A century ago, French writer and poet André Breton penned his “Manifesto of Surrealism,” which launched an art movement known for creating bizarre hybrids of words and images.
These juxtapositions, often generated through chance, were thought to stimulate the unconscious mind to cultivate new insights.
As I detail in my book “The Random Factor,” much of life is influenced by randomness – from natural evolution to the selection of friends and spouses. The surrealists, too, made randomness a cornerstone of their artistic practice.
Manifestations of the marvelous
In 1928, the artist Otto Umbehr, known simply as Umbo, snapped a picture from his window that randomly captured the street scene below.
The power of the image – “Mystery of the Street” – comes not from its content but from its orientation. When Umbo developed the photograph, he decided to invert it. The result is an ordinary image of people but with their elongated shadows taking on a startling life of their own.
As contemporary photographer Sandrine Hermand-Grisel writes, “The surrealists question the documentary value of photography. They perceive its capacity to capture the manifestations of the marvelous that can happen at random.”
Surrealist painter Max Ernst often employed the technique of “decalcomania,” which involved applying a layer of paint to a surface, such as glass, and then transferring the wet paint directly onto the canvas. Some of the paint would stick – some of it wouldn’t. No matter: Ernst would build off the random patterns and textures to create the painting.
A century ago, French writer and poet André Breton penned his “Manifesto of Surrealism,” which launched an art movement known for creating bizarre hybrids of words and images.
These juxtapositions, often generated through chance, were thought to stimulate the unconscious mind to cultivate new insights.
As I detail in my book “The Random Factor,” much of life is influenced by randomness – from natural evolution to the selection of friends and spouses. The surrealists, too, made randomness a cornerstone of their artistic practice.
British actor Ian McKellen, 85, fell off a London stage mid-performance and is now recovering after being taken to hospital, a theatre statement said on Tuesday.
When scientists in the 1960s excavated the wreck of an ancient Greek merchant ship off the northern coast of Cyprus, what they found was an amazing time capsule