ABSTRACT ART AND SURREALISM


Unit Overview

In this unit you will study the methods of abstract artists and surrealists. Subject matter became unimportant in art. Who said that a picture had to be a picture of something? Why couldn’t it portray emotions and feelings instead?

I. Abstract Art and Surrealism

By the 20th century, art got rid of subject matter. No longer could a viewer see a painting and identify people or objects. In came floating shapes- some resembling creatures, others geometric blocks of color. Even Picasso and Braque included subjects in their work- it had just become harder to identify it. The leap to total abstract art removed any reference of identifiable objects.


Music was a guide for abstract artists. Many of them tried to capture musical compositions in their paintings. A Russian composer, Alexander Scriabin (1913), wrote music that was displayed with lightshows. He believed that each musical sound had its own color and could be played as light. Composers were able to sweep people off their feet without representing nature directly. Instruments do not imitate birds singing or babies laughing. Yet a concert-goer can imagine those things. If music could be abstract and emotionally charged, why not art?

Abstract Art and Surrealism PDF



Now answer questions 1-26.



II. Interpretations


Surrealism started as a literary and political movement but had a profound effect of art, photography, and film. Influenced by the work of Freud, is aimed to uncover the subconscious, using dreamlike imagery that challenged perceptions of reality.

Freud believed that, “a dream is a disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish.” He was the father of psychoanalysis, publishing The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. He believed that people’s unconscious thoughts and feelings could be brought to consciousness with free association and by dream analysis. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published “The Surrealist Manifesto” in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.”



  Salvador Dali, Insane Genius: The Early Years: Inventing Himself  [2:20]



Abstract artists, however, had stopped painting realistically. Piet Mondrian, for instance, believed that reality was behind the naturalistic world. For this reason, he abandoned forms that resembled the natural world. He refused to paint anything that looked life-like (or realistic) and representational. He developed a more simplified abstract style which he called Neo-Plasticism, a style restricted to the three primary colors, and to a grid of black vertical and horizontal lines on a white ground. He said that the naturalistic world “has veiled us from the true reality.”


Mondrian abstracted forms until all that was left was the “essence.” According to Mondrian, this essence is discovered through the use of two types of lines (horizontal and vertical), the primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) and three different tones (white, gray, and black). He used contrast to direct the eye- it automatically goes to the section of the painting with the largest plane of color.







Now answer questions 27-32.




III. Timeline

You are required to pick TWO works of art from each unit and add them to your timeline. When you have done so, you will upload your word document to the question section so that your teacher can check on it. Add on to the timeline you received in the first unit.





Now answer question 33.



Below are additional educational resources and activities for this unit.
 
Unit 17 Abstract Art and Surrealism (Fill in the Blank)Worksheet
 
Unit 17 Cornell Notes Worksheet