American, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1963.
Painter, draughtsman, collage artist, illustrator.
David Aronson, drawn to occultism, paints Surrealistically absurd images, which are sometimes frightening or disturbing. He has produced a set of paintings on the subject of the Holocaust. He also illustrates works for young readers....
French, 20th century, male.
Born 16 September 1886, in Strasbourg; died 7 June 1966, in Basel.
Collage artist, engraver, sculptor, draughtsman, illustrator, poet.
Dadaism.
Der Moderne Bund, Dadaist groups in Zurich and Cologne, Artistes Radicaux, Das Neue Leben, Paris Surrealist Group, Abstraction-Création.
Hans Arp joined the École des Arts et Métiers in Strasbourg in 1902, at the age of 16. In 1903 he began painting and contributed to a local magazine. In 1904 he made his first trip to Paris. From 1905 to 1907 he studied under Ludwig von Hoffmann at the fine arts academy in Weimar, where he attended modern art exhibitions. He returned to Strasbourg, which his family then left for Weggis, on the edge of the Lac des Quatre Cantons in Switzerland. Between 1908 and 1910 he made a second trip to Paris and worked for a time at the Académie Julian. In Weggis he completed his first Abstract compositions and learned the art of modelling. In 1911 he co-founded the group...
German, 20th century, male.
Active also in France.
Born 1902 , in Kattowitz, Germany (now Katowice, Poland); died 24 February 1975 , in Paris.
Photographer, Painter (gouache), sculptor, engraver, draughtsman, illustrator. Portraits.
Surrealist group.
Raised in a family of engineers, Hans Bellmer trained as a technical draughtsman at the polytechnic college in Berlin ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 1907, in Nantes; died 8 May 1977, in Paris.
Painter (gouache/mixed media), watercolourist, engraver, draughtsman, illustrator.
Surrealist group.
Attracted by the Surrealist milieu, Camille Bryen gave up telegraphy in Nantes to go to Paris in 1926. Apparently, he was invited by André Breton. In 1927, he published his first collection of poetry, ...
(b London, March 29, 1905; d Hastings, Oct 22, 1976).
English painter, illustrator and stage designer. As a student at the Chelsea Polytechnic (1921–3) and the Royal College of Art (1923–5) he became a talented figure draughtsman. In the second half of the decade he spent much time in France painting intricately detailed urban scenes, which depicted the low life of Toulon and Marseille. Works such as the watercolour Toulon (1927; priv. col., see Causey, cat. no. 33) were executed in a meticulously finished and vividly coloured decorative style. Burra usually used watercolour and tempera and occasionally collage oil paints.
Burra took ideas from Cubism, Dada (notably George Grosz) and, especially, Surrealism, but his work is also linked with the English satirical tradition of William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank: Burra loved burlesque and poked fun at people’s pretensions and excesses of style and behaviour, as in John Deth (Homage to Conrad Aiken) (...
Belgian, 20th century, male.
Active since 1961 active in France.
Born 26 April 1922, in Haine-St-Pierre; died 27 September 2005, in Paris.
Sculptor, collage artist, photomontage artist, monotype artist, illustrator. Designs for jewellery, monuments.
Kinetic Art.
Groups: Hainaut Surrealist group, Haute Nuit, Madí, CoBrA.
Pol Bury first stayed in France between 1929 and 1932. In 1938 he attended the academy of fine arts in Mons. In 1940 he made his debut in Surrealism with a journal entitled ...
Italian, 20th century, male.
Born 1913, in Milan; died 1993.
Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, engraver, sculptor, illustrator. Figures, landscapes, still-lifes, animals. Stage sets.
Clerici was a keen reader of the Surrealist review Le Minotaure in his youth, and this strongly influenced his later work.
From the outset of his career, he was active in creating stage sets for opera, ballet and the theatre, at the Fenice in Venice, the Rome opera house and other venues, for the works of Monteverdi, Purcell, Lulli, Goldoni and Stravinsky. He also worked as a book illustrator. In his more personal work, he first gained a reputation as a sculptor. After ...
Portuguese, 20th century, male.
Born 1920, in Amadora near Lisbon.
Painter (including gouache), collage artist, assemblage artist, illustrator.
Groups: Os Surrealistas, Phases group.
From 1935, Artur Cruzeiro Seixas studied at the Escola de Artes Decorativas Antonio Arroio in Lisbon. He mingled in Lisbon's avant-garde art circles during the war and attended the gatherings at the Herminius Café in ...
(b Angra do Heroísmo, Azores, Jan 13, 1914; d Lisbon, December 4, 1990).
Portuguese painter, illustrator and poet. In 1935 he moved to Lisbon where his exhibition in 1940 with António Pedro and the English sculptress Pamela Bowden was considered the first national manifestation of Surrealism. In his melancholy and menacing works of the late 1930s and early 1940s, the dream-like spaces are crowded with people and animals in attitudes of violence or alarm, for example Antithesis of Calm (1940; Lisbon, Mus. Gulbenkian). The Brazilian painter Cícero Dias, who was in Portugal in the early 1940s, was an important influence on him then. During the 1940s his painting became less crowded, and the overt violence gave way to gestures of greater ambiguity. In 1944 a fire in the studio he shared with António Pedro destroyed many of their paintings.
Until 1947, when he emigrated to Paris, Dacosta participated in various group shows, winning the important Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Award in 1942. He also wrote poetry and illustrated a number of books, such as ...
(Felip Jacint )
(b Figueres, May 11, 1904; d Figueres, Jan 23, 1989).
Spanish Catalan painter, draughtsman, illustrator, sculptor, writer and film maker. One of the most prolific artists of the 20th century, his fantastic imagery and flamboyant personality also made him one of the best known. His most significant artistic contribution, however, was through his association with Surrealism.
Dalí was born into the happy, if ideologically confusing, family of a respected notary. His father was a Republican and atheist, his mother a Roman Catholic. He was named Salvador in memory of a recently dead brother. This had a profound effect: his subsequent experimentation with identity and with the projection of his own persona may have developed out of an early understanding of himself as ‘a reply, a double, an absence’ (Dalí, 1970, p. 92). His childhood provided him with the fertile memories, both true and false, that fill his autobiography and resound in his art. Catalonia remained important to Dalí, but for its landscape rather than its separatist politics. He painted for much of his life in a house he bought in Port Lligat, near the family holiday home in Cadaqués, but the radical political beliefs that his father had taught him were to be replaced by a self-conscious monarchism and Catholicism. Dalí’s first contact with painting was through Ramon Pichot (...
Spanish, 20th century, male.
Also active in France.
Born 11 May 1904, in Figueras (Catalonia); died 23 January 1989, in Port-Lligat.
Painter, sculptor, printmaker, illustrator, filmmaker, writer.
Paris Surrealist group.
Dalí was born into a middle-class family in Catalonia and named after a brother who had died the year before he was born, a fact that would later affect his conception of his own identity. Dalí’s exposure to art began early. The Impressionist painter Ramon Pichot (1872–1925) was a friend of his father’s, and as a child, Dalí attended the municipal drawing school in Figueras. By the age of 10 he had painted two ambitious works: ...
(b Buenos Aires, Aug 30, 1908; d Paris, Jan 18, 1996).
French painter, stage designer and illustrator of Argentine birth. She grew up in Trieste, Italy. Her first contact with art was through visits to European museums and in her uncle’s large library, where she gleaned her earliest knowledge of artists such as the Pre-Raphaelites, Aubrey Beardsley and Gustav Klimt. She had no formal training as an artist. Her first one-woman exhibition took place in Paris in 1935 and resulted in friendships with Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, René Magritte and Victor Brauner, bringing her into close contact with the Surrealists; her sense of independence and her dislike of the Surrealists’ authoritarian attitudes kept her, however, from officially joining the movement. Nevertheless her works of the late 1930s and 1940s reflect her interest in Surrealist ideas. She also participated in the major international exhibitions organized by the group.
Fini’s almost mystical appreciation for the latent energy residing in rotting vegetation and her interest in nature’s cycles of generation and decay can be seen in works such as ...
Slovak, 20th century, male.
Active in Canada from 1970.
Born 1921, in Nitra.
Painter (mixed media), collage artist, draughtsman, illustrator.
Avangarda 38, Bratislava Surrealist group.
Ladislav Guderna was a pupil of Fulla at the technical academy in Bratislava in 1938, and at the academy of creative art in Belgrade....
British, 20th century, male.
Active from 1926 in France.
Born 27 December 1901, in London; died 4 May 1988, in Paris.
Painter, engraver, illustrator. Figure compositions, portraits, landscapes.
Surrealism.
London Group.
Stanley William Hayter was a painter's son who studied science at King's College, London, taking degrees in organic chemistry and geology. From 1922 to 1925, he worked for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. in Abadan, but then decided to abandon this career for art. In 1926, he settled in Paris, remaining there apart from his many journeys abroad and the years 1940 to 1950 which he spent in the USA. In Paris, he attended the Académie Julian, studying under the Polish engraver Joseph Hecht and Jacques Villon. In 1927, he set up his own studio in the Rue du Moulin Vert, open to all comers and to all kinds of research, later, in 1933, moving to 17 Rue Campagne Première, which became known as Atelier 17. Many of the great artists of the time joined him there, including Miró, Arp, Tanguy, Giacometti, Matta, Brauner, Kandinsky, Vieira da Silva, Alechinsky, Courtin, Ubac, as well as André Masson, with whom he explored automatic drawing. In the USA in the 1940s, Hayter came into contact with other European and American painters, such as Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell, Gorky and Baziotes. Subsequently, he returned to Paris and, in 1972, was awarded the Grand Prix of the City of Paris for his engraved work....
Romanian, 20th century, male.
Active in France from 1930.
Born 10 October 1910, in Piatra Neamt; died 11 January 1987, in Paris.
Painter, sculptor, engraver, illustrator.
Surrealist group.
Jacques Herold was awarded a bursary to study at the school of fine art in Bucharest from 1925 to 1926...
(b Great Falls, MT, Dec 14, 1890; d New York, Oct 22, 1954).
American designer and painter, active in England. He studied painting first, at evening classes at the Mark Hopkins Institute, San Francisco (1910–12), at the Art Institute of Chicago, with lettering (1912), and in Paris at the Académie Moderne (1913–14). In 1912 he adopted the name of an early patron, Professor Joseph McKnight (1865–1942), as a gesture of gratitude. In 1914 he settled in Britain.
From 1915 McKnight Kauffer designed posters for companies such as London Underground Railways (1915–40), Shell UK Ltd, the Daily Herald and British Petroleum (1934–6). One of his master works, Soaring to Success! Daily Herald—The Early Bird (1919; see Haworth-Booth, fig.), was derived from Japanese prints and from Vorticism. In 1920 he was a founder-member of Group R with Wyndham Lewis and others. McKnight Kauffer’s designs included illustrations for T. S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems...
(Oscar de la Conception)
Cuban, 20th century, male.
Active also in France.
Born 8 December 1902, in Sagua la Grande, Cuba; died 11 September 1982, in Paris.
Painter (gouache, pastels, watercolours), draughtsman, sculptor, engraver, illustrator, lithographer, potter.
Murals.
Surrealist group.
After a brief period at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Havana from 1918 to 1923, Wifredo Lam went to Spain and remained there from 1924 to 1938, first in Madrid and later Barcelona. By 1938, Spain had been devastated by civil war and Lam was forced to move to Paris. Picasso became very fond of Lam and introduced him to André Breton, Max Ernst, and Victor Brauner, among others. From 1938 to 1941, Lam participated in the activities of the Surrealist group, particularly from 1940 when he found himself in Marseilles with the Surrealists who had been driven out of Paris by the war and the invasion of France. In 1940, Lam illustrated Breton’s ...
(b Mexico City, Aug 26, 1896; d Mexico City, Jan 28, 1971).
Mexican painter, stage designer, illustrator, and writer. He studied in Mexico City at the Escuela al Aire Libre de Coyoacán and at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, before living in Paris from 1922 to 1930, where he trained as a stage designer from 1928 to 1930 in the studio of Charles Dullin. In Paris he attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and became aware of Surrealism; he was one of the first artists to introduce the style to Mexico. In his characteristic small-scale oil paintings, such as Children with Cage (Mexico City, Mus. N. A.), in which two girls are silhouetted in front of a curtain, he combined neo-Impressionist brushwork and a highly theatrical handling of light with absurd elements. He abandoned his career as a painter at an early age, concentrating in the 1930s and 1940s on designing for the stage as well as making his name as a critic and playwright....
Belgian, 20th century, male.
Born 21 November 1898, in Lessines (Hainaut); died 15 August 1967, in Schaerbeek.
Painter, collage artist, illustrator, designer, film-maker, writer.
Brussels Surrealist group, Hainaut Surrealist group.
After classical studies in Charleroi, René François Ghislain Magritte attended, somewhat half-heartedly, the classes of Emile van Damme-Sylva, Gisbert Combaz, and Constant Montald at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from 1916 to 1918. In 1920, he linked up with E. L. T. Mesens, who had been hired as his brother Paul’s piano teacher. Magritte married a childhood friend in 1922. He earned a living working in a wallpaper factory as a designer along with Victor Servrancks, whom he had met at the Académie. He devoted his leisure time to painting. In 1923, he left the factory and created posters and advertisements, although his first such works date back to 1919. Parallel to this work, he pursued commercial production, which underscored his attachment to this art form. In 1927, he illustrated the fur catalogue for Muller and Samuel for the 1928 season. In 1924, he met the writers Camille Goemans and Marcel Lecomte. Along with these two writers, Paul Nougé, and Mesens, Magritte participated in the activities of a Belgian Surrealist group, manifest in several, often ephemeral, reviews in ...
Spanish, 20th century, male.
Born 4 May 1918, in Burriana (Castellón de la Plana).
Painter, illustrator.
Emmanuel Adsuara Manuel was a self-taught artist. He contributed drawings to the Surrealist magazine Pen in Hand ( La Main à la plume) and in the same spirit, illustrated Jean-François Chabrun's ...
