Notes 6-2: Robert Hughe's Shock of the New

Part 1 : intellectual life = struggle for absolute freedom

Andre Beton (1896-1966) "Pope" of Surrealism
Surrealism = interpretation, liberation from constraints - logic, morality - aim to recover original(?) "powers of spirit"
turning to the Unconscious-->the dream = the gate to art

Goya: when reason dreams, monsters are born.

tradition of the irrational producing a potent conter-tradition to the "reasonable"
"bejeweled Symbolist fancies"
"a lady's long kid gloves"

Futurism's attempts toward "objective" and "progressive" discarding history

Giorgio de Chirico's "metaphysics" or "metaphysical painting" (pintura metafisica) - "It was a question of mood, the sense of a reality drenched in human emotion, almost pulpy with memory."

"Space rushes away from one's eye."

"...inhabitants of de Chirico's landscape are neither men nor art, but somewhere between: they are tailor's dummies."
the encounters between object and clarity
1918 "death" of de Chirico's work (like Bob Dylan in 1970 or is it 60? But also like Dylan, made the dream seem real)

Surrealists, like Rimbaud, fashioned "a simple hallucination" to live in
Ernst (Dada collages) meets Surrealists (poets at the time)
"The Elephant of Celebes / Has sticky, yellow bottom-grease"
"a great deal of pyschic violence in a small space"
beauty (to Breton) same order as sexual desire or fear: no intellectualism

the sense of an immediate and vicious past

PART 2 : an emotional exactness bereft of representational accuracy

3 kinds of art: child art, the art of the mad, and "primative" art

Joan Miro (1893-1983) "the best pure(?) painter"
the art of children
the climax(!) of the idea
Miro's "The Farm" as "a counting of blessings" or "Noah's Ark"
"childish-ness" "everything seen equally"
"a multiplicity of life"
flashes of Hieronymus Bosch
cues from Blake:

Seek those images
That constitute the Wild:
The lion and the Virgin,
The Harlot and the Child.

"He had the rang e of a man who owns all his sensations and is abashed by none of his desires"

Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926)
"Sagrada Familia" - may never be complete (so cool)
"Parque Guell:" "...outright madness: not a straight line or a clear imperative visible anywhere."

Magritte's Pipe "a sign that denotes an object and triggers a memory"
a sea change of seeing
dread: "a pair of boots end in real toes: a fossilisation of life, or an awakening of leather?"
OUR threshold of liberty
argues NOTHING is certain

Hannah Weiner's "Magritte Poems"

Picasso "admired" for his sexual hostility (?)

turn the body into another kind of object and strip away its familiarity

a society preoccupied with the personal and the self