“Metamorphic: Collage in the Dada/Surrealist Tradition”
16 July-16 September 2016
2016 marks the centenary of Dada, the anarchic art movement that signaled the end of nineteenth-century bourgeois naturalism and the beginning of the twentieth-century concept of the artist as miscreant and provocateur. Unlike Cubists like Picasso, Braque and Schwitters, who used collage to seek expression in abstract form, Dadaists like Hannah Höch, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, and Max Ernst employed collage for the subversive critique of the hypocritical European society that had slaughtered a generation in the Great War. The Surrealists, a decade later, employed collage with equal distaste for social conformity, especially in the areas of sexual desire and, following Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, the kingdom of dreams. The prolifically creative Max Ernst, who was involved with both movements, pioneered the use of cut-up and recombined old engravings for his influential collage novel, La Femme Cent Tetes (The Hundred-Headed Woman). The juxtaposition of unlikely elements to create a paradoxical or enigmatic narrative became one of Surrealism’s signature devices, nicely expressed in the phrase from the visionary Uruguayan of the 1860s, Isidore Ducasse (aka the Comte de Lautréamont), whose Miltonic/satanic novel, Lay of Maldoro, became something of a breviary for Surrealism: “as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissection table of an umbrella and a sewing machine.”
The subversive spirit of Dada and Surrealism continues in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Metamorphic” brings together Jenny Honnert Abell, John Hundt, Catie O’Leary, Sherry Parker, Francesca Pastine, and Vanessa Woods.
(adapted from curator DeWitt Cheng’s press materials)
INFORMATION
Paul G. Allen Building & Annex
first and second floors
420 Via Palou Mall
and
David W. Packard Electrical Engineering Building
first and second floors
350 Serra Mall
on the campus of Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305 USA
(650) 725-3622
Hours:
Monday-Friday, 9AM-5PM
Image:
Portrait of a Physician
by John Hundt
collage
2012