Related Research Articles
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality. It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media.
Conroy Maddox was an English surrealist painter, collagist, writer and lecturer; and a key figure in the Birmingham Surrealist movement.
George Reavey was a Russian-born Irish surrealist poet, publisher, translator and art collector. He was also Samuel Beckett's first literary agent. In addition to his own poetry, Reavey's translations and critical prose helped introduce 20th century Russian poetry to an English-speaking audience. He was also the first publisher to bring out a collection of English translations of the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard.
Ithell Colquhoun was a British painter, occultist, poet and author. Stylistically her artwork was affiliated with surrealism. In the late 1930s, Colquhoun was part of the British Surrealist Group before being expelled because she refused to renounce her association with occult groups.
Sir Roland Algernon Penrose was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom. During the Second World War he put his artistic skills to practical use as a teacher of camouflage.
Édouard Léon Théodore Mesens was a Belgian artist and writer associated with the Belgian Surrealist movement.
Emma Frith Bridgwater, known as Emmy Bridgwater, was an English artist and poet associated with the Surrealist movement.
The Birmingham Group, sometimes called the Birmingham School, was an informal collective of painters and craftsmen associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement, that worked in Birmingham, England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All of its members studied or taught at the Birmingham School of Art after the reorganisation of its teaching methods by Edward R. Taylor in the 1880s, and it was the School that formed the group's primary focus. Members of the group also overlapped with other more formal organisations, including the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, the Ruskin Pottery and the Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Arts.
The Birmingham Surrealists were an informal grouping of artists and intellectuals associated with the Surrealist movement in art, based in Birmingham, England from the 1930s to the 1950s.
John William Melville was a self-taught British Surrealist painter. He is described by Michel Remy in his book Surrealism in Britain as one of the "harbingers of surrealism" in Great Britain.
Antonino Romanov del Renzio dei Rossi di Castellone e Venosa (Toni del Renzio) (15 April 1915 – 7 January 2007), an artist and writer of Italian and Russian parentage, was leader of the British Surrealist Group for a period.
Silvano Levy is an academic specializing in surrealism. He has published on Belgian surrealism with studies on René Magritte, E.L.T. Mesens and Paul Nougé. His research on The Surrealist Group in England began with a film on Conroy Maddox and the book Conroy Maddox: Surreal Enigmas (1995), while a wider interest in the movement led to the editorship of Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality (1997). Levy has curated national touring exhibitions of the work of Maddox and Desmond Morris, and has published a monograph on the latter entitled Desmond Morris: 50 Years of Surrealism (1997), which was followed by the enlarged re-edition Desmond Morris: Naked Surrealism (1999). Subsequent books on Morris include Lines of Thought: The Drawings of Desmond Morris (2008) and three volumes of an analytical catalogue raisonné spanning eight decades. Silvano Levy's monograph on Maddox, The Scandalous Eye. The Surrealism of Conroy Maddox, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2003. The year 2015 saw the publication of Decoding Magritte. Further studies cover Sheila Legge, Dalla Husband, Toni del Renzio, André Breton, Dina Lenković, Jean-Martin Charcot, Mary Wykeham and Birmingham surrealism. Dr Levy is editor of Surrealist Bulletin and has held academic posts at the University of Liverpool, Newcastle Polytechnic, the University of Bath, the University of Hull and Keele University, where he was promoted to Senior Lecturer in French in 1998 and then to Reader in 2005.
Robert Melville was an English art critic and journalist. Along with the artists Conroy Maddox and John Melville, he was a key member of the Birmingham Surrealists in the 1930s and 1940s. An early biographer of Picasso, he later become the art correspondent of the New Statesman and the Architectural Review.
Oscar Mellor was an English surrealist artist and photographer. An associate of the Birmingham Surrealists in the 1940s, he founded the Fantasy Press after his move to Oxford in 1948, publishing works by university poets who emerged into prominence during the 1960s. Although best remembered for the latter, he saw himself primarily as an artist whose business activities existed to support his painting.
The Birmingham Artists Committee was an English artist collective that organised exhibitions of painting and sculpture in Birmingham between 1947 and 1952.
Women Surrealists are women artists, photographers, filmmakers and authors connected with the surrealist movement, which began in the early 1920s.
Ida Kar was a photographer active mainly in London after 1945. She took many black-and-white portraits of artists and writers. Her solo show of photographs at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960 was the first of its kind to be held in a major public gallery in London. Kar thus made a significant contribution to the recognition of photography as a form of fine art.
Birmingham has a distinctive culture of art and design that emerged in the 1750s, driven by the historic importance of the applied arts to the city's manufacturing economy. While other early industrial towns such as Manchester and Bradford were based on the manufacture of bulk commodities such as cotton and wool, Birmingham's economy from the 18th century onwards was built on the production of finished manufactured goods for European luxury markets. The sale of these products was dependent on high-quality design, and this resulted in the early growth of an extensive infrastructure for the education of artists and designers and for exhibiting their works, and placed Birmingham at the heart of debate about the role of the visual arts in the emerging industrial society.
Edith Rimmington, was an English artist, poet and photographer associated with the Surrealist movement.
London Bulletin was a monthly avant-garde art magazine which was affiliated with the London Gallery between April 1938 and June 1940. It was one of the most significant surrealist publications.
References
- ↑ Gaze, Delia (1997). Dictionary of Women Artists: Introductory surveys ; Artists, A-I. Taylor & Francis. p. 170. ISBN 978-1-884964-21-3.
- ↑ Atkin, Will (10 December 2021). Historical Dictionary of Surrealism. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 144–145. ISBN 978-1-5381-3343-9.
Further reading
- Morris, Desmond (3 March 2022). The British Surrealists. Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-77728-2.
