sábado, 9 de junio de 2007

El gran masturbador, de Salvador Dalí

El gran masturbador, 1929
Salvador Dalí
Oleo sobre lienzo, 110 x 150 cm
Museo Nacional Reina Sofía. Madrid

Obra emblemática de Salvador Dalí y una de las primeras pinturas que se pueden adscribir propiamente a la época surrealista del artista.
El surrealismo, movimiento aparecido en Francia en 1924, influyó tanto en la literatura como en las artes plásticas, con una incidencia particularmente importante en la poesía y en la pintura. Heredero del dadaísmo, del que conserva el gusto por la provocación, el surrealismo también se puede considerar hijo espiritual del Romanticismo y el simbolismo, con los que comparte los valores, el lirismo, la nostalgia melancólica y la fe en la capacidad del arte para transformar el mundo. André Breton, padre de este movimiento y redactor del primer manifiesto surrealista (1924), propone el automatismo psíquico, mediante el cual se pretende expresar de palabra, por escrito o de cualquier otra forma, el funcionamiento real del pensamiento. El surrealismo se fundamenta en el mundo de los sueños y en el subconsciente, lo que lo vincula con el psicoanálisis de Sigmund Freud.
Los surrealistas no sólo invierten las tradiciones: invierten también los valores que las sustentan, constituyendo su propia galería de antepasados y rehabilitando o exaltando a poetas y artistas que habían sido menospreciados o proscritos en nombre del buen gusto. Desestiman todo lo que es claro, armonioso, equilibrado y depurado, y glorifican, por tanto, lo hermético,
maravilloso, híbrido y compuesto. Así, como podemos leer en el primer manifiesto, elaboran su propio árbol genealógico imaginario de la historia del arte, un árbol que tiene como ramas principales a Hieronymus Bosch, Brueghel el Viejo, Arcimboldo y Francisco de Goya. Del Romanticismo o, mejor dicho, del simbolismo, hacen renacer a poetas marginados u olvidados, como Arthur Rimbaud y el conde de Lautréamont, que se convierten en figuras tutelares del
movimiento, pero también a otros como Gérard de Nerval, Jules Laforgue o Tristan Corbière. Divulgan en Francia la obra de los románticos alemanes e ingleses, sin olvidar tampoco a otros pintores como Arnold Böcklin —sobre todo su obra La isla de los muertos—, James Ensor u Odilon Redon. El museo Gustave Moreau se convierte en lugar de encuentro habitual para los surrealistas, como también lo son las calles en las que las tiendas de estampas antiguas y libros de viejo comparten espacio con los tarotistas. Pero los surrealistas también encontrarán inspiración en las artes primitivas.
Así pues, El gran masturbador puede inscribirse dentro de este período, dado que Dalí entra a formar parte oficialmente del movimiento surrealista en 1929, año de ejecución de la pintura. Realizada en el verano de 1929, la tela se expone en la primera muestra personal que el pintor ofrece en París, en la galería Goemans, con el título Visage du grand masturbateur.
Tanto en este óleo como en otros del mismo período, los diversos elementos se colocan alrededor de un horizonte que divide el espacio en dos mitades desiguales, disposición que recuerda las telas de Giorgio de Chirico. En la parte superior se observa un cielo azul y nítido, y en la inferior, un terreno árido que a veces se convierte en una playa. El rostro que da título al cuadro lo encontramos en la zona central de la tela. Dalí nos lo explica de esta manera:
«Representaba una gran cabeza, amarilla como la cera, muy rojas las mejillas, largas las pestañas y con una nariz imponente comprimida contra la tierra. Este rostro no tenía boca, y en lugar de la boca había pegada una langosta enorme. El vientre de la langosta se descomponía y estaba lleno de hormigas. Algunas de estas hormigas corrían a través del espacio que habría debido llenar la boca inexistente de la gran cara angustiada, cuyo extremo acababa en arquitectura y ornamentación estilo 1900. El título de la pintura era El gran masturbador».
La parte final del rostro se transforma en una arquitectura de estilo 1900 en la que podemos ver un busto femenino con los ojos cerrados y un fragmento de un cuerpo masculino. En la parte inferior de la tela observamos tres grupos de personas. En primer término, una pareja abrazada en la que una de las figuras es una roca antropomorfa; en segundo término, una silueta que parece un hombre joven en actitud de caminar hacia el horizonte. El tercer grupo, situado en último término y de tamaño muy pequeño, consta de un niño acompañado de un adulto. Todas estas figuras, que proyectan sombras muy claras y recortadas sobre una superficie de tierra reseca de color verde grisáceo, aparecen ubicadas en un espacio ambiguo que recuerda a los espacios poco profundos que construía Joan Miró y en los que, a partir del horizonte, las imágenes parecían flotar.
Pero el rostro de El gran masturbador no supone ninguna novedad radical en la obra realizada por Dalí hasta ese momento. La primera vez que lo pinta, como el propio maestro explica en su Vida secreta, es en Los primeros días de la primavera (1929), y aún lo retoma varias veces más en otras obras del mismo año, como El juego lúgubre, El enigma del deseo, Los placeres iluminados o Retrato de Paul Eluard. Sin embargo, en ninguna de ellas ocupa un lugar tan preeminente como en la tela que comentamos aquí ni recibe el nombre de «masturbador».
Si analizamos las diversas interpretaciones que se han hecho de esta obra, observaremos que casi todas coinciden en identificar el título con el artista a causa del apreciable parecido entre el pintor y el rostro amarillento. La mayoría de los autores comparten la idea de que la sexualidad de Dalí, hasta la aparición de Gala, se basaba casi exclusivamente en el onanismo. Si Dalí se retrata de esta manera, podríamos pensar que, de hecho, está representando su sexualidad. De todas formas, el mismo Dalí nos sugiere esta identificación, ya que las alusiones a la masturbación son numerosas en su autobiografía, aunque nunca llega a afirmar inequívocamente que el rostro angustiado del óleo en cuestión sea su autorretrato.
Desde el punto de vista psicoanalítico, la masturbación está directamente relacionada con la infancia. En este sentido, resulta reveladora la experiencia que Dalí vive en el verano de 1929 y que él mismo nos relata en Vida secreta:
«Desde el momento de mi llegada a Cadaqués fui asaltado por un recrudecimiento de mi período infantil. Los seis años del bachillerato, los tres años de Madrid y el viaje que acababa de hacer a París retrocedieron totalmente, mientras que todas las fantasías y representaciones del período de mi infancia volvieron a tomar victoriosamente posesión de mi cerebro». La elección de la masturbación como tema no sería tan extraña si tenemos en cuenta, además, que en verano de 1930 Dalí escribió en Portlligat un poema homónimo que, junto con los textos El amor, La cabra sanitaria y El burro podrido, publicó en su libro La mujer visible,6 dedicado a Gala, su esposa y musa. Podemos decir, entonces, que se trata de un motivo habitual en este período.
A lo largo de su vida, el pintor defendió que la morfología del cabo de Creus había sido el modelo de este rostro angustiado: «En este lugar privilegiado, casi se tocan la realidad y la dimensión sublime. Mi paraíso místico comienza en las llanuras del Empordà, lo rodean las colinas de las Alberes, y llega a la plenitud en la bahía de Cadaqués. Este país es mi inspiración permanente. También, el único lugar del mundo donde me siento querido. Cuando pinté aquella roca que titulé El gran masturbador, no hice nada más que rendir homenaje a uno de los jalones de mi reino y mi cuadro era un canto a una de las joyas de mi corona».
Trabajos recientes, sin embargo, lo han relacionado, muy acertadamente, con la obra de Hieronymus Bosch (c 1450 – 1516) El jardín de las delicias, que Dalí conocía muy bien, ya que había podido contemplarla personalmente en el Museo del Prado de Madrid durante su época de estudiante.
Fuentes:

Merzbau, de Kurt Schwitters

Merzbau (Teilansicht: Grosse Gruppe)
um 1932, zerstört (1943)
Foto (Repro): Kurt Schwitters Archiv im
Sprengel Museum Hannover
© Pro Litteris, Zürich



Press release
Museum Tinguely: Kurt Schwitters. MERZ Ð a total vision of the world
May 1 - August 22, 2004

[...] Kurt Schwitters is among the outstanding artistic pioneers of the first half of the 20th century. After the First World War he made the provocative statement that "one can use waste material to shout out loud", and from then on he employed everyday materials and objets trouvés in his collages and assemblages. In 1919 he invented his own artistic movement, Merz; the term is taken from the bank name "Kommerz- und Privatbank". From now on he grouped together all aspects of his very varied artistic activities -painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, drama, typography and happenings -under the heading of Merz.
With his programmatic idea of a "total Merz vision of the world", embracing all areas of life and art, he set an example for the thinking and creative work of many artists of the post-war generation. Together with Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters was Jean Tinguely's most important artistic role model: "I was ... completely schwittered, Schwitters was my hero," said Tinguely.
At the heart of the exhibition is Schwitters' masterpiece and culmination of his idea of a total art work: the Merzbau (Merz building), a monumental three-dimensional assemblage progressively created from 1923 onwards in the artist's studio and home in Hanover. On display is a walk-in reconstruction of the original Merzbau, which was entirely destroyed in 1943. The reconstruction was built by Peter Bissegger, on the initiative of Harald Szeemann, using original photographs. It is complemented by photographic and textual records, as well as selected reliefs, collages and sculptures from the late 1920s, casting light on the way in which Schwitters was influenced at the time by constructivist tendencies. [...]

Fuente: http://www.tinguely.ch

Las musas inquietantes, de Giorgio De Chirico

Giorgio De Chirico
The Disquieting Muses,1918
Oil on canvas
Private collection
Fuente: http://www.arte.go.it/mostre/dechirico

Dos niños amenazados por un ruiseñor, de Max Ernst



Max Ernst. (French, born Germany. 1891-1976).
Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale. 1924.
Oil on wood with painted wood elements and frame, 27 1/2 x 22 1/2 x 4 1/2" (69.8 x 57.1 x 11.4 cm).
© 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris


Gallery label text Dada, June 18–September 11, 2006
Made in 1924, the year of Surrealism’s founding, Ernst described this work as "the last consequence of his [sic] early collages—and a kind of farewell to a technique..." He later gave two possible autobiographical references for the nightingale: the death of his sister in 1897, and a fevered hallucination he recalled in which the wood grain of a panel near his bed took on "successively the aspect of an eye, a nose, a bird’s head, a menacing nightingale, a spinning top, and so on."

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In Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, a girl, frightened by the bird's flight (birds appear often in Ernst's work), brandishes a knife; another faints away. A man carrying a baby balances on the roof of a hut, which, like the work's gate (which makes sense in the picture) and knob (which does not), is a three–dimensional supplement to the canvas. This combination of unlike elements, flat and volumetric, extends the collage technique, which Ernst cherished for its "systematic displacement." "He who speaks of collage," the artist believed, "speaks of the irrational." But even if the scene were entirely a painted illusion, it would have a hallucinatory unreality, and indeed Ernst linked his work of this period to childhood memories and dreams.
Ernst was one of many artists who emerged from service in World War I deeply alienated from the conventional values of his European world. In truth, his alienation predated the war; he would later describe himself when young as avoiding "any studies which might degenerate into bread winning," preferring "those considered futile by his professors—predominantly painting. Other futile pursuits: reading seditious philosophers and unorthodox poetry." The war years, however, focused Ernst's revolt and put him in contact with kindred spirits in the Dada movement. He later became a leader in the emergence of Surrealism.

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It was Max Ernst, in 1924, who best fulfilled the Surrealist's mandate. Ernst did it above all in the construction called Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, which starts from one of those instincts of irrational panic which we suppress in our waking lives. Only in dreams can a diminutive songbird scare the daylights out of us; only in dreams can the button of an alarm bell swell to the size of a beach ball and yet remain just out of our reach. Two Children incorporates elements from traditional European painting: perspectives that give an illusion of depth, a subtly atmospheric sky, formalized poses that come straight from the Old Masters, a distant architecture of dome and tower and triumphal arch. But it also breaks out of the frame, in literal terms: the alarm or doorbell, the swinging gate on its hinge and the blind-walled house are three-dimensional constructions, physical objects in the real world. We are both in, and out of, painting; in, and out of, art; in and out of, a world subject to rational interpretation. Where traditional painting subdues disbelief by presenting us with a world unified on its own terms, Max Ernst in the Two Children breaks the contract over and over again. We have reason to disbelieve the plight of his two children. Implausible in itself, it is set out in terms which eddy between those of fine art and those of the toyshop. Nothing "makes sense" in the picture. Yet the total experience is undeniably meaningful; Ernst has re-created a sensation painfully familiar to us from our dreams but never before quite recaptured in art—that of total disorientation in a world where nothing keeps to its expected scale or fulfills its expected function.

Fuente: http://www.moma.org/

La condición humana, de Magritte

René Magritte (1898-1967)
The Human Condition , 1934.
Belgium
Oil on canvas, 3 ft 3 1/2 x 2 ft 7 1/2
Surrealism
Private Collection







Fuente: http://www.usc.edu/programs/cst/deadfiles/lacasis/ansc100/index.html

Carnaval de Arlequín, de Miró

Carnival of Harlequin
Joan Miro1924-25
Oil on canvas
Spanish
Unframed: 26 x 35 5/8" (66.04 x 90.48 cm.)

Fuente: http://www.albrightknox.org/

Monumento a la Tercera Internacional, de Tatlin



Monumento a la Tercera Internacional, de TatlinVladimir Tatlin. (Russian, 1885-1953). Pamiatnik III Internatsionala by Nikolai Punin. 1920.
Cover with letterpress illustration on front; 1 letterpress illustration, Page: 11 x 8 5/8" (28 x 21.9 cm).
Publisher: Izo NKP, Petersburg.
Edition: unknown.
Gift of The Judith Rothschild Foundation

Fuente: http://www.moma.org






Vladimir Tatlin
Monumento a la 3ª Internacional1920
Maqueta. 400 m. no construida
Fuente: http://www.epdlp.com

La habitación roja, de Matisse

Henri Matisse
La habitación roja. 1908
Óleo sobre lienzo. 180.5 x 221 cm.
Hermitage. San Petersburgo

Fuente: http://www.epdlp.com

La danza, de Matisse


The Dance. Matisse, Henri.
Oil on canvas. 260x391 cm
France. 1909 - 1910
Source of Entry: State Museum of New Western Art, Moscow. 1948

The pair of panels known as "The Dance and Music" (also in the Hermitage) are amongst Matisse's most important - and most famous - works of the period 1908 to 1913. They were commissioned in 1910 by one of the leading Russian collectors of French late 19th and early 20th-century art, Sergey Shchukin. Until the Revolution of 1917, they hung on the staircase of his Moscow mansion.
Both compositions belong to a group of works united by the theme of "the golden age" of humanity, and therefore the figures are not real people but imagined image-symbols.
The sources of Matisse's "The Dance" lie in folk dances, which even today preserve something of the ritual nature - albeit not always comprehended today - of pagan times.
Before this canvas, the theme of the dance passed through several stages in Matisse's work. Only in this composition of 1910, however, did it acquire its famous passion and expressive resonance. The frenzy of the pagan bacchanalia is embodied in the powerful, stunning accord of red, blue and green, uniting Man, Heaven and Earth.
How rightly has Matisse captured the profound meaning of the dance, expressing man's subconscious sense of involvement in the rhythms of nature and the cosmos! The five figures have firm outlines, while the deformation of those figures is an expression of their passionate arousal and the power of the all-consuming rhythm. The swift, joint movement fills the bodies with untamed life force and the red becomes a symbol of inner heat. The figures dance in the deep blue of the Cosmos and the green hill is charged with the energy of the dancers, sinking beneath their feet and then springing back.
For all its expressiveness, Matisse's "Dance" has no superfluous emotion, other than that required by the subject. The very organisation of the canvas ensures that. Instinct and consciousness are united into a harmonious whole, as we can feel in the balance between centrifugal and centripetal forces, and in the outlines of the figure on the left, strong and classical in proportion.

Fuente: http://www.hermitagemuseum.org

La novia del viento (La tempestad), de Kokoschka



Oskar Kokoschka
La Tempestad, 1914
Óleo sobre lienzo. 181 x 220 cm.
Öffentliche Kunstsammlung. BasileaAut.


Fuente: http://www.epdlp.com/

Improvisación, de Kandinsky



Improvisation 7, 1910.
Oil on canvas, 131 x 97 cm
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Fuente: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/kandinsky/




Vasily Kandinsky Russian, 1866-1944
Improvisation 30 (Cannons), 1913
Oil on canvas 109.2 x 109.9 cm
Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection, 1931.511

Fuente: http://www.artic.edu

La noche, de Beckmann

The Night 1918-19
Max Beckmann
Oil on canvas133 x 154 cm
Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
Photo © Walter Klein
© VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn/DACS 2002

In The Night (1918-19), Beckmann depicts the disturbing torture of a family. While it can be taken as referring to the contemporary situation, and the violent civil strife that followed the end of the war in Germany, it also expresses a universal sense of man's inhumanity to man.

Fuente: http://www.tate.org.uk

Escena callejera berlinesa, de Kirchner

KIRCHNER, Ernst Ludwig
Escena callejera berlinesa, 1914-1925
Óleo sobre lienzo125 x 90,5 cm
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid


Obra fundamental y muy significativa del lenguaje de los expresionistas alemanes y esencial en la producción de Kirchner. Realizada en dos momentos, en 1914 y modificada en 1925, nos ofrece con gran fuerza la visión que de la ciudad poseían Kirchner y sus compañeros. Unas calles de colorido arbitrario y perspectiva angustiosa, sirven de ámbito para una escena de prostitución. La figura principal es una "cocotte" vestida de rojo, rodeada por seres anónimos, de rostros como máscaras. Es la visión de la ciudad como centro de la corrupción.

Fuente: http://www.museothyssen.org/

Desnudo femenino, de Modigliani

Female Nude, c.1916, by Amedeo Modigliani
© The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London.


Amedeo Modigliani painted people. In many ways this concise statement sums up the artist’s entire output during his short career in Paris in the first two decades of the twentieth century. No other modern artist concentrated so absolutely on the representation of people. Moreover, in a period when avant-garde art was experimenting with the breakdown of forms, Modigliani steadfastly retained their integrity.
Always individual and idiosyncratic, he drew on a variety of sources – Renaissance to Rococo painting, the art of Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne and Brancusi, ancient Greek, African and Asian sculpture – to create his own highly original and modern signature style.
Modigliani’s life story, as told by his contemporaries and biographers since his premature death at the age of 35 in 1920, has tended to overshadow his achievement as an artist. Born into a cultivated Sephardic Jewish family from Livorno in Tuscany, Modigliani studied in his native town and in Florence and Venice, before moving to Paris in 1906. The riveting story of the handsome and dissolute young bohemian’s life in the French capital, brought to an end by a combination of ill health, alcohol consumption and drug abuse, has acquired legendary status. His restlessness was not, however, reflected in his art, which, if sometimes poignant, has none of the nervous expressionistic energy of that of many of his contemporaries. Apart from a handful of landscapes painted in the south of France in 1918, Modigliani’s paintings are restricted to portraits and nudes, most of which were painted in the last six years of his career, between 1913 and 1919.
Modigliani’s friend, the sculptor Jacob Epstein, said: ‘The legend of the debauched artist is just a legend. What legend gives us is an implausible caricature of a man, a painter who left behind only a body of legends. Amedeo Modigliani left behind a life’s work in art.’

Mademoiselle Pogany, de Brancusi


Mademoiselle Pogany. 1912.
Constantin Brancusi, French (born Romania), 1876 - 1957
White marble; limestone block17 1/2 x 8 1/4 x 12 3/8 inches (44.4 x 21 x 31.4 cm) Base: 6 x 6 3/8 x 7 inches (15.2 x 16.2 x 17.8 cm)
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris


Fuente: http://www.philamuseum.org

Contracomposición, axonométrica, de Theo van Doesburg

Theo van Doesburg (Christian Emil Marie Küpper). (Dutch, 1883-1931), Cornelis Van Eesteren. (Dutch, 1897-1988) and Cornelis Van Eesteren. (Dutch, 1897-1988).
Contra-Construction Project, Axonometric. 1923.
Gouache on lithograph, 22 1/2 x 22 1/2" (57.2 x 57.2 cm).
Gift of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.



Van Doesburg, a painter, writer, editor, and architect, was a founder and driving force behind the de Stijl movement, which was centered in the Netherlands in the late teens and early 1920s. Cornelis van Eesteren, an architect, joined the group in 1922. Artists and others contributing to van Doesburg's periodical, De Stijl, attempted to create a new harmonic order in the aftermath of World War I. They attempted to construct a utopian solidarity between art and life under the influence of Piet Mondrian's early theories of Neo-Plasticism, which proposed that the essence of the imagined and seen world could be conveyed only through a logical system of abstraction based on the line, square, and rectangle and the primary colors plus black and white.
According to van Doesburg, architecture had to be approached in an entirely new way, which would ultimately give rise to a universal aggregate of easel painting, sculpture, and architecture. As suggested by this axonometric drawing, one of a group rendered but never built, architecture, enlivened by flat colors, was to be economical and dynamic, with planar elements balanced asymmetrically around an open core. Such structures would allow the modern individual to achieve harmony with his or her surroundings.

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With the zeal of a crusader, Theo van Doesburg, the prolific writer, painter, and cofounder of the avant-garde Dutch movement de Stijl, promoted a new order uniting art and life. In his utopian quest for a universal ideal, cleansed of social and artistic conventions but not without moral and spiritual dimensions, van Doesburg predicated a formal language of abstraction on the rectangle, primary colors (red, blue, and yellow), and asymmetrically balanced compositions. To suggest what a de Stijl environment might look like, van Doesburg enlisted the assistance of the architect Cornelis van Eesteren. In 1923 the two men mounted a landmark exhibition at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie L'Effort Moderne in Paris. This so-called "Contra-Construction" was among the works exhibited.
The Contra-Construction is not a study for a specific building but a meditation on a new kind of architectural space and structure. Serving as a demonstration of the ideas in the artists' manifestos, the composition-an axonometric placed diagonally on the paper-is key to understanding their aims. The construction seems to float on the sheet, divorced from time or place. The high vantage point lets us see many sides at once, but we have no clear understanding of front, side, or back, or of inside and out. Horizontal and vertical planes define a complex of asymmetrical volumes around a central open core. Color is a constructive element, applied to elements running the height, length, and width of the construction. The planes have an atectonic character, being divorced from a supporting function. The spatial relations and sense of freedom in the composition underscore van Doesburg's overarching goal: to liberate humanity from material things through a new form of modernism.

Fuente: http://www.moma.org/

Funeral del anarquista Galli, de Carrà


Carlo Carrà. (Italian, 1881-1966).
Funeral of the Anarchist Galli. 1910-11.
Oil on canvas, 6' 6 1/4" x 8' 6" (198.7 x 259.1 cm).
Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest.
© 2007 Carlo Carrà / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

Fuente: http://www.moma.org/

Desarrollo de una botella en el espacio, de Boccioni




Umberto Boccioni. (Italian, 1882-1916).

Development of a Bottle in Space. 1912 (cast 1931).

Silvered bronze, 15 x 23 3/4 x 12 7/8" (38.1 x 60.3 x 32.7 cm).

Aristide Maillol Fund

Fuente: http://www.moma.org/