Other Modern Art Movements

Pop Art
It is a passive conception of the social reality. It does not express the creativity of the popular classes but their non-creativity. The origin of the movement is in Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who are considered as Neo-Dadaists. Painting becomes again something that evokes. The mere fact of taking a real object and to put it in the painting is an instinctive manipulation of reality. Given that it is a urban art the images end capsized in the painting, unite to the matter or giving a phantom appearance.

These artists, the same as the Dadaists before, take elements from the reality and incorporate them to the work of art. We can find glued elements or photos mix with the painting. The language is that of the publicity, very easy to understand. One of the most famous representatives of the movement is Warhol, to whom we can add Rosenquists, with his elements taken of daily life; Tom Wesselman, who incorporates other elements so that we can find ourselves in front of installations; Roy Lichtenstein, who portrays the world as in a comic; Claes Oldenburg, who makes enormous sculptures of daily use objects; Christo, famous because his wrappings of buildings or natural elements and his installations.

Op Art
Optical Art was born in the 1950’s. It is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing. Op art is a perceptual experience related to how vision functions. It is a dynamic visual art, stemming from a discordant figure-ground relationship that causes the two planes to be in a tense and contradictory juxtaposition. Op Art is created in two primary ways. The first, and best known method, is the creation of effects through the use of pattern and line. Often these paintings are black and white, or otherwise grisaille.

The works are based on the repetition of some elements, mainly lineal, or simple geometric forms and through the colour give to them the appearance of having a third dimension or of being in movement. One of the most famous artist related to this movement is Vasarely.

Kinetic Art
Kinetic art is art that contains moving parts or depends on motion for its effect. The moving parts are generally powered by wind, a motor or the observer. The term kinetic sculpture refers to a class of art made primarily from the late 1950s through 1960s. Kinetic art was first recorded by the sculptors Gabo and Pevsner.
The American Alexander Calder invented the mobile, consisting of a delicately balanced wire armature from which sculptural elements are suspended. In common with other types of kinetic art, kinetic sculptures have parts that move or that are in motion. The motion of the work can be provided in many ways: mechanically through electricity, steam or clockwork; by utilizing natural phenomena such as wind or wave power; or by relying on the spectator to provide the motion, by doing something such as cranking a handle. Kinetic art encompasses a wide variety of overlapping techniques and styles.

Graffiti
It began in the 1970’s. It is a type of deliberate marking on property that can take the form of pictures, drawings, words or any decorations inscribed on any surface outside walls and sidewalks. Even if graffiti have always existed, young New Yorkers belonging to the black and Puerto Rican communities started adopting tags (signatures made with aerosol sprays).

The first modern identified tagged in New York was Taki, a Greek-American artist. At the same time, the graphs also made their appearance. These were real urban frescoes painted with spray-paint. Futura 2000, Dust and Pink were recognised although their celebrity was limited to the hip-hop culture. Basquiat and Haring started to work in the street and the subway but their work was renowned and reputed. They won instant critical acclaim and attracted the attention of influential art dealers.

The difference between tagging and graffiti is not clear but some say that while tagging is gang-motivated and meant as vandalism or viewed as too vulgar or controversial to have public value, graffiti can be viewed as creative expression, whether charged with political meaning or not.

Land Art
It is an art movement which emerged in America in the late 1960 and early 1970s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked. Sculptures are not placed in the landscape; rather the landscape is the very means of their creation. The works frequently exist in the open, located well away from civilization, left to change and erosion under natural conditions. Many of the first works, created in the deserts of Nevada, New Mexico, Utah or Arizona were ephemeral in nature and now only exist as video recordings or photographic documents.

Artist belonging to this group are De Maria, Heizer and Goldsworthy.

Arte Povera
The term 'Arte Povera' was introduced by the Italian art critic and curator, Germano Celant, in 1967. His pioneering texts and a series of key exhibitions provided a collective identity for a number of young Italian artists based in Turin, Milan, Genoa and Rome. They were working in radically new ways, breaking with the past and entering a challenging dialogue with trends in Europe and America. As the Italian miracle of the post-war years collapsed into a chaos of economic and political instability, Arte Povera erupted from within a network of urban cultural activity. Arte Povera described a process of open-ended experimentation. In the wake of the iconoclastic artistic innovations of Italian precursors Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, artists were able to begin from a zero point, working outside formal limitations. Arte Povera therefore denotes not an impoverished art, but an art made without restraints, a laboratory situation in which a theoretical basis was rejected in favour of a complete openness towards materials and processes.
The artists associated with Arte Povera worked in many different ways. They painted, sculpted, took photographs and made performances and installations, creating works of immense physical presence as well as small-scale, ephemeral gestures. They employed materials both ancient and modern, man-made and 'raw', revealing the elemental forces locked within them as well as the fields of energy that surround us. Members of this group are Anselmo, Pistoletto and Metz

Minimalism
Minimal Art emerged as a movement in the 1950s and continued through the Sixties and Seventies. It is a term used to describe paintings and sculpture that thrive on simplicity in both content and form, and seek to remove any sign of personal expressivity. The aim of Minimalism is to allow the viewer to experience the work more intensely without the distractions of composition, theme and so on.
There are examples of the Minimalist theory being exercised as early as the 18th century when Goethe constructed an Altar of Good Fortune made simply of a stone sphere and cube. But the 20th century sees the movement come into its own. From the 1920s artists such as Malevich and Duchamp produced works in the Minimalist vein but the movement is known chiefly by its American exponents such as Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Ellsworth Kelly and Donald Judd who reacted against Abstract Expressionism in their stark canvases, sculptures and installations.
Minimal Art is related to a number of other movements such as Conceptual Art in the way the finished work exists merely to convey a theory, Pop Art in their shared fascination with the impersonal and Land Art in the construction of simple shapes. Minimal Art proved highly successful and has been enormously influential on the development of art in the 20th century. Representative artists are Frank Stella and Ellsword Kelly .

Abstract Avant-Garde after 1945

There are several different movements that share their not representative depiction in the works of art. Among them there are Abstract Expressionism, Informalism, Art Brut, CoBrA and Lyrical Abstraction.

Abstract Expressionism
It developed between the 1940’s and the early 1960’s. It was an American post WWII movement. After seeing the images and photographs of the war, the artists decide to explore colour and shape. These works of American artists were a kind of competition with the Europeans who translated to the USA as refugees during and after the war. The artist combine the emotional intensity and self-expression of the Expressionist with the anti-figurative images of other Avant-Garde movements. It can be divided in two groups: Action Painting and Colour Field and Hard-Edge. The movements found some parallel in other European movements.

Action Painting is a term that was used by the first time to describe Jackson Pollock work. This artist, the same as Franz Kline or Willem de Kooning used their psyche as the driving force for their works. The canvas was seen as an arena and painting was irrational, instinctive and impulsive.

Colour Field and Hard-Edge are two formal trends in American abstraction in the early 60’s. Colour Field consists of large coloured areas, without signs or forms that the eye can catch. Colour was used without any perspective, producing a sensation of impressive size. The shades of colour were diluted into the canvas. On the other hand, Hard-Edge described some works in which colourful atmospheres were emphasised. The works have clearly defined outlines and edges and the precision clarify the compositions. Representative of this movement are Rothko, Barnet Newman, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Kenneth Nolan.

Informalism
After WWII some painters contemplated geometric abstraction as a load and the cold intellectualism, out of touch with the reality of poverty and despair. Spontaneity and authenticity were more meaningful to the new generation of artist. From this reaction was born a new painting style fully abstract that was the result of the artist’s emotional and physical engagement. The term was coined to classify the work of Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, Jean Fautier and Alberto Burri.

The informalists were not interested in having a total control over the processes of artistic work but in emphasizing spontaneity, irrationality and freedom of form. They sought out rebellious tools and paints, capable of producing things accidental and unexpected. He aimed at escaping from the prison of traditional art.

Art Brut
This style was created by Dubuffet at the beginning of 1945 out of the official culture. He focused in the art of the insane. It is inspired in the art production of a insane asylum. Dubuffet created the Collection de l´Art Brut, containing works of these non professional artists. In Dubuffet’s word Art Brut was “those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses- where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere- are, because of these very facts, more precious than the production of professions. After a certain familiarity with these flourishing of an exalted feverishness, live so fully and so intensely by their authors, we can not avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade”.

CoBrA
It was a post WWII European Avant-Garde movement. The name comes from the three home cities: Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, which are respectively the head, body and tail of the cobra snake. The group was founded by Asger Jorn, Alechinsky and Karel Appel among others.

When Europe was devastated these artists wanted to unite their forces and react to the inhumanity of a civilization based on reason and science. The group has a political and social dimension based on a criticism of the Cold War society. In the group met old members of the Amalgamation Dutch group, the Danish Host and the Belgian Revolutionary Surrealist. Their values are nonconformity and spontaneity. Their inspiration were children drawings, the alienated and folk art, motifs from Nordic mythology, Marxism. They rejected erudite art and all official art events. They aimed at expressing a combination of the Surrealstic unconscious with the romantic forces of nature by using an abstract language. They were distinguish by painting with brilliant colour, violent brushwork and distorted human figures.

Lyrical Abstraction
It is a French style of abstract painting that developed between 1945 and 1960. It is very close to the Art Informel and to the Abstract Expressionism. It was created by the painter Georges Mathie who wanted to separate cold geometric abastraction from a hot organic and lyrical form of abstraction. Hans Hartung is one of the members of this group. For him painting means streaking, hatching and brushing until the canvas is throughly invaded. He did, disguised and erased an image until all that was left were the deletions.

Figurative Avant-Garde after 1945

The New Objectivity and Magic Realism have their beginnings in an exhibition hold in 1925. Their common characteristic is the representation of domestic indoors or scenes of every day life expressed in an unreal dimension.

The first representatives of the New Objectivity trend to imitate ancient German models but they depicted people and things with a cold and striking precision. They tried to take some elements of the expressionist too, depicting greed, lust, rage, brutality, spinelessness and cowardice, this is, what they understood as the portrait of a person.

Authors belonging to this New Objectivity are Max Beckman, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Edward Hopper or Balthus. Beckman, Dix and Grosz are more linked to the German expressionism, while the others created very personal works. Hopper painted a urban world, full of silence, in an space unreal and metaphysical that created in the spectator an impression of the subject being far from them. His compositions are geometrical, with sophisticated lights, always cold and artificial, and with simplified details. The scene is always almost desert, with few images what underlines the impression of loneliness.

The images of the French Balthus create a cold and sombre atmosphere. He was influenced by the realists and his portraits show a gesture of great reflection and concentration. He frequently depicted familiar scenes or images in which very young girl are presents. These girls were considered to be the only pure characters but there is something provocative in them. With the time he evolved to a more simple depiction.

The Magic Realism has two different aspects, the social and the socialist realism. By Social Realism we understand art works which chronicle the everyday conditions of the working classes and are critical of the social environment that causes these conditions. This style was broadly accepted during the years following the 1929 crisis in the USA. Among the representatives of this group are Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, both of them muralists.

In Paris, after the end of WWII many artists of left-wing focused on depicting the dramatic conditions of the working-class lives, their social plight, but workers, builders, men and women, capable of building a better world. Some members of this group were Picasso, Leger, Buffet and Gruber.

Social Realism is not very different from Socialist Realism. The main difference relies on the fact that Socialist Realism tends to advertise revolution and it is linked to the adherence to party doctrine.

Hyper Realism is other trend of the same period and it has a good representative in the Spanish Antonio Lopez, with urban views that may appear as photography given the accuracy to the model.

In more recent times other artists have developed a realistic approach to art, this can be the case of Lucian Freud, and amazing portraitist, or Fernando Botero, with a very particular aesthetic, painting fat images through which he represents the reality of his Colombia or makes strong critics against any kind of violence, denouncing injustices all over the world and presenting art as a compromise and a weapon for fighting in favour of people.

Avant-Garde Sculpture (II)

The decisive step towards modern sculpture consisted of the addition of combination and construction to previous methods of sculpting and modelling. The use of sheet iron and wires was connected with it, in particular after Picasso’s first works. Picasso did not invent iron sculptures, although it may be true that there is a Spanish tradition behind them. The Spaniard Pablo Gargallo, who shared a studio with Picasso in Barcelona and followed him to Paris was already cutting figures and masks out of sheet copper. Given the contemporary general interest in tribal art, he may have linked the Spanish tradition with observation of hammered and chased African metalwork. Later Gargallo made it his own speciality.

Julio Gonzalez did great progress with his sculpture probably when Picasso asked for his expert knowledge of smithing and welding to execute his projects. Gonzalez works established the new art form of iron sculpture. Owing to the material and the technique, the volume of a figure was reproduced by rods reaching into and surrounding space, by surfaces and rounded walls. This involved that inner penetration of figure and space that Gonzalez made the principle of his sculpture. The representations became, if not exactly abstract, at least figurative spatial diagrams.

Calder was the artist who produced the most delicate wire sculpture. This mechanical engineer, who learnt to paint in New York, settled in Paris where he invented the toy like party mobile wire figures more suited to him. He put into practice the futuristic programme of sculpture made mobile with the help of hand- or motor-driven apparatuses.

Giacometti was one of the main sculptors of the avant-garde. He emerged as with a new vision of sculpture which could have imitations, but no successors. During his formation he knew Rodin’s work, and when he went to Paris he entered in contact with all the previous avant-garde sculpture attempts, from ethnic works to those of the most important artists of the moment (Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi). He entered in contact with the surrealist and due to this his sculptures live because of their significant plastic formulation and the endless possible ways of interpreting them. His work in the thirties acquired the disturbing dimension which characterizes the Surrealism.

From 1935 to 1945 Giacometti sought to reproduce the outward appearance of figures and head as we see them in reality: in the distance, in space, as a part of a much larger field of vision. He strove to introduce perspective into sculpture, at first making use of the methods employed by painters, such as a decrease in size and vaguer definition as the distance increases, large bases to set the figures off. He made many studies of passers-by in the street and after models in the studio and he transferred the shorthand stile of his drawings to sculpture. He discovered that making distant figures smaller was an unsatisfactory way of recreating reality. He found that the more accurate way of depicting people was their extreme elongation and slimness. His images are armatures of iron rods and plaster. His work sometimes remembers the finish used by Rodin in Caen’s Bourgeoisies.

Avant-Garde Sculpture (I)

While Rodin was still being the most famous sculptor of the moment, a number of progressive younger artists were calling his art in question. The academic and official style was firmly founded in middle-class taste and Rodin’s works belonged to it but, at the same time, his pathos style and the literary nature of his bronzes were making a way for other principles. Rodin influenced with two elements: first, his treatment of the torso and second, his victory over symbolism. In addition to this, some critics added the importance of Egyptian sculpture. An example of the mix of these influences is The Mediterranean, by Maillol, that can be considered pure sculpture.

One of the things that led modern sculptors to break with the rules of the Western art tradition was the discovery that the images of the primitive people in the colonial empires of Oceania and Africa were not merely exotic curiosities, examples of naïf art or barbaric fetishes, but creative works with the same consideration as the classical models. These products were known in Europe since mid 19th century.

The first European artists to study Oceanian an African objects as works of art were not sculptors but painters: Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Kirchner. They adopted these models in both their paintings and their sculpture works, with images with short legs, thick thighs, long torso and big heads. Some artist adapted the models while others just imitated them. Examples of both trends are Modigliani and Brancusi respectively.

Modigliani created heads of women inspired by an elegant refinement of African and Buddhist art were in a style very much his own. Cut from ashlar stones stolen in public building, they should all be regarded as sculptured fragments of architecture. His production included pillar-like heads, kneeling caryatids and standing nude women.

Brancusi did not manage to make so personal an adaptation. Since he did not want to imitate certain African figures too openly, he split them into fragments. In some way he tried to adapt primitive modernity to the modernity of the technical era.

Cubism
Picasso did his personal approach to sculpture from the Cubist language. His idea was to hold view of each element from different angles of the surface parts with regard to each other as a last manifestation of Rodin’s impressionism. It served to intensify the multiple broken gleams of light on the bronze.

In the case of Picasso works of sculpture, the term that should be used is construction. For the themes a new category has to be defined, for nothing here is represented as corresponds to tradition, such as a human figure or an animal or an allegory of them or even a still life. Other characteristic is that this sculpture has no base and can neither stand nor lie, but hangs on the wall and in this sense it is more like a picture than a relief. The origin of these sculpture may be the papier collés used by Picasso who one day decided to substitute the material by lead and wires. Picasso could have collaborated with Julio Gonzalez when beginning with these works.

These sculptures extend into our real space, for they let the eye penetrate into what is in reality the invisible space of the object (the first sculpture Picasso did was a guitar). For these works Picasso was inspired in African art. He took from this, apart from the idea the assemblage of concave and convex shapes. The objects represented are not useful but they are the plastic representation of them.

Futurism
The artists of this movement dealt with came to modern sculpture by way of academicism and Rodin. They found their inspiration in their knowledge of archaic and non-European sculpture, together with the added stimulus of modern painting spearheaded from Paris.

Futurist sculpture had a different origin. It is the manifesto of a total break with the past. The creation of forms was preceded by theories and principles. This art was seen as matter whose emanations of energy and flashes of movement would be swept up into the surrounding atmosphere.

The characteristics of the movement are evident in Umberto Boccioni, with his Development of a Bottle in Space and Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. For him movement could be as beautiful as any manifestation of classical art. His figures are influenced by Rodin, Gaudi and Cubism. Its representation of movement in space marks no advance on the breakdown of movement in the chrono-photographs. He kept to the traditional concept in which the volume of a body is a modelled mass, more or less closed.

More influential than the works were the ideas for a sculpture of the future which Boccioni set in their manifesto. Some ideas are: Sculpture needs to find new sources of emotion, not copy the academicism. The objects will be given life through their extension into space tangible, systematic and plastic. Sculpture will be produced by the systematized vibrations of light and the interpenetration of planes. Transparent planes of glass or celluloid, sheets of metal, wire, electric lights inside and out, will go to indicate the planes, trends, tones and halftones of a new reality. Colouring can step up the emotional force of the images. The materials do not need to be the traditional, but the artist can mix as many as he wants in each sculpture, if with it can gain movement.

Other authors related to this movement are Duchamp-Villon, Brancusi, who has a very personal sculpture and Archipenko. Brancusi can not be held responsible for the Art Deco style, but he is for the pseudo-mythical and quasi-mystical trimming in which his works have been wrapped. Archipenko stands out as the highest of the higher sculptors. He is famous because of his sculpto-paintings.

Dadaism
Marcel Duchamp was a middling painter with an ingenious turn of mind that has made him one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. After the first experiments of Cubism and Futurism, he took the front fork of a bicycle with its wheel, set it upside down on a studio stool and signed this object construction with his name as a work of art. This new concept of art was promptly taken over by individual artists in other countries.

The artists of the Dada movement in Germany (Arp, Ernst, Schwitters) and later of French Surrealism produced relief pictures. The use of unartistic materials and unpainterly strong colours forms apart of their art of dispute. The same as classical freezes were painted in bright colours, they coloured their creations. Aiming at creating a work of art as a harmonious whole, assemblages and relieves of outstanding beauty were constantly produced in spite of their intention to shock.

Constructivism
Tatlin created the link between Picasso and the Russian constructivism. They gave the western artistic revolution a new direction influenced equally by icons and Russian folk art, and the combination of cosmic speculations and radical living revolution. Tatlin took a radical step from representational to non-representational sculpture. The bits of wood, metal and glass that he assembled represent nothing; they are material forms in space. Some of his works needed the walls as a support but others were suspended in space by curved metal rods or wires spanning the corner of the room. He called them counter-reliefs or wounter-corner-reliefs.

Other artists involved in this movement are Gabo and Pevsner. Gabo used materials that gave the impression of transparency, particularly in his busts. Pevsner reproduced Picasso’s cubists painting of female nudes as transparent relief constructions, using curved celluloid surfaces.

Surrealism

It was an artistic movement that brought together artists, thinkers and researchers. They were involved in a hunt of sense of expression of the unconscious. They were searching for the definition of a new aesthetic, new humankind, and new social order. Their forerunners were the Italian Metaphysical painters, mainly Giorgio de Chirico, and they also received the influence of the Symbolism and Dadaism.

It came into being after the French poet Andre Breton 1 published Manifeste du Surrealisme. Breton suggested that rational thought was repressive to the powers of creativity and imagination and thus inimical to artistic expression. He admired Freud and its concept of the subconscious. It is closely related to some forms of abstract art.

At the end of World War I Tristan Tzara, leader of the Dada, wanted to attack society through scandal.He believed that society that creates the monstrosity of war do not deserve art so he decided to create an anti-art, full of ugliness instead of beauty. Tzara wanted to offend the new industrial commercial world of the bourgeoisie. His victims did not feel insulted. They saw this art as a reaction against old art. The result was the opposite to its original one because anti-art became art.

One group of artists did not follow Tzara´s ideas. The Surrealist movement gained momentum after the Dadá. It was led by Breton. The artists researched and studied the work of Freud and Jung. Some of the artists expressed themselves in the abstract tradition while others used the symbolic tradition. The two forms of expression formed two distinct trends: automatism and veristic surrealism.

Automatists
Artists interpreted it as referring to a suppression of consciousness in favour of the subconscious. They were more focused on feeling and less analytical. They understood Automatism as the automatic way in which the images of the subconscious reach the conscience. They believed that images should not be burdened with meaning. They saw the academic discipline of art as intolerant of the free expression of feeling. They felt form which had dominated the history of art, was a culprit in that intolerance. They believed abstractionism was the only way to bring to life the images of the subconscious. Coming from the Dada tradition, these artists linked scandal, insult and irreverence toward the elite’s freedom. They continued to believe that lack of form was a way to rebel against them.

Veristic Surrealists
They interpreted automatism to mean allowing the images of the subconscious to surface undisturbed so that their meaning could be deciphered through analysis. They wanted to faithfully represent these images as a link between the abstract spiritual realities and the real forms of the material world. To them the object stood as a metaphor for an inner reality. Through metaphor the concrete world could be understood, not only by looking at the objects, but also by looking into them. They saw academic discipline and form as the means to represent the images of the subconscious with veracity. The images would easily dissolve into the unknown. They hoped to find a way to follow the images of the subconscious until the conscience could understand their meaning. The language of the subconscious is the image. The consciousness had to learn to decode that language so it could translate it into its own language of words. Later they branched out into three other groups.

In the works of surrealist we find the legacy of Bosch, Brueguel, William Blake and the symbolic painters of the 19th century, in addition to the perennial questioning of philosophy, the search of psychology and the spirit of mysticism. It is a work based on the desire to permit the forces that created the world to illuminate our vision. They must allow us to consciously develop our human potential.

Characteristics
It was highly influenced by the psychoanalysis: images are as confusing and startling as those of dreams and can have a realistic, though irrational style, precisely describing dreamlike fantasies.
Sometimes they invented spontaneous techniques, modelled upon the psychotherapeutic procedure of free association as a means to eliminate conscious control in order to express the working of the unconscious mind, such as exquisite corpse.
Artists
Some of the representatives of this movement are: Marx Ernst, Frida Kahlo, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Oscar Dominguez.

Techniques
Surrealism has the same lack of prejudice of Dadaism both in the use of photographic procedures and object production out of their normal use. Traditional techniques were used, because those can be appropriate for depicting imaginations

Max Ernst
He reached to the deepest critic of the form as a depiction and the style as something unitary. He used any technique that would be useful for transmitting his ideas. He used collage and frottage. His work is frequently a pile of rubbish of bourgeois culture.

Joan Miro
He used symbolic keys to depict the unconscious. His principle is not the organic world. His world is simple, clear. His mythology is easy, transparent. His painting is unstressed, freely chromatic, without equilibrium among signs and colours .

Hans Arp
He was previously involved in the Dadaism. He depicted organic forms, both in painting and sculpture. He used geometric shapes, orthogonal images and continuously curve forms, concave and convex.


Yves Tanguy
He invented the anti-Nature with never ending landscapes, planet like settings, lack of light and sun and remains of organic life such as bones, mummified fruits, fossils and shells.

Salvador Dali
His view is full of sexual connotations and his works are highly rhetorical, with a mix of lubricous and holy. He overcame cynically the bolshevism. He represent an ambiguous mix of reaction and anarchy. His compositions are very complicated.

Rene Magritte
He is the artist who worked in a deepest way the lack of logic of the image. He invented the anti-history. He discovered the non-sense of the normal. He created with great detail and realism images of ambiguous significance that could have a double sense.

Expansion
Other artist contributed to the expansion of the Surrealism, equally in Europe and in the United States. Soon it appeared as a way of eluding the reality of the problems through ambiguity and paradox. The movement gained prestige with the adhesion of artists such as Picasso. The analytical cubism, discomposing the objects did a similar work as that of the Surrealism.

Dadaism

It is a post World War I cultural movement that appeared in visual arts, Literature (mainly poetry), Theatre and Graphic design. It was a protest against the barbarism of the War. Dadaists believed War was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both: Art and everyday society.
Dadaist works are characterized by its deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. It influenced on later movements including Surrealism.

According to its proponents, Dadá was not art, it was anti-Art. For everything that art stood for, Dadá was to represent the opposite. Dadça supposed that where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dadá ignored them. If art is to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strives to have no meaning. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dadá offends.

Interpretation of Dadá is dependent entirely on the viewer.This movement was highly influential in Modern Art. It became a commentary on art and the world, thus becoming art itself.

The artists had become disillusioned by Art, Art History and History in general. Many of them were veterans of World War I. They had grown cynical of humanity after seeing what men were capable of doing to each other on the battlefields of Europe. Members of the movement were: Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Marx Ernst, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters.

They became attracted to a nihilistic view of the world. They thought that nothing mankind had achieved was worthwhile, not even Art. They created an Art in which chance and randomness formed the basis of creation. The basis of Dadá is nonsense. With the order of the world destroyed by World War I, Dadáa was a way to express the confusion that was felt by many people as their own world was turned upside down.

They took normal objects but they put them in such a way that they were completely useless.These objects received the name of `ready made´. In paintings they tend to glue objects to the images, making of everything a kind of machine, something mechanic, no human.

Metaphysical Painting

This Italian Avant-Garde art movement was born in Ferrara in 1917 with Carlo Carrá and Giorgio de Chirico. The word metaphysical is core to the poetic of the movement. They depicted a dreamlike imagery with figures and objects seemingly frozen in time. The artists accepted the representation of the visible world in a traditional perspective space.

There is something strange in their works: unusual arrangements of human beings and dummy-like models; objects in strange, illogicl contexts; unreal lights and colours; unnatural static of still figures. They were opposed to Futurism and they had more than a new way of painting a new way of seeing things.

The logic of their works was different: deserted squares; silent, rigidly rendered buildings, colonnades and shadows, trains pasing away in the distance; clocks and statues. There is never any precise hint in the paintings about the place or moment of the scene. The scenes are full of eventless, tome of silence, imminence and enigma. All that generated a new reality which goes beyond the meaning of the things presented by creating a sense of expectation and mistery and bonded with the unconscious mind.

This movement may appear as a reaction against Cubism and Futurism. It may seem strange that many of the achievements of 20th century Italian art came during the rise of Fascism, and Metaphysical painting is not an exception. It settled the premises of Surrealism.
The main members of this movement were Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrá, Giorgio Morandi, Italo Savino, Luigi Filippo Tibertelly, Ardengo Soffici.