Week 4 Lecture

Editor's Notes

• #4: Weimar Republic: -nickname given to German state from 1919-1933, named for city of Weimar where new constitution was drafted in 1919 following Germany ’s defeat in WWI -it was first attempt to establish a liberal democracy in Germany, which failed with the ascent of Hitler in 1933 and the Third Reich -following WWI, Germany in a state of near chaos and violence, and depression as soldiers are returning home from war, many severely disfigured Friedrich Ebert was the Social Democratic President responsible for murders of Spartacist League, headed by Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebnicht, Marxists and socialists, who participated in Berlin revolution of 1919. She and other revolutionaries were tortured and killed. Ebert was held responsible for their murders.
• #5: Aesthetic vs. anti-aesthetic
• #14: After it was shut down in 1933, many of its teachers (including its last director, Mies van der Rohe) emigrated to the U.S. and consequently its influence is even more conspicuous in the many buildings, art and architecture schools (Mies ’ IIT campus) and furniture and fixtures knockoffs
• #19: Max Ernst was a WWI vet (awarded medal of honor), German hero, darling boy of surrealism, ladies man, who studied art history and psychiatry at Bonn University -his influences were broad (art of the insane, as you read, 19th century storybooks, art history) and he practiced collage, painting, etc -invented two surrealist techniques, which are like automatism in their process, frottage – an image produced through rubbing; grattage – an image produced through scraping -he was such a pivotal figure in surrealism—Breton called his show in Paris in 1921, the first surrealist exhibition -he was also influenced by the dreamworld and the possibilities of a child ’s imagination -Ernst had an alter-ego named Loplop, who often presents Ernsts work within the work itself. This character refers to his childhood (since children and their dreams figure prominently in his work) when he says that the death of his beloved pet bird coincided with the birth of his younger brother, creating a kind of bird man in his mythology, Loplop
• #20: Breton paid homage to the “surrealist” artists that preceded him in his surrealist manifesto in 1924 and in his text “Surrealism and Painting” later, citing the work of Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Andre Masson, Joan Miro, Max Ernst as surrealist in their technique Breton was a poet, who served in WWI as a medical orderly in a ward of shellshock patients in Paris; because of this interaction with trauma victims and because of his innate sensibility, he was swayed by psychoanalytical ideas and its emphasis on dreams and the unconscious mind He also had a love of absurdity. He had mingled with the Dadaists during their heyday, taking their anarchist tendencies even further, Breton once said that the ultimate surrealist act was to fire a gun randomly into a crowd, a statement which seems tragically relevant today and comes off in the very least, as reckless and misanthropic. Perhaps it can be attributed to this stint in the military and general disillusionment with humanity.. Breton was a force whose occasional tyrannical rule over the surrealist movement caused rifts and the movement ’s eventual dissolution, he was dubbed the “Pope” of surrealism because of this near despotic rule.
• #21: Much of surrealist practice and revolt from the norm was dedicated to overcoming bourgeois notions of repressed and forbidden sexual desire and was therefore built on the bodies of women, including the work of Man Ray, whose images appear in the first La Revolution Surrealiste , Hans Bellmer ’s specially constructed doll made of grotesquely reconstructed female body parts, and later the Belgian surrealist, Rene Magritte’s works, such as “The Rape” (castration anxiety? – the “vagina dentata”). Some surrealists fetishized the body, in fact violently attacked it at times, which could be attrib to the throngs of disfigured soldiers returning from war, or their own experiences in WWI.
• #24: Grosz, an avowed Communist and supporter of the working class, was a painter, illustrator and caricaturist whose obvious disdain for the German bourgeoisie is revealed heree . He documented the rise of fascism in Germany until forced into exile by Hitler and ended up in US teaching in New York and influenced a younger generation of artists (Bearden et al). He didn ’t return to Germany until 1954.