A brief overview by Alyson Muenzer (2004).[1]
.
When we consider what might make a work of art grotesque, we should probably look to Ewa Kurylik’s chapter titled "Distorting Techniques," for she suggests that the following terms are closely related to grotesque paintings and drawings: separation, mixture, reassembly, duplication, multiplication, elongation, compression, enlargement, miniaturization, reversal, simplification, overcrowding, and fantastic interpretation and projection. These characteristics will repeatedly surface [...] as we take a journey observing some of the most significant art to appear in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. From Dada to Abstract Expressionism, artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Willem de Kooning were constantly producing works that would redefine the way in which we see grotesque art today. Keep in mind that "grotesque" does not necessarily mean "gross." On the contrary, it can define works that represent a dream-like state, works that are deemed art because the artist says so, works that reveal personal suffering, works that poke satirical fun at politics and society, and works that urge us to question just what kind of world we are living in. [...].
Arguably the most important art movement from 1914 to 1918 is Dada, led by the rebellious Marcel Duchamp. Dada was known for its rebelliousness as well as the sense of nihilism that its art produced, a nihilism created by uneasy feelings and disgust generated by WWI. Duchamp was widely recognized for his "readymades"--commonplace objects such as a bicycle wheel or a urinal that were to be considered art because the artist deemed it so. Duchamp’s most famous work,
Fountain (1917), is actually a urinal signed "R. Mutt," the signature being a pseudonym. Shocking the art world at its debut,
Fountain represented Duchamp’s feelings towards the hypocrisies of his fellow artists and their supposed progressive views. Also, Duchamp’s work illustrated how the artist, by manipulating the context in which a certain object is found, could change the viewer’s perception of said object. Let us also remember that at the hands of Duchamp, DaVinci’s Mona Lisa was befitted with a mustache and goatee, again, a manipulation of context and art because the artist sa[id] so.
By 1918, Dada found its way to other parts of Europe, partly in thanks to the campy, rauchous, laughter-filled Cabaret Voltaire. It was at this time that Berlin Dada became a well-known movement, its artists screaming that something was not right in the world. Led by George Grosz and John Heartfield, Berlin Dada dealt more with politics and social issues in a bitingly satirical manner. Grosz, largely recognized for his satirical drawings which often appeared in newspapers, took much of his inspiration from drawings and scribbles which he found on public urinals and in children’s drawings. His
Café Scene (1914) depicts a roomful of people whose characteristics are clearly exaggerated; their facial expressions are harsh, and not a single one appears to be someone whom we would want to have a conversation with. Each person is self-absorbed, and Grosz portrays this with a harshness of line and color. Linking Grosz to John Heartfield is the fact that Heartfield used several of his fellow artist’s drawings in his photomontages, pieces of work which were produced by combining drawings and photographs, adding in a bit of ironic, satirical text for an extra bite. Heartfield’s
Adolf, the Superman:
Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk (1932) shows Hitler, in an x-ray fashion, with a stack of gold coins for his vertabrae column, with his mouth wide-open as if he is shouting. Wishing that the viewer might gain a stronger insight into the cruel workings of politics, Heartfield’s photomontages illustrated didactic morals while addressing political matters.
Pittura metafisica,[3] also known as "Metaphysical Painting," was known for its use of strange combinations of everyday objects which served to represent outlandish states, along with a soothing, empty appeal that could be found in many works. Giorgio de Chirico, the forerunner of the movement, strove to produce works that would best represent the dislocating, bizarre-like state of dreams; his work
The Philosopher’s Conquest (1914) seems to have roots in a nightmare-world as it shows tall, industrial-like buildings, cannons, over-sized, sharp-edged flowers, and a clock. Not surprisingly, Pittura Metaf[i]sica as well as Dada would come to influence the Surrealist Movement, one of the most infamous movements in art history.
In the mid-1920’s, a movement known as [
Die]
Neue Sachlichkeit, or "The New Objectivity," was gaining momentum in Weimar Germany. Some of the art associated with this movement consisted of detached, sarcastic paintings attacking German society while other works were indicative of the artists’ time spent in WWI. Otto Dix, whose works were often positioned between the fantastic and the harshly realistic, sought to portray society in a cynical, not-too-flattering light. His painting
The Journalist, Sylvia von Harden (1926), leaves the viewer wondering if the person depicted is a man or a woman; it is completely androgynous [...]. The subject’s fingers and chin are grotesquely long, and there is a huge, black circle drawn around her right eye. Also producing cynical works dealing with German society wass Max Beckmann, best-known for his circus and carnival scenes which alluded to the phantasmagoric. Beckmann’s
The Trapeze (1923) shows several circus players, pushed into a small area, much unlike the vast, wide spaces which these players usually require in order to perform. Each one wears an empty expression, void of feeling any disharmony at their cramped situation. Beckmann would soon go on to become a stronger artist in the coming years, but his metaphorical circus and carnival drawings clearly marked his advent as an artist.
Rejecting Dada’s cynicism while applauding its rebuff of logic, and incorporating the dream-like state of Pittura Metaf[i]sica, the Surrealist Movement took off in the mid-1920’s and produced works that showed the combination of several tendencies to yield art that was seen as ideal. Originally literature-based, Surrealist works derived much of their inspiration from children’s drawings and thoughts, [and those of] mental patients and untrained artists [as well]. Freud’s thoughts and interest in human dreams and behavior were also inspiration for the movement. Largely marked by the artist’s alienation from his work, Surrealism’s key artists included the likes of Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, and Max Ernst.
Dali [...] held claim to the fact that his works came to him through his dreams and trance-like states. In
The Enigma of William Tell (1933), several psychological aspects are at work; first, it is suggested that the painting represents Dali’s resistance against his father’s authority by showing a man who is kneeling, holding a small child, "William Tell" being the father. The severe elongation of the right buttock is seen as phallic while cannibalistic imagery is seen where instead of having an apple on the baby’s head (Dali’s head), there is a raw cutlet. However popular, fashionable, and influential Dali would become, these traits still did not prevent the artist from being cast out of the movement during the 1940’s.
Producing paintings with his blunt, matter-of-fact style, Rene Magritte was another major figure belonging to the Surrealist movement. In Magritte’s work, we can see the artist taking what we know as the pre-Modernist world and distorting it, reshaping the familiar in order to produce an alien quality. We also gain a sense of Magritte’s hallucinatory images through inconsistent pairings; this can be seen in his painting
The Course of Summer [
Les marches de l'été] (1938). In the foreground of the painting is a woman’s body from the collarbone down to the beginning of the thighs. The "body" comes to us in two parts: the chest area and the abdomen area clearly belong to two different human beings. The background scene contains the ocean, some mountains, and a blue sky interspersed with billowy clouds and boxes; however, the boxes do not take on a different color, for it is as if they are "box-clouds"; in other words, the boxes and the clouds combine and blend into one another. Magritte also enjoyed doing works which attempted to defy word meanings; for example, in one
work, he painted a pipe, the only image on the canvas, and the caption, written in French, read: "This is not a pipe."[4]
A pioneer of several artistic inventions, Max Ernst was celebrated for his sense of the comic, and [...] most associated with [Dada Cologne and] the [more] literary Surrealist movement;[5] many of his paintings were accompanied with poems, often [...] children’s rhymes. In
The Elephant Celebes (1921), he combines several inanimate objects in order to create a quasi-mechanic creature. His comic side is revealed as he has painted a tiny, little pencil beneath the elephant which is supposed to serve as some kind of [... support] for the enormous creature.[6] Ernst was also credited with the invention of
frottage, a technique where objects such as string or floorboards, for example, are layered in paper, canvas, etc., at times producing works that come out looking like monstrous creatures. Obviously enjoying the combination of different materials to produce works of art, Ernst also extensively used collages to display his creativity. Often, he would take Victorian engravings and woodcuts and set them against images of free association, those that are so closely linked to the Surrealists.
A self-taught artist and also a non-believer, Francis Bacon ironically used Christian iconography in order to produce the masterpiece that would bring him to the forefront of the art world [...],
Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). Many view this work as a summation of the primal feelings and emotions caused by the war. Bacon’s
Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef (1954) was [...] one of his [most grotesque] paintings [...] based on a picture of Pope Innocent X.[7] [Bacon's] paintings show a sometimes-tortured, always isolated figure who has been blurred with the stroke of a brush in order to suggest human suffering. These particular paintings became images of a decade that was permeated by the threat of the atomic bomb.
Art Brut, or "Art in the Raw," was given its name by Jean Dubuffet, a French artist who believed that art should show that it is socially responsible.[8] Against any smoothness or fine finish that Dali was famous for, Art Brut aimed to take postwar art in a fresh direction. Dubuffet designed works which replicate wall graffiti, taking Surrealism to new extremes; he also used his graffiti-inspired paintings to portray sophisticated friends and intellectuals in a non-sophisticated way, as seen in his painting
Generalized Activity No. 14 (1976). Yet another artist who made extensive use of collages, Dubuffet often constructed his collages with materials that seemed inappropriate for the uses he made of them, using materials such as aluminum foil, coal, or even butterfly wings.
Abstract Expressionism also produced several artists who created grotesque works; one in particular and perhaps the most famous was Willem de Kooning. Changing his pre-1950’s style of same "all-overness," de Kooning began to produce works based on women, presenting them as agents of both destruction and creation.[9] Using slashing brushstrokes in order to produce a destructive element, de Kooning’s painting
Woman I (1950-1) asks the viewer, "Are women being celebrated, or are they being portrayed misogynistically?" [...]
Always in danger of being over-used, the term "grotesque" cannot be avoided when viewing many twentieth-century works of art. In fact, this essay barely skims the surface of those artists and their works. Many other artists have arguably produced pieces that easily qualify [as grotesque]: Joan Miro, Frida Kahlo, Paul Klee, even [...] Andy Warhol. Looking ahead, the twenty-first century is sure to be marked with art forms which qualify as grotesque.
References (and illustrations added by Mariano Akerman)
1. Alyson Muenzer, "Urinals, Dreams, Graffiti, and Personal Suffering as Art: A Brief Overview of the Grotesque in Twentieth-Century Painting" (Middle Tennessee State University),
David Lavery, The Grotesque in Art,
http://davidlavery.net/Grotesque/The_Grotesque_In/grotesquepainting.html#Muenzer (2004). See also
http://davidlavery.net/Grotesque/.
2. Ewa Kuryluk,
Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1987, pp. 301-7.
3. Muenzer's "Pittura Metafysica" has been replaced here by the original, Italian name of the movement,
Pittura Metafisica.
4. Magritte's paradoxical image questions
representation (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images). Representation in turn may well be used as some sort of ideological tool (Ann Marie Baldonado, "Representation," Emory University, Fall 1996,
http://english.emory.edu/Bahri/Representation.html).
5. Cologne was under British occupation from 1918 to 1926, essentially just about as long as Dada lasted as a movement. In an atmosphere of strictly imposed order and censorship, Ernst and others protested hierarchy and tradition by exploring the collective subconscious and its incongruous juxtapositions.
6. In a conversation with Penrose, Ernst once noted that the title
Celebes was derived from the opening words of a German schoolboys' rhyme, with undeniable sexual connotations:
Der Elefant von Celebes
Hat hinten etwas gelebes
Der Elefant von Sumatra
Der vögelt seine Grossmama
Der Elefant von Indien
Der kann das Loch nicht finden.
(The elephant from Celebes / has sticky, yellow bottom grease / The elephant from Sumatra / always fucks his grandmamma / The elephant from India / can never find the hole ha-ha. William Jeffett, "Max Ernst," in
International Dictionary of Art and Artists, ed. James Vinson , Detroit: St. James Press, 1990, vol. 2, pp. 864–65).
7. Bacon appropiated Velázquez's
Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650), but in his 1954 version, "animal carcasses hang at the pope's back, creating a raw and disturbing Crucifixion-like composition. The pope's hands, elegant and poised in Velázquez's version, are rough hewn and gripping the church's seat of authority in apparent terror. His mouth is held in a scream [or a grin] and black striations drip down from the pope's nose to his neck. It's as if Bacon picked up a wide house painting brush and brutishly dragged it over the face. The fresh meat recalls the lavish arrangements of fruits, meats and confections in 17th-century vanitas paintings, which usually carried subtle moralizing messages about the impermanence of life and the spiritual dangers of sensual pleasures. Sometimes, the food itself showed signs of being overripe or spoiled, to make the point. Bacon weds the imagery of salvation, worldly decadence, power and carnal sensuality, and he contrasts those things with his own far more palpable and existential view of damnation" (Marie Louise Schumacher, "Screaming in Paint,"
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 27.1.2007).
8. For a discussion, see Samantha Krukowski,
Jean Dubuffet and the Deculturation of Art (thesis), Washington University in St. Louis, 1992,
http://www.rasa.net/writings/dubuffet.html
9.
Woman I has been "influenced by images ranging from Paleolithic fertility fetishes to American billboards, and the attributes of this particular figure seem to range from the vengeful power of the goddess to the hollow seductiveness of the calendar pinup. Reversing traditional female representations, which he summarized as "the idol, the Venus, the nude," de Kooning paints a woman with gigantic eyes, massive breasts, and a toothy grin. Her body is outlined in thick and thin black lines, which continue in loops and streaks and drips, taking on an independent life of their own. Abrupt, angular strokes of orange, blue, yellow, and green pile up in multiple directions as layers of color are applied, scraped away, and restored" (New York, The Museum of Modern Art,
MoMA Highlights, 1999, revised 2004).
En un libro que es la continuación de su Historia de la belleza (2004), Eco explora la fealdad a lo largo de la historia del arte. En principio, belleza y fealdad son conceptos que se rechazan mutuamente y, por lo general, se considera que la fealdad es la antítesis de la belleza. Dado que la fealdad suele ser entendida como la ausencia de belleza, bastaría definir a esta última para saber qué es la fealdad. Pero si bien es relativamente fácil establecer los parámetros de lo bello, ello no significa que la fealdad deba ser percibida sólo como "el infierno de la belleza".[1] Ya que las manifestaciones de la fealdad a través de los siglos son más ricas, complejas e imprevisibles de lo que comúnmente se cree. Entre demonios, locos, enemigos terribles y presencias perturbadoras, entre abismos y deformidades, entre monstruos y fantasmas se descubre una vena iconográfica extraordinariamente amplia y a menudo insospechada.
