From Monet to Warhol - 5: Surrealism, Pop Art
at the Goulandris Foundation, Athens.
This is the last post on this exhibition. If you want to see the previous posts, you can go here for Impressionism, here for Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, here for Japonisme and Nabis, and here for the Unclassifiables. If you do not wish to read the introduction to this post again, move down to the Surrealism section.
A wonderful exhibition, which gave me great pleasure. Firstly because it was great seeing paintings that I had seen before and loved. Secondly because some of it was new to me, and this includes artists I had not come across before, artists like Maurice Denis whose work was such a pleasant surprise.
The ensemble of eighty three works of forty five artists, mostly paintings, which is on loan from the Swiss private collection, was assembled over three generations, affording us the opportunity to retrace the history of modern art from the 1880s until the present day.
Most of the major movements, currents and trends that have marked the evolution of painting are touched upon here in varying degrees of detail: Impressionism, Symbolism, Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Japonisme, Synthetism, the Nabis, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. They reflect the increasing changes imposed on perspective, colour and figuration, as well as the historical context in which they were conceived.
Surrealism:
In 1924 a group of young European artists and intellectuals gathered in Paris and decided to create a new artistic movement. Under the aegis of Andre Breton who drew up their founding manifesto, it expressed their refusal to allow logic a central role in the course of their lives that must henceforth be ruled by the power of imagination or chance. The term Surrealism, first pronounced a few years before by Guillaume Apollinaire, was chosen to designate their line of thinking.
Breton organised and managed this movement with an iron hand, and it would reach its summit in the 1920s and 1930s, expanding internationally. However, the increasing disagreements within the group led its members, notably Max Ernst, Man Ray and Rene Magritte, to take their own separate paths.
Max Ernst, Yellow Seashell, 1928, (oil with graphite on paper on canvas)
Domesticated Egg is part of an ensemble of 37 works - readymades, drawings and photographs - that Man Ray assembled under the title Objects of My Affection. Through this selection the artist confirmed that he had not lost his colourful sense of humour and reclaimed his lotyalty to the Dada spirit of his beginnings.
Pop Art:
At the end of the 1950s in New York, as well as in London and Paris, young artists wanted to put an end to the supremacy of Abstraction by reintegrating in a thundering way, figuration and the everyday life into their work. This collective effort was dubbed Nouveau Realisme in France, and Pop Art in the USA and met with resounding success.
Not one of the painters affiliated with this movement acknowledged belonging to a group. Nevertheless, the points in common that connect works of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselman, without mentioning Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg, make them the representatives of a new art.
Andy Warhol, Man Ray, 1974, (screeprint in colours on wove paper)
Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke, 1965, (porcelain enamel on steel)
Roy Lichtenstein, Yellow and Black Brushstroke, 1970, (marker, coloured pencil and graphite on paper)
From 1968 Lichtenstein began drawing inspiration from the works of Claude Monet. First, he concentrated on his Haystacks, then his Rouen Cathedrals, and finally his Water Lilies that he associated with his own earlier series Reflections.
Roy Lichtenstein, Portrait Triptych, 1974, (left and central sheets: coloured pencil and graphite on paper. Right sheet: coloured pencil and paper collage on paper)
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