that mean?". It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.
The 1960s brought a great increase in public awareness of Magritte's work. One of the means by which his imagery became familiar to a wider public was through reproduction on rock album covers; early examples include the 1969 album Beck-Ola by the Jeff Beck group (reproducing Magritte's The Listening Room), Jackson Browne's 1974 album, Late for the Sky, with artwork inspired by Magritte's L'Empire des Lumières[5], and the Firesign Theatre's album Just Folks . . . A Firesign Chat based on The Mysteries of the Horizon. Alan Hull of UK folk-rock band Lindisfarne used Magritte's paintings on two solo albums in 1973 and 1979. Styx adapted Magritte's Carte Blanche for the cover of their 1977 album The Grand Illusion, while the cover of Gary Numan's 1979 album The Pleasure Principle, like John Foxx's 2001 The Pleasures of Electricity, was based on Magritte's painting Le Principe du Plaisir.
Jethro Tull mention Magritte in a 1976 lyric, and Paul Simon's song "Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War" appears on the 1983 album Hearts and Bones. Paul McCartney, a life-long fan of Magritte, owns many of his paintings, and claims that a Magritte painting inspired him to use the name Apple for the Beatles' media corporation. Magritte is also the subject and title of a John Cale song on the 2003 album HoboSapiens.
Numerous films have included imagery inspired by Magritte. The Son of Man, in which a man's face is obscured by an apple, is referenced in the 1992 film Toys, the 1999 film The Thomas Crown Affair and in the 2004 short film Ryan. In the 2004 film I Heart Huckabees, Magritte is alluded to by Bernard Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman) as he holds a bowler hat. According to Ellen Burstyn, in the 1998 documentary The Fear of God: 25 Years of "The Exorcist", the iconic poster shot for the film The Exorcist was inspired by Magritte's L'Empire des Lumières.
In Spain, an award-winning children's TV show, El Planeta Imaginario (1983–1986), dedicated two episodes to René Magritte: "M, el extraño viajero" (M, the strange traveller) and "La Quimera" (The Chimera).
Magritte's painting The Treachery of Images is referred to in The Forbidden Game: The Chase, a book by L. J. Smith, in which the difference between image and reality becomes key to solving the entire conflict. The same painting (and its caption, "This is not a pipe") inspired a graphic in the video game Rayman Raving Rabbids. The online game Kingdom of Loathing refers to this painting, as well as to The Son of Man.
Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, in 1898, the eldest son of Léopold Magritte, a tailor, and Adeline, a milliner. He began lessons in drawing in 1910. In 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water. The image of his mother floating, her dress obscuring her face, may have influenced a 1927–1928 series of paintings of people with cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants, but Magritte disliked this explanation. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels for two years until 1918. In 1922 he married Georgette Berger, whom he had met in 1913.
Magritte worked as an assistant designer in a wallpaper factory, and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926 when a contract with Galerie la Centaure in Brussels made it possible for him to paint full-time. In 1926, Magritte produced his first surreal painting, The Lost Jockey (Le jockey perdu), and held his first exhibition in Brussels in 1927. Critics heaped abuse on the exhibition. Depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris where he became friends with André Breton, and became involved in the surrealist group.
When Galerie la Centaure closed and the contract income ended, he returned to Brussels and worked in advertising. Then, with his brother, he formed an agency, which earned him a living wage.
Surrealist patron Edward James allowed Magritte, in the early stages of his career, to stay rent-free in his London home and paint. James features in two of Magritte's pieces, Le Principe du Plaisir (The Pleasure Principle) and La Reproduction Interdite.
During the German occupation of Belgium in World War II he remained in Brussels, which led to a break with Breton. At the time he renounced the violence and pessimism of his earlier work, though he returned to the themes later.
His work was exhibited in the United States in New York in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospective exhibitions, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992.
Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on August 15, 1967 and was interred in Schaarbeek Cemetery, Brussels.
Popular interest in Magritte's work rose considerably in the 1960s, and his imagery has influenced pop, minimalist and conceptual art. In 2005 he came ninth in the Walloon version of De Grootste Belg (The Greatest Belgian); in the Dutch language version he was 18th.
A consummate technician, his work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe "This is not a pipe" (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. (In his book This Is Not a Pipe French philosopher and critic Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox.)
Magritte used the same approach in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an internal caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. In these Ceci n'est pas works, Magritte points out that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself - we cannot smoke tobacco with a picture of a pipe.[citation needed]
His art shows a more representational style of surrealism compared to the "automatic" style seen in works by artists like Joan Miró. In addition to fantastic elements, his work is often witty and amusing. He also created a number of surrealist versions of other famous paintings.
René Magritte described his paintings by saying,
My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, "What does that mean?". It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.
The 1960s brought a great increase in public awareness of Magritte's work. One of the means by which his imagery became familiar to a wider public was through reproduction on rock album covers; early examples include the 1969 album Beck-Ola by the Jeff Beck group (reproducing Magritte's The Listening Room), Jackson Browne's 1974 album, Late for the Sky, with artwork inspired by Magritte's L'Empire des Lumières[5], and the Firesign Theatre's album Just Folks . . . A Firesign Chat based on The Mysteries of the Horizon. Alan Hull of UK folk-rock band Lindisfarne used Magritte's paintings on two solo albums in 1973 and 1979. Styx adapted Magritte's Carte Blanche for the cover of their 1977 album The Grand Illusion, while the cover of Gary Numan's 1979 album The Pleasure Principle, like John Foxx's 2001 The Pleasures of Electricity, was based on Magritte's painting Le Principe du Plaisir.
Jethro Tull mention Magritte in a 1976 lyric, and Paul Simon's song "Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War" appears on the 1983 album Hearts and Bones. Paul McCartney, a life-long fan of Magritte, owns many of his paintings, and claims that a Magritte painting inspired him to use the name Apple for the Beatles' media corporation. Magritte is also the subject and title of a John Cale song on the 2003 album HoboSapiens.
Numerous films have included imagery inspired by Magritte. The Son of Man, in which a man's face is obscured by an apple, is referenced in the 1992 film Toys, the 1999 film The Thomas Crown Affair and in the 2004 short film Ryan. In the 2004 film I Heart Huckabees, Magritte is alluded to by Bernard Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman) as he holds a bowler hat. According to Ellen Burstyn, in the 1998 documentary The Fear of God: 25 Years of "The Exorcist", the iconic poster shot for the film The Exorcist was inspired by Magritte's L'Empire des Lumières.
In Spain, an award-winning children's TV show, El Planeta Imaginario (1983–1986), dedicated two episodes to René Magritte: "M, el extraño viajero" (M, the strange traveller) and "La Quimera" (The Chimera).
Magritte's painting The Treachery of Images is referred to in The Forbidden Game: The Chase, a book by L. J. Smith, in which the difference between image and reality becomes key to solving the entire conflict. The same painting (and its caption, "This is not a pipe") inspired a graphic in the video game Rayman Raving Rabbids. The online game Kingdom of Loathing refers to this painting, as well as to The Son of Man.
Thursday, 12 July 2007
les lampes de Terrahead (The Lamps Of Terrahead) by Juliano Estovas
One of my favourite pieces of art is "les lampes de Terrahead" (The Lamps Of Terrahead).
It was an attempt at political satire in the form of a children's book written by the lesser known artist Juliano Estovas in 1930.
Juliano was born into the wealthy Estovas family, situated in the town of torres de barbues near Saragossa on July 12th 1908.
Throughout the private tutorage of his youth he showed an aptitude towards art which lead to his enrollment into the University of Salamanca where he studied art and philosophy.
As he was a contemporary of painter Federico Odio and poet Yolanda Espitec, Estovas followed the pair when they left for Paris in 1926 seeking involvement with the surrealist movement that had been established there by Andre Breton.
The trio worked together on various small exhibitions and tried to rub shoulders with the in crowd when and where they could. Odio recounts the many parties Juliano would tag along with him too in a vane hope for recognition in his Autobiography “An Emphatic Womb”.
“It was a disgusting sight. Estovas like a little troll, lounging on a chair discussing philosophy with a great like Yves Tanguy, mouthing off about god knows what and pretending he knew better. I did always enjoy having him around to make me look good, though.”
Estovas had little success with his paintings, but still managed to fund a luxurious lifestyle with hand outs from his parents and gifts from the many rich aristocrats and widows he was seen escorting through the streets of Paris. He was soon given the name “la prostituée de peinture” (The Painting Prostitute) by his friends.
It was through his most famous romance with French Aristocrat Charlotte De Truite that he gained the money to publish the book.
The slim volume depicted the fictitious Lamp Family in various different scenes of tragedy and unease, along with incomprehensible sentences inspired by the Dada movement.
"La courbure de doigts dans la lumière." (The fingers bend in the light.)
“les lampes de Terrahead” was a disastrous flop as it was distributed in book shops as a Children's book. A bad choice but many believed it would have had just as little success had it been released as a Surrealist Pamphlet or Magazine.
René Char once commented on the book referring to the artwork as amateur “even by the standards of those talentless maul handed losers from Salamanca.”
Estovas showed no signs of disappointment at his works failings. Thowing self praise around and claiming that the work was influenced by Jose Ortega’s work La deshumanizacion del arte (The dehumanization of art)(1925), and that it was an elitist joke against the masses. The Lamp family representing the lower classes and the uneducated. He also cited Pedro Salinas as an influence on his work. Salinas, however, referred to Estovas in an interview as “That miserable cretin that calls my name up to make himself seem smart and draw the attention away from him constantly clawing his diseased loins.”
“les lampes de Terrahead” is the only piece of work of the estimated, one hundred and fifty two creations by the artist that remain intact today. The others long lost or destroyed.
Estovas passed away in the Sainte Anne hospital, Paris on Oct 14th 1933 aged 25 after falling out of a window to escape the Husband of one of his many mistresses and folding into the mist of obscurity.
It was an attempt at political satire in the form of a children's book written by the lesser known artist Juliano Estovas in 1930.
Juliano was born into the wealthy Estovas family, situated in the town of torres de barbues near Saragossa on July 12th 1908.
Throughout the private tutorage of his youth he showed an aptitude towards art which lead to his enrollment into the University of Salamanca where he studied art and philosophy.
As he was a contemporary of painter Federico Odio and poet Yolanda Espitec, Estovas followed the pair when they left for Paris in 1926 seeking involvement with the surrealist movement that had been established there by Andre Breton.
The trio worked together on various small exhibitions and tried to rub shoulders with the in crowd when and where they could. Odio recounts the many parties Juliano would tag along with him too in a vane hope for recognition in his Autobiography “An Emphatic Womb”.
“It was a disgusting sight. Estovas like a little troll, lounging on a chair discussing philosophy with a great like Yves Tanguy, mouthing off about god knows what and pretending he knew better. I did always enjoy having him around to make me look good, though.”
Estovas had little success with his paintings, but still managed to fund a luxurious lifestyle with hand outs from his parents and gifts from the many rich aristocrats and widows he was seen escorting through the streets of Paris. He was soon given the name “la prostituée de peinture” (The Painting Prostitute) by his friends.
It was through his most famous romance with French Aristocrat Charlotte De Truite that he gained the money to publish the book.
The slim volume depicted the fictitious Lamp Family in various different scenes of tragedy and unease, along with incomprehensible sentences inspired by the Dada movement.
"La courbure de doigts dans la lumière." (The fingers bend in the light.)
“les lampes de Terrahead” was a disastrous flop as it was distributed in book shops as a Children's book. A bad choice but many believed it would have had just as little success had it been released as a Surrealist Pamphlet or Magazine.
René Char once commented on the book referring to the artwork as amateur “even by the standards of those talentless maul handed losers from Salamanca.”
Estovas showed no signs of disappointment at his works failings. Thowing self praise around and claiming that the work was influenced by Jose Ortega’s work La deshumanizacion del arte (The dehumanization of art)(1925), and that it was an elitist joke against the masses. The Lamp family representing the lower classes and the uneducated. He also cited Pedro Salinas as an influence on his work. Salinas, however, referred to Estovas in an interview as “That miserable cretin that calls my name up to make himself seem smart and draw the attention away from him constantly clawing his diseased loins.”
“les lampes de Terrahead” is the only piece of work of the estimated, one hundred and fifty two creations by the artist that remain intact today. The others long lost or destroyed.
Estovas passed away in the Sainte Anne hospital, Paris on Oct 14th 1933 aged 25 after falling out of a window to escape the Husband of one of his many mistresses and folding into the mist of obscurity.
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