art assignment - man ray

Man Ray

From the time he began attracting attention as an artist until his death more than sixty years later, Man Ray allowed little of his early life or family background to be known to the public, even refusing to acknowledge that he ever had a name other than Man Ray.

Man Ray (August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976), born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. Best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media and considered himself a painter above all. He was also a renowned fashion and portrait photographer.

While appreciation for Man Ray's work beyond his fashion and portrait photography was slow in coming during his lifetime, especially in his native United States, his reputation has grown steadily in the decades since.

In 1999, ARTnews magazine named him one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century, citing his groundbreaking photography as well as "his explorations of film, painting, sculpture, collage, assemblage, and prototypes of what would eventually be called performance art and conceptual art" and saying "Man Ray offered artists in all media an example of a creative intelligence that, in its 'pursuit of pleasure and liberty,'"—Man Ray's stated guiding principles—"unlocked every door it came to and walked freely where it would.

art assignment - raoul hausmann

raoul hausmann

Raoul Hausmann was born in Vienna but moved to Berlin with his parents at the age of 14, in 1901. His earliest art training was from his father, a professional conservator and painter. He met Johannes Baader, an eccentric architect and another future member of Dada, in 1905. At around the same time he met Elfride Schaeffer, a violinist, who he married in 1908, a year after the birth of their daughter, Vera. That same year Hausmann enrolled at a private Art School in Berlin^, where he remained until 1911.

After seeing expressionist paintings in Herwarth Walden's gallery Der Sturm in 1912, Hausmann started to produce expressionist prints in Erich Heckel's studio, and became a staff writer for Walden's magazine, also called Der Sturm, which provided a platform for his earliest polemical writings against the art establishment. In keeping with his expressionist colleagues, he initially welcomed the war, believing it to be a necessary cleansing of a calcified society, although being an Austrian citizen living in Germany he was spared the draft.

Hausmann met Hannah Höch in 1915, and embarked upon an extramarital affair that produced an 'artistically productive but turbulent bon. That would last until 1922. In 1916 Hausmann met two more people who would become important influences on his subsequent career; the psychoanalyst Otto Gross who believed psychoanalysis to be the preparation for revolution, and the anarchist writer Franz Jung. By now his artistic circle had come to include the writer Salomo Friedlaender, Hans Richter, Emmy Hennings and members of Die Aktion magazine, which, along with Der Sturm and the anarchist paper Die Freie Straße published numerous articles by him in this period.

art assignment - wiston smith

winston smith

Winston Smith is a fictional character and the protagonist of George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The character was employed by Orwell as an everyman in the setting of the novel, a "central eye ... [the reader] can readily identify with". Winston Smith works as a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line. This involves revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs — mostly to remove "unpersons," people who have fallen foul of the party. Because of his proximity to the mechanics of rewriting history, Winston Smith nurses doubts about the Party and its monopoly on truth.

Winston Smith, lured into joining a secret organization whose aim is to undermine the dictatorship of "Big Brother", is actually being set up by O'Brien, a government agent. Captured and tortured, he eventually betrays his accomplice and lover, Julia. His freedom is finally and completely stripped when he accepts the assertion 2 + 2 = 5, a phrase that has entered the lexicon to represent obedience to ideology over rational truth or fact. Winston's death at the hands of the party is not depicted in the conclusion of the novel, but is deeply foreshadowed at the start of the novel.

art assignment - joseph cornell

joseph cornell

Joseph Cornell was born in Nyack, New York, to Joseph Cornell, a well-to-do designer and merchant of textiles, and Helen TenBroeck Storms Cornell, who had trained as a kindergarten teacher. The Cornells had four children: Joseph, Elizabeth (b. 1905), Helen (b. 1906), and Robert (b. 1910). Both parents came from socially prominent families of Dutch ancestry, long-established in New York State. Cornell's father died in 1917, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. Following the elder Cornell's death, his wife and children moved to the borough of Queens in New York City. Cornell attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in the class of 1921, although he did not graduate. Except for the three and a half years he spent at Phillips, he lived for most of his life in a small, wooden-frame house on Utopia Parkway in a working-class area of Flushing, along with his mother and his brother Robert, whom cerebral palsy had rendered physically challenged.

Cornell's most characteristic art works were boxed assemblages created from found objects. These are simple boxes, usually glass-fronted, in which he arranged surprising collections of photographs or Victorian bric-à-brac, in a way that combines the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Many of his boxes, such as the famous Medici Slot Machine boxes, are interactive and are meant to be handled.

art assignment - kurt schwitters

kurt schwitters

Kurt Schwitters was born on 20 June 1887, the only child of Edward Schwitters and his wife Henriette His parents were proprietors of a ladies' clothes shop. They sold the business in 1898, using the money to buy five properties in Hanover which they rented out, allowing the family to live off the income for the rest of Schwitter's life in Germany. In 1901 the family moved to Waldstrabe 5, future site of the Merzbau. The same year, Schwitters suffered his first epileptic seizure, a condition that would exempt him from military service in World War I until the last stages of the conflict, when conscription began to be applied to a far wider section of the population.

After studying art at the Dresden Academy alongside Otto Dix and George Grosz, (although Schwitters seems to have been unaware of their work, or indeed of contemporary Dresden artists Die Brucke), 1909-14, Schwitters returned to Hanover and started his artistic career as a post-impressionist. As the First World War progressed, however, his work became darker, gradually developing a distinctive expressionist tone. Expressionism was a predominantly German artistic movement best exemplified by Die Brucke, and by the paintings of Emil Nolde and Ernst Kirchner in particular.

Schwitters spent most of the war working as a technical draftsman in a factory just outside Hanover. He was drafted into the 73rd Hanoverian Regiment in March 1917, but exempted as unfit in June of the same year. By his own account, his time as a draftsman influenced his later work, using Machines as metaphors of human activity.

art assignment - max ernst

max ernst
Ernst was born in Brühl, Germany, near Cologne. In 1909, he enrolled in the University at Bonn to study philosophy but soon abandoned the courses. He began painting that year, but never received any formal artistic training. During World War I he served in the German army, which was a momentous interruption in his career as an artist. He stated in his autobiography, "Max Ernst died the 1st of August, 1914."

After the war, filled with new ideas, Ernst, Jean Arp and social activist Alfred Grünwald formed the Cologne, Germany Dada group. In 1918 he married the art historian Luise Straus—a stormy relationship that would not last. The couple had a son who was born in 1920, the artist Jimmy Ernst. In 1919 Ernst visited Paul Klee and created paintings, block prints and collages, and experimented with mixed media.
In 1922, he joined fellow Dadaists André Breton, Gala, Tristan Tzara, and Paul Éluard at the artistic community of Montparnasse^. Constantly experimenting, in 1925 he invented a graphic art technique called frottage .which uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images.

He also created another technique called 'grattage' in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. He uses this technique in his famous painting 'Forest and Dove'

art assignment - hannah hoch

hannah hoch

Hannah Höch was born Anna Therese Johanne Höch in Gotha, Germany. From 1912 to 1914 she studied at the College of Arts and Crafts in Berlin under the guidance of Harold Bergen. She chose the curriculum glass design and graphic arts, rather than fine arts, to please her father. In 1914, at the start of World War I, she left the school to work with the Red Cross. In 1915 she returned to schooling, entering the graphics class of the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts. Also in 1915, Höch began an influential friendship with Raoul Hausmann, a member of the Berlin Dada movement.

Höch's involvement with the Berlin Dadists began in earnest in 1919. After her schooling, she worked in the handicrafts department for Ullstein Verlang [The Ullstein Press], designing dress and embroidery patterns for Die Dame [The Lady] and Die Praktische Berlinerin. The influence of this early work and training can be seen in her later work involving references to dress patterns and textiles. From 1926 to 1929 she lived and worked in the Netherlands. Höch made many influential friendships over the years, with Kurt Schwitters and Piet Mondrian among others. Hausmann, along with Höch, was one of the first pioneers of the artform that would come to be known as photomontage.

art assignment- richard huelsenbeck

Richard hulsenbeck
Richard Hülsenbeck was a medical student on the eve of World War I. Born 23 April 1892 in Frankenau, Germany.Died 30 April 1974 in Muralto, Switzerland. He was invalided out of the army and emigrated to Zürich, Switzerland in February 1916, where he fell in with the Cabaret Voltaire. In January 1917, he moved to Berlin, taking with him the ideas and techniques which helped him found the Berlin Dada group. 'To make literature with a gun in my hand had for a time been my dream,'(1) he wrote in 1920. His ideas fitted in with left-wing politics current at time in Berlin. However, idealistic Huelsenbeck and his companions were their challenge 'Dada is German Bolshevism' had unfortunate repercussions later, when the National Socialists denounced all aspects of modern art as Kunstbolschewismus. Later in life, he moved to New York City, where he practiced Jungian psychoanalysis under the name Charles R. Hulbeck. In 1970 he returned to the Ticino region of Switzerland. He died 1974 in Muralto, Switzerland.

Quote

“Hatred of the press, hatred of advertising, hatred of sensations are typical of people who prefer their armchair to the noise of the street."

art assignment

john heartfiled

Helmut Herzfelde was born in Berlin, Germany on 19th June, 1891. His father was a socialist writer and his mother was a textile worker and trade union activist. As a result of their politics the family was forced to flee to Switzerland in 1896.

After leaving school at fourteen Herzfelde worked for a bookseller in Wiesbadenl. In 1907 he became an assistant to the painter, Hermann Bouffier, and two years later became a student at the School of Applied Arts in Munich.

In 1912 Herzefelde started work as a designer in Mannheim for a year before moving to Berlin to study under Ernst Neuman at the Arts and Crafts School.

During the First World War Herzefelde began contributing work to Die Neue Jugend, an arts journal published by his brother, Wieland Herzfelde. He was drafted into the infantry where he meets George Grosz.

Herzefelde continued to contribute illustrations to Die Neue Jugend. While working for the journal Heartfield developed a new style of work that later became known as photomontage (the production of pictures by rearranging selected details of photographs to form a new and convincing unity). A pacifist and Marxist, Herzfelde, changed his name to John Heartfield in 1916 in protest against German nationalism.

GOMA art excursion

at GOMA i had fun and it was exciteing to see al the different pices of art work and it was interesting on what kinds of art works mean what. i had learnt alot about the the GOMA art gallery by reading the art work and trying to see what the artist saw in what they were painting.

GOMA art excursion

juxtapose: to put unlike objects side by side. surrliest would put unlike objects together to make it a surrliest image, and so that it would and wouldnt make sence in a way.

surrlisem pictures

the meaning of surrlisem

surrlisem: the menaning for surrlisem is that it is an artistic and literary movement, dedicated to expessing the imagination as revealed in dreams. it is a free of mindfull control of reason and convention.