8 - 1920s In Europe & Russia - Surrealism & Sexuality

The Dada movement was an anti art movement starting in around 1916 and fading out around 1923, developing into the Surrealism movement.Surrealism started to take off mainly in France, but spread around the world throughout the 1920's affecting art, film and literature in many countries.

Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism, Phaidon, 2004.

Surrealism involves finding the extraordinary within an ordinary world. It also looked at the unconscious drives such as hunger, anger, and sexuality.

These drives meant that many artists used the human anatomy in their artwork Brassai, Man Ray and Salvador Dali. The image left, False Sky, Brassai, 1934, includes two photo's of a woman's torso, on top of a photograph of a horizon with the sea and sky meeting. The image is very symmetrical and the two torsos give a nice contrast onto the sky and see with the curves of the body. The portion of sky and sea left from the torso's also looks like a skyline or mountain, with the shadows on the torso giving a nice effect that may look like clouds and a nights sky.

The idea of sexuality in art in this time period spanned from the subtle body form like 'False Sky' to more explicit and erotic images like some of Man Rays work.

Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism, Phaidon, 2004.

Man Ray's Return to Reason, right, shows the nude female body covered in strips of light coming from a window, covered by a net curtain. The effect gives off a striped shadows, shows the curves of the female body. Mary Ann Caws describes the the image as

'both natural, like an animal - tiger-striped - and cultural, since the reflection reveals a constructed object. The woman is made animal by the imposition of the photographers design.'

 (Mary Ann Caws,  The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter, 1997)

This shows that the human body can be made into something else because of the culture at the time, disguising the body into that culture.

Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism, Phaidon, 2004.

Man Ray uses shadows and lighting to his advantage in a lot of his pieces, like the one to the left. The sexuality of this image is very multi-gender, with the torso being androgynous, showing hair on the armpits and muscles as a masculine side, along with breasts showing a feminine side. Mary Ann Caws says that this image
          'takes on the appearance of a bull's head'
(Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism, Phaidon, 2004)
This appearance can related to the Surrealism movement as it shows the change from automatism and cubism to more curved, irrational ideas.