Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin was the daughter of the composer Joaquín Nin and the classically trained singer Rosa Culmell. Nin spent her early years in Spain and Cuba, about sixteen years in Paris (1924–1940), and the remaining half of her life in the United States, where she became an established author.
Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. Its intention 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 as well.
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí of Púbol, known as Salvador Dalí, was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work.
Surrealism in art, poetry, and literature uses numerous techniques and games to provide inspiration. Many of these are said to free imagination by producing a creative process free of conscious control. The importance of the unconscious as a source of inspiration is central to the nature of surrealism.
The Persistence of Memory is a 1931 painting by artist Salvador Dalí and one of the most recognizable works of Surrealism. First shown at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932, since 1934 the painting has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, which received it from an anonymous donor. It is widely recognized and frequently referred to in popular culture, and sometimes referred to by more descriptive titles, such as "The Melting Clocks", "The Soft Watches" or "The Melting Watches".
María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga was a Spanish Mexican surrealist painter who created the majority of her most iconic and celebrated works in Mexico.
Wolfgang Robert Paalen was an Austrian-Mexican painter, sculptor, and art philosopher. A member of the Abstraction-Création group from 1934 to 1935, he joined the influential Surrealist movement in 1935 and was one of its prominent exponents until 1942. Whilst in exile in Mexico, he founded his own counter-surrealist art-magazine DYN, in which he summarized his critical attitude towards radical subjectivism and Freudo-Marxism in Surrealism with his philosophy of contingency. He rejoined the group between 1951 and 1954, during his sojourn in Paris.
Minotaure was a Surrealist-oriented magazine founded by Albert Skira and E. Tériade in Paris and published between 1933 and 1939. Minotaure published on the plastic arts, poetry, and literature, avant garde, as well as articles on esoteric and unusual aspects of literary and art history. Also included were psychoanalytical studies and artistic aspects of anthropology and ethnography. It was a lavish and extravagant magazine by the standards of the 1930s, profusely illustrated with high quality reproductions of art, often in color.
Spanish art has been an important contributor to Western art and Spain has produced many famous and influential artists including Velázquez, Goya and Picasso. Spanish art was particularly influenced by France and Italy during the Baroque and Neoclassical periods, but Spanish art has often had very distinctive characteristics, partly explained by the Moorish heritage in Spain, and through the political and cultural climate in Spain during the Counter-Reformation and the subsequent eclipse of Spanish power under the Bourbon dynasty.
DYN was an art magazine founded by the Austrian-Mexican Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen, published in Mexico City, and distributed in New York City, and London between 1942 and 1944. Only six issues were produced.
Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach is an oil painting by the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, from 1938. It is part of the Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, in Hartford, Connecticut.
Bridget Bate Tichenor was a British surrealist painter of fantastic art in the school of magic realism and a fashion editor. Born in Paris, she later embraced Mexico as her home.
Alice Phillipot (Alice Rahon) (8 June 1904 – September 1987) was a French-born Mexican poet and artist whose work contributed to the beginning of abstract expression in Mexico. She began as a surrealist poet in Europe but began painting in Mexico. She was a prolific artist from the late 1940s to the 1960s, exhibiting frequently in Mexico and the United States, with a wide circle of friends in these two countries. Her work remained tied to surrealism but was also innovative, including abstract elements and the use of techniques such as sgraffito and the use of sand for texture. She became isolated in her later life due to health issues.
Jiří "Georg" Dokoupil is a Czech-German painter and graphic artist. He was founding-member of the German artist group Mülheimer Freiheit and the Junge Wilde Art movement, which arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme was an exhibition by surrealist artists that took place from January 17 to February 24, 1938, in the generously equipped Galérie Beaux-Arts, run by Georges Wildenstein, at 140, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. It was organised by the French writer André Breton, the surrealists' brain and theorist, and Paul Éluard, the best known poet of the movement. The catalogue listed, along with the above, Marcel Duchamp as generator and arbitrator, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst as technical advisers, Man Ray as head lighting technician and Wolfgang Paalen as responsible for the design of the entrance and main hall with "water and foliage". The exhibition was staged in three sections, showing paintings and objects as well as unusually decorated rooms and mannequins which had been redesigned in various ways. With this holistic presentation of surrealist art work the movement wrote exhibition history.
Antonio Muñiz is an abstract surrealist artist from Los Angeles.
Valentine Penrose, was a French surrealist poet, author, and collagist.
The Spanish artist Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) is known as a surrealist painter: however, he also created or contributed the script, costumes and set designs to a number of ballets, and dance is a motif often found in his painting.
Pays interdit is a surrealist painting by Wolfgang Paalen, originally called L´upyre, which in the final version of 1937 shows a drop-shaped stylized idol of femininity with tentacle-like arms, that stands in precarious proximity to an abyss opening unexpected in dark-crystalline forms to the observer. Three spherical space-bodies hover in front of them, two of which are shaped like falling, burning meteorites. The painting is the first oil painting by Paalen, that is artfully based on his surrealist technique of fumage. It explores the theme of mortal fears and primordial femininity with a hermetical iconography. The painting is presently in a private collection.
Renate Druks was an American painter and filmmaker. She worked in Los Angeles, where she also practiced Thelema, the occult religious movement established by Aleister Crowley. She acted as a muse to other artists including Anaïs Nin, Marjorie Cameron and Kenneth Anger.
