All posts tagged: Surrealist

A Workingman’s Surrealist | Jeremy Lybarger

A Workingman’s Surrealist | Jeremy Lybarger

Published by Jenni Sidey

You could say that H. C. Westermann became an artist on the morning of March 19, 1945. While serving as a marine gunner on the USS Enterprise during World War II, the twenty-two-year-old witnessed an enemy aircraft dive-bomb the nearby USS Franklin off the coast of Japan, killing more than seven hundred men—most of them broiled in the explosions, others asphyxiated by the rampant smoke and fuel vapor or drowned in the ocean. Westermann later recalled the “horrible smell of death” that seethed from that inferno—a smell that lingered in his imagination for decades as he transfigured the experience into sculptures, prints, and drawings of enigmatic brio. A recurring image in Westermann’s work is the death ship: stalled, adrift, encroached on by sharks. He sometimes portrays it as a masted merchant ship, at other times as a metal-hulled freighter, hobbled in arctic ice or becalmed in a shabby sundown port. The death ship is his most autobiographical motif, though it hardly conveys the idiosyncrasy of his vision, which cribs from science fiction, pulp novels, and …

Surrealist Artist Behind Hand-Chair Dies at 90

Surrealist Artist Behind Hand-Chair Dies at 90

Published by Jenni Sidey

Pedro Friedeberg, an artist affiliated with the Mexican offshoot of the Surrealist movement and who is now best known for his absurdist designs, including the iconic Hand-Chair, died on Thursday in San Miguel de Allende. He was 90, according to his New York gallery, Ruiz-Healy Art. Friedeberg’s diverse practice included paintings dense with dreamy imagery and design objects that looked like body parts and animals. Though commonly labeled a Surrealist, he bristled against being associated with that movement. Related Articles When a W magazine journalist made the error of claiming that he was the last of the Surrealists in 2024, Friedeberg said, “That’s a terrible mistake. I’m neither a Surrealist nor the last of anything.” He also didn’t like being labeled an artist—“a horrible word,” he once told an interviewer for Christie’s—and said that, if his career took a different turn, he would have become “a spiritualist or a gigolo.” He is most fondly remembered for the Hand-Chair, a seat resembling a large palm that he designed during the early 1960s. He had been assigned …

Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou: The Short Surrealist Film That Revolutionized Cinema (1929)

Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou: The Short Surrealist Film That Revolutionized Cinema (1929)

Published by José Betancourt

Un Chien Andalou means “an Andalu­sian dog,” though the much-stud­ied 1929 short film of that title con­tains no dogs at all, from Andalu­sia or any­where else. In fact, it alludes to a Span­ish expres­sion about how the howl­ing of an Andalu­sian sig­nals that some­one has died. And indeed, there is death in Un Chien Andalou, as well as sex, albeit death and sex as processed through the uncon­scious minds of the young film­mak­er Luis Buñuel and artist Sal­vador Dalí, whose col­lab­o­ra­tion on this endur­ing­ly strange movie did much to make their names. Two of its mem­o­rable images — among six­teen straight min­utes of mem­o­rable images — came straight from their dreams: a hand crawl­ing with ants, and a razor blade slic­ing the moon as if it were an eye. “Less than two min­utes into the pic­ture, a man — played by the stocky, unmiss­able fig­ure of Buñuel him­self — stands on a bal­cony, gaz­ing wolfish­ly at the moon,” writes New York­er film crit­ic Antho­ny Lane. “Cut to the face of a woman. Cut back to …

A Brief History of Surrealist Art: From the Bible and Ancient Egypt to Salvador Dalí’s Dream Worlds

A Brief History of Surrealist Art: From the Bible and Ancient Egypt to Salvador Dalí’s Dream Worlds

Published by José Betancourt

The term sur­re­al­ism — or rather, sur­réal­isme — orig­i­nates from the French words for “beyond real­i­ty.” That’s a zone, we may assume, reach­able by only dar­ing, and pos­si­bly unhinged, artis­tic minds. But in fact, even the most down-to-earth among us go beyond real­i­ty on a night­ly basis. We do so in our dreams, where the accept­ed mechan­ics of space and time, life and death, and cause and effect do not apply. Or rather, they’re replaced by anoth­er set of rules entire­ly, which feels per­fect­ly con­sis­tent and con­vinc­ing to us in the moment. Such “dream log­ic” may frus­trate the friends and fam­i­ly we attempt to regale with tales of our night visions, but as the sur­re­al­ists found, it could also be put to the ser­vice of endur­ing art. In the Hochela­ga video above, that chan­nel’s cre­ator Tom­mie Trelawny pro­vides a long his­to­ry of sur­re­al­ism in a short run­ning time. Trac­ing that move­men­t’s roots, he goes all the way back to the ancient cul­ture of the Aus­tralian Abo­rig­i­nals, for whom the con­cept of the “dream­time” still plays an …