Word: surrealistic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...huge painting of scarlet lips suspended over a landscape, the work of American-born Dadaist and Photographer Man Ray, sold Nov. 5 at Sotheby Parke Bernet in Manhattan for $750,000. It was by far the highest price ever paid at auction for a surrealist work...
...Harry Willock and George E. Ryder, is the season's most demanding work. The rhymes vary from one-syllable words to items like apogee and collation-an invitation to learning, but also to mystification. The illustrations are something else: portraits of the animal kingdom as seen by the surrealist eye and rendered by the quattrocento hand. Long after the Peacock poetry is memorized or forgotten, the pictures will detonate in the mind, like the bizarre conceits of John Tenniel for the Alice books...
...proper homage to his life and presence as well as his art was the double take. In the midst of a movement, surrealism, which specialized in attention-getting stunts, political embroilments, sexual scandals and fervid half-religious crises, Magritte-next to Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, the best surrealist painter -seemed to be all phlegm and stolidity. He lived in respectable Brussels; he stayed married to the same woman, Georgette Berger, for the rest of his life; by the standards of the Paris art world in the '30s, he might as well have been a grocer. Yet Magritte possessed...
...point of his career was in the 1940s. He decided, in a mood of perversity, to paint "modern art" -pictures full of impressionist fuzz and expressionist slather. The Gorgon, 1943, a wretched parody of Monet applied to a surrealist syntax, may be the least inept of these. If anything, they showed how far Magritte's real gifts lay from the orthodox processes of modernism. Nor did his first essays in the surrealist manner, done in 1925-26, indicate much about the artist to come; they are, for the most part, grab bags of motifs from other painters, chiefly Ernst...
Magritte's turning point was 1927, when he went to live in Paris. There, immersed in the surrealist movement, he was no longer a provincial spectator. And he quickly realized where his contribution to it might lie: not in the exploitation of chance and random effects, like Masson or Ernst, still less in exoticism and neurosis, like Dali, but in hallucinatory ordinariness. One of the obsessions of surrealism was the way inexplicable events intruded into everyday life. With his dry, matter-of-fact technique, Magritte painted things so ordinary that they might have come from a phrase book...