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Rachel Cohen

formal (1)

Surrealism and Form

Sunday, November 3, 2013

There are other feelings for form, of course, but that doesn’t mean the Surrealists didn’t have formal feelings.  Form is often described in spatial terms, as arrangements of objects, as landscapes with prominent and receding features.  Perhaps the Surrealist feeling for form could be evoked by inversion: one could speak of a disarray of objects, or of interior landscapes in which prominence is, like that in dreams, more a matter of excitation and disturbance. This is not to say that when you look at, say, a Max Ernst collage, your eye is not still balancing [...] more