So Surreal by Katelyn Leonard

SO SU RRE A L Spring 2019

The Great Late Salvador Dalí

Surrealism Today Page 19

Page 14

What Is Surrealism? Page 10

Turkish Illustrator Aykut Aydoğdu Page 9

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Table of contents Photography and Surrealism

Turkish Illustrator Aykut Aydoğdu

What is Surrealism?

Surrealism Icons

The Great Late Salvador Dalí

Surrealism Today

René Magritte

Surrealism — One of America’s Favorite Art “isms”

impressum Designer Cover Art Press Typefaces

Katelyn Leonard Aykut AydoÄ&#x;du Blurb Neuton Bebas Neue

Articles and Photos Courtesy of https://www.boredpanda.com/surreal-digital-illustrations-aykut-aydogdu https://1stwebdesigner.com/modern-surrealism/ http://www.artnews.com/2005/02/01/the-great-late-salvador-dal/ images from google https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-what-is-surrealism https://www.parkwestgallery.com/what-is-surrealism-art/ https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/yves-tanguy https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-rene-magritte https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/phsr/hd_phsr.htm https://mymodernmet.com/salvador-dali-facts/2/

About the designer As an art student, I am able to study the different movements throughout the years. The surrealist movement has been one that has kept my attention. The eccentric style has been around since 1924 with the goal to liberate thought, language, and human experience from the oppressive boundaries of rationalism. This magazine will highlight artists from the past and present as well as their modes of creating. This magazine will be full of visuals and information about artists throughout history. I hope you enjoy viewing the art as much as I do.

Katelyn Leonard Editor

Photography and Surrealism S

urrealism was officially launched as a movement with the publication of poet André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. The Surrealists did not rely on reasoned analysis or sober calculation; on the contrary, they saw the forces of reason blocking the access routes to the imagination. Their efforts to tap the creative powers of the unconscious set Breton and his companions on a path that carried them through the territory of dreams, intoxication, chance, sexual ecstasy, and madness. The images obtained by such means, whether visual or literary, were prized precisely to the degree that they captured these moments of psychic intensity in provocative forms of unrestrained, convulsive beauty. Photography came to occupy a central role in Surrealist activity. In the works of Man Ray and Maurice Tabard, the use of such procedures as double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization dramatically evoked the union of dream and reality. Other photographers used techniques such as rotation or distortion to

render their images uncanny. Hans Bellmer obsessively photographed the mechanical dolls he fabricated himself, creating strangely sexualized images, while the painter René Magritte used the camera to create photographic equivalents of his paintings. In her close-up photograph of a baby armadillo suspended in formaldehyde, Dora Maar performs a typical Surrealist inversion, making an ugly, or even repulsive subject compelling and bizarrely appealing. But the Surrealist understanding of photography turned on more than the medium’s facility in fabricating uncanny images. Just as important was another discovery: even the most prosaic photograph, filtered through the prism of Surrealist sensibility, might easily be dislodged from its usual context and irreverently assigned a new role. Anthropological photographs, ordinary snapshots, movie stills, medical and police photographs— all of these appeared in Surrealist journals like La Révolution Surréaliste and Minotaure, radically divorced from their original purposes.

This impulse to uncover latent Surrealist affinities in popular imagery accounts, in part, for the enthusiasm with which Surrealists embraced Eugène Atget’s photographs of Paris. Published in La Révolution Surréaliste in 1926 at the suggestion of his neighbor, Man Ray, Atget’s images of vanished Paris were understood not as the work of a competent professional or a self-conscious artist but as the spontaneous visions of an urban primitive—the Henri Rousseau of the camera. In Atget’s photographs of the deserted streets of old Paris and of shop windows haunted by elegant mannequins, the Surrealists recognized their own vision of the city as a “dream capital,” an urban labyrinth of memory and desire.

Turkish Illustrator Creates Surreal Artworks That Will Haunt Your Broken Heart This Turkish, Istanbul-based illustrator Aykut AydoÄ&#x;du has developed a unique style creating surreal, enigmatic illustrations that reflect the most intense and incomprehensible feelings that haunt the hearts of those who suffer or have already suffered for love. Looking incredibly real, his illustrations are full of symbolism that brings out heavy and almost morbid look on how painful it can be to love someone. The most common objects in his artworks are female figures that are interacting with different elements of nature.

What Is Surrealism? How Art Illustrates the Unconscious Surrealism is more than an artistic style—it’s an artistic movement. Unlike other creative movements, which can be characterized by themes of imagery, color choices, or techniques, defining Surrealist art is slightly harder to do. Surrealist artists—like Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, or Michael Cheval, among many others—seek to explore the unconscious mind as a way of creating art, resulting in dreamlike, sometimes bizarre imagery across endless mediums. The core of Surrealism is a focus on illustrating the mind’s deepest thoughts automatically when they surface. This thought process for creating art known as “automatism.” Over the years, Surrealism has resulted in a fascinating collection of artwork ranging from mythical landscapes, to obscure sculpture arrangements, to intriguing depictions of people and animals. 10

What Is Surrealism and How Did It Begin? The poet Guilliame Apollinaire first coined the term “Surreal” in reference to the idea of an independent reality, existing “beneath” our conscious reality. But the Surrealist movement initially surfaced in 1924 when French poet André Breton published his “Manifesto of Surrealism,” influenced by the theories and writings on the unconscious mind by psychologist Sigmund Freud, the groundbreaking studies of Karl Jung, and the early 20th-century Dada movement. While Surrealism started as a literary movement in the prose and poetry of Breton and others, visual artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp embraced Surrealism and were recognized in Breton’s 1925 publication, “La Révolution Surréaliste.” Early Surrealists challenged the constraints of consciousness and rationality in order to liberate the unconscious mind—a “superior reality,” as Breton called it. A fundamental aspect of the Surrealist movement is a mode of expression called “automatism,” which involves the act of automatic or uncensored recording of the thoughts and images that emerge into an artist’s mind. With a focus on tapping into involuntary thought processes and interpreting dreams, Surrealist artwork is not

limited to a specific artistic style or technique. Throughout the 1920s, visual artists continued exploring Surrealist concepts in art, seeking complete creative freedom. The first-ever Surrealism exhibition, titled “La Peinture Surrealiste,” took place in 1925 at the Galerie Pierre in Paris, firmly establishing the visual component of the movement. Early Surrealists challenged the constraints of consciousness and rationality in order to liberate the unconscious mind—a “superior reality,” as Breton called it. A fundamental aspect of the Surrealist movement is a mode of expression called “automatism,” which involves the act of automatic or uncensored recording of the thoughts and images that emerge into an artist’s mind. With a focus on tapping into involuntary thought processes and interpreting dreams, Surrealist artwork is not limited to a specific artistic style or technique. Throughout the 1920s, visual artists continued exploring Surrealist concepts in art, seeking complete creative freedom. The first-ever Surrealism exhibition, titled “La Peinture Surrealiste,” took place in 1925 at the Galerie Pierre in Paris, firmly establishing the visual component of the movement.

Top: “Le Lezard aux Plumes d’Or II” (1971, M.800), Joan Miró Bottom: “Umbrella Man” (2016), Peter Max

The Great Late Salvador Dalí Article by George Stolz

he year 1939 cuts across the career of Salvador Dalí like a fault line. Dalí’s work up to that point is generally considered among the most original of the period, and some of his early Surrealist paintings are regularly afforded masterpiece status in the 20th-century canon. But then, in 1939, Dalí broke with his fellow Surrealists and shifted the primary focus of his activities from Paris to New York. Almost overnight his work became “late,” which, in Dalí’s case, is generally understood as synonymous with repetitive, kitschy, vulgar, and pompous—in a word, lesser. But the “late” Dalí lived and worked for another half century, painting and sculpting while at the same time making regular forays into film, writing, design, and fashion. In the process, he produced a vast and eclectic body of work that has rarely been given critical scrutiny comparable with that devoted to work from the early years. That situation now appears to be changing, with an increasing number of critics, historians, and artists examining Dalí’s late work from a contemporary perspective, distanced from the modernist context in which it has usually been judged, and distanced as well from the flamboyant figure of the artist himself. Independent of its intrinsic merits or lack thereof, the late work has in part been obscured from critical

appraisal by the larger-than-life figure of Dalí himself, who never seems to have shied away from offending the sensibilities of others while unabashedly seeking (and achieving) fame and fortune. This is the Dalí whom André Breton anagrammatically nicknamed Avida Dollars in reference to the artist’s overt eagerness for financial remuneration; the Dalí who paraded his strange brand of reactionary politics and provocative mores in the social arena, much as he paraded his unsettling neuroses and obsessions in his work; the clowning, eyeflashing, mustache-twirling public

“He was like that— everything he said had an exclamation point at the end of it,” Rosenquist says. “Everything about him was an exclamation point.” figure described by Robert Hughes (an admirer of the early work) as a “pretentious, whorish old fanatic.” The “old fanatic” died in Spain at age 85, in 1989, after a debilitating illness that had long isolated him from his beloved jet-set scene and his favored corner table at the St. Regis hotel’s bar in New York. “My sense is that Dalí is going to be completely reborn, and people are going to look at him in completely new ways,” says Robert Rosenblum, professor of modern European art at New York University’s Institute

of Fine Arts. “Younger eyes are already looking at him without

all that baggage and prejudice of the ’60s and ’70s. Dalí might have seemed an anathema to people coming from the world of Mondrian, but today what Dalí did is something younger artists aspire to.” A main focus of the current revisionist appreciation of Dalí is his relationship to the development of Pop art in the early 1960s. In this view, Dalí anticipated not only the photo-based and dot techniques found in much Pop art—evidenced, for example, in Dalí paintings such as The Sistine Madonna (1958) and Portrait of My Dead Brother (1963)—but also the pervasive blend of irony and adulation toward mass-media images that underlies the work of artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and even Sigmar Polke. “He was the first in the 20th century to ask the questions that are of the greatest topicality to us today,” Curiger explains. “You can see it in his way of introducing photographic optics, in how he does not care about expression of the brushstroke, or in his understanding of the importance of images in the collective memory and collective subconscious.

It almost brings him closer to Duchamp in the end.” Above all, however, Dalí’s role as a precursor of Pop is currently being traced back to the influence of his life and work on the life and work of Andy Warhol. The parallels, major and minor, are many: both worked and reworked iconic media images of such figures as Marilyn Monroe, Mae West, and Mao Zedong; both freely bridged the worlds of art, fashion, and advertising; both published their own periodicals (Dalí’s was titled the Dalí News); both created window displays for Bonwit Teller; both surrounded themselves with sycophantic retinues (whose membership occasionally overlapped); and both called attention to themselves in such a way as to blur the distinction between what an artist makes and what an artist does. “It’s the perfect Old Testament and New Testament story,” Rosenblum says. “Warhol picked up right where Dalí left off—no Dalí, no Warhol. He was as much an antimodernist as Duchamp was and as Warhol was— they were all freethinkers.” Warhol’s work today is considered relevant far beyond its Pop context. By extension, those who link Warhol to Dalí see Dalí—and the late Dalí in particular—as belonging squarely to the present, when artists regularly merchandise

not only the objects they create but also their own image, and when the art-world boundary between commercial images and noncommercial images has become porous at best. “Artists have always tended to like Dalí, even when he was out of fashion,” says William Jeffett,

curator of exhibitions at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. “But now there’s a younger generation of artists that is fascinated by Dalí, by his breaking down of hierarchies, by his mixing of commercial imagery with fine-art imagery. It’s at the core of where we are now.” “Dalí is obviously the model for later artistic production, especially Warhol,” says artist Mike Kelley. “It’s impossible to look at contemporary art now and not think of Dalí. What I find especially interesting is how endlessly creative he was. It’s hidden because of all the kitsch he produced. But with so much of what he did—who could have done something like that, and at that time? It looks like it was made yesterday. And from the perspective of the contemporary art world, with its enthusiastic and even indiscriminate absorption of 14

imagery from a vast range of sources, even the widely held view of Dalí’s post-1939 work as kitsch does not slip past unexamined. “It wasn’t so much that Dalí was cynical—he had intuition,” says Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art. “He intuited that with the advent of television and mass media, with the advent of an era in which the product of art is its very consumption, the role of the artist had changed. Like Warhol and Koons, he played with advertising, he played with banality, he played with mass media. He had the clairvoyance to see that artists must create work that will be consumed, not only contemplated apart from society in museums and galleries.” “There’s been a very real shift in the last few years,” Jeffett says. “Younger people today are intrigued by the late Dalí—by his theories of DNA, or by his nuclear mysticism, or even by his mixing of art and religion—for the same reasons why high modernists wouldn’t even look at it. They’re not even talking about Surrealism. They’re engaging with it on its own terms.” “His lobster telephone is one of my favorite works,” Koons says. “Everything about it seems like a dislocated

image. But, in fact, a lobster is a crustacean, and in times past, we would use shells to communicate— so it’s not really so dislocated, after all. I have a postcard of the lobster telephone in my bedroom, and I never get tired of it.” Rosenquist cites Dalí’s skilled and detailed brushwork as being of particular importance to him, as well as Dalí’s ability to deal with hefty intellectual subject matter in a way that is accessible to a broad public. His own first encounter with the artist occurred in 1959 when Dalí noticed the window displays Rosenquist was preparing for Fifth Avenue department stores. Dalí sought out the anonymous window dresser and upon finding him, as Rosenquist still vividly recalls some 45 years later, arched his eyebrows, twirled his mustache, and invited the struggling young artist to drinks at the St. Regis bar. Arriving at Dalí’s regular corner table, Rosenquist, tired after a long day’s work and a bit intimidated by Dalí’s retinue, proceeded to stick his elbow in a plate of cocktail nuts, scattering peanuts in all directions.

“He was like that—everything he said had an exclamation point at the end of it,” Rosenquist says. “Everything about him was an exclamation point.” Regardless of the current flurry of interest in Dalí’s late work, it still lacks detractors, and the traditional view that Dalí’s early talent was squandered is still the prevailing one among critics and historians. But, as Jeffett points out, an added benefit of the contemporary art world’s distance from the reallife figure of Dalí is that currentday scholars are in a position to approach the artist’s more glaring weaknesses in an analytical fashion. “All of the rethinking about Dalí is especially interesting because it’s being done from a scholarly point of view, not a polemical one,” Jeffett says. “But it’s important that scholars don’t whitewash Dalí. It’s important to look at everything, but to look at everything as scholars. That is, in fact, happening.” “What we need to do with the late work is look at the art,” says Stuckey. “The late work is so different from what most other artists were doing at the time. Was Rosenquist doing it? Was Rauschenberg doing it? Nobody else in the world could have done what Dalí was doing when he was doing it.” “I’ve developed a newfound respect for him,” says Kelley. “That willful perversity of Dalí’s in the end looks more fresh than the utopianism of so much modernism.”

15 Surreal Facts About Salvador Dalí 1 He beleieved he was a reincarnation of his dead brother

2 He was expelled from art school (twice)

3 He didn’t do drugs 4 Surrealists weren’t pleased with him

5 He had an unconventional marriage

6 He tricked Yoko Ono 7 He designed the Chupa Chups logo 8 He loved throwing dinner parties 9 He paid his restaurant bill in doodles

10 He moonlighted as a fashion designer

11 He produced covers for vogue 12 He designed jewelry - including a pulsating heart

13 He created a hologram of Alice Cooper

14 He illustrated a copy of Alice in Wonderland

15 He built his own museum 15

The Remnant by Henrik

Faceless Composition by Lara Jade

Surrealism Today: Her Influences and Legacy T

he Surrealism art movement had a great impact in art, literature, culture and even extending to politics. Surrealism is a creative act of effort towards liberating the imagination. It is as dynamic as it is subtle; Surrealism is still alive and growing until today. Many artists around the world are influenced by Surrealism styles, ideas & techniques. Surrealism taught the world to see art not merely visually and literally; but to appreciate it in a subconscious level as well. Today, surrealism is a familiar form of art that continues to grow globally. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s easy for artists to show their creativity through Surrealism, because the style provides them more freedom to convey their feelings and thoughts through the canvas. Surreal art can be dreamy or gritty; or it can be optimistic or depressing.

Surrealist web design is just like opening a door and seeing a strange, new planet. You never know what to expect, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bizarre but familiar, just like our dreams. New techniques have now been adopted with the coming of the digital age. Photo manipulation is the favorite technique of this age when creating Surrealist art. Most Surrealist web design make use of realistic, three-dimensional images that are recomposed and rearranged instead of drawn illustrations. This is to create more realistic, magical and strange world. With Surrealist web design, Flash is also a popular tool to use, because it can incorporate dreamy effects, animation and music, making it all the more surreal and interesting.

What You Need to Know about

René Magritte Magritte began his artistic education early. He started drawing lessons in 1910, made his first paintings as an adolescent, and enrolled at the Académie Royale des BeauxArts in Brussels in 1916. He began his career painting abstractions. Six years later, in 1922, three major events shaped Magritte’s life and style: He married Georgette Berger, exhibited six paintings at the Antwerp Congress of Modern Art show, and viewed Giorgio de Chirico’s work for the first time. The Italian painter’s haunting, shadowy, symbolladen scenes convinced Magritte to render his own psychological landscapes. Though he began this work in Brussels, Magritte and Georgette moved to Paris in 1927 so he could integrate himself into Surrealist circles. His new milieu offered both inspiration and upset. Though he first thrilled at the ideas of writer and movement leader André Breton, they eventually became too dogmatic for him. Despite the Surrealists’ aversion to religion, Georgette once wore a necklace with a gold cross to a party, causing a disagreement between her husband and Breton. Magritte received plenty of individual acclaim through his life, beginning around the 1930s. The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him a retrospective in 1965, less than two years before he died of pancreatic cancer. “Outwardly his life has been uneventful, but the interior world of imagination revealed in his art has been varied and extraordinarily inventive and has won him a leading place among the fantasists of our time,” wrote curator James Thrall Soby. Like many Surrealists, Magritte was deeply engaged with literature. He created drawings for texts by poet Paul Éluard, fiction writer Georges Bataille, and the Marquis de Sade, the famed S&M chronicler. Magritte also worked in advertising, designing ads for clients in industries from cars to fashion. As in his commercial design, Magritte employed a neat, flat finish in his art. Just decades afterwards, Andy Warhol would follow a similar trajectory, more clearly infusing his prints, paintings, and sculptures with evidence of his days as a commercial draftsman. Magritte also used his professional skills for political ends, making graphics and posters for the Belgian Communist Party.

Son of Man, 1964 19

Salvador Dali, “Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach,” 1938

Joan Miró, “A Drop of Dew Falling from the Wing of a Bird Awakens Rosalie Asleep in the Shade of a Cobweb,’ 1939

Surrealism — One of America’s Favorite Art “isms” Of all the many “isms” of 20thcentury art, Surrealism, in America, is surely the biggest hit. Analytic Cubism might confuse and Abstract Expressionism annoy but Surrealism, enigmatic but not opaque, with its easy-toread photographic illusionism, dream-like images, visual puns and puzzles, playful jests, flamboyant theatricality, strange juxtapositions of the ordinary and the bizarre, and Freudian edginess appeals to an American idea of what advanced art and artists should be. Surrealism, a movement founded by artist and writers with revolutionary intent and distinct leftist overtones, became immensely popular on this side of the Atlantic almost as soon as it arrived. It has remained so ever since. 20

Its success was, in fact, stunning. New York department stores hired Surrealists to arrange shop windows. Fashion houses enlisted them to design clothes and photograph models. Hollywood directors eagerly collaborated with them. Pop icons wrote songs about them. Their influence on graphic design and advertising seems limitless. And the catchphrase “It’s so surreal” has entered the language as a code for bemused angst. The Wadsworth Athenaeum’s fascinating surrealism exhibition was jointly organized by two American museums, the Wadsworth and the Baltimore Museum of Art, with important collections of Surrealist art.

It is focused (with some digressions) on Surrealism and the war years, when many European modern artists were in exile in the U.S, But woven into the tapestry are many other narratives: the Surrealists’ early and vehement resistance to European fascism, the rich history of Surrealism in Hartford and Connecticut, harrowing tales of artists driven out of country to country by war and repression, the reception of advanced modern art by American collectors and museums, the many overlapping relationships and influences between artists, gallery owners, collectors, museum curators, and each other. Finally, a suggestion of a coda: the early, surrealist careers of American artists who went on to found Abstract Expressionism.

The Icons of Surrealism

Building on the anti-rational tradition of Dada, Surrealism counted among its members such major Dada figures as Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp. By 1924, this group was augmented by other artists and literary figures, including the writers Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, Georges Bataille, and Antonin Artaud; the painters Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy; the sculptors Alberto Giacometti and Meret Oppenheim; and the filmmakers René Clair, Jean Cocteau, and Luis Bunuel.