Donella Shahbazian November 30, 2013

Dada: Dada was a literary and artistic movement born in Europe at a time when the horror of World War I was being played out in what amounted to citizens' front yards. Many claim that Dada began in Switzerland in 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter but the height of New York Dada was the year before in 1915. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestoes, art theory, theater and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I. For many participants, the movement was a protest against the nationalist and colonist interests, which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity in art and more broadly in society that corresponded to the war.

Surrealism: Surrealism began as a philosophical movement that said the way to find truth in the world was through the subconscious mind and dreams, rather than through logical thought. The movement included many artists, poets, and writers who expressed their theories in their work. The movement began in the mid-1920s in France and was born out of an earlier movement called Dadaism from Switzerland. It reached its peak in the 1930s. Surrealism images explored the subconscious areas of the mind. The artwork often made little sense as it was usually trying to depict a dream or random thoughts.

Salvador Dali: Salvador Dali was born in Figueres, Spain on May 11, 1904. His father was a lawyer and very strict, but his mother was kinder and encouraged Salvador's love for art. Growing up he enjoyed drawing and playing football. He often got into trouble for daydreaming in school. He had a sister named Ana Maria who would often act as a model for his paintings. Salvador began drawing and painting while he was still young. He painted outdoor scenes such as sailboats and houses. He also painted portraits. Even as a teenager he experimented with modern painting styles such as Impressionism. When he

turned seventeen he moved to Madrid, Spain to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. Dali lived a wild life while at the academy. He grew his hair and had long sideburns. He hung out with a radical group of artists and got into trouble often. When he was close to graduation he was expelled for causing problems with the teachers. Not long after that, he was imprisoned for a short time for supposedly opposing the dictatorship of Spain. Surrealism began as a cultural movement. A French poet named Andre Breton in 1924 started it. The word "surrealism" means "above realism". Surrealists believed that the subconscious mind, such as dreams and random thoughts, held the secret to truth. The movement had an impact on film, poetry, music, and art. Surrealist paintings are often a mixture of strange objects and perfectly normal looking objects that are out of place. Surrealistic paintings can be shocking, interesting, beautiful, or just plain weird.

Marcel Duchamp: Marcel Duchamp was born on July 28,1887 and died on October 2,1968.He was a French-American painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Dadaism and conceptual arts, although not directly associated with Dada groups. Duchamp is commonly 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 twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in

painting and sculpture. Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentiethcentury and twenty first-century art. By World War I he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to put art back in the service of the mind. After he withdrew from the art world, Duchamp remained a passive, if influential, presence in New York avant-garde circles until he was rediscovered in the 1950s by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Duchamp's insistence that art should be an expression of the mind rather than the eye or the hand spoke to Minimalists and Conceptual artists alike. It ushered in a new era summed up by Joseph Kosuth's claim that "all art is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually." The seminal concept of the mass-produced readymade was eagerly seized upon not only by Andy Warhol and other Pop artists who claimed Duchamp as their founding father but also, owing to its performativity aspects, by Fluxus, Arte Povera and Performance artists. Duchamp's radical critique of art institutions made him a cult figure for generations of artists who, like him, refused to go down the path of a conventional, commercial artistic career. Though his work was admired for its wide-ranging use of artistic materials and mediums, it is the theoretical thrust of Duchamp's eclectic but relatively limited output that accounts for his growing impact on successive waves of twentieth-century avant-garde movements and individual artists who openly acknowledged his influence.