Remedios Varo (historial surrealism)

the flutist

Remedios Varo's fanciful allegories (rivers that flow out of wineglasses, troubadours who play music on strands of women's hair, men's coats that become boats) are frequently inured by themes of isolation and confinement. This is not surprising, given that the Spanish anarchists fled Europe before the start of World War II.

hairy locomotion

What do we get?

1- emblematic androgynous figures with heart-shaped faces, large almond eyes, and aquiline noses,

2- kind of self-portraiture,

3- sense of isolation,

Magritte, the graphic designer of surrealism

Magritte is the graphic designer of surrealism. Here a link to his paintings.

1. use of ordinary objects in unfamiliar spaces,

2. representational photo-like poetic imagery,

3. familiar objects—the sky, people, trees, mountains, furniture, the stars, solid structures, graffiti—become united in a single weird combination,

4. psychoanalytic,

the graphic LOWBROW surrealism of Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington' art often touches on alchemy and magic. In her memoir of insanity, Down and Below, she writes of her attraction for chemistry and alchemy.

Some ideas about Carrigton's art:

1- Bosch-like fantasy (she would visit the Prado Museum in the 1930s),
2- humor!
3- spatial understanding of the quattrocento,
4- make your own personal mythology (in Carrington's case: Catholicism, Jewish mysticism and Celtic elements),
5- be weird,

Surrealist graphic design techniques

1- Fumage (smoking) was a technique of automatism invented by Wolfgang Paalen (1907-1959) in the late 1930s. Here the chance imagery was provoked. by moving a candle under a sheet of paper; and random areas of soot would develop from which the mind could form images. All these techniques depend for their application upon the hallucinatory mind of the artist.

2- Frottage (rubbing), developed by Ernst and described by him in Beyond Painting, (1948).

3- Grattage (scraping), also a created by Ernst, which transferred frottage to to oil painting. In decalcomania (transferring) the image was obtained by laying arbitrary patches of color on a piece of paper. A clean piece was then rubbed gently on top. When separated, strange grottos, exotic vegetation and underwater scenes suggested themselves to the imagination. A picture was made by chance. 

Nota bene: See that a lot of these contributions disappear in the digital media. Why? The notoriety of the effect is realized in 2D of the analog texture. Obtaining this digitally would not be a tangible realization, but a casual formal addition.  

Manifeste du Surréalism (a graphic design take)

in france, by the mid 1920's dada had lost its momentum. simultaneously, many of the french dadaists joined the ranks of the surrealists led by André Breton who in 1924, published the Surrealist Manifesto.

what are the main points here for us? design the unconscious!

1- dreams,
2- represent your traumas as sublimation,
3- life as poesis,
4- reality is never what it seems,
5- tanatos (death) is always looking from the corners!

Paul Klee (the mark of music and spirituality)

"Transcendentalism was the common interest of the painters who formed the Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1910. It was also a deep Bauhaus thought and practice. 

Klee loved the "primitive," and especially the art of children. He looked for their polymorphous freedom to create signs, and respected their innocence and directness.

Klee was inspired by music and thought that music counterpoint (his favorite form) could be translated directly into shades of color and value, repetitions and changes of motif. Klee's compositions of stacked forms fan out like decks of cards or color swatches. The idea is to freeze time in a static composition, to give visual motifs the "unfolding" quality of aural ones.

fortunato depero's dinamo

Fortunato Depero was tireless in his propagation of Futurist principles. He promoted the art of the Futurist book, founded and directed the machine-art magazine Dinamo, produced Futurist radio programs, designed costumes and furniture, opened the Casa d'Arte Futurista in Italy and New York, and invented an "onomalanguage," a free-word, free-sounding expressive verbal rigmarole. 

Representing the so- called second stage of Futurism (from 1919 to about 1930), Depero was the individual most responsible for putting the often inaccessible Futurist theory into practice, particularly in the service of business.

Here is Depero's contribution to Campari (all in black and white):

 

neoplasticism: from typeface, to furniture, to architecture, to fine art

van doesburg's

De Stijl, also known as Neoplasticism, was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 in Leiden. De Stijl consisted of artists and architects. In a more narrow sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands.Proponents of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour. They simplified visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, using only black, white and primary colors. (WP)

typeface:

or, 

piet zwart's

only then you can infer this form:

mondrian's

and this,

rietveld's chair

see that all the objects above belong to the same function. 

1- color scheme (red, black, yellow, blue), 
2- abstract geometric essence (i.e., the parallelogram, preferably the rectangle), 
3- abstraction i.e., the relation between negative, positive,

then this follows,

jacobus oud's cafe de unie, rotterdam, 1925

rietveld's METZ

van doesburg's cinébal, strasbourg 

white stripes album cover

what is unique about neoplasticism? 

1. elegance, 

2. succinctness, 

3. geometric forms that breathe in minimal movement

4. no circle nor curve! 

Pure metaphysics.

dziga vertov & constructivist cinema

Malevich: Russian Cubo Futurism

Malevich, Peasant Woman, early 1910s

Malevich, Morning after the Storm, circa 1910s

the woodcutter, 1912

self-portrait, 1909

What do we see here?

A unique synthesis between Cubism, Futurism and Russian vernacular (stained glass, orthodox iconography)

Russian Futurism

Believe it or not, Russian Futurism is more "avant" garde than its Italian counterpart. Why?

Check this flicker selection of Russian avant-garde book covers.