Surrealista

During the World War I years, the French Dada artist Marcel Duchamp expressed his aesthetic nihilism by selecting mass-produced objects, designating them as sculpture, and calling them "ready-mades." Objects such as a bottle rack, a snow shovel, and a urinal were pronounced by Duchamp to be subjects of art. The Dadaist emphasis on the role of accident, chance, and the unconscious in the creation of art-as in Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages (1913-14, Museum of Modern Art)-was to influence the later surrealist movement.

The French artist Jean Arp employed chance in several relief sculptures made of painted wood, with clever, connotative titles. Arp is best known, however, for his later abstract sculpture in the round-biomorphic forms to which he gave the name concretions, for example Human Concretion (1935; cast stone version, 1949, Museum of Modern Art). The German-born Max Ernst, like Arp, pioneered both Dada and surrealism; his Lunar Asparagus (1935, Museum of Modern Art), a delightful work in plaster, depicts two elongated, attenuated plantlike figures.

The Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti gave form to his fantasies in such haunting works as the construction The Palace at 4 A.M. (1932-33) and the bronze Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932), both in the Museum of Modern Art. Also involved with Dada and surrealism, and a frequent collaborator with Duchamp, was the American-born Man Ray, whose work is well illustrated by the fascinating Object to Be Destroyed (1923, destroyed in 1957), a metronome with an oscillating stem displaying a photograph of an eye.

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