Yes there are many. Look under surrealist artists in Yahoo search. There are pictures of their interpretations of art. You must however do your own thing and experiment to get an idea of how to approach this kind of art. Have fun.
Spartawo...

Enrico Donati, the last living surrealist
Pam Grady

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Printable VersionEmail This Article del.icio.us
Digg
Technorati
Reddit Slashdot
Fark
Newsvine
Google Bookmarks
(0) Georgia (default)
Verdana
Times New Roman
Arial



"I'm 981/2 and hope to live another few more years and do some more things," artist Enrico Donati says on a recent visit to San Francisco's M.H. de Young Memorial Museum to tour the exhibition dedicated to his work, "The Surreal World of Enrico Donati." The display re-creates the Milan native's New York studio, with paintings, sculpture and personal artifacts, including kachina dolls, African masks and photos of friends and colleagues that made up the artist community of mostly European expatriates in World War II-era New York. They included Marcel Duchamp and Yves Tanguy and pioneering Surrealist writer Andre Breton.

Donati walks with difficulty now, but his hands are steady and his eyes are sharp. The last surviving Surrealist is still working, but this exhibition, which displays three distinct styles of painting, represents only a decade of his long career, spanning the 1940s and '50s.

"I moved around. I'm an artist who gets fed up with doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. Now there are some artists who do that all their lives, (but) I couldn't do it," he says. "I had to. It was a question of instinct and personality. My personality - I like the same woman, 50 years the same lady, but painting, oh no, I couldn't stand it."

"It's amazing, three major styles in just 10 years. If someone came and showed me the three different styles, I never would have thought they were the same artist," says Timothy Anglin Burgard, the museum's Ednah Root Curator of American Art. "The oldest painting is 1943, 1943 to '48 are sort of the biomorphic works, all very organic, flowers, vegetables and mandragora roots. And then there are these paintings that are almost Abstract Expressionist, where he's dripping the paint and pouring the painting. Then this last section, Duchamp called these moonscapes, and it looks like it, moonlike forms, craters. He mixed sand and quartz into his paintings, and that's how he got that (effect)."

The style may have changed, but Donati insists that his subject was always the same, whether inspired by his original leitmotif, the mandragora (a member of the nightshade family, often called mandrake, that, according to mythology, grows beneath the gallows, fertilized by the final ejaculations of hanged men), or by a fossil found on a beach in Dover, England, in 1949, which sparked his imagination while he resisted opening it for more than a decade.

"Life, death and rebirth," he says. "When I picked up (the fossil), it was reborn. I put it back to life. I split the fossil in two and discovered it was an animal, a fish. (Before that,) I invented the mandragora of the woods, so that the roots that came out were animal roots, an animal that lived and died and I picked it up and it became alive again. Even if they don't exist, I made them live."

The moonscapes, with their tactile layers of quartz and terra cotta, developed from Donati's random encounter with a broken vacuum cleaner.

"All the damn dust came out, so I took it and put it in the canvas, and I saw things there that were extraordinary," he says. "I made a series of paintings of moonscapes for 20 years. Quartz, I had it grinded and then I used it. I put it on the canvas on top of the dust and the mixture was unbelievable."

Other items in the exhibition are amusing, such as 1945's "Totem (Hommage À Julius)," a totem pole he constructed out of ladies' hat blocks that he presented to art dealer Julius Carlebach as an authentic American Indian piece. Perhaps because he knew that Donati began collecting American Indian art in the 1930s, Carlebach believed it was real and offered $1,000 for it, prompting the artist to reveal the gag when he burst out laughing.

That same year, Donati and Duchamp prepared a window display at Manhattan's Brentano's bookstore to celebrate the publication of their friend Breton's book "Le Surrealisme et la Peinture." In homage to a work by Rene Magritte, Donati painted toes on a pair of shoes and those were added to a headless mannequin that Duchamp brought. They put the book in its hands, and set it up next to a running faucet. Not an hour went by before members of the Salvation Army rushed into the store to warn store owner Arthur Brentano Jr. that he was risking damnation for the blasphemy of a headless man reading a book. Donati chuckles at the memory.

"(Brentano) told us, 'Get out with all this stuff.' So we took it around the corner to the Gotham Book Mart. We installed it there, and it stayed there until the end of the month."

Then there is "Prière de toucher," the playful catalog cover Donati and Duchamp collaborated on for the "Le Surrealisme en 1947" exhibition at Paris' Maeght Gallery. It was Duchamp's inspiration to put a woman's breast on the cover, but the prototype he brought to Donati was plaster. Donati refined the idea, buying 999 falsies from a manufacturer in Brooklyn.

"I brought them back to my studio and then I started to paint the nipples, 999 nipples, with a crayon," he says. "Marcel was on the floor with me, doing some of it. Then I was left alone. Marcel didn't stay there. I invented the idea to put the velvet around it, the black velvet like it was coming out of a dress. When it was finished, Marcel came one day. In English he wrote, 'Please touch,' ' Prière de toucher' in French, and that's the title of the book. They're all numbered, 1 to 999, inside. In there is 'Idea of Marcel Duchamp in collaboration with Enrico Donati.' I made them all; that's it. So we worked together, all our lives, until he died.

"Surrealism was done by instinct, and you were looking at an object not with the eye, but behind the eye. You had the feeling of something extraordinary, but you didn't see it, but you had the feeling of it. So you put the feeling on canvas, and it became Surrealism. It was automatism, in which you do it by a succession of thought. One thing brought you to another thing, then another thing. At the end of it, it was something else, something new that you never saw with your eye, but you felt it. You felt it, and it came out because it was something that was in you, and that's very Surrealist.

"That's all." {sbox}


The Surreal World of Enrico Donati runs through Sept. 2 at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. Tues.-Sun. (until 8:45 p.m. Fri.). Adults $10, seniors $7, youths 13-17 $6, children 12 and younger free. (415) 750-3600, www.thinker.org .

Pam Grady is a freelance writer.

This article appeared on page N - 20 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Hi,

Take a look :
http://beinart.org/

Kind regards,

José
http://sitekreator.com/hushcolours/index.html
http://theartplanet.blogspot.com