Surrealism

Many a creative genius of 20th-century art was overshadowed by the two great Spaniards - Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso. Nobody was discussed, disputed or written about as much as they were; no other artist's work was covered as extensively as that of these two titans in books, albums, brochures and articles.

The exhibition “On Line: Drawing Through the 20th Century” was quite a notable event in New York’s MOMA 2010-2011 calendar not so much because of the eye-catching works on display, but rather, for its cognitive value. The title given to it says much to an attentive and interested viewer who would recognize Kandinsky’s essay with the same title; besides, it uses a term from the Internet, a kind of a homonym that is familiar to everybody.
The second part of the title marks the scope of the introduction within a century-long period of transformation of drawing, its “groundbreaking history of an art form”, starting with revolutionary innovative processes at the beginning of the 20th century and following its development along the same lines up to the present day; it is formulated by “pushing the line of drawing into real space, expanding its relationship to gesture and form and invigorating its links with painting and sculpture, photography and film, and, notably, dance and performance”.

The canvases that he produced during the second French period, from 1923 to 194 1, which include his exile in the United States, were marked by the same ambivalence. Certain works had all the appearance of surrealist influences, but this is not the case. The spectacular Nu au-dessus de Vitebsk (Nude above Vitebsk) of 1933, which holds, in effect, more of an autobiographical, narrative revelation than of a surrealist dream. In this painting, the nude is treated in a manner which became more of a return to an earlier order of the early twenties in France. The polished style and the quality of the design shows a consummate academic exercise understanding the long tradition of nude painting viewed from the back, apart from his grappling, arbitrarily beneath the urban landscape. But this arbitrariness is not an overt "surrealist" aspect of the work (it is reminiscent of the painting of Man Ray, A l'Heure de l'observatoire, les amoureux (Time of Observatory, The Lovers) of 1932-1934).

"For Arp, art is Arp" - this proclamation made by Marcel Duchamp in 1949 arouses a curiosity to get to know Arp's understanding of art, presented at the exhibition in the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck*. There are many reasons to consider the painter, sculptor, and poet Hans (Jean) Arp (1886-1966) to be among the most influential artists of the 20th century. In Zurich in 1916, together with his artist colleagues Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara he founded Dada, a protest movement against war and human despotism. With mostly provocative, sometimes playfully-ironic artistic means of expression, the Dadaists tried to surmount existing social and aesthetic norms, and in doing so, revolutionized the art scene in only a short time. "Happenings" and "performances", significant forms of expression even in today's art, are directly rooted in Dadaism, and "concrete poetry" is wholly in the tradition of the poet Arp as well.

THE GREAT SWISS ARTIST, POET AND THINKER MERET OPPENHEIM WOULD HAVE CELEBRATED HER HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY ON 6 OCTOBER 2013. IF THIS WERE NOT SUFFICIENT REASON TO BRING OUT OUR COLLECTIONS AND TAKE ANOTHER INTENSE LOOK AT THEM AFTER THE MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION IN 2006, TODAY THE QUESTION IS - WHAT STATUS CAN HER ART CLAIM AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF RECENT ARTISTIC OUTPUT FROM SWITZERLAND?