Surrealism was an artistic and literary movement dedicated to expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams. Aiming to free thought from the conscious control of reason, Surrealism became an incredibly male dominated group run by its founding member, André Breton. Breton was also the chief editor of La Révolution Surréaliste. This was a publication, which in 1929, circulated René Magritte’s I Do Not See The (Woman) Hidden In The Forest (figure 1). The collage consists of a group of photographs of Breton and other key surrealists such as Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst. These figures with their eyes closed became representative of the surrealist’s fascination with accessing the unconscious through the dream like state. But it is the painting in the middle of the collage that forms the initial focus of our attention. The image presents a nude woman, who in modestly covering her breasts, appears to be concealing herself from the viewer. Anne Marsh suggests that Magritte’s collage is perhaps the most literal rendition of the sexually driven male gaze'. The combination of the icon of the closed eyes and the female nude gives us access to imagining an unrestrained and audacious scale of male fantasies and desires within Surrealism.
This reference to woman as the ‘Other’ is not a new concept within art history. Woman is seen as offering closer access to this unconscious state yearned for by man and she thus becomes an emblem of male desire, a force against the rational and repressive in society. As in Magritte’s picture, woman is represented as being poised at the centre of male dreams. She is illustrated as a projection or as an object of men’s own dreams of femininity. Unfortunately, the very nature of Surrea...
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...rd: Routledge Critical Thinkers (London: Routledge Press, 2008)
Lusty, Natalya, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, (Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2007)
Lyford, Amy, Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetic of Post-World War One Reconstruction in France, (California: University of California Press, 2007)
Marsh, Anne, The Darkroom: Photography and The Theatre of Desire (Australia: Macmillan Art Publishers, 2003)
Rosemont, Penelope, Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (The Surrealist Revolution Series) (Texas: University of Texas Press, 1998)
Schroeder, Jonathan & Zwick, Detlev, Mirrors of Masculinity: Representation and Identity in Advertising Images: Consumption, Markets and Culture, (Volume 7: March 2004)
Stamelman, Richard, Convulsive Beauty: The Image of Woman in Surrealism, (Williamstown USA: Williams College Museum of Art, 1995)
Though the start of artistic expression cannot be pinpointed to a specific date, the growth of art and its complexity cannot be denied. Two complex pieces of art which will be compared and contrasted within this essay are Mary Cassatt’s Portrait of the Artist and Frida Kahlo’s Self Portrait with Monkey. Though Cassatt belonged the Impressionist movement (Streissguth 48) and Kahlo who was labeled as a member of the Surrealist movement, which she later denied (Stremmel, Kerstin, & Grosenick 1940), both paintings have an equal number of similarities as contrasting elements.
Woman in a Studio is a paragon of Picasso’s adaptive work that blends many different styles of art. In this particular work, Picasso combines the elements of analytical and synthetic cubism in order to develop a work that develops a figure resembling a woman. In this painting, Picasso depicts a woman with whom he has a connection. Through the utilization of geometric shapes and a monochromatic color scheme, Picasso creates an environment that forces the audience to thoroughly analyze the work in order to develop a complete understanding of the woman depicted in the painting. Through an analysis of the subject matter, the elements of the painting, and the emotions evoked by the painting, we are able to thoroughly analyze Woman in the Studio and understand its meaning and its presentation as a cubist work.
Surrealism, who has not heard this word nowadays? World of the dreams and everything that is irrational, impossible or grotesque, a cultural movement founded immediately after the First World War and still embraced nowadays by many artists. In order to understand it better it is necessary to look deeper into the work of two outstanding artists strongly connected with this movement, and for whom this style was an integral part of their lives.
René Magritte is a 20th century Belgian Artist. He was influenced by André Breton -a writer known as the founder of surrealism-for his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, Sigmund Freud-a neurologist-for his psychoanalysis that repetition is a sign of trauma. He studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris between 1916 and 1918.1 After leaving because he thought that it was a complete waste of time, and upon meeting Victor Servranckx-a fellow artist who introduced Magritte to futurism, cubism and purism-Jean Metzinger and Fernand Leger had a large influence on his early works of cubism.
Common sense seems to dictate that commercials just advertise products. But in reality, advertising is a multi-headed beast that targets specific genders, races, ages, etc. In “Men’s Men & Women’s Women”, author Steve Craig focuses on one head of the beast: gender. Craig suggests that, “Advertisers . . . portray different images to men and women in order to exploit the different deep seated motivations and anxieties connected to gender identity.” In other words, advertisers manipulate consumers’ fantasies to sell their product. In this essay, I will be analyzing four different commercials that focuses on appealing to specific genders.
Coontz, Stephanie. A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. New York: Basic Books, 2011. 42.
The development of modernist sentiments is largely the result of spasmodic cultural transformations and the ensuing creative exchanges between architects, modern artists and designers. For the purpose of research, this paper will solely deal with Surrealism, an important aspect of Modernism and chart its development through two contemporary Australian surrealists – James Gleeson and Sidney Nolan.
This paper identifies the ethical issues of how both men and women are portrayed in advertising, and argues that ads can be successful in generating sales without portraying women as objects, and without perpetuating that men must be masculine.
Advertising in American culture has taken on the very interesting character of representing our culture as a whole. Take this Calvin Klein ad for example. It shows the sexualization of not only the Calvin Klein clothing, but the female gender overall. It displays the socially constructed body, or the ideal body for women and girls in America. Using celebrities in the upper class to sell clothing, this advertisement makes owning a product an indication of your class in the American class system. In addition to this, feminism, and how that impacts potential consumer’s perception of the product, is also implicated. Advertisements are powerful things that can convey specific messages without using words or printed text, and can be conveyed in the split-second that it takes to see the image. In this way, the public underestimates how much they are influenced by what they see on television, in magazines, or online.
Many paintings and other artworks can be considered surreal. Surrealism is defined simply as "a 20th-century art form in which an artist or writer combines unrelated images or events in a very strange and dreamlike way." (Merriam-Webster). The artist Salvador Dali is a well-known surrealist painter. Astonishing examples of surrealism paintings by him are The Persistence of Memory, Swans Reflecting Elephants, and Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.
The aim of this essay is analyse women´s images in The Yellow Wallpaper and in The Awakening, since the two readings have become the focus of feminist controversy.
Rosemont, F. (ed.), 1978, André Breton. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, Pathfinder, New York, London, Montreal, Sydney.
122. - 25. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Goldman, Jane. A. A. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual. Cambridge, U.K., New York, USA. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 100-115 Gualtieri, Elena.
The groundbreaking Demoiselles d’Avignon was controversial not only for the way the women looked but also for the positions of the women. Although Picasso did not emphasize on detail, he “saw that the rational, often geometric breakdown if the human head and body employed by so many African artists could provide him with the starting point for his own re-appraisal of his subjects”(Cubism 53). “The naked women become inextricably bound up in a flux of shapes or planes which tip backwards and forwards from the two-dimensional surface to produce much the same sensation as an elaborate sculpture…”(Cubism 54).
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, exemplifies the model of art it proposes as it also offers the reader on how to read that very art. Following the main character, Stephen Dedalus, through life, Joyce uses Stephen’s immediate perception to convey how an artist views the world. The reader witnesses Stephen encountering everyday aspects of life as art—the words of a language lesson as poetry or the colors of a rose as beautiful. Through Stephen’s voyage and words, Joyce introduces the theory that “beauty” as a label for an object is not born from the actual physical object itself, but rather lies within the process one goes through when encountering the object. Joyce’s theory is also experienced by the reader as he or she encounters Stephen’s perceptions as well as the beauty of the poetic language and vivid description within Joyce’s narrative. The rhythmic patterns and stylistic sentences create a multitude of authorial voices that blend at various points in the novel involving Joyce, Stephen, and the reader.