ART HISTORY

Our class was assigned a group assignment as a final project for FTA411, Art History subject. My group, Group 4, was assigned to present on Surrealism and Cubism art movement. Below are the links to the video. Enjoy! Presentation: Part 1  , Part 2  , Part 3              Short film:  Surrealism artist, Salvador Dali

          Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early ’20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism. It proposed that the Enlightenment—the influential 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement that championed reason and individualism—had suppressed the superior qualities of the irrational, unconscious mind. Surrealism’s goal was to liberate thought, language, and human experience from the oppressive boundaries of rationalism.  Officially consecrated in Paris in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by the poet and critic André Breton (1896–1966), Surrealism became an international intellectual and political movement. The visual artists who first worked with Surrealist techniques and imagery were the German Max Ernst (1891–1976), the Frenchman André Masson (1896–1987), the Spaniard Joan Miró (1893–1983), and the American Man Ray (1890–1976).  The ...

          Cubism was one of the revolutionary art styles of the 20th century. It began around 1907 with Pablo Picasso’s painting titled Demoiselles D’Avignon which included elements of cubist style. The name ‘cubism’ derived from a comment made by a critic named Louis Vauxcelles who described Georges Braque's paintings as reducing everything to ‘geometric outlines, to cubes’. Cubism artists aimed to show different viewpoints at the same time and within the same space by breaking objects and figures down into distinct areas or planes and so suggest their three dimensional form. In doing so they were emphasizing the two-dimensional flatness of the canvas instead of creating the illusion of depth.            The Cubists saw the constraints of perspective as a challenge to advance. The fact that a picture drawn in perspentive could work from only one point of view limits their choices. As the picture was drawn from a settled position...