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25 Mar 07
L'amour fou
Fur teacups, wheelbarrow chairs, lip-shaped sofas ... the fashion, furniture and jewellery created by the Surrealists were useless, unique, decadent and, above all, very sexy. Guardian Unlimited, 24 March 2007.
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Everyone knows something about surrealism, the most popular art movement of the 20th century. The word has spread so far that people now say "surreal" when all they mean is "odd", "totally weird" or "unexpected". No doubt this would give heartburn to André Breton, the pope of the movement nearly a century ago, who took the title from his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had called his play The Breasts of Tiresias, "a surrealist drama". But too late now. The term is many years out of its box and, through imprecision, has achieved something akin to eternal life. Surrealist painting and film, that is. In fact, some surrealist images have imprinted themselves so deeply and brightly on our ideas of visual imagery that we can't imagine modern art (or, in fact, the idea of modernity itself) without them.
Does this ring any bells?
The V&A's new show looking at Surrealism's impact on modern design has some familiar exhibits - and some interesting surprises. The Observer, 25 March 2007.
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Next week, the public will be let into some very dark rooms in South Kensington to find sexual fetishes, dismembered corpses, necrophiliacs and exclusive bondage equipment. The new show at the V&A, the latest in the museum's ambitious restatements of the great movements in 20th-century design, is called Surreal Things. Although it contains masterpiece paintings - including Magritte and de Chirico - it is emphatically about objects rather than 'art', although in the Surreal world the distinction is not always clear. Of all the 'isms' in modern painting, only Surrealism connects with design. There is, for example, no such thing as an Impressionist chair or an Abstract Expressionist telephone or a Symbolist car.
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