Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is best known for his theories on communicative rationality and the public sphere. In 2014, Prospect readers chose Habermas as one of their favourites among the "world's leading thinkers". Associated with the Frankfurt School, Habermas's work focuses on the foundations of epistemology and social theory, the analysis of advanced capitalism and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, contemporary politics German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests. Habermas is known for his work on the concept of modernity with respect to the discussions of rationalization set forth by Max Weber, he has been influenced by American pragmatism, action theory, poststructuralism. Habermas was born in Düsseldorf, Rhine Province, in 1929.
He had corrective surgery twice during childhood. Habermas argues that his speech disability made him think differently about the importance of deep dependence and of communication; as a young teenager, he was profoundly affected by World War II. Until his graduation from gymnasium, Habermas lived near Cologne, his father, Ernst Habermas, was Executive director of the Cologne Chamber of Industry and Commerce, was described by Habermas as a Nazi sympathizer. He was brought up in a staunchly Protestant milieu, his grandfather being the director of the seminary in Gummersbach, he studied at the universities of Göttingen and Bonn and earned a doctorate in philosophy from Bonn in 1954 with a dissertation written on the conflict between the absolute and history in Schelling's thought, Das Absolute und die Geschichte. Von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken, his dissertation committee included Oskar Becker. From 1956 on, he studied philosophy and sociology under the critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno at the Goethe University Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research, but because of a rift between the two over his dissertation—Horkheimer had made unacceptable demands for revision—as well as his own belief that the Frankfurt School had become paralyzed with political skepticism and disdain for modern culture—he finished his habilitation in political science at the University of Marburg under the Marxist Wolfgang Abendroth.
His habilitation work was entitled Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. It is a detailed social history of the development of the bourgeois public sphere from its origins in the 18th century salons up to its transformation through the influence of capital-driven mass media. In 1961 he became a Privatdozent in Marburg, and—in a move, unusual for the German academic scene of that time—he was offered the position of "extraordinary professor" of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in 1962, which he accepted. In this same year he gained his first serious public attention, in Germany, with the publication of his habilitation. In 1964 supported by Adorno, Habermas returned to Frankfurt to take over Horkheimer's chair in philosophy and sociology; the philosopher Albrecht Wellmer was his assistant in Frankfurt from 1966 to 1970. He accepted the position of Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg in 1971, worked there until 1983, two years after the publication of his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action.
He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984. Habermas returned to his chair at Frankfurt and the directorship of the Institute for Social Research. Since retiring from Frankfurt in 1993, Habermas has continued to publish extensively. In 1986, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the highest honour awarded in German research, he holds the position of "Permanent Visiting" Professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, "Theodor Heuss Professor" at The New School, New York. Habermas was awarded The Prince of Asturias Award in Social Sciences of 2003. Habermas was the 2004 Kyoto Laureate in the Arts and Philosophy section, he traveled to San Diego and on 5 March 2005, as part of the University of San Diego's Kyoto Symposium, gave a speech entitled The Public Role of Religion in Secular Context, regarding the evolution of separation of church and state from neutrality to intense secularism. He received the 2005 Holberg International Memorial Prize.
In 2007, Habermas was listed as the seventh most-cited author in the humanities by The Times Higher Education Guide, ahead of Max Weber and behind Erving Goffman. Jürgen Habermas is the father of Rebekka Habermas, historian of German social and cultural history and professor of modern history at the University of Göttingen. Habermas is mentor. Among his most prominent students were the pragmatic philosopher Herbert Schnädelbach, the political sociologist Claus Offe (professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berl
Kitsch
Kitsch called cheesiness or tackiness, is art or other objects that speaking, appeal to popular rather than "high art" tastes. Such objects are sometimes appreciated in a knowingly humorous way; the word was first applied to artwork, a response to certain divisions of 19th-century art with aesthetics that favored what art critics would consider to be exaggerated sentimentality and melodrama. Hence,'kitsch art' is associated with'sentimental art'. Kitsch is related to the concept of camp, because of its humorous and ironic nature. Kitsch art may contain palatable and romantic themes and visuals that few would find disagreeable, shocking or otherwise objectionable, it may be quaint or "quirky" without being controversial. To brand visual art as "kitsch" is pejorative, as it implies that the work in question is gaudy, or that it serves a ornamental and decorative purpose rather than amounting to a work of what may be seen as true artistic merit. However, art deemed kitsch may be enjoyed in an positive and sincere manner.
The term is sometimes applied to music or literature, or indeed any work. As a descriptive term, "kitsch" originated in the art markets of Munich in the 1860s and the 1870s, describing cheap and marketable pictures and sketches. In Das Buch vom Kitsch, Hans Reimann defines it as a professional expression "born in a painter's studio"; the study of kitsch was done exclusively in German until the 1970s, with Walter Benjamin being an important scholar in the field. Kitsch is regarded as a modern phenomenon, coinciding with social changes in recent centuries such as the Industrial Revolution, mass production, modern materials and mediums such as plastics and television, the rise of the middle class and public education—all of which have factored into a perception of oversaturation of art produced for the popular taste. Modernist writer Hermann Broch argues that the essence of kitsch is imitation: kitsch mimics its immediate predecessor with no regard to ethics—it aims to copy the beautiful, not the good.
According to Walter Benjamin, kitsch is, unlike art, a utilitarian object lacking all critical distance between object and observer. Kitsch is less about the thing observed than about the observer. According to Roger Scruton, "Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious."Tomáš Kulka, in Kitsch and Art, starts from two basic facts that kitsch "has an undeniable mass-appeal" and "considered bad", proposes three essential conditions: Kitsch depicts a beautiful or emotionally charged subject. The Kitsch movement is an international movement of classical painters, founded in 1998 upon a philosophy proposed by Odd Nerdrum and clarified in his book On Kitsch in cooperation with Jan-Ove Tuv and others, incorporating the techniques of the Old Masters with narrative and charged imagery. Camp Cliché Lowbrow Museum of Bad Art – Privately owned museum Poshlost – A Russian word for a particular negative human character trait or man-made thing or idea Prolefeed – Newspeak term in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George OrwellNotable examplesDogs Playing Poker – Set of paintings by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge Velvet Elvis – A painting of Elvis Presley on velvet William-Adolphe Bouguereau – 19th-century French painter Christmas cards Adorno, Theodor.
The Culture Industry. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-25380-2 Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten. "Wabi and Kitsch: Two Japanese Paradigms" in Æ: Canadian Aesthetics Journal 15. Braungart, Wolfgang. "Kitsch. Faszination und Herausforderung des Banalen und Trivialen". Max Niemeyer Verlag. ISBN 3-484-32112-1/0083-4564. Cheetham, Mark A. "Kant and Art History: moments of discipline". Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-80018-8. Dorfles, Gillo. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, Universe Books. LCCN 78-93950 Elias, Norbert. "The Kitsch Style and the Age of Kitsch," in J. Goudsblom and S. Mennell The Norbert Elias Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Gelfert, Hans-Dieter. "Was ist Kitsch?". Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen. ISBN 3-525-34024-9. Giesz, Ludwig. Phänomenologie des Kitsches. 2. Vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.. Reprint: Ungekürzte Ausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. ISBN 3-596-12034-9 / ISBN 978-3-596-12034-5. Gorelik, Boris. Incredible Tretchikoff: Life of an artist and adventurer. Art / Books, London.
ISBN 978-1-908970-08-4 Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture. Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-6681-8 Holliday and Potts, Tracey Kitsch! Cultural Politics and Taste, Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-6616-0 Karpfen, Fritz. "Kitsch. Eine Studie über die Entartung der Kunst". Weltbund-Verlag, Hamburg. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. "The Modern System of the Arts". Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-02010-5 Kulka, Tomas. Kitsch and Art. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-271-01594-2 Moles, Abraham. Psychologie du Kitsch: L'art du Bonhe
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist, famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the'Frankfurt School' of social research. Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, economic disruption, environmental crisis, the poverty of mass culture using the philosophy of history as a framework; this became the foundation of critical theory. His most important works include Eclipse of Reason, Between Philosophy and Social Science and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned and made other significant works possible. On February 14, 1895, Horkheimer was born the only son of Babetta Horkheimer. Horkheimer was born into a wealthy Orthodox Jewish family, his father was a successful businessman who owned several textile factories in the Zuffenhausen district of Stuttgart, where Max was born. Moritz expected his son to own the family business. Max was taken out of school in 1910 to work in the family business, where he became a junior manager.
During this period he would begin two relationships. First, he met Friedrich Pollock, who would become a close academic colleague, who would remain Max's closest friend, he met Rose Riekher, his father's personal secretary. Eight years Max's senior, a gentile, of an economically lower class, Riekher was not considered a suitable match by Moritz Horkheimer. Despite this and Maidon would marry in 1926 and remain together until her death in 1969. In 1917, his manufacturing career ended and his chances of taking over his family business were interrupted when he was drafted into World War I. However, Horkheimer was denied service on medical grounds. In the spring of 1919, after failing an army physical, Horkheimer enrolled at Munich University. While living in Munich, he was mistaken for the revolutionary playwright Ernst Toller and arrested and imprisoned. After being released, Horkheimer moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he studied philosophy and psychology under the respectable Hans Cornelius. There, he met Theodor Adorno, several years his junior, with whom he would strike a lasting friendship and a collaborative relationship.
After an abortive attempt at writing a dissertation on gestalt psychology, with Cornelius's direction, completed his doctorate in philosophy with a 78-page dissertation titled The Antinomy of Teleological Judgment. In 1925, Horkheimer was habilitated with a dissertation entitled Kant's Critique of Judgement as Mediation between Practical and Theoretical Philosophy. Here, he met Friedrich Pollock; the following year, Max was appointed Privatdozent. Shortly after, in 1926, Horkheimer married Rose Riekher. In 1926 Horkheimer was an "unsalaried lecturer in Frankfurt." Shortly after, in 1930, he was promoted to professor of philosophy at Frankfurt University. In the same year, when the Institute for Social Research's directorship became vacant, after the departure of Carl Grünberg, Horkheimer was elected to the position "by means of an endowment from a wealthy businessman"; the Institute had had its beginnings in a Marxist study group started by Felix Weil, a one-time student of political science at Frankfurt who used his inheritance to fund the group as a way to support his leftist academic aims.
Pollock and Horkheimer were partners with Weil in the early activities of the Institute. Horkheimer worked to make the Institute a purely academic enterprise; as director, he changed Frankfurt from an orthodox Marxist school to a heterodox school for critical social research. The following year publication of the Institute's Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung began, with Horkheimer as its editor. Horkheimer intellectually reoriented the Institute, proposing a programme of collective research aimed at specific social groups that would highlight the problem of the relationship of history and reason; the Institute focused on integrating the views of Sigmund Freud. The Frankfurt School attempted this by systematically hitching together the different conceptual structures of historical materialism and psychoanalysis. During the time between Horkheimer's being named Professor of Social Philosophy and director of the Institute in 1930, the Nazis became the second largest party in the Reichstag. In the midst of the violence surrounding the Nazis' rise and his associates began to prepare for the possibility of moving the Institute out of Germany.
Horkheimer's venia legendi was revoked by the new Nazi government because of the Marxian nature of the Institute's ideas as well as its prominent Jewish association. When Hitler was named the Chancellor in 1933, the Institute was thus forced to close its location in Germany, he emigrated to Geneva, Switzerland and to New York City the following year, where Horkheimer met with the president of Columbia University to discuss hosting the Institute. To Horkheimer's surprise, the president agreed to host the Institute in exile as well as offer Horkheimer a building for the Institute. In July 1934 Horkheimer accepted an offer from Columbia to relocate the Institute to one of their buildings. In 1940, Horkheimer received American citizenship and moved to the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles, where his collaboration with Adorno would yield the Dialectic of Enlightenment. In 1942, Horkheimer assumed t
Culture
Culture is the social behavior and norms found in human societies. Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Cultural universals are found in all human societies; the concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization, philosophy and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society. In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts, education, or manners; the level of cultural sophistication has sometimes been seen to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital.
In common parlance, culture is used to refer to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century; some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the lower classes and create a false consciousness, such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions; when used as a count noun, a "culture" is the set of customs and values of a society or community, such as an ethnic group or nation. Culture is the set of knowledge acquired over time.
In this sense, multiculturalism values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same planet. Sometimes "culture" is used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture, or a counterculture. Within cultural anthropology, the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked or evaluated because any evaluation is situated within the value system of a given culture; the modern term "culture" is based on a term used by the Ancient Roman orator Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes, where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul or "cultura animi," using an agricultural metaphor for the development of a philosophical soul, understood teleologically as the highest possible ideal for human development. Samuel Pufendorf took over this metaphor in a modern context, meaning something similar, but no longer assuming that philosophy was man's natural perfection, his use, that of many writers after him, "refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, through artifice, become human."In 1986, philosopher Edward S.
Casey wrote, "The word culture meant'place tilled' in Middle English, the same word goes back to Latin colere,'to inhabit, care for, worship' and cultus,'A cult a religious one.' To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensive to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly." Culture described by Richard Velkley:... meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires most of its modern meaning in the writings of the 18th-century German thinkers, who were on various levels developing Rousseau's criticism of "modern liberalism and Enlightenment". Thus a contrast between "culture" and "civilization" is implied in these authors when not expressed as such. In the words of anthropologist E. B. Tylor, it is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, art, law and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Alternatively, in a contemporary variant, "Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices and material expressions, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held in common.
The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is "the way of life the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time." Terror management theory posits that culture is a series of activities and worldviews that provide humans with the basis for perceiving themselves as "person of worth within the world of meaning"—raising themselves above the physical aspects of existence, in order to deny the animal insignificance and death that Homo sapiens became aware of when they acquired a larger brain. The word is used in a general sense as the evolved ability to categorize and represent experiences with symbols and to act imaginatively and creatively; this ability arose with the evolution of behavioral modernity in humans around 50,000 years ago, is thought to be unique to humans, although some other species have demonstrated similar, though much less complex, abilities for social learning. It is used to denote the co
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid- to late 20th century across philosophy, the arts and criticism and that marked a departure from modernism. The term has more been applied to the historical era following modernity and the tendencies of this era. While encompassing a wide variety of approaches, postmodernism is defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward the meta-narratives and ideologies of modernism calling into question various assumptions of Enlightenment rationality. Common targets of postmodern critique include universalist notions of objective reality, truth, human nature, reason and social progress. Postmodern thinkers call attention to the contingent or socially-conditioned nature of knowledge claims and value systems, situating them as products of particular political, historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-referentiality and moral relativism and irreverence.
Postmodern critical approaches gained purchase in the 1980s and 1990s, have been adopted in a variety of academic and theoretical disciplines, including cultural studies, philosophy of science, linguistics, feminist theory, literary criticism, as well as art movements in fields such as literature and music. Postmodernism is associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction and post-structuralism, as well as philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson. Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, include assertions that postmodernism promotes obscurantism, is meaningless, adding nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. Postmodernism arose after World War II as a reaction to the perceived failings of modernism, whose radical artistic projects had come to be associated with totalitarianism or had been assimilated into mainstream culture; the basic features of what is now called postmodernism can be found as early as the 1940s, most notably in the work of artists such as Jorge Luis Borges.
However, most scholars today would agree that postmodernism began to compete with modernism in the late 1950s and gained ascendancy over it in the 1960s. Since postmodernism has been a dominant, though not undisputed, force in art, film, drama, architecture and continental philosophy. Salient features of postmodernism are thought to include the ironic play with styles and narrative levels, a metaphysical skepticism or nihilism towards a "grand narrative" of Western culture, a preference for the virtual at the expense of the Real and a "waning of affect" on the part of the subject, caught up in the free interplay of virtual, endlessly reproducible signs inducing a state of consciousness similar to schizophrenia. Since the late 1990s there has been a small but growing feeling both in popular culture and in academia that postmodernism "has gone out of fashion". Structuralism was a philosophical movement developed by French academics in the 1950s in response to French Existentialism, it has been seen variously as an expression of High modernism, or postmodernism.
"Post-structuralists" were thinkers who moved away from the strict interpretations and applications of structuralist ideas. Many American academics consider post-structuralism to be part of the broader, less well-defined postmodernist movement though many post-structuralists insisted it was not. Thinkers who have been called structuralists include the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, the semiotician Algirdas Greimas; the early writings of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the literary theorist Roland Barthes have been called structuralists. Those who began as structuralists but became post-structuralists include Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze. Other post-structuralists include Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray; the American cultural theorists and intellectuals whom they influenced include Judith Butler, John Fiske, Rosalind Krauss, Avital Ronell, Hayden White.
Post-structuralism is not defined by a set of shared axioms or methodologies, but by an emphasis on how various aspects of a particular culture, from its most ordinary, everyday material details to its most abstract theories and beliefs, determine one another. Post-structuralist thinkers reject Reductionism and Epiphenomenalism and the idea that cause-and-effect relationships are top-down or bottom-up. Like structuralists, they start from the assumption that people's identities and economic conditions determine each other rather than having intrinsic properties that can be understood in isolation, thus the French structuralists considered themselves to be espousing Constructionism. But they tended to explore how the subjects of their study might be described, reductively, as a set of essential relationships, schematics, or mathematical symbols.. Post-structuralists thinkers went further, questioning the existence of any distinction between the nature of a thing and its relationship to other things.
Postmodernist ideas in philosophy and the analysis of culture and society expanded the importance of critical theory and ha
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, is best known for its visual artworks and writings. Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects, developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself, its aim was to "resolve the contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality". Works of surrealism feature the element of unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe affecting the visual arts, literature and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice and social theory; the word'surrealism' was coined in March 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire three years before Surrealism emerged as an art movement in Paris.
He wrote in a letter to Paul Dermée: "All things considered, I think in fact it is better to adopt surrealism than supernaturalism, which I first used". Apollinaire used the term in his program notes for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which premiered 18 May 1917. Parade was performed with music by Erik Satie. Cocteau described the ballet as "realistic". Apollinaire went further, describing Parade as "surrealistic": This new alliance—I say new, because until now scenery and costumes were linked only by factitious bonds—has given rise, in Parade, to a kind of surrealism, which I consider to be the point of departure for a whole series of manifestations of the New Spirit, making itself felt today and that will appeal to our best minds. We may expect it to bring about profound changes in our arts and manners through universal joyfulness, for it is only natural, after all, that they keep pace with scientific and industrial progress; the term was taken up again by Apollinaire, in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, written in 1903 and first performed in 1917.
World War I scattered the writers and artists, based in Paris, in the interim many became involved with Dada, believing that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought the conflict of the war upon the world. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued. During the war, André Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from shell-shock. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché, Breton felt that Vaché was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry, he admired the young writer's anti-social disdain for established artistic tradition. Breton wrote, "In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most."Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault.
They began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault wrote The Magnetic Fields. Continuing to write, they came to believe that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada form of attack on prevailing values; the group attracted additional members and grew to include writers and artists from various media such as Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise, Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, Yves Tanguy. As they developed their philosophy, they believed that Surrealism would advocate the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination according to the Hegelian Dialectic.
They looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. Freud's work with free association, dream analysis, the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination, they embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness. As Salvador Dalí proclaimed, "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad."Beside the use of dream analysis, they emphasized that "one could combine inside the same frame, elements not found together to produce illogical and startling effects." Breton included the idea of the startling juxtapositions in his 1924 manifesto, taking it in turn from a 1918 essay by poet Pierre Reverdy, which said: "a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be−the greater its emotional power and poetic reality."The group aimed to revolutionize human experience, in its
Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French-American painter, chess player, writer whose work is associated with Cubism and conceptual art. He was not directly associated with Dada groups. Duchamp is regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentieth-century and twenty first-century art, he had a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as "retinal" art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to use art to serve the mind. Marcel Duchamp was born at Blainville-Crevon in Normandy and grew up in a family that enjoyed cultural activities; the art of painter and engraver Émile Frédéric Nicolle, his maternal grandfather, filled the house, the family liked to play chess, read books and make music together.
Of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp's seven children, one died as an infant and four became successful artists. Marcel Duchamp was the brother of: Jacques Villon, printmaker Raymond Duchamp-Villon, sculptor Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, painter; as a child, with his two elder brothers away from home at school in Rouen, Duchamp was closer to his sister Suzanne, a willing accomplice in games and activities conjured by his fertile imagination. At eight years old, Duchamp followed in his brothers' footsteps when he left home and began schooling at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille, in Rouen. Two other students in his class became well-known artists and lasting friends: Robert Antoine Pinchon and Pierre Dumont. For the next eight years, he was locked into an educational regime which focused on intellectual development. Though he was not an outstanding student, his best subject was mathematics and he won two mathematics prizes at the school, he won a prize for drawing in 1903, at his commencement in 1904 he won a coveted first prize, validating his recent decision to become an artist.
He learned academic drawing from a teacher who unsuccessfully attempted to "protect" his students from Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, other avant-garde influences. However, Duchamp's true artistic mentor at the time was his brother Jacques Villon, whose fluid and incisive style he sought to imitate. At 14, his first serious art attempts were drawings and watercolors depicting his sister Suzanne in various poses and activities; that summer he painted landscapes in an Impressionist style using oils. Duchamp's early art works align with Post-Impressionist styles, he experimented with classical subjects. When he was asked about what had influenced him at the time, Duchamp cited the work of Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, whose approach to art was not outwardly anti-academic, but individual, he studied art at the Académie Julian from 1904 to 1905, but preferred playing billiards to attending classes. During this time Duchamp sold cartoons which reflected his ribald humor. Many of the drawings use visual puns, or both.
Such play with words and symbols engaged his imagination for the rest of his life. In 1905, he began his compulsory military service with the 39th Infantry Regiment, working for a printer in Rouen. There he learned typography and printing processes—skills he would use in his work. Owing to his eldest brother Jacques' membership in the prestigious Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture Duchamp's work was exhibited in the 1908 Salon d'Automne, the following year in the Salon des Indépendants. Fauves and Paul Cézanne's proto-Cubism influenced his paintings, although the critic Guillaume Apollinaire—who was to become a friend—criticized what he called "Duchamp's ugly nudes". Duchamp became lifelong friends with exuberant artist Francis Picabia after meeting him at the 1911 Salon d'Automne, Picabia proceeded to introduce him to a lifestyle of fast cars and "high" living. In 1911, at Jacques' home in Puteaux, the brothers hosted a regular discussion group with Cubist artists including Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Roger de La Fresnaye, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, Alexander Archipenko.
Poets and writers participated. The group came to be known as the Section d'Or. Uninterested in the Cubists' seriousness, or in their focus on visual matters, Duchamp did not join in discussions of Cubist theory and gained a reputation of being shy. However, that same year he painted in a Cubist style and added an impression of motion by using repetitive imagery. During this period Duchamp's fascination with transition, change and distance became manifest, as many artists of the time, he was intrigued with the concept of depicting the fourth dimension in art, his painting Sad Young Man on a Train embodies this concern: First, there's the idea of the movement of the train, that of the sad young man, in a corridor and, moving about. There is the distortion of the young man—I had called this elementary parallelism, it was a formal decomposition. The object is stretched out, as if elastic; the lines follow each other in parallels, while changing subtly to form the movement, or the form of the young man in question
