ДО ВІДКРИТТЯ ЗАЛИШИЛОСЬ:

48 хвилин 22 секунд

Не пропустіть історичної події!

  Кот, который стал завсегдатаем музея известного поэта Иссы Кобаяси (Issa Kobayashi, 1763-1827),      работавшего в жанре хайку, недавно был назначен специальным директором музея. Кот по кличке     Сора (Sora) стал регулярно посещать Мемориальный музей Иссы в Синано (Shinano), префектура  Нагано, самостоятельно проделывая весь путь от расположенного неподалёку дома своей хозяйки. Музей утверждает, что двухлетний Сора начал появляться здесь в конце августа прошлого года. Сначала он просто бродил вокруг стоянки, но потом начал подремывать в выставочных залах и офисе, пробравшись через автоматические двери.

Сора, которого также называют Кантё-нэко (Kancho-neko), т.е. Кот-директор, в настоящее время ежедневно приходит в офис примерно в 8 утра, после чего отправляется в путешествие по служебным помещениями или музею на радость посетителям. Примерно в 5:30 дня кот отправляется домой. Если погода плохая, то Тоё Кобаяси (Toyoo Kobayashi), настоящий директор музея, подвозит Сору до    дома. С апреля этого года Сора начал приходить в музей вместе со своей маленькой сестричкой  Уми (Umi). (from http://news.leit.ru/archives/3881)

С дремучих гор бежит Прутец,

Там рыщет по лесу песец,

Пасется беленький телец,

И резво скачет жеребец.

В терновнике поет скворец,

А на дуде дудит дудец.

Густые травы косит жнец,

В долине песнь завел певец.

*** 

Сжевав на завтрак огурец,

Понюхав старый холодец,

Покинув каменный дворец,

В челнок садится мой отец.

Плывет по волнам наш храбрец,

Боец, борец и удалец.

Навстречу плыл другой самец,

Беглец из города Донец,

Где каждый третий был подлец.

Сосал небрежно леденец.

Он был несказанный гордец.

Эй, оглянись же ты, слепец!

На берегу стоит стрелец.

«Хо-хо, ты больше не жилец»,-

Прицелившись, сказал стрелец.

«Ха-ха, ты тоже не жилец», -

Зловеще прошипел стрелец,

Отправив  в грудь ему свинец.

 
***

На дне Прутца лежит мертвец.

И по Прутцу плывет мертвец.

Такую весть принес гонец.

Куда же ты смотрел, Творец?

 
***

Таков печальный их конец.

А тот, кто слушал – молодец.


Авторы : Я, Алена и miss_meyerhold 

1)      Мы изначально боимся чего-то, и именно эта картинка на экране нам об этом напоминает и пробуждает затаенные страхи.

       2)    Мы очень смелые и  ничего не боялись, но, увидев эту жуткую рожу в телевизоре, просто покрылись холодным потом и теперь не знаем куда спрятаться.

Короче, что появилось раньше – курица или яйцо?

 И на закуску пару забавных фобий:
 

Акрибофобия — навязчивое сомнение в правильности понимания смысла прочитанного

(этим мало кто в Интернете страдает)

Апейрофобия - навязчивый страх перед бесконечностью.

(которая никому из нас не грозит)

Апифобия — ужас перед пчёлами, осами, шмелями

(я знаю такого человека)

Барофобия — боязнь подъёма тяжестей, земного притяжения, гравитации

(последствие уроков физики)

Гексакосиойгексеконтагексафобия — боязнь числа 666

на пару с

Гипомонстрэскуипедалофобия — боязнь длинных слов

Гленофобия — боязнь кукол (боязнь взгляда куклы)

(да-да)

Зоифобия — боязнь жизни

Пантофобия (панфобия, панофобия) — боязнь всего, что может произойти

(масштабные фобии)

Иерофобия — Боязнь встречи с предметами религиозного культа

(шел-шел и вдруг навстречу тебе – кадилом по голове!)

Контрафобия — навязчивое провоцирование ситуации, вызывающей страх, например страх высоты сочетается со стремлением стать лётчиком, стюардессой и пр.

(это когда боишься пьесы, но все равно ее пишешь)

Нозофобия — навязчивый страх заболеть неизлечимым заболеванием

(мой диагноз)

Параскаведекатриафобия — боязнь пятницы, 13-го дня месяца

(скоро узнаем…)

Русофобия — боязнь, неприятие или же отрицание всего, что связано с «русским».

(у Русских даже фобия своя есть!)

Фобофобия — страх иметь фобии

(есть над чем задуматься)

Хрематофобия — боязнь прикасаться к деньгам 

(а вот этим не страдаю)

Эргофобия— боязнь работать

(мы-мы не рабы!)

  <--- Это Доктор Зигги над нами смеется.

   

Страх – вещь сугубо личная.

Кто-то боится тараканов, а кто-то – открытых окон.

Наши страхи, безусловно, могут многое про нас рассказать. За каждыми фобиями (будь-то боязнь змей, высоты или жужжания пылесоса) стоят другие, более глубокие страхи. Так сказать, архетипы страхов (как мог бы выразиться дедушка Зигги). Абсолютного списка привести не могу, но на мой взгляд прежде всего стоит отметить : страх смерти, страх боли, страх быть брошенным и нелюбимым, страх оказаться не на высоте, страх перед неизвестным (пересекается со страхом смерти). 

Заниматься авто-психо-анализом вещь неблагодарная, но давно хотелось составить некую классификацию страхов :

• Ситуационные страхи

- боюсь, что лифт в котором я еду вдруг оборвется или (еще хуже) резко понесется вверх, выше, пробьет крышу и тогда… не знаю, что тогда, но будет плохо.

- боюсь упасть в яму метро или под рельсы трамвая. Ужасно боюсь, что кто-то туда столкнет.

- в детстве сильно темноты боялась, сейчас тоже бывает иногда. Особенно если до лампы долго тянуться.

- боюсь в ванной, когда задернута занавеска душевой : а вдруг там уже кто-то лежит? Или сидит?

• Страхи фауны и флоры

- дико боюсь ночных бабочек. Пожалуй, самый иррациональный страх в моем списке. Какого черта бояться ночных бабочек? Они же даже укусить никого не могут. Помню, правда, в детстве кто-то рассказывал, что от их пыльцы можно ослепнуть. Других тварей вроде не боюсь, хотя с подозрением отношусь к насекомым. 

• Кино-страхи

- детские впечатления. Пока до меня дошло, что эти фильмы задумывались как комедии…. Надо сказать, что Зубастики и Чёки стоили мне долгих бессонных ночей.

   

- фильмы Стивена Кинга. Ну это отдельный полноценный пласт поп-культуры. Ему я обязана нелюбовью к клоунам, отелям и ваннам.

   

- японские фильмы ужасов : темноволосые корчащиеся девочки, которые убивают всех и вся и от которых нет спасения. Тут конечно визуальный ряд сыграл основное значение – ужасно это все выглядит на экране. Просто парализует. И полное ощущение безысходности вдобавок. И постоянное напряжение. Мрак. 

   

What does it say about me?... Probably, that I watch too many horror films. 
Еще продолжим при случае...

цитаты и выражения мелькающие то там, то сям

Перлы нарытые в интернете :

1. Феминистическое

So, Sigmund, wake up. Of course I don't have a cock. I'm a woman. I don't need a cock. I have a brain

(yeeah, girl power!)

2. Реалистичное

День не задался с самого утра: зазвонил будильник...

(особенно в понедельник он не задается)

3. Отмороженное

Пойду посплю перед сном.

(с меня станется ляпнуть такое)

4. Историческое

Кант обезглавил Бога, а Робеспьер короля

(а лучше бы наоборот.. то есть лучше бы Бог обезглавил Канта. В младенчестве.)

5. Оптимистичное

Ars longa – dolce vita!

(dixi)

6. Циничное

Миром управляет не тайная ложа, а явная лажа

(Пелевин… что тут еще сказать?)

7. Умное

Закон опутывает тебя тысячами нитей. Разорвешь 2 из них - ты преступник. Разорвешь все - ты бог

(такое все ницшеанское что ай-ай-ай)

8. Мерзкое

What have you been reading? The gospel according to St.Bastard?

(взято на вооружение)

9. Актуальное

Если человек отвечает вопросом на вопрос, то он либо еврей, либо студент на экзамене...

(предпочитаю первую опцию)

10. Философское

If you want to make God laugh, tell Him about your plans.

(н-да.. отличный у вас план..)

  

SHREK VS ICE AGE
Перед тем как смотреть "2" неплохо бы глянуть с чего весь этот сыр-бор
 

Будучи главным ретроградом и консерватором, многие нашумевшие фильмы я смотрю через пару лет после их появления на свет. Не то чтобы я очень к этому стремлюсь, но часто именно так и получается. Так что до Шрека и доIce Age добралась только сегодня.
Well, in 2010 I’ll probably watch “BrokebackMountain” or “Mr and Ms Jones”.Также следует отметить, что я с особым подозрением отношусь к новым супер-пупер компьютерным техникам в мультипликации. Я обходила стороной все эти “Toy Story” и прочие Мадагаскары. Мой последний любимый мультик это был Король Лев, так что я боец еще старой диснеевской закалки. Но как говорится врага надо знать в лицо : посему и были скачены Шрек вместе с Ледниковым Периодом.  

Шрек : удивительно бездарное и безвкусное зрелище с тугими попытками на юмор. Уже начали порядком поднадоедать попытки любой ценой спародировать Матрицу к месту и ни к месту. Тяжеловесный туалетный юмор меня оставил равнодушной. Герои не трогают совершенно, диалоги затянуты, история скучна и предсказуема. Причина широкомасштабной истерики по поводу этого фильма осталась не понята. Ну, может кто нибудь объяснит мне в чем там главный прикол? Потому что я его в упор не вижу. Или это говорящий осел всех так очаровал? The only one who get my approbation were the three blind mice – cute and … well, very cute.


Ice Age : совсем другое дело! Этот мультик меня в какой то мере даже примирил с компьютерной 3-дшной графикой.  Все же мне наверное больше нравятся истории про животных, а не про скучных людишек (доктор Зигги говорит : вспомни как твоя барби всегда валялась в стороне, а ты играла с пластмассовыми зверушками!). Порадовало в фильме многое. Ну для начала моя личная предвзятая субъективная любовь ко всему доисторическому. Далее, легкий ненавязчивый юмор  с хорошо дозированными моралью и сантиментами. Ну и разумеется герои… вернее один, мой любимый – Диего. Признаюсь честно, все 12 минут пока он считался мертвым, я рыдала не переставая и выкрикивала оскорбления в адрес кровожадных сценаристов. Ах, Диего… он не мог мне не понравится. Во-первых он тигр (а тигры почитаются у меня как любимые животные), во-вторых он сильный и кровожадный. В-третьих.. он раскаявшийся злодей, а ничто так не трогает мое сердце как чистосердечное раскаяние (доктор Зигги говорит : это корнями уходит в твое детство, когда твое неокрепшее воображение поразил Айртон). А еще у него такие симпатичные клыки. И глаза зеленые

   

In spite of the challenges to representational art, many twentieth-century artists remained committed to capturing the world around them. ‘Realism’ was itself a contested term, with different styles emerging, but also different interpretations of its significance. Because it was considered to be immediately understandable, realism came to be associated with social equality - an art made for ordinary people. When the poet Jean Cocteau coined the term ‘A Call to Order’ around 1920, he saw a return to realism among modernists as contributing to the reconstruction of society after the First World War. In the more extreme climate of the 1930s, realistic styles were annexed to support opposing political ideologies. In Nazi Germany, an implausibly heroic style was officially sanctioned as a weapon against modernism, while Social Realism in the Soviet Union sought to celebrate the ordinary worker. In each case, realism became the point where art and propaganda met. Artists worked with and against these expectations, in some cases simply attempting to set down their own concrete experience within a world of shifting values.

Meredith Frampton  1894-1984 Painter and etcher; Son of the sculptor Sir George Frampton and artist Christabel Cockerell. Studied at John's Wood Art School and Royal Academy Schools and exhibited there (1920-45) a number of meticulously painted realist works.

 

Portrait of a Young Woman  1935

This work relates to the tradition of full-length portraits of women that is associated in particular with the work of earlier artists, such as Van Dyck and Gainsborough. However, it is executed with a clarity and precision that give it an unmistakeably modern feeling. Frampton said that he made this painting as 'a relaxation from commissions, and to celebrate an assembly of objects... beautiful in their own right'. 

 

Marguerite Kelsey  1928

A professional artist''s model in the 1920s and 1930s, Marguerite Kelsey (1908?-1995) was renowned for her gracefulness and ability to hold poses for a long time. The simple, short-sleeved pale tunic dress worn with low-heeled shoes and her straight hair were all essential elements of the fashionable ''garçonne style'' created by the couturiers Coco Chanel and Jean Patou from the mid-1920s. 

      

Jean Hélion  1904-1987 In the 1930s Hélion was a prominent abstract artist in the group Abstraction-Création. But shortly before the Second World War he became disillusioned with non-figurative art. By the 1950s he was painting from life. 'Nude with Loaves' demonstrates his enduring interest in the female physique and his fascination for common but mysterious objects. In this picture apparently realistic objects, such as the loaves of bread, begin to take on an emblematic quality. In this way the artist powerfully evokes the grim reality of life in post-war Paris. Hélion has been described as a painter of the 'human condition'. His intense concentration on a solitary figure finds parallels in the work of Giacometti and Bacon.

                    
Seated Woman with Small Dog 1939            Nude with Loaves  1952 


Ну а дальше идут прелести типа :

     или       

<-- это Матисс над нами смеется


А еще фунтов за 6 можно прогуляться в огромном лабиринте из пустых белых коробок (Йоко была бы в восторге). Я же от этого сомнительного удовольствия скромно воздержалась.


http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/

Твин Пикс можно вообще при желании полностью растащить на цитаты. Монологи Купера по сути своей великолепны от начала и до конца. Но несколько фразочек и выражений мне особенно приглянулись, в основном изза своей культового значения и изза своей абсурдной линчевской прелести.

PETE : Gone fishing.

(в icq мой уход в away обозначается теперь только так)

РЕТЕ : She's dead. Wrapped in plastic

(no comments)

SHELLY : It's happy hour in France. Come on cowboy light your fire.

(лучший повод чтобы выпить)

КУПЕР : Damn good food, Diane

(жаль что из фильма вырезали эпизод с ней… о, Диана!)

КУПЕР : Sheriff Harry S. Truman. Shouldn't be to hard to remember that

(no shit, Sherlock?!)

КУПЕР : That's what I need, clean place, reasonably priced.

(главное тут – голос и интонация)

КУПЕР : Douglas firs…

(опять таки… непередаваемые нотки в голосе)

Meet Me At The Roadhouse

(место встречи изменить нельзя)

COOPER : Diane, I'm holding in my hand a small box of chocolate bunnies.

(сюрреализм и абсурд в одном флаконе)

 
   


SHERIFF TRUMAN : Holy smoke.

(вся гамма удивления в двух словах)

CONCIERGE : The Norwegians are leaving. The Norwegians are leaving…

(истерический смех… после ТП не могу нормально общаться с норвежцами)

COOPER : There's over ten thousand dollars here. That's a lot of girl scout cookies.

(пример куперского юмора)

COOPER : Diane, it struck me again earlier this morning. There are two things that continue to trouble me, and I'm speaking now not only as an agent of the Bureau, but also as a human being. What really went on between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys? And who really pulled the trigger on JFK?

(мы все вместе с агентом Малдером теряемся в догадках)

КУПЕР : You know, this is, excuse me, a damn fine cup of coffee

(классика)

КУПЕР : Now I'd like two eggs, over hard. I know don't tell me, it's hard on the arteries, but old habits die hard, just about as hard as I want those eggs ... bacon, super-crispy, almost burned, cremated ... ... that's great and I'll have the grapefruit juice, just as long as those grapefruits ... ... are freshly squeezed.

(ммм….)

ОДРИ : He's got emotional problems, it runs in the family

(самый простой способ обьяснить некоторые свои.. странности)

COOPER : Black as midnight on a moonless night.

(вы никогда не будете пить кофе как раньше после ТП)

PETE : Fellas don't drink that coffee. You'd never guess, there was a fish ... in the percolator.

(ага… см.выше)

LAURA : (from tape) Hey, what's up, doc? Doc, James is sweet ... but he's so dumb. I just know I'm going to get lost in those woods again tonight. I just know it.

(this girl just fascinates me… she is so… beautiful)

BENJAMIN : Jerr, I didn't come here to lose my shirt, I just came to take it off.

(хо-хо, парниша!)

JERRY : Sweetheart, I'd like to order two drinks, one double scotch on the rocks and my brother would like a double scotch on the rocks. (winks)

(хи-хи-хи-хи ничто не веселит меня больше такой вот глупости)

ALBERT : (scans it scornfully) Welcome to amateur hour.

(в связи с мерзким характером употребляю часто)

  

BOB : Catch you with my death bag. You make think I've gone insane ... but I promise, I will kill again.

(ууууу…)

LITTLE MAN : She's filled with secrets. Where we're from, the birds sing a pretty song ... and there's always music in the air.

(брр.. он меня пугает не меньше Боба)

BEAUTIFUL WOMAN : I feel like I know her, (distressed) but sometimes my arms bend back. I know who killed Laura Palmer

(трам-пам-пам….! - Break the code solve the crime!)

АЛЬБЕРТ : Stupidity however,  is not a necessarily inherent trait.

(мой любимый персонаж )

ALBERT : (smiles and points at TRUMAN; smartass) Look its trying to think.

(Albert is the best!)
 

DR. JACOBY : Agent Cooper, the problems of our entire society are of a sexual nature.

(коротко и ясно… Фрейду до него далеко)

DONNA : Maybe you should run away and join the circus.

(применимо ко многим..)

Laura was wild

(something in this phrase deeply affects me)

HANK : Catch you later.

(не забываем при этом облизать домино)

COOPER : ... in the heat of the investigative pursuit the shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line.

(куперовская геометрия)

DR. JACOBY : Laura wanted to corrupt people because that how she felt about herself.

(I can dig that)

LOG LADY : My log does not judge. (…) Shut your eyes and you'll burst into flames. (…) Fire is the devil hiding like a coward in the smoke.

(all the poetry of TP..)

What do you get when you cross a Norwegian with a Swede? A socialist who wants to be king

(I just love everything about Norwegians he-he)

We are all Icelanders.

(их бин я-я фольксваген наркоман)

КУПЕР : What I want and what I need are two different things Audrey.

(моя любимая фраза… произносить надо медленно и вдумчиво)

ЛОРА : Why is it so easy to make men like me? And I don’t even have to try very hard. Maybe ... if it was harder ... I feel like I’m going to dream tonight. Big bad ones, ...

(I’m not different from others, I do love Laura. And maybe want to be like her…a little)

COOPER : Harry, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Everyday, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it, just let it happen.

(полностью поддерживаю)

Laura... Laura... Don’t go there... Hurting me... Hurting me...

(этот голосок забыть невозможно)

БЕНДЖАМИН : Let’s have a look ... at the new girl.

(уфффф….незавидная ситуация для Одри. Да и для бедного зрителя у которого нету 2 сезона тоже!)

Le surrealisme... et apres ?

From www.tate.org.uk

The influence of Surrealism stretched far beyond the confines of the movement, as individual artists made their own explorations of the irrational and the unconscious. Artists from Pablo Picasso to Jackson Pollock drew strength from the Surrealist movement, harnessing its energies to produce work of an extraordinary intensity. One reason for this wider diffusion of Surrealist themes was a feeling that the unfolding horrors of twentieth-century history had shown the overwhelming power of the irrational. Hybrid figures, part-human and part-animal, began to appear in works of art made on both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps reflecting the anxieties of an age marked by dehumanising conflicts. New insights into the human propensity for brutality were provided by cultural and psychoanalytic theories, such as Sigmund Freud’s ideas of sex and death as primal drives, and the archetypes identified by Carl Jung. The richer anthropological understanding of non-western cultures also helped to shape the way in which western culture was analysed and criticised.

There was a widespread sense of doubt about how to continue to make art - and, indeed, how to live - in this time of crisis. It seemed to be present in Picasso’s constant reinvention of the figure, which suggested a loss of fixed identity. It was prominent in novels such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938). In different ways it was also evident in Pollock’s violent figurative works and in Germaine Richier’s insect-like creatures, whose encrusted surfaces suggest the eruption from within the individual of suppressed anxieties and liberating powers.

Paul Klee
1879-1940

He used many different art styles in his work, including surrealism and cubism. He and his friend Wassily Kandinsky were also famous for teaching at the Bauhaus school of art after World War One. Klee worked with many different types of media – oil paint, watercolor, ink, and more. He often combined them into one work. He has been variously associated with expressionism, cubism and surrealism but his pictures are difficult to classify. They often have a fragile child-like quality to them, and are usually on a small scale. They frequently allude to poetry, music and dreams and sometimes include words or musical notation. The later works are distinguished by spidery hieroglyph-like symbols. Klee taught at the Bauhaus, before being denounced by the Nazi Party for producing "degenerate art".

Walpurgis Night  1935

In 1933 Klee was stripped of his teaching post at the Bauhaus and fled to Switzerland where he died in 1940. More than a hundred of his works were confiscated from German museums and collections. Walpurgis Night is the night that marks the transition from winter to spring, falling on the eve of the first of May. In folk tradition, witches would gather on the Brocken, the highest of the Harz Mountains, to perform rituals to ward off evil. According to his son Felix, such legends exerted a particularly strong influence on Klee’s work.

  

Walpurgis Night 1935                      The Castle Mountain of S.  1930              Comedy  1921

 Joan Miró
1893-1983

His work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a fascination with the subconsious mind, an interest in recreating the child-like, and Catalan and Spanish pride. He developed his unique style: organic forms and flattened picture planes drawn with a sharp line. Interested in automatism and the use of sexual symbols (for example, ovoids with wavy lines emanating from them), Miró’s style was influenced in varying degrees by Surrealism and Dada, yet he rejected membership to any artistic movement. Miró confessed to creating one of his most famous works, Harlequin's Carnival, while hallucinating due to a lack of food.  In 1926, he collaborated with Max Ernst on designs for Sergei Diaghilev. In his final decades Miró accelerated his work in different media producing hundreds of ceramics, including the Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun at the UNESCO building in Paris.

Painting  1927

Delicate linear forms float on the open blue that Miró associated with dreams. With André Masson, Miró was the first to create imagery using automatic techniques in which forms seemed to emerge directly from the unconscious. From this he developed his own personal sign language, which simplified familiar things such as stars, birds and parts of the body. He later revealed, for example, that the white shape in this painting signified a horse.

Women and Bird in the Moonlight  1949

Head of a Catalan Peasant  1925

Miró claimed that his paintings of the mid-1920s such as Head of a Catalan Peasant came 'almost entirely from hallucination'. However, it is now known that he meticulously copied the image of this work from a small preparatory drawing. (The grid like structure underlying the blue wash relates to the scaling-up of the initial drawing.) Miró himself was a Catalan and may have chosen to represent the peasant with a red barratina cap to symbolise support for Catalan nationalism. Other elements in the painting are either ambiguous or mysterious, with the eyes, for example, also suggesting breasts.

Pablo Picasso  

1881-1973

The Three Dancers  1925

The jagged forms of Three Dancers convey an explosion of energy. The image is laden with Picasso's personal recollections of a triangular affair, which resulted in the heart-broken suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. Love, sex and death are linked in an ecstatic dance. The left-hand dancer in particular seems possessed by uncontrolled, Dionysian frenzy. Her face relates to a mask from Torres Strait, New Guinea, owned by the artist, and points to Picasso's association of 'primitive' forms with expressiveness and sexuality.

Nude Woman in a Red Armchair  1932

Composed with free and sensuous curves, this work celebrates the serene physicality of Picasso’s young companion of the period, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Though never a member of the movement, the painter had been praised by the Surrealists from the outset and allowed them to show his works in their exhibitions. Particularly close links were established in the early 1930s, as Picasso’s energetic productivity coincided with the Surrealists' liberation from sexual convention.

Weeping Woman  1937

The Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936 when the Fascist General Franco took up arms against the Republican government. Although a long-time resident in France, Picasso identified closely with the Spanish Republican cause. Weeping Woman is an intensely personal image, whose features are modelled on his lover Dora Maar, as well as an emblem of the suffering of the Spanish nation. It captures a mood of moral anxiety that haunted those who witnessed the war from abroad.

Goat's Skull, Bottle and Candle  1952

After the suffering of the Second World War, Picasso made a number of monochromatic works concerned with atrocities in the Korean War. He also painted four versions of this still-life subject, whose inspiration appears to have been the execution of the Communist partisan Nikos Beloyannis by the Greek government. The grey tones establish the sombre mood, while the candle and skull are traditional reminders of death. His willingness to take a moral stand reinforced Picasso's status as the most influential artist of his generation.

Jackson Pollock

1912-1956

Jackson Pollock was a very famous astract expressionist. His work and persona exemplify and extend the myth of the Creative Genius Artist, and the individual as a force for breaking new boundaries and unleashing powerful new ideas upon a staid and conservative culture and society. Perhaps this is why his work, along with several others of the Abstract Expressionist movement was exhibited in a touring exhibition designed by the American government of the day, (and backed by the CIA) to demonstrate the great benefits afforded by freedom of thought that the brilliant democratic society and culture of America could give rise to. He began painting with his (often very large) canvases on the floor, and developed what was called his "drip" (or his preferred term, "pour") technique. He used his brushes as implements for dripping paint, and the brush never touched the canvas. Pollock's technique of pouring and dripping paint is thought to be one of the origins of the term Action Painting. Pollock was dubbed "Jack the Dripper" as a result of his painting style.

Naked Man with Knife  circa 1938-40

Pollock was beginning to find his own individual style when he made this work. The startlingly violent image of three interlocking figures was derived from a lost work by the Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco showing the fraternal struggle between Cain and Abel. Pollock’s exploration of the theme may reflect his interest in the archetypal myths explored in Jungian psychoanalysis. The subject may also refer to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, which engulfed Europe as America looked on with horror.

Number 23  1948

Pollock began to drip and pour paint in 1947. This work, in which streams of black and white enamels were poured onto the surface, shows the improvisatory possibilities of this method. The sweeping arc of Pollock's gesture can be seen in the liquid black, which has bled into the white painted background to become grey. This acts as a base over which the thicker white paint is deliberately woven. The effect is rhythmic but controlled, energetic but delicate. Although there was an element of chance, Pollock frequently emphasised the importance of decisions over the merely accidental.

Francis Picabia

1879-1953

 
Francis Picabia was renowned for his iconoclastic, mocking wit, and his willingness to move from one artistic style to another. Picabia said that he liked to change his ideas ‘as one would change one’s shirt’. This state of continual metamorphosis meant that he was linked, at various times, to most of the significant modern art movements of his lifetime, beginning his career as an Impressionist and ending in pared-down abstraction. He spent much of the First World War in New York and Barcelona and dedicated himself to ridiculing traditional ideas of good taste and artistic skill. His best-known works from this period were copies of existing technical drawings, which he gave sexually-suggestive titles. These activities, along with those of his friends, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, came to be associated with Dada.He was later associated with the Surrealists, who had absorbed many of the principles of Dada, but without sacrificing his independence by joining the group. By perpetually transforming his style and working practice, Picabia sought to avoid repetition and deliberately challenged conventional views of artistic development. The Fig-Leaf (1922), for example, covered over one of his most notorious machine paintings. In the same anarchic spirit, he gave misleading dates to works such as Portrait of a Doctor, which he painted around 1935-8, but added ‘1925’ some years afterwards.

The Fig-Leaf  1922

Picabia painted The Fig-Leaf using glossy household paint over another work entitled Hot Eyes. The original painting, which was based on a technical drawing of a turbine brake, caused a scandal when submitted for an important Paris exhibition in 1921. The figure in the new image is derived from Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808), a neo-classical painting by Ingres, with Picabia’s addition of a fig-leaf (the French say ‘vine leaf’) as a reference to censorship. The inscription DESSIN FRANÇAIS (‘French drawing’) sarcastically mocked the contemporary revival of interest in traditional art skills.

  



Collection :  POETRY AND DREAM  from www.tate.org.uk


The displays in Poetry and Dream show how contemporary art grows from, reconnects with, and can provide fresh insights into the art of the past. The large room at the heart of the wing is devoted to Surrealism, while the surrounding displays look at other artists who, in different ways, have responded to or diverged from Surrealism, or explored related themes such as the world of dreams, the unconscious and archetypal myth. These displays also show how characteristically Surrealist techniques such as free association, the use of chance, biomorphic form and bizarre symbolism have been reinvigorated in new contexts and through new media, often at far remove from the intentions of their pioneers. These displays also show how characteristically Surrealist techniques such as free association, the use of chance, biomorphic form and bizarre symbolism have been reinvigorated in new contexts and through new media, often at far remove from the intentions of their pioneers. Surrealism itself drew on earlier role models in evolving an artistic style, and de Chirico's dream-like classical landscapes inhabited by enigmatic objects were particularly influential.

Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico ( 1888 - 1978) was an influential pre-Surrealist Greek-Italian painter born in Volos, Greece to Italian parents who founded the scuola metafisica art movement. De Chirico is best known for the paintings he produced between 1909 and 1919, his metaphysical period, which are memorable for the haunted, brooding moods evoked by their images. At the start of this period, his subjects were still cityscapes inspired by the bright daylight of Mediterranean cities, but gradually he turned his attention to studies of cluttered storerooms, sometimes inhabited by mannequin-like hybrid figures.

        

The Uncertainty of the Poet            La Famille du Peintre                 

For the poets and artists of the Surrealist movement, dreams stood for all aspects of the world repressed by rationalism and convention. Surrealism was distinguished among twentieth-century art movements for its longevity, embodied in André Breton, who wrote the First Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 and remained at its heart until his death in 1966. Initially stimulated by Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious mind, Breton and his associates looked to dreams to release hidden desires and irrational love, the delirium of obsession and madness. Ultimately, they saw the dream as a revolutionary force, and attempted to reconcile the liberation of desire with the political liberation envisaged by Karl Marx. The ‘revolution of the mind’ sought by Surrealism drew upon the uncensored creative impulses of the unconscious. This ensured that it never became a style. Artists such as René Magritte or Salvador Dalí used the imagery of dreams themselves as a source for their work. For others, including Joan Miró and Jean Arp, automatic techniques of drawing or writing without premeditated themes or correction opened a floating world of abstract associations. They even captured such unexpected conjunctions in the way that they mounted their exhibitions. The International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 introduced the movement to London with dissimilar works set densely against each other. This display follows the same method to plunge into what the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon called 'a wave of dreams'. 

The Uncertainty of the Poet 1913
De Chirico’s quiet square evokes the classical arcades and statuary of antiquity (the sculpture is a torso of Aphrodite). In contrast, the passing train and perishable bananas suggest a sense of the contemporary and immediate. The distorted perspective and shadows undermine the conventions of pictorial space and time. De Chirico’s early works were enthusiastically embraced by the Surrealists, who saw in them a dream-like parallel existence. The poet Paul Eluard wrote: ‘these squares are outwardly similar to existing squares and yet we have never seen them ... We are in an immense, previously inconceivable, world.’

The Melancholy of the departure 1916
The window and the map with a traced route evoke ideas of travel, suggesting escape from a cluttered, claustrophobic studio. As a child in Greece, de Chirico, who was an Italian, felt detached from his surroundings and identified with the voyaging Argonauts of Greek mythology. He imagined their journey 'of profundity and solitude' across 'measureless oceans'. The Melancholy of Departure was painted after de Chirico had returned from Paris to Italy to serve in the First World War.

La Famille du Peintre 1926
In the mid-1920s de Chirico reworked many of the themes of his pre-war paintings in the light of his interest in the art of the old masters. In contrast to their pre-war counterparts, the mannequins in this work have a flesh-like solidity, while their grouping echoes traditional scenes of the Holy Family. The easel and painting stick appear to refer to the artist's belief in the importance of old-fashioned technical skills. However, de Chirico's attitude towards tradition and the past was always ambiguous and ironic. The building fragments that emerge from the mannequins' stomachs, for example, seem vaguely classical but also suggest a child's building blocks.


René Magritte 

Magritte (1898 - 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. He is well known for a number of witty and amusing images.A consummate technician, his work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects, or 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. His art shows a more representational style of surrealism.

Man with a newspaper 1928
Magritte’s disconcertingly dead-pan style is seen clearly in these four simply-painted scenes, which seem to be indistinguishable apart from the disappearance of the man of the title. They suggest a subverted comic-strip and, indeed, were based on an illustration in a popular health manual. There are slight changes of perspective between the four panels, which add to the disquieting effect, and may relate to the displacement of images in early 3-D viewing devices. This subtle undermining of the everyday was characteristic of Magritte and his Belgian Surrealist colleagues, who preferred quiet subversion to overt public action.

The Reckless sleeper 1928
 figure sleeps in a wooden alcove above a dark cloudy sky. The way into this space is barred by a tablet embedded with everyday objects, which are displayed as in a children’s book. These objects are presented as if dreamed by the sleeper. As Magritte knew, some or all of them could also be read as Freudian symbols. This combination of different possible interpretations adds to the painting’s suggestion of unease and disorientation. It was painted when Magritte was closest to the French Surrealist group, having moved temporarily to Paris from Brussels.

The Annunciation 1930
The objects in this painting appear to be a metal sheet with bells, a paper cut-out and two balusters (Magritte referred to similar objects in his paintings as bilboquets, a French stick and ball game). Their enlargement and conjunction with the landscape creates a feeling of incongruity recalling the experience of dreams. In titling this work The Annunciation, Magritte may have been alluding ironically to the hostility towards Catholicism shown by the French Surrealists. But the title also suggests that something is about to happen, an expectation that is central to the eerie quality of this strange landscape.

       

Man with a Newspaper                   Reckless Sleeper                        the Annunciation


Max Ernst

Max Ernst (1891 - 19760 was a German artist. Constantly experimenting, in 1925 he invented a graphic art technique called frottage, which uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images. The next year he collaborated with Joan Miró on designs for Sergei Diaghilev. With Miró's help, Ernst pioneered grattage in which he troweled pigment from his canvases. In Montparnasse he was a central figure in the birth of Surrealism, an art movement rejecting logical presentation of subject matter in favor of free association and the whims of the psyche. After a period with the Surrealists, Ernst left the movement due in part to Breton's desire to ostracize Ernst's friend Éluard. Ernst developed a fascination with birds that was prevalent in his work. His alter ego in paintings, that he called Loplop, was a bird that he suggested was an extension of himself stemming from an early confusion of birds and humans. He said his sister was born soon after his bird died. Loplop often appeared in collages of other artists work, such as collages like Loplop presents André Breton, and they usually had a bird foot-like object superimposed on another artist's piece.Ernst helped inspire the development of Abstract expressionism.

Celebs 1921
The central rotund shape in this painting derives from a photograph of a Sudanese corn-bin, which Ernst has transformed into a sinister mechanical monster. Ernst often re-used found images, and either added or removed elements in order to create new realities, all the more disturbing for being drawn from the known world. The work's title comes from a childish German rhyme that begins: 'The elephant from Celebes has sticky, yellow bottom grease…' The painting's inexplicable juxtapositions, such as the enigmatic headless female figure and the elephant-like creature, suggest the imagery of a dream and the Freudian technique of free association.

Men Shall Know Nothing of This  1923
Ernst studied philosophy and psychology in Bonn and was interested in the alternative realities experienced by the insane. This painting may have been inspired by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s study of the delusions of a paranoiac, Daniel Paul Schreber. Freud identified Schreber’s fantasy of becoming a woman as a ‘castration complex’. The central image of two pairs of legs refers to Schreber’s hermaphroditic desires. Ernst’s inscription on the back of the painting reads: ‘The picture is curious because of its symmetry. The two sexes balance one another.’

Forêt et colombe 1927
Forests appear frequently in Ernst’s works and recall his feelings of the ‘enchantment and terror’ of the woods near his childhood home. Forests are a potent symbol in German tradition, and were also adopted by the Surrealist group as a metaphor for the imagination. In this work, a small dove, which Ernst liked to use as a symbol to represent himself, is trapped among menacing trees. The shapes are created using a technique he called ‘grattage’, in which paint is scraped across the canvas to reveal the imprint of objects placed beneath.

   

Celebs                             Men Shall Know Nothing of This                     Forêt et colombe 



Raymond Tanguy 

Tanguy (1900 – 1955) was a surrealist painter. By chance, he stumbled upon a painting by Giorgio de Chirico and was so deeply impressed he resolved to become a painter himself in spite of his complete lack of formal training. Yves Tanguy's paintings have a unique, immediately recognizable style of nonrepresentational surrealism. They show vast, abstract landscapes, mostly in a tightly limited palette of colors, only occasionally showing flashes of contrasting color accents. Typically, these alien landscapes are populated with various abstract shapes, sometimes angular and sharp as shards of glass, sometimes with an intriguingly organic look to them, like giant amoeba suddenly turned to stone.

Les Transparents 1951
Tanguy moved to the United States in 1939 with the painter Kay Sage, paving the way for the Surrealists' wartime exile in New York. Influenced by the light and space of America, Tanguy began to work on a larger scale. His new works featured partly mechanical, partly biomorphic forms set against awesome skies. The title of this painting can be related to the Surrealists' preoccupation in the 1940s with the theme of otherworldly beings - 'invisibles' - that escape normal understanding.

La Journée Bleue 1937
Tanguy joined the  Surrealist movement in 1925, the year after its foundation. Despite his lack of training, he began to paint and soon achieved an astonishing technical precision, depicting vast dream-like spaces. The foreground in Azure Day is occupied by grouped and piled forms that defy rational explanation. They have been associated with the ancient standing stones of Tanguy’s native Brittany. When divisions in the Surrealist group emerged in the 1930s, Tanguy remained close to André Breton who described him as ‘the man in whom I see the moral adornment of our time: my charming friend’.

          

Les Transparents                                           La Journee bleue

 

Francis Bacon 

Bacon (1909 – 1992) was an Anglo-Irish painter, atheist, gambler and bon vivant. He was a collateral descendant of the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon. His artwork was well-known for its bold, abstract, and often grotesque or nightmarish imagery. Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois have both created powerful and sometimes disturbing images derived from the body which seem to reflect upon the human condition. Two of the great individualists of modern art, Bacon and Bourgeois emerged as mature artists in the wake of Surrealism.’Our sense of realism has been changed to some extent since Surrealism - well, really since Freud’, Bacon said, ‘because we’ve been made more conscious of how realism can draw on the unconscious’. Both artists, in their distinctive ways, have shown a fascination with the human body, which is subjected to various modes of metamorphosis in the paintings and sculptures in this room. Most of Bacon’s paintings are focused on distorted or fragmented images of the human figure. The flesh of these figures is swollen, bulbous and damaged, suggesting the exterior signs of internal despair and anguish. Bacon’s characters are often presented as trapped within claustrophobic interior spaces, an image of human isolation that has led to associations between his work and the post-war philosophy of existentialism. 

Three Figures and Portrait  1975
The furious movement of the two principal figures is placed within a claustrophobic setting, watched over by the portrait, which gives this work a striking intensity. It is usually seen as an image of tragic suffering. One - and possibly both - of the twisting human figures have been identified as George Dyer, the artist’s lover, who committed suicide in 1971. The bird-like form in the foreground, with its snarling human mouth, has been linked to the Furies, the fearsome agents of divine judgement in Greek mythology.

Reclining Woman  1961
In spite of the title, the figure in this painting appears to have been originally intended as a man. The male genitalia were covered over with a thin layer of paint. Unusually, the figure was cut from another canvas and pasted onto this one, on which the background was painted. Male nudes appeared in many of Bacon's paintings. He may have accepted the misidentification of this figure as a way of disguising its implicitly homoerotic imagery at a time when homosexuality was illegal.

          

Three Figures and Portrait                                    Reclining Woman  
 

Paul Nash

Nash (1889 - 1946) was a british war-painter and also a pioneer of modernism, promoting the avant-garde European styles of abstraction and surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1933 he co-founded the influential modern art movement Unit One with fellow artists Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and the critic Herbert Read. It was a short-lived but important move towards the revitalisation of British art in the inter-war period.Nash, found much inspiration in the English landscape, particularly landscapes with a sense of ancient history, such as burial mounds, Iron Age hill forts such as Wittenham Clumps and the standing stones at Avebury and Stonehenge.

 Pillar and Moon  1932-42
Paul Nash was deeply affected by his experiences as a soldier and an artist during the First World War. This picture was based around 'the mystical association of two objects which inhabit different elements and have no apparent relation in life... The pale stone sphere on top of a ruined pillar faces its counterpart the moon, cold and pale and solid as stone.'Though not explicitly about mourning, the deep, unpopulated space and ghostly lighting gives the scene a melancholy air. Rather than depict a real landscape, Nash said that his intention had been 'to call up memories and stir emotions in the spectator'.

Landscape from a Dream  1936-8
This painting marks the culmination of Nash’s personal response to Surrealism, of which he had been aware since the late 1920s. As the title suggests, it echoes the Surrealists’ fascination with Freud’s theories of the power of dreams to reveal the unconscious. Nash explained that various elements were symbolic: the self-regarding hawk belongs to the material world, while the spheres reflected in the mirror refer to the soul. Typically, Nash set this scene on the coast of Dorset, unearthing the uncanny within the English landscape.

Totes Meer (Dead Sea)  1940-1
In about 1908 Nash read a poem by Blake which 'seemed an exhortation to open my eyes and look about me, above all, to look up, to search the skies'. Nash was also familiar with Blake's art, and with Samuel Palmer's Blake-influenced work. Nash's work as a war artist made him 'feel I am one with my native land', a response comparable to Blake's own impulse to save Albion through his prophetic writings. Totes Meer was based on photographs of a dump for wrecked German aircraft, but the image suggests an ironic parallel with Blake's Spirit of God.

  

Pilar and Moon                           Landscape from a dream                                         Dead Sea


Paul Delvaux 

Delvaux (1897 - 1994) was a Belgian painter, famous for his surrealist paintings with female nudes. In 1926 Delvaux first encountered the metaphysical art of Giorgio de Chirico, which impressed him greatly, although Delvaux was then painting compositions featuring nudes in landscapes of an idyllic nature, and his work would not show de Chirico's influence for several more years. Delvaux found further inspiration in visits to the Brussels Fair, where the Spitzner Museum, a museum of medical curiosities, had a booth in which skeletons and a mechanical Venus figure were displayed in a window with red velvet curtains. This spectacle captivated Delvaux, supplying him with motifs that would appear throughout his work after 1934. In the mid-1930s Delvaux also began to adopt some of the motifs of his fellow Belgian Rene Magritte, as well as that painter's deadpan style in rendering the most unexpected juxtapositions of otherwise ordinary objects.Although Delvaux associated for a period with the Belgian surrealist group, he thought of his art as a renewed classicism through which to convey the poetry and mystery of modern life. The paintings Delvaux became famous for usually feature numbers of nude women who stare as if hypnotized, gesturing mysteriously, sometimes reclining incongruously in a train station or wandering through classical buildings, accompanied by skeletons or puzzled scientists.

Sleeping Venus  1944
The work of Belgian artist Paul Delvaux combined classical perfection with an erotic and troubling atmosphere. The sensuousness of Sleeping Venus is set against its oppressive night-time setting. Delvaux later explained that it was painted in Brussels during the German wartime occupation and while the city was being bombed. ‘The psychology of that moment was very exceptional, full of drama and anguish’, he recalled. ‘I wanted to express this anguish in the picture, contrasted with the calm of the Venus’. Though never an official Surrealist, Delvaux was associated with the Belgian group around Magritte.

Leda  1948
Delvaux did not formally belong to the Surrealist movement. However, the dream-like atmosphere of his works, together with his erotic preoccupation with an ideal female figure, led to him being recognised as one of the leaders of Belgian Surrealism. The subject of this painting is the classical myth of the sexual encounter of Jupiter, disguised as a swan, and Leda. The story was part of the repertoire of traditional art and Delvaux has alluded to the works of past masters such as Raphael and Ingres in some details of the composition. However, the setting is an incongruously modern, urban landscape, which in its emptiness suggests strangeness and alienation.

 

Leda               Sleeping Venus


Man Ray 

May Ray (1890–1976) was an American Dada and Surrealist artist. Man Ray showed evidence of being artistically and mechanically inclined from childhood. After graduating from Boys' High School in 1908, he was offered a scholarship to study architecture but chose to pursue a career as an artist instead.After a few unsuccessful experiments, and notably after the publication of a unique issue of New York Dada in 1920, Man Ray stated, "Dada cannot live in New York", and in 1921 he went to live and work in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, France during the era of great creativity. Together with Surrealist photographer Lee Miller—his lover and photography assistant at the time—Man Ray invented the photographic technique of solarization. He also created a technique using photograms he called rayographs.

Pisces  1938
Pisces was based on an image from Les Mains libres (Free Hands), a suite of drawings that Man Ray published with poems by Paul Eluard in 1937. ‘In these drawings my hands are dreaming’, he later remarked. The woman lies alongside a fish to create what the artist described as ‘a contrasting of similar and different forms at the same time’. Man Ray strengthened the identification of woman and fish by choosing Pisces, the zodiac sign of paired fishes, as the English title.

Salvador Dalí  - des tableaux splendides que je n'avais pas encore eu la chance de voir en version originale

Forgotten Horizon  1936
Dalí’s disturbing, imaginary landscapes often contain references to his own life. Forgotten Horizon is a typical example, drawing upon memories of childhood holidays on the beach at Rosas on the Costa Brava. The striding woman in the distance is his cousin, Carolinetta, while the dancing figures in the foreground were inspired by a picture on a postcard. Dalí intended the effect to be hallucinatory, with the figures appearing as if projected onto a prepared background or theatrical set.

Autumnal Cannibalism  1936
Painted just after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, this work shows a couple locked in a cannibalistic embrace. They are pictured on a table-top, which merges into the earthy tones of a Spanish landscape in the background. The conflict between countrymen is symbolised by the apple balanced on the head of the male figure, which refers to the legend of William Tell, in which a father is forced to shoot at his son.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus  1937
According to Greek mythology, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a pool. Unable to embrace the watery image, he pined away, and the gods immortalised him as a flower. Dalí shows this metamorphosis by doubling a crouching figure by the lake with a hand clutching an egg, from which the narcissus flower sprouts. When this painting was first exhibited it was accompanied by a long poem by Dalí. Together, the words and image suggest a range of emotions triggered by the theme of metamorphosis, including anxiety, disgust and desire.

Mountain Lake  1938
Mountain Lake demonstrates Dalí’s use of the multiple image: the lake can simultaneously be seen as a fish. By such doubling he sought to challenge rationality. The painting combines personal and public references. His parents visited this lake after the death of their first child, also called Salvador. Dalí seems to have been haunted by the death of his namesake brother whom he never knew. The disconnected telephone brings the image into the present by alluding to negotiations between Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, and Hitler over the German annexation of the Sudetenland in September 1938.

          

  
Et quelques tableaux en vrac...

Leonor Fini - Little Hermit Sphinx  1948
Fini adored cats, and used the image of the Sphinx (a mythological hybrid of a lion and woman) partly as a self-portrait. She regarded the Sphinx as a symbolic intermediary between the human and animal realms, and between the conscious and the uncharted areas of the mind and spirit. In this painting, the Sphinx appears as a child-like, domesticated creature, sitting in front of its ramshackle home. The bird skull at its feet and the organ hanging in the doorway, however, hint at acts of violence.

Ithell Colquhoun - Scylla  1938
This is an apparently simple image of a boat seen between rocks. Colquhoun said that the title refers to the female sea-monster who, according to the ancient legend in Homer's Odyssey, inhabited narrow straits and devoured passing sailors. However, this reference to mythology was provoked by an unexpected recognition of one form in another, as Colquhoun explained: 'It was suggested by what I could see of myself in a bath … it is thus a pictorial pun, or double-image'.

Tristram Hillier - Variation on the Form of an Anchor  1939
Like Nash and Wadsworth, Hillier was impressed by the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, which he encountered while living in Paris in the 1920s. The Italian's plunging perspectives and unexpected juxtapositions evoked a mysterious world that led Hillier towards Surrealism. The scale of this anchor-structure is overwhelming, like a monument of unknown significance. It is one of several mysterious beach scenes with abandoned elements made in the 1930s.

      

Little Hermit Sphinx                 Scylla                          Variation on the Form of an Anchor  




........ to be continued

MELANCHOLIE - exhibition in Berlin
Neue Nationalgalerie, Kulturforum, Potsdamer Platz
17 feb - 7 may


For more than two thousand years, melancholy has been recognized as the intellectual source of all great creations in European art. The exhibition 'Melancholy - Genius and Madness in Art' traces the historical development of the idea from antiquity to today's digital images - using over 300 masterpieces of painting, sculpture, prints, photography and video art.

The exhibition panorama begins with the earliest representations of melancholy in the ancient world and its rediscovery in medieval panel painting, the work of Albrecht Dürer and the Italian Renaissance. A journey through the pictorial worlds of ensuing periods reveals how melancholy continues to reinvent itself - in Baroque ideas of transitoriness, Rokoko sensibilities, and Romantic longings. A separate section of the exhibition looks at late 19th century scientific exploration of melancholy as a phenomenon positioned between insanity and genius. A final focus lies in the 'melancholy of modernism' as found in the art of Munch, Grosz, Dix, Beckmann, Anselm Kiefer's lead works and Sigmar Polke's alchemy pictures.



ORIGIN OF MELANCHOLY in Antiquity - in Aristoteles times the idea arose that people of special creativity and imagination were in danger of losing themselves in tje world of their thoughts, to the point of complete resignation. Hence, there was a close kinship between genius and madness. Hippocrates suspected that the origin for this lay in the black bile in the blood.

     

Aristoteles                                                                                                              Hippocrates


BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL - the melancholy in the Middle-Ages. Monks and hermits were now counted among those at risk from melancholy, next to statesmen, scholars and artists. Visions of hell and devils were seen as symptoms of acedia, the so-called monk's disease. Acedia is a Greek word, literally meaning caringfree. In Roman Catholicism, acedia is one of the seven deadly sins, and is defined as spiritual laziness, putting off what God asks you to do, or not doing it at all. Acedia implies the attitude of the people that go from fury to laziness in a second.


MARTIN SCHONGAUER               Salvador DALI                                                                
SAINT ANTHONY,  1470-1473     THE TEMPTATION OF ST ANTHONY                          


     


Devilish creatures are attacking Anthony. He, however, has fallen into a state of meditative levitation. The contrast between limp body and lustful visions corresponds with the symptoms of melancholy as described in antiquity. Anthony also struggles with acedia, capital sin of sloth. + the biblically inspired iconography of Mary Magdalene as the atoning sinner, and the allegorical motif of pondering purpose and transience of human life, knowledge and creation. 


THE PICTURE OF MELANCHOLY par excellence : Albrecht Durer's engraving of 1514. This programmatic picture contains the entire humanistic knowledge about the relationships between genius and madness in allegorical code. No other work of Dürer's fascinates more than this print. While a putto is scribbling eagerly, the winged "Melencolia" ponders in momentary idleness, surrounded by the tools of her many skills: geometry, mathematics, architecture. An allegory of humanistic quest for knowledge, she embodies the creative human being. Her Christian fervour, her will to model herself after God, turns her into a figure of virtue. The enigma of melancholy became the obsession of alchemy, medicine and art. Astrology too entered into the speculations. It defined melancholics as the Children of Satrun.

There is also some other changes after the Durer's engraving : in Cranach painting Melancholy dressed in beguiling red,looks at us seductively. The figure of virtue from Dürer's famous Melencolia I has mutated into a figure of diabolical charm - a witch. The black cloud pictures the dangers of melancholy: witches and demonic animals abduct their victims.

In his Four Seasons Arcimboldo created allegorical portraits out of seasonal natural produce. The seasons were associated with the four stages of life or the four temperaments. Autumn corresponded to melancholy: sad chestnut eyes see winter's approach behind autumn's bounty.


ALBRECHT DÜRER                                                                         GIUSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO
MELENCOLIA I,1514                                                                       AUTUMN, 1573  

        


MELANCHOLY CONTEMPLATING THE END - XVII and XVIII century, baroque and still-lives. All is vain and transient, earthy life holds nothing but resignation. At the time of the Enlightenment, this shift of the melancholy idea from intellect to sensitivity reached its peak. Every man or woman could be melancholic, if only he or she was sensitive enough.

In Codde's painting the young man with the misty-eyed look is totally exhausted from doing nothing (or from smoking hemp). Soon he will doze off and slide from the stool. Only this slapstick awakening will shock him out of the melancholy that has overpowered him in the light of the knowledge that learning is futile.

Baroque theme : Animals crawl out of a mysterious carpet of vegetation onto a skull: a snake and lizard meet on the top of the skull while a cockroach crawls along the temple. The fact that these animals could all eat each other lends this memento mori a bizarre tone.

PIETER JACOBSZ CODDE                                                                        
YOUNG MAN WITH A PIPE, INDULGING IN IDLENESS, 1630                             MEMENTO MORI! 

             


Melancholic landscapes

Bocklin's painting : With infinite quietude, the coffin on the punt slides towards its final resting place, accompanied by devout mourning. The dark forest appears to be waiting to wrap the deceased in uncertainty. Landscape and fictive motifs combine into a uniquely melancholic atmospheric space.

Friederich's painting : The barefoot monk defies the elements in solitude. Figure and thoughts have lost themselves in the expanses of the sea. The naked, emotionally charged landscape places desperate hopelessness and spiritual faith in direct dialogue. As a melancholic, the monk warns of excessive striving for knowledge.


ARNOLD BÖCKLIN,                                                                                       CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH
THE ISLE OF THE DEAD, 1883                                                                   MONK BY THE SEA, 1808-1810

   

GENIUS AND MADNESS - the epidemic spread of melancholy called a new science to the fore : psychiatry. Under its sign, scientists began to research melancoly statistically, systematically and anthropologically. Genuises were classified as mental abnormalities. At the same time, aspects of madness began to exert immense fascination in art and poetry. The Flowers of Evil published in 1857 by Charles Baudelaire, became an inspirational source for the European avant-garde.

   

Antonin Artaud                           Sigmund Freud                                                    Charles Baudelaire 



Wallis' painting : The bare room, arsenic bottle and torn-up manuscripts tell of the young poet's suicide, born out of creative desperation, poverty and lack of success. As the tragic melancholic figure par excellence, Thomas Chatterton became an icon of the British Romantic period.

HENRY WALLIS                                                                                                                       FRANZ VON STUCK
THE DEATH OF CHATTERTON, 1856                                                                                LUCIFER 

  
 
THE MELANCHOLY OF MODERNISM - here everything is centred around the insight that not only individuals but also society can become diseased with melancholy. Classes, groups or economic systems turn their existence into an end in itself and lose contact with reality.

In Hooper painting : Smoking, the naked woman has paused in the warming rays of sunlight - a fleeting moment of pleasure in an evidently lonely existence. Her thoughts seem to be circulating around the same questions as those of the observer: questions of the whereabouts, of purpose, of the next stage and the final aim.

In Mueck's sculpture : The unusual proportions of Mueck's sculptures lend them an enormous psychological presence. The naked man has crouched down morosely, the heaviness of his body reflects the weight on his soul. Hopelessness is given a visual expression: he is cornered by a great emptiness.


EDWARD HOPPER                                                                                                 RON MUECK
A WOMEN IN THE SUN, 1961                                                                              UNTITLED (BIG MAN)

   


Some other paintings:


SALVADOR DALI'S MELANCHOLY 

           




Modigliani                                                                Picasso                         de Chirico
The Melancholy Angel                                           Absinthe drinker        Melancholy and mystery of a street 

         


Munch                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Virgil Elliott 
Melancholy (1&2)      
      


exhibition site : http://www.melancholieinberlin.org/