"Trends and Movement"

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I am Maya Batiya, A student of Department of English , MKBU.

∆∆ Thinking activity ∆∆

 "Trends and Movement"

This Blog is a part of the thinking Activity of the trends and movements in this Blog .

       _Assigned by Megha ma'am.. 

1. Expressionism :

Expressionism, artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person. The artist accomplishes this aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements. Expressionism can also be seen as a permanent tendency in Germanic and Nordic art from at least the European Middle Ages, particularly in times of social change or spiritual crisis, and in this sense it forms the converse of the rationalist and classicizing tendencies of Italy and later of France.

Expressionism in literature:

Expressionism in literature arose as a reaction against materialism, complacent bourgeois prosperity, rapid mechanization and urbanization, and the domination of the family within pre-World War I European society. It was the dominant literary movement in Germany during and immediately after World War I.

In forging a drama of social protest, Expressionist writers aimed to convey their ideas through a new style. Their concern was with general truths rather than with particular situations; hence, they explored in their plays the predicaments of representative symbolic types rather than of fully developed individualized characters. Emphasis was laid not on the outer world, which is merely sketched in and barely defined in place or time, but on the internal, on an individual’s mental state; hence, the imitation of life is replaced in Expressionist drama by the ecstatic evocation of states of mind. The leading character in an Expressionist play often pours out his or her woes in long monologues couched in a concentrated, elliptical, almost telegrammatic language that explores youth’s spiritual malaise, its revolt against the older generation, and the various political or revolutionary remedies that present themselves. The leading character’s inner development is explored through a series of loosely linked tableaux, or “stations,” during which he revolts against traditional values and seeks a higher spiritual vision of life.

Decline of the movement:

The decline of Expressionism was hastened by the vagueness of its longing for a better world, by its use of highly poetic language, and in general the intensely personal and inaccessible nature of its mode of presentation. The partial reestablishment of stability in Germany after 1924 and the growth of more overtly political styles of social realism hastened the movement’s decline in the late 1920s. Expressionism was definitively killed by the advent of the Nazis to power in 1933. They branded the work of almost all Expressionists as degenerate and forbade them to exhibit or publish and eventually even to work. Many Expressionists went into exile in the United States and other countries.

∆ Surrealism:

Surrealism,movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism’s emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.

• Surrealist artists:

With its emphasis on content and free form, Surrealism provided a major alternative to the contemporary, highly formalistic Cubist movement and was largely responsible for perpetuating in modern painting the traditional emphasis on content. The work of major Surrealist painters is too diverse to be summarized categorically. Each artist sought his or her own means of self-exploration. Some single-mindedly pursued a spontaneous revelation of the unconscious, freed from the controls of the conscious mind, while others, notably the Catalan painter Joan Miró (though he never officially joined the group), used Surrealism as a liberating starting point for an exploration of personal fantasies, conscious or unconscious, often through formal means of great beauty.

A range of possibilities falling between the two extremes can be distinguished. At one pole, exemplified at its purest by the works of the French artist Jean Arp, the viewer is confronted with images, usually biomorphic, that are suggestive but indefinite. As the viewer’s mind works with the provocative image, unconscious associations are liberated, and the creative imagination asserts itself in a totally open-ended investigative process. To a greater or lesser extent, the German artist Max Ernst, French painter André Masson, and Miró also followed this approach, variously called organic, emblematic, or absolute Surrealism.

"•Women artists"

Though it was a movement dominated by men—and often regarded as outright sexist—several talented women made inroads, if only briefly, into Breton’s tight-knit circle. Many of the women had close, usually intimate, relationships with the male artists, but they also flourished artistically and exhibited at Surrealist exhibitions. Essential members of the group include American painter and writer Dorothea Tanning, whose paintings often feature young women seemingly at the mercy of intangible forces; American painter and poet Kay Sage, known for works characterized by stiff architectural objects and suggestions of figures against bleak landscapes or wastelands; English-born Mexican artist and writer Leonora Carrington, whose haunting, autobiographical, somewhat inscrutable paintings incorporate images of sorcery, metamorphosis, alchemy, and the occult; Oppenheim, who was famous for her assemblages of everyday items, many of which evoked eroticism; and British artist Eileen Agar, known for her paintings, collages, and objects, who had close connections with the British Surrealist community. These women’s role in the movement was explored in depth by scholar Whitney Chadwick in her groundbreaking book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985).

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