Thinking Activity- Trends and Movements of 20th century

 This blog is written in response to the thinking activity given on the Trends and movements of the 20th century, by Yesha Bhatt Ma’am at the Department of English, MKBU. in this blog i am going to discuss about three major moments of art and literature of 20th century and those are Expressionism, Surrealism and Dadaism.

Expressionism

Expressionism, artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person. The artist accomplishes this aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements.

Expressionism was first observed in the works of Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor, each of whom in the period 1885–1900 evolved a highly personal painting style. These artists used the expressive possibilities of colour and line to explore dramatic and emotion-laden themes, to convey the qualities of fear, horror, and the grotesque, or simply to celebrate nature with hallucinatory intensity.

To understand expressionism we had a task in our classroom with all our classmates to draw something collaboratively on the viewboard. We all used our imaginations to draw something and most of us came up with very good ideas and also with very good drawing skills.

In this drawing I drew the Hand with an eye on it. It came into my mind from the thought of the internet as the various internet platforms always get information of our activities and it un escapable, to express something like that I drew that hand which has an eye on it.

Surrealism

Surrealism, movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism’s emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. 

 According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.”

To understand Surrealism we had a classroom activity in which we all did drawings based on the surrealism. In this activity also everyone came up with lots of unique ideas and also inspired from different other artworks and tried to interpret and recreate something new out of it.

For this activity I draw the picture of a girl that is cut into two parts and form inside her is coming a hand that is somewhat rotten also like a dead body.

Dadaism

Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centers in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire. New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris. Dadaist activities lasted until the mid 1920s.

Dada artists sought to expose accepted and often repressive conventions of order and logic, favoring strategies of chance, spontaneity, and irreverence. Dada artists rejected cultural standards and values, and were thus dissatisfied with traditional definitions of what art could be. Duchamp advocated for a philosophy of total freedom in art, and many followed suit. Artists used assemblage, collage, and mass-produced everyday objects to reject cultural standards.

Dada was born out of a negative reaction to the horrors of the First World War. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. Judaism's most profound characteristics include humour, whimsy, artistic freedom, emotional reaction, irrationalism, and spontaneity. Invaluable created a fun, educational infographic that details some of the elements of Dada literature, and it includes writing prompts to help master each.

After learning about Dadaism we were all asked to make a Dadaist art. Some of us came up with photography, poems and drawings. I chose to do something different and after some digging and help from a friend I made some images from two online platforms Dall-E and Midjourney. Those two platforms offer free and premium service of generating Art works with the help of AI. What we have to do is to type a description of what we want or upload a photo of which we want to create something and the software will auto generate the artwork for us. I have chosen to make something out of the image of an anime character of Albedo from the anime series Overlord. The original picture was simple but after processing in the software it came out totally different.

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