MoMa Vist; Surrealism and Pop Art

May 13, 2015

HUA101

                                            Online Assignment #7

       Surrealism is the artistic and literary movement led by French poet Andre Breton from 1924 through World War ll. Breton sought to overpower what he perceived as the oppressive rationalism of society today by evaluating the “sur realisme” which means the superior reality, of the subconscious, drawing on the theories of Sigmund Freud. Breton reasoned for an abandoned mode of expression resulting from the mind’s involuntary mechanisms, particularly dreams, and called on artists to explore the unknown depths of the imagination with essential new methods and visual forms. The Surrealist movement contained multiple artistic techniques. Photographs and odd combinations of objects were also central to Surrealism. Artists disrupted common, everyday images and things to reveal the troubled sexual and psychological forces buried beneath the surface of familiar reality.

          This artwork is called The Menaced Assassin. The Menaced Assassin is a 1927 oil on canvas painting made by Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte. The measurement for the painting is 4’11” x 6’5”. The colors are dull: a lot of black, white brown, maroon, a little red and tan. The story behind this artwork is, a bloodied naked woman is shown laid out on a couch. The assassin, a well-dressed man, is preparing to leave as you see his coat and hat on a chair and his bag near the corridor. However, he is held back by the sound of music. In a calm, sedately manner, the man listens to a gramophone. ON the other hand, two men armed with a club and a net await for the assassin in the foyer to trap him as three onlookers watch the scene from over the balcony.

            Pop Art: By the early 1960’s Americans had enjoyed several years of economic prosperity and political stability. Televisions were global, and families across the nation gathered in their homes to watch certain programs and were pierced by commercials for Tide Laundry detergent and Lucky Strike cigarettes. For the first time, Americans were joined together most powerfully but not through their local communities—by broadcast images, which helped to define a new popular culture. Using imagery from television, comic books, and print advertising, the works in the gallery tested the conventional values of the era. This included the natural notions of femininity and domesticity put out by the mass media. Rebellious and bold, Pop art led in a new decade of cultural revolutions that would restructure American society.

              This artwork is called Pin-Up. Pin-up is a 1961 oil, cellulose and collage on panel made by Richard Hamilton, a British painter, collage artist and one of the founders of Pop art. The measurements for the artwork is 53 ¾ x 37 ¾ x 3 including the frame. The colors of the painting are peach, black, tan and off white. The image of the woman takes up almost the whole panel. Hamilton took this theme directly from popular culture, using pictures from Playboy and other men’s magazines as his sources. While the art mentions pervasive photographs of sex symbols, it is also a modern treatment of a conventional subject of painting- the odalisque or reclining nude. Hamilton approaches that tradition through a variety of pictorial modes. The hair is a stylized cartoon, the breasts appear both in drawing and in three dimensional relief, and the bra is a photograph applied as a collage. “Mixing idioms is virtually a doctrine in Pin-up” said Hamilton.