Spanish Figuration to Surrealism

Jose Gutierrez Solana - The Showcases - 1910 Rosario de Velasco - Adam y Eve - c.1920s As an answer to the revolutionary nature of the avant-garde and the climate of political instability after World War I, in the 1920's and 1930's there is a "call to order" in the European art world. Its origin is situated in metaphysical Italian painting and in German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). It involved a re-reading of traditional genres through a return to representation and to a set of figurative visual codes which would reveal the tensions between Modernity and Anti-Modernity. In Spain, artists such as Ángeles Santos (1911), Alfonso Ponce de León (1906-1936), o the Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) of the 20's, would move between magical realism, metaphysical painting, Surrealism and even Hyper-Realism, with no perceived contradiction. On the contrary, this nomadism was characteristic of those years. Angeles Santos - Tertulia (The Gathering) - 1929 Remedios Varo - Modernity - 1936 Man Ray - Dust Breeding (Duchamp's Glass with Dust Notes - 1920 (This photo is a document of The Large Glass after it had collected a year's worth of dust while Duchamp was in New York. The photograph was taken using a two-hour-long exposure.) Ives Tanguy - Belomancia I - 1927 Maruja Mallo (1902-1995) - Earth and Excrement