The American art movement of the 1930s originates directly from Dada. Surrealism basically resembles the rational thinking that affects society with reference to Freud's dreaming and his thoughts about the unconscious. Surrealism will make it unconscious to the surface in raw, uncontrolled form. This they seek to get through different means. In the literature, the Surrealists work with automatic transcript, which is a development of Freud's mental automation. This is clearly characterized by its absurdity. The absurd would then be circumcised under the control of consciousness, but the surrealists believe that the true content is only expressed without control. You can then determine the degree of truth by how absurd it seems for consciousness. Within literature, surrealism makes clear with rational language, which they think is rooted in the bourgeoisie. This showdown is expanded to become a showdown with the very idea of progress and rationality. And this is what underlies Andrés Breton's surrealist manifesto in 1924. Surrealism means persuasion. Moreover, the style deals with the unconscious, dreams, religion, and sexuality; among other aspects of democracy.
The reality is linked and presented in a new and surprising way. Surrealists attach great importance to what they call 'object trouvee.' The found object could contain a truth that could not be achieved. Otherwise, it could seem dragging and enigmatic, which was just the proof of its value. Often the Surrealists found natural objects whose sensible forms seemed to have their own lives and could associate with personal and psychological meanings. The correlation between painting and literature is the very breach of content and form. Within the painting there is no burglary, surrealism is closest to an academic style, and the main thing is work on the subject (Saab, 2009). Within the movement itself, two styles work; one style is represented. For example, Miro, working in free forms and compositions, playfully and heavily emphasizes forms, colors, and composition. Miro joined the Surrealists in 1924, in which toys-like objects emerge in his paintings. In addition, he also works with collages and assemblers.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
The other form of surrealism can be called cadaver-surrealism; Artists like Dali, de Chirico, Magritte - paint in a strong naturalistic, pedantically well-worked way. It operates with a rigid universe, a fixed state that does not represent a linearly changing process of change. The analysis coupled with the illusion becomes essential. At Dali, this is reflected through glass containers with surgically carved examples of life. His pics are powerful exhibits that abolish all life and put time on hold. He cultivates the tangible reality, as in a flask in which he immerses human cross-section, to investigate them.
Another example is Magritte. Here the object world becomes a static and statuary beauty. At the same time, he introduces some image-philosophical commentary on this beauty, in which the work of art can turn out to be a glamor that reveals elementary knowledge of the conditions of recognition; he shows that rationality is not unambiguously rational. Generally, for the surrealists, the works were not the key, but the process itself was. The work was only a manifest expression of the artist's state at any given time. Being surrealist believed in an absolute surreal reality where the imagination and rationality, object and subject form part of a coherent whole. How such a reality could be achieved, the Surrealists had no definitive answer; the method was individual. Nevertheless, surrealism became associated with communism because they believed that the revolution of communism could provide humanity with the necessary freedom.
The artistic movement as a whole must be understood not only as a set of individual characters artists, but rather as a follow-up process and growing up from the inheritance of the earlier movements of art, against which they differ in their character or, on the contrary, their creative practice follow up. In the case of abstract expressionism as the avant-garde direction of abstract painting is the situation essentially the same. Whatever the movement is perceived to be exclusively American, it owes much to its own the form of the early and somewhat later orientations of the European art modernity of the first half of the twentieth century (Saab, 2009). The gait was rough. Instead of laying a paint layer over a layer of paint with a fine paintbrush, it was thrown violently with all available, dripped, pressed and wiped. In the impulsive act of painting spontaneously the unconscious is to be released. At first, the public was hard hit by the scandal. It did not have anything to do with what had previously been regarded as art.
The most important representative of this type of painting was Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). He described his method as action painting. Representatives of Action painting dealt with the nature and composition of the color and the associated expressive possibilities. Jackson Pollock laid his large canvases on the floor. Then he dripped paint on the canvas using brushes, drilled cans, and other containers. Sometimes he hurled the paint directly on it. In art history, it is common in the discourse on the abstract expressionism in the two main directions Action Painting and Color Field Painting . It would be too far-reaching within such a framework to provide a complete overview of all the abstracts expressionism associated with the artist. Therefore, the chapter on the basic topics, techniques and problems in both directions using selected artists and their works become; always with regard to certain features as special representative of the American identity and in this way ultimately politically functionalized. One of the two currents of abstract expressionism was the Action Painting. Here, the artists sought European traditions and rules and thus to have direct access to one's own unconscious.
The most prominent representative of this new American art was certainly Jackson Pollock. In particular, his drip paintings are among the most popular iconic works of abstract expressionism, such as one of his most famous works, his painting ‘Going West’ of 1934/35, in which he designed the motif of the Westward Trail and the American pioneers (Temkin, 2010). Pollock has a night scene here in the mountains, through which a carriage-car parked by the moonlight a lonely house. From 1929 to 1931, Pollock was a pupil of Benton’s at the Art School Art Students League in Manhattan. Pollock had himself initially at the style, the subjects, and also the way in which he works but the greatest merit of Benton was, to impose on his pupil a set of rules which the latter violently could rebel. This emancipation from the realistic style of the regionalists led to that Pollock in the early 1940s increasingly integrated abstract elements in his works.
Abstract Expressionism is the first major modern movement in the United States. During the war, some artists and cultural critics fled to the United States, thus creating a foundation for American participation in modernism. The movement was liberated from Cubism and realism and prioritized the process itself as the immediate expression of spontaneous feeling. In addition, it is an emotionally-abstract method of painting. Abstract Expressionism is art that does not work with carefully calculated compositions, but spontaneously, individually primitive, inspired by African art, folk art, and children's drawings. The style can be seen as a further development of expressionism - but is not based on a set and experienced motive. At the same time, the subconscious also works a lot with the inheritance of abstract expressionism from surrealism.
The abstract expressionism, so the content of their art as moral, rather than aesthetically, was about subjective questions, not stylistic (Temkin, 2010). Therefore, they turned against the abstract, thus expressing the subject. This abstraction did not go through Kandinsky but was their own first-hand experience, which means that the abstraction comes to them, being the human content. This human content, bound in morality, the psychic aftermath of human wreckage caused by the Second World War turns into a tragedy that plays in their images. The individuality of the image was an attempt to eliminate any connection to an absurd and alienated world. The abstract expressionism declared apolitical, yet it came to stand for the liberal ideas, as American policy has always included. The Americans exported this art to Europe as a sign of the free and startling world the United States was. The artists were made as heroic, brave men from a democracy with total freedom of action.
References
Saab, A. J. (2009). For the millions: American art and culture between the wars University of Pennsylvania Press.
Temkin, A. (2010). Abstract Expressionism at the Museum of Modern Art: Selections from the Collection The Museum of Modern Art.
