The avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism continue to have a huge influence on cultural practice, especially in contemporary art, with its obsession with sexuality, fetishism, and shock tactics. In this new treatment of the subject, Hopkins focuses on the many debates surrounding these movements: the Marquis de Sade's Surrealist deification, issues of quality (How good is Dali?), the idea of the 'readymade', attitudes towards the city, the impact of Freud, attitudes to women, fetishism, and primitivism. The international nature of these movements is examined, covering the cities of Zurich, New York, Berlin, Cologne, Barcelona, Paris, London, and recenlty discovered examples in Eastern Europe. Hopkins explores the huge range of media employed by both Dada and Surrealism (collage, painting, found objects, performance art, photography, film) , whilst at the same time establishing the aesthetic differences between the movements. He also examines the Dadaist obsession with the body-as-mechanism in relation to the Surrealists' return to the fetishized/eroticized body.
[...]... that human nature is fundamentally irrational, Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and André Masson conducted an often turbulent love affair with psychoanalysis, aiming to plumb the mysteries of the human mind For many people Dada and Surrealism represent not so much movements in 20th-century art history as ‘modern art’ incarnate Dada is seen as iconoclastic and confrontational;... Walter Mehring, Wieland and Helmut (later John) Heartfield, and George Grosz, were Communist sympathizers (the last three were card-carrying members of the Party) The other group, including Raoul 11 A historical overview German Dada Dada and Surrealism Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and Johannes Baader, were more sympathetic towards anarchism Anti-art in Berlin manifested itself in open opposition to the main... it as a kind of cultural esperanto, while Huelsenbeck stresses notions of rupture and renewal Both attitudes were key ingredients of Dada Beyond this, the word paradoxically stood for everything and nothing It amounted to a kind of absurd admixture of affirmation and negation, a kind of pseudo-mysticism Art was a dead religion Dada was born Duchamp’s antipathy towards the ‘craft’ associations of visual... on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and a new order of things that would restore Dada and Surrealism the balance between heaven and hell It is interesting that a fundamentally constructive note is struck by Arp’s talk of a curative role for art and a ‘new order of things’ here Other Dadaists would be considerably more negative, seeking to destroy art as a concept Arp himself had an almost... clientele and their allegiances It was born early in 1919 with the arrival of Picabia, Dada s self-appointed ambassador of nihilism He had just spent a period in Switzerland during which he had turned up in Zurich, representing, for Zurich Dada s chronicler Hans Richter, ‘an experience of death’ Zurich Dada in its final phase was nihilistic in any case, with Walter Serner declaiming a particularly bleak Last... its participants, figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, and Raoul Hausmann, counterposed their love of paradox and effrontery to the insanities of a world-gone-mad, as the First World War raged in Europe Surrealism, Dada s artistic heir, was officially born in 1924 and had virtually become a global phenomenon by the time of its demise in the later... Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld, a pseudonym adopted by Alfred Grunewald with the surname translating as ‘money bags’, an oblique reference to Grunewald’s banker father Cologne Dada s 13 A historical overview Elsewhere in Germany there were further Dada outposts Hanover, considerably more conservative and sedate than Berlin, was home to Kurt Schwitters Friendly with Berlin artists such as Hausmann and. .. text to a ‘ready-made’ object to a photograph, might be used to give Dada or Surrealist ideas embodiment In Dada a basic distrust for the narrowness of art frequently translated into open antagonism towards its values and institutions At this point, therefore, we should put generalities aside and examine the overall historical outlines of Dada A discussion of Surrealism will arise out of this Dada s origins:... familiar Zurich style Tzara himself arrived in Paris in January 1920 but over the next couple of years Breton, whose tendency to seek coherence of outlook gradually alienated him from the anarchic Picabia, as well as Tzara, inevitably assumed avant-garde leadership like your politicians: nothing like your artists: nothing Fundamentally, Paris Dada, like Dada manifestations elsewhere, waged war... broadly analogous to the New York Dadaists, eventually gave way to the apparently seamless surfaces in which John Heartfield specialized Heartfield’s slick montages made use of essentially Surrealist techniques of juxtaposition for savagely satirical purposes After Berlin Dada s demise in the immediate aftermath of its major public manifestation, the Dada Fair’ in Berlin of June 1920, Heartfield was .