More than Melting Clocks: 10 Surrealist Masterpieces You Need to Know

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Among radical 20th century art movements (of which there are more than a few), Surrealism is one of the few that’s been able to establish a hold on the popular as well as avant-garde imaginary, in no small part due to the outlandish public persona of its self-proclaimed ringleader Salvador Dalí. What’s sometimes forgotten, however, are the vastly different ways the Surrealist techniques of mining the subconscious were realized by artists from Armenia to the Americas. As theses 10 paintings excerpted from Phaidon’s The Art Book show, the results are diverse, hallucinatory, and wholly unique.

The Joan Miro painting Women and Bird in the Moonlight, 1949: Playing and mingling acrobatically with one another, these imaginary, frolicking figures project themselves vivaciously into the foreground. The background paint has been rubbed away to show the canvas underneath, lending it a raw, earthy quality. Evoking imagery from a primitive world, the magical figures conjure up thoughts of prehistoric cave-paintings, restored to us with all their freshness.

Ai Weiwei’s Tree – NGC Collection

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Ai Weiwei’s Tree (2009–10) stands a towering five metres in height, and spans the same distance at its upper reaches. A commanding yet enchanting presence in Gallery B105, Tree is flanked to the west by the late Sol LeWitt’s experiment with colour and asymmetry, Wall Drawing No. 623 Double asymmetrical pyramids with colour ink washes superimposed, 14 November 1989–17 November 1989. To the east, ordered rows of crabapple trees are viewable through the tall windows behind Ai’s sculpture — twelve trees planted just so by landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander for the opening of Moshe Safdie’s National Gallery of Canada (NGC) building in 1988.

Ai’s significant oeuvre since the mid-1990s is indeed owed to a combination of attitude — felt palpably in the his guiding mantra, “Everything is Art, Everything is Politics” — and in the production of an exceptional caste of works created through the re-imagination of original parts that the artist himself did not produce. From Qing Dynasty tables cut and geometrically reshaped, to a Tang Dynasty vase painted with the immediately recognizable logo of Western consumption and all things “pop” — Coca-Cola — Ai imbues the Duchampian tradition of the readymade with a conviction attuned to contemporary geopolitics and aesthetic sensibility.

What Was Surrealism? Read the Real Story Behind the Enigmatic Art Movement

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Despite its status as one of the most widely cited and recognizable art movements to come out of the early 20th century,Surrealism remains (perhaps appropriately) something of an enigma to contemporary art viewers. In some ways, it’s simply too strange—the paintings, sculptures, and writing that the loosely defined philosophy has produced appear to have little in common beyond an insistence on the part of their creators that they refer to the world of dreams and intuition. In this excerpt from Phaidon’s Art in Time, we look at some of the key works to emerge from this intense and variegated artistic ferment and how they relate to one another.

When poet André Breton defined Surreal­ism in the 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, he described an attitude that scorned the logic of accepted hierarchies, conventions, and institutions—one that sought revolution beginning with the individual and extend­ing to the political. According to the Sur­realists, in focusing on the visible, tangible world, human civilization had ignored a world of other, superior (“sur”) realities that could be found through dreams and chance aspects of life, which they termed “the marvelous.”

The Chilling, Anxious World of Mona Hatoum

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Tate Modern’s retrospective of Mona Hatoum spans the artist’s 35-year career, and she has made a lot of art. Hatoum’s works mine geopolitics, gender, art history, and her own past to reveal a world that is frightening and complex.

Hatoum’s practice is layered and asks for contemplation. By abstracting the everyday, objects are made distressing, with an enormous cheese grater becoming an instrument of torture. Seemingly innocuous items — hair, cots, a birdcage — induce anxiety, and are a reminder that the world can be a chilling place. We should be shocked into consciousness, furious at those causing torment and pain, but in this exhibition her works are so cluttered that they are partly muted. Simply put, the exhibition is too damn large.

100 Years On, Why Dada Still Matters

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“How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada,” proclaimed the poet, musician, and theater producer Hugo Ball in the summer of 1916, as World War I raged on. “How does one become famous? By saying dada…How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, Europeanized, enervated? By saying dada.” In this spirit of anarchy, a new artistic and literary movement called Dada burst forth in Zurich 100 years ago.

Dada’s centennial is being celebrated across the world this year. Zurich has planned over 150 events at venues throughout the city, including the Cabaret Voltaire—which was founded by Ball and served as the birthplace of the movement. In New York, MoMA opens “Dadaglobe Reconstructed,” an exhibition bringing together works by more than 40 artists that were originally made for an unrealized anthology conceived by poet and Dada co-founder, Tristan Tzara.

So what’s all the fuss about?

Appropriation In Art – Part of a Belief System

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In recent years the word ‘appropriation’ has become a fashionable, obliquely commendatory term used in discussions of contemporary art. The implication is that making use of a borrowed image is somehow a radically original thing to do. The less you change that image, the better. In particular, used in this context, the word also implies the existence of an unspoken conspiracy between the maker of what is being presented to general scrutiny as an artwork –‘Yes, anyone can look at this, feel free’ – and a privileged sector of the audience – ‘Congrats, you’re in the know.’

Dear Seattle Art Fair, I Love You and I Want You to Live

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Just like last year, when the announcement came over the loudspeaker at 6 p.m. on Sunday that the Seattle Art Fair was closed, people applauded. But this time, the applause was a little more sparse, a little more nervous. Fair organizer Max Fishko said people clap only in Seattle. The desire for success is so strong.

It’s strong in me. It’s why I did more listening than looking at the fair last weekend, even though I like looking at art about 11 times more than talking to random strangers. I’m trying to crack the code of this thing. Who were these 18,000 people who showed up during the fair’s four days? Why did they stand in an opening-night line that stretched two football fields long? Can Seattle Art Fair, which just finished its second year, survive in the long term? Can it be good for art and culture in Seattle in general?

Contemporary Art Is Flourishing Everywhere in Berlin

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In former sex clubs, churches, and East German watering holes.

When the Berlin collector Karen Boros first visited the place she now calls home, in the late 1990s, she was “catapulted into a different world,” she recently told me. “People were running around in leather outfits and strange masks, and fog machines made it impossible to see.” At that time, the windowless bunker was a fetish-and-techno club with an infamous history: Built in 1942 under the direction of Albert Speer, it was designed as a Nazi bomb shelter. After the war it was used as a Red Army POW camp and, then, as an East German warehouse for storing bananas imported from Cuba. Later it hosted S&M nights and avant-garde performances. In 2003, when Boros, now 54, and her husband, Christian, 51, were searching for a spot for their sizable art collection, the empty, ugly concrete structure in the center of Berlin was for sale. “So we asked our artist friends: ‘What do you think of a Nazi building?’ ” Christian told me when I visited them in Berlin. “And they all said, ‘Of course! To change it with contemporary art would be the best.’ In Berlin, you don’t build a proud signature museum the way Eli Broad or Bernard Arnault did. You change a historical building.”

Lapis Lazuli: A Blue More Precious than Gold

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The first blue pigment to hold its color was often prized over gold. The semi-precious stone lapis lazuli was ground into an iridescent pigment, sometimes called ultramarine, that seemed to shine when applied to the canvas. The first known use of it as a pigment goes back to 6th and 7th century BCE wall paintings in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, the country where almost all of the lapis lazuli used in art was mined. It became especially popular in Renaissance Europe, often used to accent the robe of the Virgin Mary, the hue simultaneously telegraphing a high price, and a purity of material.

At the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a chunk of lapis lazuli is currently on view in the The Painter on Display, a small rotating installation on the identity of artists and their materials. Organizer Lola Sanchez-Jauregui, a Maher curatorial fellow in American art, stated in an online post: “It’s important not to overlook this material side of painting. I hope that viewing these tools will help people approach the paintings from a new point of view.”

At Seattle Art Fair, the Interaction Between Technology and Modern Life

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The Seattle Art Fair, started last year by Paul G. Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, has a proud inner geek.  But like Mr. Allen himself, who has fingerprints on much of the city’s explosion of growth, geekiness only touches the surface.

Through a real estate development arm of his company, Vulcan Inc., he is building the vast urban campus of Amazon.  His Allen Institute is bringing Ph.D. researchers in brain and cell science to Seattle from around the world. And his sports franchise, the Seattle Seahawks of the N.F.L., is a local obsession.

Now his passion for art, as a collector and benefactor, is resonating too. The fair, which featured 84 galleries from locations as varied as New York, Los Angeles, Seoul and Miami — up from 60 in its first year — drew more than 15,000 visitors last year, and had about 18,000 by the fair’s close on Sunday.

Simply the Best: Martin Creed is Triumphant at The Park Avenue Armory in New York

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If Martin Creed had been alive in Medieval Europe, it is easy to imagine him as an admired court jester, entertaining the royals with dashes of absurdity while at the same time speaking truth to power, gingerly prodding the monarch. Creed delights in tweaking, and even flouting, convention. He hatches harebrained schemes—usually just single, simple ideas, if we’re being honest—and executes them with absolute commitment. Against all odds, his deadpan Duchampian strategies spill over into profundity.

Everyone knows Creed’s most famous work, Work No. 227, The Lights Going On and Off (2000–01). At his magnificent survey, “The Back Door,” which runs at the Park Avenue Armory in New York through August 7, it is stationed in a stately little room with a small door that is continually opening and closing, which is another Creed work (you may guess its title). His art is one of constant, extreme change: on or off, opened or closed. It is about things, situations, people that are here one minute and gone the next. It invites you to live in the moment, for a moment, between those states.

Good retrospective exhibitions deftly assemble an artist’s work to tell a story that we know parts of but want to hear in full; great ones offer up myriad new tales by presenting old work in fresh ways. This is a great show. Curated by Tom Eccles and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, it marshals a solid selection of Creed’s greatest hits along with plenty of lesser-known nuggets, tucking them into the intimate and out-of-the-way sections of the Armory that are not often used in the art shows staged there. It renders familiar art and architecture deliciously uncanny.

Hoarders or collectors? Our frightened society has forgotten the difference

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New York art show The Keeper celebrates our poetic obsession with objects, but how many of us simply surround ourselves with familiar, reassuring rubbish?

The exhibition and these reactions suggest a new chapter in the history of collecting. The psychology of the collector seems more traumatised, anxious and defensive. The type of collecting the New Museum draws attention to tends towards the repetitive, and may be hard to explain to or share with others: amassing infinite numbers of the same thing suggests not so much an interest in the meaning or history of objects or a feel for their poetry as a need to surround oneself with reassuring familiarity. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” wrote TS Eliot. Is this a symptom of the same fearfulness fuelling Donald Trump’s run at the presidency, with his offer to defend and protect Americans? Someone out there definitely has a huge collection of Trump memorabilia.

Audio-fail: why is so much sound art so bad?

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Susan Philipsz and John Cage have shown that the genre has claims to greatness, but two works in Edinburgh betray the emptiness of much sound art.

Let’s get this straight, sound art buffs: of course art can be made with sound. It can be made with anything. The first masterpiece of sound art is Marcel Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise, created exactly a century ago. What you see is a ball of twine between two brass plates. What you are told is that it has an unknown object sealed inside. When the twine is shaken the hidden object moves about and makes a rattling noise. As the title makes clear, this “hidden noise” is crucial to the artwork’s meaning.

Duchamp was a genius. He could put a noise in a ball of string and hey presto, it was art. He made it look easy – well, he made everything look easy – and yet many daft and self-indulgent sound works are only “art” at the most glib level as sadly exposed by the National Gallery’s exhibition Soundscapes last summer, in which only Philipsz rose above the banal. They prove what an act of magic it really is to turn sound into sculpture, the ear into a mind’s eye.

The Architect Who Became a Diamond

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A conceptual artist devises an ingenious plan for negotiating access to a hidden archive.

Last September, in Guadalajara, an American conceptual artist named Jill Magid and a pair of gravediggers convened at the Rotonda de los Jaliscienses Ilustres, a monument where the most celebrated citizens of the state of Jalisco are entombed. With them were two notaries and a handful of bureaucrats. It was just after eight in the morning, and the area was nearly silent. The quiet was disturbed by the sound of chisels striking stone. The gravediggers removed a metal plaque, then a cement wall, and, finally, a brick façade. More than an hour later, they hit what they were looking for: an oxidized copper urn, filled with the ashes of Luis Barragán, one of Mexico’s greatest architects, who died in 1988. They removed the urn from the cavity, brushing off dust and ants. Then they opened the vessel and presented it to Magid, who scooped out half a kilo of what looked like dirt and transferred it to a plastic bag, which she then put into a box. The next day, with the box in her carry-on, she flew home to New York.

Why the Art World Is Desperately Seeking Forgotten Artists

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In May, the painter Carmen Herrera surveyed her first US solo show in a decade at New York’s Lisson Gallery and wept with joy. She had ample reason to. Besides being represented by one of the world’s most important galleries, she had canvases on view in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn, the Tate, as well as an upcoming retrospective at the Whitney (opening September 16).

Not bad for a 101-year-old emerging artist—who sold her first painting at the age of 89.

The 10 Most Controversial Art Projects of the Last Century

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Has much changed since Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain?

The art world is no stranger to the gasp-inducing project or performance: in fact, it seems at times to thrive on it. In these dog days of summer, when the art world slows down and the tumbleweeds approach Chelsea, we’re excited to hear that provocative exhibitions are still taking place around the world.

In Tokyo, ASAKUSA gallery is showing “Radical Democracy,” which features the work of artists Thomas Hirschhorn andSantiago Sierra. Sierra, in particular, has gotten flack for recruiting menial laborers in his work, and paying them a small rate to tattoo them, dye their hair, or make them sit in cardboard boxes. It is the transparency of power that makes the audience uncomfortable. “Nothing has changed since the Middle Ages,” the Spanish artist told BOMB magazine in 2004. He continues, “Art is conceptual entertainment. Regardless of how radical it is, it has a great penetration on the market.”

What Was Abstract Expressionism? A Paint-Splattered Primer on America’s First Major Art Movement

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You don’t need to be an art insider to hear the term “Abstract Expressionists” used to describe the inspiration behind all manner of contemporary painting, but what was the original movement all about? Hint: it’s more than just Jackson Pollock drinking and tossing paint on a canvas. In this brief essay from Phaidon’s Art in Time: A World History of Styles and Movements, we learn about the historical developments and key artists that paved away for this highly influential American painting style.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the United States made its first major contribution to the international art world with a painting style that would fundamentally change twentieth-century art. In a New World translation of ideas from European modernism, the Abstract Expressionists combined the flatness and geometry of Cubism, German Expressionist gesture and color, and Surrealist spontaneity and improvisation into their often mural-sized canvases.

In Search of the “Big Technique”: Alex Katz on Why Artists Should Stick to a Style in a Changing Art World

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In this extensive interview excerpted from the revised and expanded edition of Phaidon’s monograph Alex Katz, the New York-based painter sits down with his longtime friend Robert Storr, the now-outgoing dean of the Yale School of Art, for a lively, winding discussion about the artist’s influences, concerns, and life history.

You once said that a jerk is somebody who competes with the wrong guy. [laughs]

Those Klines and de Koonings had so much big energy; I wanted to make something that knocked them off the wall. Just like that—more muscle, more energy. They set the standard. It wasn’t the style I wanted to follow, but I wanted to paint up to their standards. So I took a figurative work and I said, “Well, I want a figurative painting on the scale of the Abstract Expressionists,” you know, on a big scale.

No one had been there, so it was really exciting. I had a painting in my first show at Marlborough (New York) in 1973, which was a group exhibition with Franz Kline, and Clyfford Still, and others. I put a flower painting in from the late 1960s and I was really scared that it was going to look like a piece of crap there. But it didn’t. It held up.

Vantablack – Can an artist ever really own a colour?

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Anish Kapoor has the exclusive rights to paint using Vantablack, the blackest black that has ever existed – but other artists are keen to use it.

Colour is precious. Colour can drive you mad – especially if you are an artist. The colours that artists use can be as expensive as gold – which installationist Richard Wright painted on to a wall in Tate Britain to win the Turner prize – or as lethal as arsenic, which in the Romantic age was used to make the beautiful but deadly Scheele Green.

The colour currently ruffling artistic temperaments is black – but not just any black. This is the blackest black ever. Vantablack, developed by British company NanoSystems to use on stealth satellites reflects almost no light at all.

The Top 10 Most Expensive Living American Artists of 2016

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Each year, artnet News rounds up the art world’s top-performing artists at auction, across categories. But as the 2016 results come in from the first half of auction season, not much has changed since we last mined theartnet Price Database to identify the most expensive living American artists of 2015—which isn’t a good thing.

Similar to artnet News’s last list featuring the top 10 most expensive living British artists, the lack of diversity is evident, and the problem is no different on this side of the Atlantic. David Hammons is the only person of color on the list, and Cindy Sherman has been knocked off, leaving Cady Noland as the lone female artist in this pricey deck of cards. There are also some surprises, though, as Ed Ruscha‘s 1963 painting, Smash, is only a few million behind Jasper Johns‘s iconic Flag (1983) artwork. Nevertheless, we’re waiting for some new voices to rise to the top in 2017.