New Objectivity New Theories of Painting in Germany, 1920s The Great War ended with the notorious Treaty of Versailles, a treaty, which inflicted humiliating reparations upon the German peoples, leaving them with feelings of despair and anger and a stunned disbelief. ...
School of Paris The Young Artists The significance of the School of Paris lies chiefly, not in its innovations, but in the lack of innovation. The decades between the wars were conservative on several fronts. First, there was the well-known “Return to Order” which,...
Marcel Duchamp, Part One Marcel Duchamp began his career as a painter and ended it as a maker of carefully crafted objects. Using a combination of intellectual, aesthetic, and psychological viewpoints, this podcast discusses Duchamp’s decision to...
The School of Paris Recall to Order After the Great War, the fabric of European society was in tatters. An entire generation of young men had been killed in a senseless slaughter on the Western Front. A generation of young women would never find mates and a...
SURREALISM AND ITS OBJECTS ART BECOMES FETISH Surrealism was initially practiced in written form as textual production, as a means of freeing the literary mind from “writerly” conventions. Just as Sigmund Freud took dictation, so to speak, writing down what his...
SURREALIST THEORY The Marvelous Mind of Surrealism In the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, André Breton wrote, “I believe in the future resolution of these two states — outwardly so contradictory — which are dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality,...