Surrealism: Genesis of a Revolution

Description

The Dada movement and then the Surrealists appeared in the First World War aftermath with a bang: revolution of thought, creativity, and the wish to break away from the past and all that was left in ruins. This refusal to integrate into the Bourgeois society lead Georg Grosz to remark of Dada, "it's the end of -isms." Breton asserted that Dada does not produce perspective, "a machine which functions full steam, but where it remains to be seen how it can feed itself." Surrealism emerged amidst such feeling. These artists often changed from one movement to another. They were united by their superior intellectualism and the common goal to break from the norm. Describing Dada with its dynamic free-thinkers, and the Surrealists with their aversive resistance to the system, the author brings a new approach, which strives to be relative and truthful. Provocation and cultural revolution: Dada and the Surrealists, aren't they above all just a direct product of creative individualism in this unsettled period?

Megan McShane is an art historian who received her Ph.D. from Emory University. Specializing in avant-garde European art during the Great Wars, she was a Violence Studies Fellow at Emory, where she received the President's writing award for research on women's issues. She further developed her interest in artists under Vichy at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington D.C. last year.