Dada and Surrealism in Rome

Written by Carlo Valenti

Over 500 works including oils, sculptures, readymades, assemblages, collage, automatic drawing in its entirety retrace the birth, the succession of posters and exhibitions, the figurative journey of many protagonists of these two revolutionary movements that have had so much power between subversive the avant-garde artists and have exerted much influence on art after the first half of last century. In the past two exhibitions devoted to these movements by bringing out the most popular players forget about all those children, soldiers, gave their contribution to characterize the ethics and aesthetics. Dada and Surrealism were not a mere art movement, were much more: a philosophy of life. The Dadaists, nihilists believe, pursued the radical negation of all values, while Surrealism was, on the contrary, born under the sign of the commitment as radical. This exhibition, perhaps only for completeness and quality of the works, provides a comprehensive overview on only two of the historical avant-garde art movements that have kept the same time news and subversive. The fate of Dadaism was very strange, ignored for years by both the public and by critics and artists, was discovered when it was realized that this movement was born after the Fauves, the Cubists, the Futurists, the abstract, the Expressionists, has influenced in a decisive way the theories and practice garde contemporary of this war.

Dada and Surrealism advocated a cultural revolution in the sense "Maoist" of the term, though a mere visual revolution. Their new philosophy of life challenged, inter alia, the purely formal experimentation of the artist, free from the slavery of his role specialization. But what were the causes that enabled to Dadaism and Surrealism to establish itself as a current break with a tradition thousands of years? Max Planck in 1933 had diagnosed the crisis of values that mankind was going through and the artist, perhaps more of all, against the rampant conformism Traditional doing its work a direct witness of the historical situation in which they live and work. The Dadaist exacerbates, pushing the outer limits, the same subversive contained the same terms as the last romantic culture, transforming the dialectic of bourgeois dialectic of invention and imitation. In the early twentieth century artists could choose between two directions: either continue the tradition, or radical renovation choosing the path of adventure. Dada, with its tabula rasa, concretely manifested the intention to break the historical continuity with the past. With the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich, 1916), dates the birth of the Dadaist movement, on the initiative of Hugo Ball and Emmy Henning his partner, but only three years after the publication of the Manifesto of 1918, the Dada movement comes out found between its employees and exhibitors Cubists, Futurists, abstract and expressionist.

Dada was a meeting between young people "angry" share the same libertarian spirit, a state of mind rather than a school. And today, we see the reappearance in the last two decades social and philosophical conditions of the years 1916-23, thus witnessing the rebirth of that spirit. The revolt, however, can not repeat the gestures of the past because, as Heraclitus said: "You can not go into the same river twice," then each generation will find its instruments of rebellion and the mold in his own image and likeness.

Surrealism is not born in 1924 with the First Manifesto of Surrealism written by Breton, but in 1914 when he discovered the presence of writers who played a key role in the development of Surrealist thought: Rimbaud, Vache, Jarry, Apollinaire, Sigmund Freud. In them he found the "total revelation and confirmation of all their insights: the anticipation of the modern spirit in all its most subversive, the importance of language and poetry, the fundamental role of the imagination, a refusal the appearance utilitarian-bourgeois intellectual activities, the deeper meaning of the crisis of all values. Breton, in his essay "Surrealism and the art as an end" (1928) stated: "An idea of imitation is very limited, given the art as an end, has led to a serious misunderstanding that we see extended until the present day ours. the assumption that man is capable only of playing, more or less happily, the image that touches it, the painters have proved far too conciliatory in their choice of models. "
The requirement of fidelity to the "inner model" is predominant in the art of the surrealists and then there is no place for a recipe for aesthetic or figurative cliche: none accumulates together artists like Max Ernest, Man Ray, Joan Miro, nothing except, precisely the ideal need to be faithful to oneself and not to make a "beautiful painting." The desire to express their dreams, their desires, their own world view, is overshadowing the aesthetic requirements. For the surrealist what matters is the value of the work and subversive as Breton says: "What qualifies the surrealist work is, first of all, the spirit in which it was conceived." And about the future of the surrealist movement which has continued to grow not only in France but also in the Americas and Europe, the same Breton us to be saying that the surrealist activity "does not run any serious risk to an end, so long ' man will be able to distinguish an animal from a flame or a stone. "

Until 7 February 2010 at the Complesso del Vittoriano.