What kind of artists put a moustache on the Mona Lisa? Enter a urinal in an art competition? Declare their own independent republic? Hijack a ship? Dadas!
And what happens to such a movement? With Dada, many of the artists declared their own "Pope" and continued their journey (with no destination) into Surrealism, creating burning giraffes, "amoebic" dogs, and lobster telephones-some of the most imaginative and intense works of art of the 20th century. In "Dada and Surrealism For Beginners," you'll get a colorful overview of these two movements, and develop a sense of the turbulent, wild, and unapologetically mad mood and tone of the Dada and Surrealist movements. Whether you're an artist, would-be artist, or someone seeking the marvelous, you'll find the courage and originality of the movements inspiring, and you'll gain an understanding of their long-term (and current) influences on contemporary art and culture - everything from performance art to pop art to the abandoned train ticket you find in the street.

The traumatic surreal is the first major study to examine the ground-breaking role played by Germanophone women artists working in surrealist traditions in responding to the traumatic events and legacies of the Second World War. Analysing works in a variety of media by leading artists and writers, the book redefines the post-war trajectories of surrealism and recalibrates critical understandings of the movement's relations to historical trauma. Chapters address artworks, writings and compositions by the Swiss Meret Oppenheim, the German Unica Zurn, the Austrian Birgit Jurgenssen, the Luxembourg-Austrian Bady Minck and the Austrian Olga Neuwirth and her collaboration with fellow Austrian Nobel-prize winning novelist Elfriede Jelinek. Locating each artist in their historical context, the book traces the development of the traumatic surreal through the wartime and post-war period. -- .

Dada formed in 1916, embedded in a world of rational appearances that belied a raging confusion - in the middle of the First World War, in the neutral centre of a warring continent, fundamentally at the heart of Western art. This book sets out new coordinates in revision of a formation that Western art history routinely exhausts through its characterisation as a 'revolutionary movement' of anarchic cultural dissent, and does so in order to contest the perpetuated assumptions about Dada that underlie the popular myth. Dada is difficult and the response to it is not easy, and what emerge from the theoretical readings developed here are profoundly rational bases to the Dada non-sense that pitted itself against its civilised age, critically and implicitly to propose that Dada courses as vitally today as it did in 1916. The Zurich Dada formation initiated deliberate and strategic cultural engagements that struggled then, as they do now, to cohere in any sense as a 'movement', extreme in their ranges as diametrically hostile oppositionalities. Dada may be given art historically as identifiable along a trajectory of sustained ruptures and seizures, but it confounds all attempts at defined or definitive readings. This book duly offers not a history of Dada in Zurich but theoretical engagements of the emergencies and now the residue of the years 1916-19 - from 'lautgedichte' to laughter, masks to manifestos, chance to chiasmata - rounding to the 'permanent' Dada by which the formation ultimately breaks the containment and deep peace of art historical chronology.

Largely self-taught as an artist, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) developed a unique ability to transform interior and unconscious impulses into figurative forms and intensely claustrophobic compositions. Emerging into notoriety in the period following World War II, Bacon took the human body as his nominal subject, but a subject ravaged, distorted, and dismembered so as to writhe with intense emotional content. With flailing limbs, hollow voids, and tumurous growths, his gripping, often grotesque, portraits are as much reflections on the trials and the traumas of the human condition as they are character studies. These haunting forms were also among the first in art history to depict overtly homosexual themes. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Jorn + Munch is the first publication to examine the enduring impact Edvard Munch (1863-1944) had on Asger Jorn (1914-1973). In Munch's later works, Danish artist Jorn discovered an artist with a direct, spontaneous, and raw form of expression. Already influenced by surrealism's unprompted painting style, Jorn was naturally drawn to Munch's similarly unbridled compositions. In particular, Jorn was interested in Munch's use of intense colors and his gestural application of paint in the later works. From the middle of the 1940s, and for many years after that, Munch is shown to be a challenging and important reference point for Jorn's own body of work. Distributed for Mercatorfonds Exhibition Schedule: Munch Museum, Oslo (10/15/16-01/15/17) Jorn Museum, Silkeborg, Denmark (02/11/17-05/28/17)

In Surrealist sabotage and the war on work, art historian Abigail Susik uncovers the expansive parameters of the international surrealist movement's ongoing engagement with an aesthetics of sabotage between the 1920s and the 1970s, demonstrating how surrealists unceasingly sought to transform the work of art into a form of unmanageable anti-work. In four case studies devoted to surrealism's transatlantic war on work, Susik analyses how artworks and texts by Man Ray, Andre Breton, Simone Breton, Andre Thirion, Oscar Dominguez, Konrad Klapheck, and the Chicago surrealists, among others, were pivotally impacted by the intransigent surrealist concepts of principled work refusal, permanent strike, and autonomous pleasure. Underscoring surrealism's profound relevance for readers engaged in ongoing debates about gendered labour and the wage gap, endemic over-work and exploitation, and the vicissitudes of knowledge work and the gig economy, Surrealist sabotage and the war on work reveals that surrealism's creative work refusal retains immense relevance in our wired world. -- .

World-renowned for her work during the Weimar period, Hannah Hoech was a pioneer in many aspects, both artistic and cultural. She was the lone woman of the Berlin Dada movement - the riotous form of art that deconstructed sound, language, and images to re-assemble them into new objects, texts and meanings. Hoech was a pivotal force in the development of collage, paving the way for today's ubiquitous image editing techniques. A determined believer in women's rights, Hoech questioned conventional concepts of partnership, beauty and the making of art, her work presenting acute critiques of racial and social stereotypes, particularly that of her native Germany. Focusing on Hoech's collages, this book examines the artist's career from the 1920s to the 1970s, charting her oeuvre from early works influenced by fashion and mass media, through to her later compositions of lyrical abstraction. It reveals her rapid development of a personal style, which was both humorous and often moving, but also offered critical commentary on society at a time of tremendous social change. Included are essays that examine themes such as the concept of the "New Woman" and the legacy of German colonialism. Featuring international scholarship on a groundbreaking artist, this volume brings together important source texts and reference material, which were first translated into English for the original edition of this book.

A book of new paintings by John Welson and new poems by David Greenslade, working in collaboration for the first time on a suite of poems and paintings connected by the theme of moths and butterflies.

The Empord triangle, like its notorious sister the Bermuda Triangle, outlines a space where unusual things happen. In this case, that space is the land surrounding three major landmarks of Salvador Dali's life: his house at Port Lligat, its front door guarded by a stuffed bear; the castle of Pbol, where he lived in his old age and where his wife Gala is buried; and the Dalu Theatre-Museum of Figueres, where he himself is buried. Some of these landscapes and buildings recur in Dali's work, and each of the buildings constitutes a work in itself. Enticing, wide, glossy landscape photographs throughout The Empord Triangle constitute a tour of these three centers of Dal'nian experience.

Man Ray, surrealist master and exponent of the Dada movement, managed to reinvent not only the photographic language, but also the representation of the body and face, as well as the genres of the nude and the portrait themselves. This book brings together around 200 photographs produced from the 1920s right up to his death in 1976, all featuring female subjects.Through rayographs, solarisations and double exposures, the female body undergoes a continual metamorphosis of forms and meanings, becoming an abstract form, an object of seduction, classical memory or realistic portrait, in endless playful and refined variations. Among the protagonists of his shots are Lee Miller, Berenice Abbott, Dora Maar and Juliet, a lifelong companion, to whom is dedicated the amazing The Fifty Faces of Juliet portfolio (1943-1944). But these women were, in turn, great artists: as evidence is presented here a corpus of works dating back to the time - between the 1930s and '40s - of their most direct association with Man Ray and with the environment of the Dada avant-garde and Parisian surrealism. This volume offers a wide survey of one of the most exuberant periods of the 20th century, with authentic masterpieces of photographic art such as the Electricite portfolios (1931) and the very rare Les mannequins. Resurrection des mannequins (1938). Text in English and Italian.

The lives, loves and works of key British Surrealists revealed by one of the last surviving members of this movement, bestselling author and artist Desmond Morris. Feted for their idiosyncratic and imaginative works, the surrealists marked a pivotal moment in the history of modern art in Britain. Many banded together to form the British Surrealist Group, while others carved their own, independent paths. Here, bestselling author and surrealist artist Desmond Morris - one of the last surviving members of this important art movement - draws on his personal memories and experiences to present the intriguing life stories and complex love lives of this wild and curious set of artists. From the unpredictability of Francis Bacon to the rebelliousness of Leonora Carrington, from the beguiling Eileen Agar to the 'brilliant' Ceri Richards, Morris brings his subjects' foibles and frailties to the fore. His vivid account is laced with his inimitable wit, and profusely illustrated by images of the artists and their artworks. Featuring thirty-four surrealists - some famous, some forgotten - Morris's intimate book takes us back in time to a generation that allowed its creative unconscious to drive their passions in both art and life. With 105 illustrations

How did women Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington and Claude Cahun take up the question of female identity in terms of their own aesthetic and intellectual practice? What was the response of women analysts such as Joan Riviere to Freud's psychoanalytic construction of femininity? These are among the questions that Natalya Lusty brings to her sophisticated and theoretically informed investigation into the appropriation of 'the feminine' by the Surrealist movement. Combining biographical and textual methods of analysis with historically specific discussions of related cultural sites such as women's magazines, fashion, debutante culture, sexology, modernist lesbian subculture, pornography, and female criminality, the book examines the ambiguities and blind spots that haunt the work of more central figures such as Andre Breton, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Walter Benjamin, and the Surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer. Lusty's examination of a series of psychoanalytic Surrealist themes, including narcissism, fantasy, masquerade, perversion, and 'the double', illuminates a modernist preoccupation with the crisis of subjectivity and representation and its ongoing relevance to more recent work by Cindy Sherman and Judith Butler. Her book is an important contribution to modernist studies that will appeal to scholars and students working across a diverse range of fields, including literary studies, gender studies, visual culture, cultural studies, and cultural history.

Emerging from the disruption of the First World War, surrealism confronted the resulting 'crisis of consciousness' in a way that was arguably more profound than any other cultural movement of the time. The past few decades have seen an expansion of interest in surrealist writers, whose contribution to the history of ideas in the twentieth-century is only now being recognised. Surrealism: Key Concepts is the first book in English to present an overview of surrealism through the central ideas motivating the popular movement. An international team of contributors provide an accessible examination of the key concepts, emphasising their relevance to current debates in social and cultural theory. This book will be an invaluable guide for students studying a range of disciplines, including Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology and Cultural Studies, and anyone who wishes to engage critically with surrealism for the first time. Contributors: Dawn Ades, Joyce Cheng, Jonathan P. Eburne, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Guy Girard, Raihan Kadri, Michael Loewy, Jean-Michel Rabate, Michael Richardson, Donna Roberts, Bertrand Schmitt, Georges Sebbag, Raymond Spiteri, and Michael Stone-Richards.

Harold Pinter's Betrayal received its premiere at the National Theatre, London, in November 1978. After an initially guarded critical response, the work was rapidly revaluated and won the Olivier Award for Best New Play the following year. Set in London and Venice the play has an innovative chronology that opens at the end of an affair and works its way backwards over nine years, from 1977 to 1968. It is widely considered one of the playwright's pivotal works.

Dada: The Collections of The Museum of Modern Art is the first publication devoted exclusively to MoMA's unrivalled collection of Dada works. Beginning with a core group acquired on the occasion of the landmark Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition of 1936, enriched in 1953 by a bequest selected by Marcel Duchamp, and steadily augmented over the years, the Museum's Dada collection presents the movement in its full international and interdisciplinary scope during its defining years, from 1916 through 1924. Catalyzed by the major Dada exhibition that appeared in Paris, Washington, D.C., and at The Museum of Modern Art in 2005-6, the book benefits from the latest scholarly thinking, not only as found in the exhibition's catalogues but also in the critical responses to them, as well as in an ambitious series of seminars organized around the show. Featuring generously illustrated essays that focus on a selection of the Museum's most important Dada works, this publication highlights works in many media, including books, journals, assemblages, collages, drawings, films, paintings, photographs, photomontages, prints, readymades and reliefs. It also includes a comprehensive catalogue of the Museum's Dada holdings, including those in the Museum's Archives and Library. Edited by Anne Umland and Adrian Sudhalter, members of the Museum's Department of Painting and Sculpture, this book inaugurates an ambitious new series of scholarly catalogues on the Museum's collection.

One of the greatest collaborations of cinema history, L'Age d'Or(1930) united the geniuses of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali in the making of a Surrealist masterpiece - a uniquely savage blend of visual poetry and social criticism. The film was banned and vilified for many years in many countries, becoming justly legendary for its subversive eroticism and its furious dissection of 'civilised' values. In a remarkable, intuitive reading of L'Age d'Or, Paul Hammond interweaves a detailed account of the extraordinary circumstances of its production with a dazzling interpretation of its aesthetic and political nuances. At once authoritative and polemical, this is a study entirely in tune with its subject, a fitting celebration of a major landmark in world cinema.

Salvador Dali (1904-89) was one of the most controversial and paradoxical artists of the twentieth century. A painter of considerable virtuosity, he used a traditional illusionistic style to create disturbing images filled with references to violence, death, cannibalism and bizarre sexual practices, from the extraordinary limp watches in The Persistence of Memory to the gruesome monster in Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War and the fetishistic lobster in the famous Lobster Telephone. Born in Figueras, Spain, Dali was initially influenced by Impressionism and Cubism, but subsquently became involved with the Surrealists, the most revolutionary artists of the time. They regarded his paintings as revealing the normally hidden world of the unconscious. Indeed the Surrealists' leader, Andre Breton, remarked: "It is perhaps with Dali that for the first time the windows of the mind are opened fully wide". However, Breton later expelled him from the group for this right-wing sympathies and derided his commercial success in the United States, calling him 'Avida Dollars'. Dali's response was equally curt: " The difference between me and the Surrealists is that I am a Surrealist". Not restricting his interests to painting, Dali wrote three autobiographies, designed sets and costumes for a play by his friend Federico Garcia Lorca and collaborated with Luis Bunuel in the film Un Chien andalou, a medium which proved particularly apt for his provocative imagery.

With a career spanning seven decades, Catalan-born Joan Miro (1893-1983) was a polymath giant of modern art, producing masterworks across painting, sculpture, art books, tapestry, and ceramics, and embracing ideologies as varied as Fauvism, Surrealism, Dada, Magic Realism, Cubism, and abstraction. Over the course of his prodigious output, Miro evolved constantly, seeking to eschew categorization and the approval of "bourgeois" art critics as much as he pursued his own dreamlike worlds. Emerging into the public spotlight in the early 1920s, he first experimented with Fauvism and Cubism before developing a distinctive style of symbols and pictograms, arranged in elusive visual narratives, with frequent reference to Catalan life. As his career progressed, Miro moved towards Surrealism, and, despite never fully identifying with the movement, emerged as one of its most celebrated practitioners with techniques including automated drawing, Lyrical Abstraction, and Color Field painting. In later years, he diversified his media further, working with ceramics, textiles, and even proposing sculptures made of gas. Through his vivid colors, dreamlike fantasies, and enigmatic symbols, this book brings together the numerous strands of Miro's kaleidoscopic oeuvre to introduce his fascinating career, its interaction with major modernist movements, and how it made him into a modernist legend. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

For Rene Magritte, painting was a form of thinking. Through paintings of ordinary objects rendered with illusionism, Magritte probed the limits of our perception-what we see and cannot see, the nature of representation-as a philosophical system for presenting ideas, and explored perspective as a method of visual argumentation. This book makes the claim that Magritte's painting is about vision and the act of viewing, of perception itself, and the process of how we see and experience things in the world, including paintings as things.

Dal. Picasso. Ernst. Magritte. Maddox. Breton. Artaud, Fondane, Masson--all are to be found in this gallery of surrealist artists. Focussing on surrealist visuality--defined as the visual expression of internal perception or, in Andr Breton's words, internal representation--the contributors to this handsomely illustrated volume shed new light on one of the twentieth century's most exciting cultural movements.

In this generously illustrated and lively book, Christopher Lloyd sets out and interprets the lifelong achievement of Picasso (1881-1973) as a draftsman. Although there have been many publications about his drawings that have tended to focus on particular periods of his career, this stunning volume specifically examines how drawing serves as the vital thread connecting all of Picasso's art, just as it also links his private world with his public persona of which he was becoming increasingly aware in his later years. Picasso and the Art of Drawing ultimately showcases how the basis of the titular artist's style as painter, sculptor, printmaker, and designer was manifestly achieved through drawing. Distributed for Modern Art Press

During 1889, Belgian artist James Ensor (1860-1949) painted a monumental canvas that would be his magnum opus: The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889. The work is one of the most complex paintings ever painted. It was only 40 years after its completion that the monumental canvas was first publicly exhibited at the James Ensor retrospective at the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1929. Needless to say, therefore, that the exhibiting of Ensor's work in 1929 was for many a revelation. Until then it had been seen and was known only to a limited group of visitors and insiders. Between 1889 and 1929, a veritable revolution had taken place in the visual arts. Before and during World War I, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, and Dadaism all came into being. Few explanations can accommodate the full daring and frenzy of such a painting which chaotic composition and barbaric style seem revolutionary, and look far beyond the early 20th century. Since the purchase of the work in 1987 by the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), The Entry has acquired cult status. No other work depicts the notion of belgitude so aptly as The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889, and yet the painting can in the first place be regarded as a somewhat quirky but striking representation of Ensor's vision of humanity.

Penrose' wrote Andre Breton `est Surrealiste dans l'amitie' and `The Friendly Surrealist' is an apt description for the man who more than any other nurtured friendships and connections which introduced European Surrealism to the British art world. Roland Penrose embraced the fantasies and rebellions of the Surrealist movement through his friendships with artists such as Picasso, Man Ray, Miro, Ernst and Tapies. His own works, which often reveal the true emotions behind his relationships with his wives, Valentine Boue and Lee Miller, constitute an important contribution to British Surrealist art.