In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille--poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled "enemy within" surrealism--used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, [...]
The Mexican revolution of 1910-1920 gave rise to an artistic explosion that was felt most profoundly in printmaking. The left-wing government viewed art as an important vehicle for education and the promotion of revolutionary values. It established a program to cover the walls of public buildings wi[...]
Genius, anti-artist, charlatan, guru, imposter? Since 1914 Marcel Duchamp has been called all these. Arousing passion and controversy, he has exerted a great influence on art, whose very nature he challenged and redefined as concept rather than product by questioning its traditionally privileged opt[...]
The DYN Circle in Mexico. Transformed by the mysterious pre-Columbian artifacts and monuments that suffused the Mexican landscape, distressed by the failure of political ideology, and inspired by discoveries of scientists of the day, the artists of the Dyn circle played a critical but under-reco[...]
Celebrated for his brilliant use of old film stills, portraits, postcards and other found imagery, John Stezaker engages with this exquisitely selected found material through inversion, excision, incision, fusion and accidental damage. In this extensive monograph/exhibition catalog, Stezaker focuses[...]
World-renowned for her work during the Weimar period, Hannah Hoch was a pioneer in many aspects, both artistic and cultural. She was the lone woman of the Berlin Dada movement - the riotous form of art that deconstructed sound, language, and images to re-assemble them into new objects, texts and m[...]
"Can't the dream be used in solving the fundamental problems of life?" asked Andre Breton, in the "First Surrealist Manifesto." For the Surrealists, dreams were the ultimate site of possibility, the realm in which the artist and writer might be liberated from his or her rationality, moral judgment a[...]