'Warburg, Surrealism, and the Other Renaissance'. Conference Aby Warburg: Image, Memory, Montage'. University of Turku, Department of Art History, December 2014. (original) (raw)

Surrealism's Centenary: Centenary: Revolutionary Politics beyond Painting and Poetry

The Brooklyn Rail, 2024

No modernist movement assailed more consistently the encrustations of meaning—and the psychosocial habits they engrain and perpetuate—than that which formed around the poet André Breton a century ago in Paris (along with artists and authors who later broke with his imperious direction). For the Surrealists, bourgeois modernity belied all manner of repressed desires and drives. Liberated from the strictures of linguistic and social propriety, Surrealist writing, painting, photography, and other media sought to coax (or to scare) those desires into consciousness and collective use. That the movement’s imagery has been reduced to mostly fatuous pastiches of its own intentions is hardly arguable. Yet Surrealism’s virulent opposition to colonialism, nationalism, and fascism proved as foundational to its development as any interest in Freud. In light of revived far right violence and attacks upon immigrants and refugees, in the wake of new ethnocides—to say nothing of the relentless technification of everyday culture—Surrealism’s antifascist and anticolonialist legacy.

Aby Warburg and the study of "visual culture"

2022

Aby Warburg was very little mentioned by scholars until the 1970s, perhaps due to the fact that he did not associate himself with a particular School of research, the art trade, or the establishment of museums. Today in historiography the study of Warburg"s work and research method is a self-sustaining and ever-expanding academic field. Traces of Warburg"s method can be identified in the work of many late-19 th and early-20 th century scholars, but its originality lied mostly on his persistence in and final elaboration of an interdisciplinary approach, which open-mindedly investigated aspects of human culture that could not be rigidly categorised and interpreted, and on his attempt to understand the cultural psychology of modern times in philosophical terms. This article will examine the basic aspects of Warburg"s idiosyncratic research and how it contributed to the overall transformation of Art History and of the study of "visual culture". In Germany Warburg was strongly influenced by scholars he met at university, such as Hubert Janitschek, Carl Justi, August Schmarsow, Hermann Usener, Karl Lamprecht, but also Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt. Warburg"s lectures and notes, together with his published work are a great source of information in order to understand his approach to some key concepts of "visual culture": rebirth, memory, conflict, pathos, astrology, evolution and metaphysics. Modern art historians, however, consider the Library and the unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas as the epitome of Warburg"s research and the fullest expression of his beliefs and ambitions. Early Influences

THE LEGACY OF BRETON IN A NEW AGE The New Surrealists

THE LEGACY OF BRETON IN A NEW AGE The New Surrealists, 2015

Over the past couple of years I have noted with pleasure the major shows on surrealism being launched at the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Academy of Design in New York, as well as the Philadelphia Museum and the Pomadou Centre. They certainly document the subject very well, on the assumption that surrealism died in the 1960', or that only a vestigial group of surrealists still practice, such as Carrington in Mexico. The fact of the matter is that one of the largest and most dynamic art movements world-wide at this time is surreal/visionary. What do Surrealism, Surreal/conceptual, Visionary, Fantastic, Symbolism, Magic Realism, the Vienna School, Neuve Invention, Outsider, the Macabre, Grotesque, Singulier Art, Characterism and Massurrealism have in common? One can probably spend some time noting the fine differences, but what they have in common is that each evolves from an artistic style inherent the thinking of Andre Breton.

Surrealism and Painting: Describing the Imaginary

Art History, 1987

In the opening section of his essay 'Le Surrealisme et la Peinture', Andre Breton offered a vivid account of his response to imagery in explanation of his approach to the visual arts. He described with telling detail his absorption in the illustrations of a book that lay in front of him. The fictive world suggested by the engravings in the book, he wrote, effaced the material world surrounding him. 'Sur la gravure l'angle du plafond et des deux murs parvient sans peine a se substituer a l'angle de ce plafond et de ces murs-ci.' Though his room was hot, he was prepared to 'accept' the winter landscape presented in another engraving, and he 'mingled with' the winged children shown there. As with pictures, so too with words: of the caption, 'II vit devant lui une caveme illuminee', he noted, 'effectivement, je la vois aussi'. Here was not simply a preference for the message above the medium, but a total indifference to the medium, from which stemmed what was perhaps the central premise of Breton's philosophy of art: 'il m'est impossible', he wrote in the same passage, 'de considerer un tableau autrement que comme une fenetre dont mon premier souci est de savoir sur quoi elle donne. .. ,I The originality of Breton's position is clear: for to consider a picture as a window, and only a window, is not to consider it as a picture at all. By contrast, though divided by issues of aesthetics and methodology, connoisseurs, critics and art historians have been united in their commitment to the idea of art as surface, and not as vista. Of course, the tapas of picture as window is wellestablished in the literature of art history; but it is always combined with discussion of the techniques of painting-the surface-and of the social and cultural context of art-the area, so to speak, between the viewer and the surface. In modern times, formalist attention to style and technique and modernist preoccupation with the idea of painting as, to paraphrase Maurice Denis, a plane surface covered by colours assembled in a certain order, have made critics and art historians particularly reluctant to follow Breton through the window of art into the illusory world of the marvellous and the surreal. The contrast of surface and depth in critical response to works of art is one of the themes of A New Mimesis, published in 1983, by Anthony Nuttall. In this