Salvador Dali Essay On Individualism

1517 Words4 Pages

QUESTION ONE

As individualism continued to develop in society and culture, it also continued in the art that we have covered since the midterm exam. A later industrial revolution led to the era often called the “roaring 20s,” a period of extremes between wealth and poverty, growth and depression, new opportunities and stagnation. The development of capitalism and a creeping of commercial values in society led to an artistic hostility toward--and alienation from--a materialistic society. How artists demonstrated this individualism in their work and activities was a response to the perspectives of the ideas that grew out of technological advances that caused the world to change and develop in new ways. Artists represented their experience and …show more content…

Founded in Paris in 1924 by a small group of writers and artists who were interested in exploring the unconscious as a means to unlock their imaginations, surrealism was influenced by Sigmund Freud, whose work explored how the conscious mind repressed imagination. Influenced also by Karl Marx, they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal contradictions in the world and spark an evolution. Spanish painter Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory is an example of Surrealism. It introduced the image of the soft melting pocket watch and illustrated Dali’s theory of “softness” and “hardness,” which was part of his thinking at the time. It seemed to present an unconscious symbol of the space and time, or of the passing of time as one experiences it in …show more content…

The paintings included brushstrokes and color that depicted space as fragments and fractures. Combining realism with collage and Cubism, it included lines of force to show objects seeming to move through space. The City Rises, by Umberto Boccioni, illustrates the construction of a modern city, with the chaos and movement in the piece indicating a war scene. Fauvism was an early 20th Century art movement co-founded by Henri Matisse and André Derain. Labeled "les fauves" (wild beasts) by an art critic, the artists favored vibrant colors and bold, winding strokes across the canvas. Matisse’s oil painting of his wife, Woman with a Hat, is an example of the development of the Fauvism movement. Its loose brushwork, its unfinished quality, and its bright, unexpected colors were a change from Matisse’s earlier

Open Document