Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Frida Kahlo and Surrealist Art

Explore surrealism from its precursors to core artists, featuring Salvador Dali, Frida Kahlo, Marcel Duchamp, and John Arp on a journey into the surrealist mind.

Explore the precursors of surrealism in Dada and Duchamp; analyze cubism, futurism, and the ready-made as ways to break rationalism and conventional art, including the urinal and the large glass.

Explore John Arp's automatic creation and concrete action, where chance and the subconscious shape flowing forms in wood reliefs, plaster works, and relief cutouts in surrealist sculpture.

Trace Chagall's journey from Belarus to Paris in 1910, where cubism and vivid color fuse his Jewish roots with biblical motifs in paintings and stained glass.

Explore the beginnings and key ideas of surrealism, from dreams and subconscious juxtapositions to metaphysical art, with practical guidance to compose your own surrealist sculptures using everyday objects.

Examine Max Ernst's surrealist innovations, including collage, aggregation, and great dash and front dash techniques. See how rubbing and texture transfer create dreamlike images, as in Europe after the rain.

Analyze Rene Magritte's surreal works, including the first surreal painting from 1926, the lovers, and the human condition, with notes on veil over a face and painterly technique.

Explore non-representational surrealism with Tanguy's open landscapes, organic forms, and automatic painting that emerges without planning and influences later artists.

Explore automatic drawing to express yourself fluidly by blending random techniques like glue, sand, and paint. Practice freehand flow, then shade chosen forms in black, white, or color.

Explore how surrealist works fuse classical Greek and Roman motifs with modern settings—colonnades, Ariadne, long shadows, and interior plazas—evolving into painterly color and narrative elements like the train.

Investigate Dali's paranoiac critical method as a pathway to subconscious creativity, analyzing key works like The Persistence of Memory and hallucinogenic corridor, noting distortion, optical illusions, and war-era symbolism.

Explore how surrealist art channels the subconscious through collage and non-objective forms, from 1919 self-portrait and 1923 tilled fields to 1933 abstractions, blending figurative and dreamlike imagery.

Study surreal imagery of six thousand silver eyes and cables over eyes, with lipstick shades to tranquilize fears of aging and anxious housewives, to explore surrealist themes in art.

Explore the surrealist practice of the exquisite cadaver technique and free association, as Schreiner’s work blends Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights and Goya influences to create dreamlike, randomly assembled imagery.

Explore Leonora Carrington's art through pre-war turmoil, self-portraits, the pursuit of psychic freedom, and alchemy-inspired symbolism, culminating in the 1963 magic world of the Mayas mural in Mexico.

Follow Frida Kahlo's autobiographical self-portraits, shaped by polio and a severe bus crash, and her rise beyond Diego Rivera's wife to a recognized Mexican artist, with communist ties.

Sophia Bassey lacked formal painting training and began painting late, producing prison murals in Acapulco and a 1993 mural for National Autonomous University in Mexico, amid a five-year prison sentence.

Explore the surrealist art of Dali, Miro, and Frida Kahlo through the course catalog, connecting key artworks and ideas within the course framework.