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ARTISTS

Surrealism

Many painters were associated with Picasso in the development of geometrical abstraction as a modern pictorial idiom, notably Georges Braque and Juan Gris both of whom were able to attain individuality of style within the general precepts of the manner. Even more than Fauvism has it been of influence outside the circle of its creators. Futurism was an Italian reaction against the static, crystallized patterns of Cubism. It introduced the idea of movement, an abstraction of dynamic concepts was introduced. Suprematism in Russia and De Stijl in Holland were the names adopted by painters in those countries who sought to expand the expressive potentialities of abstraction as a creative principle. Purism developed in France in the 1920's as an effort to achieve an even more absolute and precise order of pictorial form, with its guiding principle the clean surfaces and meticulous contours of modern machinery. The apparent elimination in principle of all but aesthetic values of subject matter in the various branches of geometrical abstraction stimulated a reaction that appears first in the iconoclastic and anarchic Dada of which the only principles were negativism and subversiveness. Although relatively short-lived, Dada paved the way for the Surrealism of 1924, which has sought to find a new subject matter in experience on the subconscious level following the investigations and theories of Sigmund Freud. The possibly initial sincerity
of its founders like Andre Breton and Max Ernst has been diluted by Salvador Dali, one of its most prominent representatives, who gained wide publicity by his spectacular exploitation of the fantastic elements inherent in it.