I'm Only Happy When It Rains

...but not buzznet :)) haha
I'm leaving my country tomorrow, because I'm going to study in Austria. So, i guess, i'm going to spend the next 4-5 years in Vienna, which is not bad at all, though it's not very good too, because i'm going to miss many many things here...especially my family and friends :(( I've just wanted to tell you, that i don't know when i'll be able to be online and if i don't answer your notes and messages, it's not because i don't want to...I'm going to miss you too, my buzznet-mates =) Well, i wish you evrything nice and i hope to hear from you soon, take care of yourselves and don't forget about me :P hahah, just kidding about the last one lol :D Bye!!!

With love : Denitsa

 Well,i was tagged twice in the past 2 days, from deliderata and tingeli, so here are the facts about myself :))


This is a game that has been flying all over Buzznet! Here are the rules:

1. List 8 facts about yourself in your journal.

2. At the end of the post, you must tag 8 people that are on Buzznet.

3.Then send them a message or note telling them to read your journal and to keep the tagging game going.


1. I like to be alone, but i'm afraid of being lonely.

2. I'm addicted to paintings and painters ( you can see that from the galleries and the journals on my blog) and i really like to paint, even i'm not so good, as i've wanted to be. And i don't mind working in a museum for a particular time, 'cause to be surrounded by paintings is what i would really enjoy.

3. I can't live without listening to music...and i prefer the sad songs, cause they make me feel good (even if it sounds senceless)

4. I don't like the heath and i don't like the cold, so my favourite season is the autumn, when it's rainy and the sky is getting grey...just love the colours in the autumn and it's the best time to have a walk on the empty streets.

5. BULGARIA. it means love, it means sadness, it means happiness...it means another tousand things to me...but it looks, that i'm going to leave it soon, sooner, than i've expected...i'm going to study abroad, in Austria i think ( if i don't change my mind till then and go to Germany)

6. I've always been an outsider...i mean, i've never been popular at highschool or have many friends, but i don't regret about it :)) i don't think, that popularity can make you really happy and being an outsider is not that bad at all :P

7. Many people have told me, that i'm a strange person...and i take it as a compliment, cause being different in some way means to be yorself in many ways ;)

8. I'm glad, that i've found such great people on buzznet like you, my friends :D i really appreciate your attention to my stuff in here and just want to thank you for being so nice to me =)

As some of you already know,i've been to this concert and at last i've seen my preciouse Brian :)) and Stefan & Steve,of course =) the show was just amazing, that was one of my greatest evenings ever!!! the supporting band was my favourite bulgarian alternative rock band Ostava and they've pleyed pretty good (about 40 min). But Placebo's performance just can't be described so easyly - they were full of energy and Brian is such and actor - he was making different faces and dancing around with Stefan :D they've played about 1 hour and 40 min songs from all of their albums, not only from MEDS and i was like singing all the time (of course after that my voice dissapeared for 2 days, but it's worth). The stupid thing was, that there weren't many ppl at the concert - about 4500, but you know, this kind of music isn't so popular here...anyway they made a show to remember and i'm very happy, that i've seen them live (especially about that i saw Brian half-nacked while he was changing his shirt :)) if you want to see some pics from the concert you can check my new gallery,it's unlocked for my friends.
~ Denitsa ~

There's something wrong with buzznet again - i can't post any comments!!! And i'm going crazy......:((

For the last 2 days,i've been cursed twice,i've been told a "hater" and "fucking bitch",only because i've said,that i don't like Fall Out Boy's music and i don't think,that Pete Wentz is attractive.And now i wonder,is it so bad to say your oppinoin,without being offended by fanatic fans...Is there something wrong with me - i just say,what i think!?T_T

Denica

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

My painting carries with it the message of pain.

Painting completed my life.

His capacity for work breaks clocks and calendars. [on Diego Rivera]

I cannot speak of Diego as my husband because that term, when applied to him, is an absurdity. He never has been, nor will he ever be, anybody’s husband.

I never knew I was a surrealist till Andr Breton came to Mexico and told me I was.

I drank to drown my pain, but the damned pain learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good behavior.

Tamale Recipes

"Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad."

"The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad."

"I do not take drugs. I am drugs."

"Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I."

"To paint a picture is either very simple or impossible."

"The problem with the youth of today is that one is no longer part of it."

"Many people do not reach their eighties because they spend too much time in their forties."

"At the age of six years I wanted to be a chef. At the age of seven I wanted to be Napoleon. My ambitions have continued to grow at the same rate ever since."

"Every morning when I awake, the greatest of joys is mine: that of being Salvador Dalí."

"Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation."

"All good ideas arrive by chance."

"I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music"

"To be an artist is to believe in life."

"I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness."

"For me a form is never something abstract: it is always a sign of something. It is a man, a bird, or something else. For me painting is never form for form's sake."

"Life obliges me to do something, so I paint."

"Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it."

"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist".

"My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."

"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see."

"Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely."

"Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated."

"The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation."

"The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms, Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him."

"I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need."

"Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight."

"There are unknown forces in nature; when we give ourselves wholly to her, without reserve, she lends them to us; she shows us these forms, which our watching eyes do not see, which our intelligence does not understand or suspect. "

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read.

It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture.

Don't be an art critic, but paint, there lies salvation.

What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is in harmony parallel with nature.

All my life I have worked to be able to earn my living, but I thought that one could do good painting without attracting attention to one's private life. Certainly, an artist wishes to raise himself intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain obscure. The pleasure must be found in the work.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution. I shut my eyes in order to see. Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

Oh yes! he loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from Holland - those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul, that abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth.

We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.

But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.

A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes that he has got the biggest piece.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.

Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

Conscience is a man's compass.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

Happiness... it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

I wish they would only take me as I am.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Love is something eternal, the aspect may change, but not the essence.

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don't always know if it is green or violet, you can't even say it's blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic that to love others.

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

Frida's life began and ended in Mexico City, in her home known as the Blue House. She gave her birth dates as July 7, 1910, but her birth certificate shows July 6, 1907. Frida was born an imaginative storyteller and this was one of many ways she rearranged the truth. Although she was spunky and courageous, Frida Kahlo lived a life of pain and suffering, mostly in the artistic shadow of her famous husband, Diego Rivera. Over the past several decades, Kahlo’s work has gained in appreciation in the art world where today she is considered one of the great masters of art in the twentieth century.

 She is certainly one of the greatest women artists, perhaps the greatest of all times. Her work has gained in stature and Rivera’s work has remained steady and today she is as famous or more so than Rivera.

Kahlo’s work today is appreciated today for its originality, its surreal, dreamlike, and fantastical quality, expressed in a personal voice. She painted about her life, without sentimentality and censure. Her life was full of adventure, violence, suffering, death, and love; all which make for great storytelling and incredible painted images.

At age 6, Frida was stricken with polio, which caused her right leg to appear much thinner than the other. It was to remain that way permanently. When Frida entered high school she was a tomboy full of mischief who became the ringleader of a rebellious group of mainly boys that continually caused trouble in the National Preparatory School. This group pulled many pranks , mainly on professors. It was also in the National Preparatory School that Frida first came in contact with her future husband, the famous Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera. He was commissioned to paint a mural in the school's auditorium.

On September 17, 1925, at about age 18, Frida Kahlo was riding the city bus with her boyfriend, Alejandro Gomez Arias, when the bus crashed and turned over in the road. Alejandro escaped serious injury but Kahlo suffered a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, and 11 fractures in her right leg. In addition her right foot was dislocated and crushed, and her shoulder was out of joint. For a month, Frida was forced to stay flat on her back, encased in a plaster cast and enclosed in a boxlike structure.

Frida's enormous strength and will to live allowed her to survive and make a remarkable recovery. She wrote during in 1927 to Alejandro, “ They’re going to change my cast for the third time, this time to keep me immobilized without being able to walk for two or three months, until my spine knits together perfectly, and I don’t know if afterwards they’ll have to operate on me…when you come back you’re really going to be in for a shock when you see how horrible I am with this apparatus. Afterward, I’m going to be a thousand times worse, so you can just imagine: after having been lying down for a month and another month with two different devices, and now two months flat on my back put in a coating of plaster, then six months again with a lighter apparatus so I can walk…Is that enough to drive a person crazy, or not?”

Although Frida's recovery was miraculous (she regained her ability to walk), she did have relapses of tremendous pain and fatigue all throughout her life, which caused her to be hospitalized for long periods of time, bedridden at times, and also caused her to undergo numerous operations. She once joked that she held the record for the most operations. Frida underwent about 30 in her lifetime. She turned to alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes to ease the pain of her physical suffering.

Once she was out and about after her accident, a close friend introduced Frida to the artistic crowd of Mexico, which included Tina Modotti (well known photographer, actress, and communist) and Diego Rivera. Frida tells the story of meeting with Diego for the first time:

“I took four little pictures to Diego who was painting up on the scaffolds at the Ministry of Public Education. Without hesitating a moment I said to him, ‘Diego, come down,’ and so, since he is so humble, so agreeable, he came down. ‘Look, I didn’t come to flirt with you or anything, even though you are a womanizer, I came to show you my painting. If it interests you, tell me so, if it doesn’t interest you, tell me that too, so I can get to work on something else to help out my parents.’ He told me, ‘Look, I’m very much interested in your painting, especially this self-portrait which is the most original. The other seem to me to be influenced by what you’ve seen. Go on home, paint a picture, and next Sunday, I’ll come to see it and tell you.’ So I did, and he said, ‘You have talent.’”

Frida became to Diego, “the most important thing in my life,” and they were married on August 21,1929. Frida’s mother called the marriage a union between an elephant and a dove, because Diego was huge and very fat, and Frida was small (a little over 5 feet) and slender. However, Frida was the last unmarried daughter of ill parents in sad financial straits. Her decision to marry Diego had pragmatic as well as romantic repercussions, since Diego paid off the mortgage on her parents’ home.

Diego Rivera loved Frida’s work and was her greatest admirer. Frida, in turn, was Diego's most trusted critic. Throughout their marriage, Diego had several affairs with other women, including Frida’s sister, Christina. Frida said to a friend, “I have suffered two serious accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar ran over me…The other accident was Diego.”

Frida let out all of her emotions on a canvas. She painted her anger and hurt over her stormy marriage and painful miscarriages.

In 1932, Diego’s career took him to Michigan where he was to create a series of murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Frida experienced severe hemorrhaging and was rushed to Henry Ford Hospital. In the retelling, and in a painting, Frida claimed to have lost a baby. Her extreme isolation in a strange land, coupled with her extreme desire to have a baby, is movingly recalled in the painting Henry Ford Hospital. She expressed the dramatic event in this small painting with strongly contrasting colors in a surreal style that distorts scale and proportion. Since 1932 Frida began experimenting with techniques, painting on tin, making lithographs, and trying fresco painting. Her work was beginning to emphasize terror, suffering, wounds, and pain.

Andre Breton recognized that Kahlo’s work was Surrealist in 1938. “The promises of fantasy are filled with greater splendor by reality itself!” he exclaimed about her work. Breton organized an exhibition in Paris to include seventeen of Kahlo’s paintings in 1938. Traveling to Paris, Kahlo met Picasso, Duchamp, Kandinsky, and others and dazzled Parisians with her style and originality. Her portrait appeared on the cover of French Vogue. She returned to Mexico feeling more sure of herself as an artist than ever before. Her pictures were selling and had earned the praise of many severe critics. Frida was not disturbed by critical comments from those horrified by her shocking themes. Frida felt uplifted by her popularity in Paris among famous artists, political figures, and writers.

Upon her return to Mexico, Diego burst Kahlo’s hopes for happiness by asking for a divorce. Her life was to continue to be one of physical and emotional suffering. The couple remarried in 1940, but Kahlo was never the same. She returned to the house of her childhood, Casa Azul in Coyoacan, making her studio there instead of next to Rivera’s in San Angel. She worked and lived in Casa Azul for the rest of her life.

Frida, despite all of the hurt in her life, was an outgoing person whose vocabulary was filled with 4 letter words. She loved to drink tequila and sing off color songs to guests at the crazy parties she hosted.

Frida only had one exhibition in Mexico and it was in the spring of 1953. Frida's health was very bad at this time and doctors told her not to attend. Minutes after guests were allowed into the gallery, sirens were heard outside. The crowd went crazy for outside there was an ambulance accompanied by a motorcycle escort. Frida Kahlo was being carried from it into her exhibition on a hospital stretcher! The photographers and reporters were shocked. She was placed in her bed in the middle of the gallery. The mob of people went to greet her. Frida told jokes, entertained the crowd, sang, and drank the whole evening. The exhibition was an amazing success.

During the same year as her exhibition, Frida had to have her right leg amputated below the knee due to a gangrene infection. This caused her to become deeply depressed and suicidal. On July 13, 1954, Frida died. No official autopsy was done but suicide was rumored. Her last words in her diary read "I hope the leaving is joyful and I hope never to return".

Max Ernst (1891-1976)

Max Ernst was born at Bruhl, near Cologne, the son of Philipp Ernst, teacher of the deaf and amateur painter, and his wife, Luise nee Kopp. Ernst taught himself to paint while studying philosophy and psychiatry at the University of Bonn (1909-1914) and exhibited his painting at the first German Autumn Salon in 1913. In 1914 Ernst became acquainted with the Surrealist painter, Jean Arp, and they began a lifelong friendship.

In 1916 Ernst was drafted into the German military to fight in WW1. After the war Ernst settled in Cologne and together with Arp and Johannes Baargeld founded the Cologne Dada group.

Their exhibition of 1920 at the Winter Brewery in Cologne was closed by the police on the grounds of obscenity. Ernst exhibited with the Paris Dada group and moved to Paris in 1922. In Paris Ernst became a member of the Surrealist group and a friend of Gala and Paul Eluard, Tristan Tzara, and Andre Breton.

During his early years of artmaking, Ernst made collages out of school textbooks, mail order catalogs, magazines, and educational pamphlets. He was able to be political and personal in his collage work, impressing Andre Breton with the possibilities of collage and the vision of Surrealism. In Beyond Painting he describes the task he set out for himself in the collage work, “I am tempted to see in collage the exploitation of the chance meeting of two remote realities on an unfamiliar plane…cultivating the effects of a systematic bewilderment…coupling two apparently uncoupleable realities on a plane apparently unsuitable to them.” Ernst’s early collages were examples of what Surrealism could mean and were inspirational to the Surrealist movement.

In 1921 Ernst began to combine assemblage and collage in large-scale painting with enigmatic plots such as Oedipus Rex, 1922, Teetering Woman 1923, and Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924. In 1924 Ernst traveled to Indochina with Gala and Paul Eluard.

Ernst invented what was called the frottage, pencil rubbings on paper or canvas, in the early 1920s. Ernst made a series of frottage works and published the “Histoire Naturelle.” The frottage realizes the surrealistic principle of psychological automatism.

Ernst showed 48 works at the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition in New York at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Ernst met the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington and lived with her until 1940 when Ernst was arrested by the Nazis. Separated from Ernst, Carrington fled to Spain in an effort to procure a visa for Ernst in Madrid and meanwhile suffered a mental breakdown. Released from prison camp, Ernst found a new love interest in Peggy Guggenheim, the wealthy American sponsor of the arts. Guggenheim arranged for Ernst’s escape from France and passage to America.

Ernst lived in New York from 1941-1945. In 1942 he met the Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning and in 1946 married and moved with Tanning to Arizona. Ernst became an American citizen in 1948. In 1953 he received the Grand Prize at the Venice Bienalle. He moved to France in 1958 and lived there until his death at the age of 85.

Joan Miró (1893-1983)

Joan Miró Ferra was born on April 20, 1893 in Barcelona, into the family of a goldsmith and watchmaker. Miró started drawing classes at the age of seven, but later yielding to his parents’ insistence to receive a decent profession took business classes and became a book-keeper. Simultaneously, in 1907-10 Joan Miró studied art in the academy La Escuela de la Lonja in Barcelona in the class of the landscapist Modesto Urgell Inglada and professor of decorative and applied arts José Pasco Merisa.In 1912-15, he studied in the private academy of Francese D’A. Galí Fabra. In 1918, together with some like-minded friends Miró founded “Agrupació Courbet”, a group of young artists who opposed themselves to conservative traditions in Catalan art.

In his works of 1913-17 the most important are the influences of Cézanne and the Fauvists: objects are close to each other and shine with bright and broken colors; striped patterns make up a kind of decorative ornament: Still Life with Rose, Portrait of E. C. Ricart, Portrait of V. Nubiola, Prades, the Village, Ciurana, the Path. Approximately in 1918 Joan Miró enters the so-called “detailistic phase” (the term was introduced by Ràfols, a fellow member of the Courbet group). Jacques Dupin, Miró’s biographer, called this period “poetic realism”. Landscapes, painted in Montroig, where the artist spent the summer at his parents’ farm, have deep perspectives which are full of methodically painted details: The Vegetable Garden with Donkey, The Wagon Tracks.

In 1920, Joan Miró arrived in Paris and from now on shared his time between Spain and France. In 1921-22, he created The Farm – the highest achievement in his “poetic realism”. The canvas of 132x147 cm includes the whole universe; it is full of everyday objects, which have symbolic meanings and which make the picture “open to numerous interpretations”. The American author Ernest Hemingway bought the picture because “he saw his impressions of the Catalan landscape and mentality reflected in it”. (p.30 in Joan Miró. By Janic Mink. Benedikt Taschen Verlag. 1993) Two pictures that followed, The Tilled Field and Catalan Landscape (Hunter), testify to the artist's quick evolution from observation and imitation of the real life to unconventional and symbolic realization of mental images. Realistic forms are forced out by distorted shapes – stretched, swollen, twisted; by abstract geometric shapes - cones, circles, triangles, and lines… Remembered dreams, especially those seen when he had to go to bed hungry, become a source of inspiration. He confessed later that hungry hallucinations were his muse. “Compared to the use of ether, cocaine, alcohol, morphine, or sex, Miró’s hunger-hallucinations look almost like a monkish fasting.” (p.44 in Joan Miró. By Janic Mink. Benedikt Taschen Verlag. 1993) In 1924, Miró met André Breton, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon and other participants of the Surrealistic group. The same year the first Surrealist Manifesto is published. Miró executed several more paintings in the surrealistic vein.

A relatively small Harlequin's Carnival (1924-25, Buffalo) brought the surrealistic phase of his work to a climax. His intellect, subconscious mind and hands created the world of boneless, flowing, amorphous creatures, which freely change their shapes and position in the space and universe. Figures and objects, a fish, an insect, a ladder, flames, stars, cones, circles and spheres, all have real prototypes, but on the canvas are swinging colored shadows, celebrating a holiday. As time progresses, Miró’s pictures become increasingly abstract, and his forms more organic. By the end of the 1920s Miró’s vocabulary of pictorial idioms is formed. There are signs, which mark the space (a line of horizon, sun and stars in the upper part of a picture; waves or bunches of plants in the lower part), and service signs, or messengers, which communicate and unite the different parts of space: a flying bird, a running rabbit, a ladder going into the sky, organs of sensual perception – an eye and ear, a human figure with enormous feet: Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird. 1926; Dog Barking at the Moon. 1926; Landscape (The Hare). 1927, etc.)

In the 1930s the artist experimented with different materials. He made assemblages from materials and objects that he found; he painted, drew and collaged on paper, masonite, sandpaper, copper. In 1932-36 he created a series of pictures after his sketches-collages. Cut out of catalogues and magazines, machines and everyday objects, he arranged and glued them onto the paper, those collages were used for future paintings; in his artistic compositions all those technical parts and blocks turned into organic mildly shaped forms, which remind of animal organs, human limbs, and embryos. Fulfilled in bright colors, these works represent some of Miró’s most abstract works: Painting. 1933, Composition. 1933, Painting, 1933. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Miró returned to Paris and stayed in France until 1940.

 In 1937, Miró painted a large panel The Reaper for the Spanish Republican pavilion at the Paris World Fair. The panel, which presented a Catalan peasant, disappeared or was destroyed after the pavilion was disassembled. One of the most important works of the period is Still Life with Old Shoe. Everyday things – a bottle, a loaf of bread, an apple pierced by a fox, and an old shoe – irradiate unreal light, making a simple still life of everyday objects look like a scene from the Apocalypse. In 1940, in Varengeville (Normandy), Miró starts a series of gouaches Constellations, the work on which he continued in Montroig and Barcelona. These 23 works became one of the highest points in his creativity. Stars, moon scythes, discs, eyes, birds and animals, human figures, some indefinite forms either come close together or leave the free space. These gouaches were created, as Miro admits, under the influence of night, stars, music of Bach and Mozart, which stirred up in him multiple poetic associations reflected in titles: The Nightingale's Song at Midnight and the Morning Rain. 1940. Ciphers and Constellations in Love with a Woman; Constellation: Awakening at Dawn. 1941. etc. In the 1940-70s the artist could realize his dream about monumental art, which was a way of “reaching people”.

 In 1947 in the USA, he executed mural for Cincinnati Terrace Hilton Hotel. In 1956, he settled in Palma de Majorca in a villa with a large studio designed by friend, the architect Josep Lluis Sert. Here, in collaboration with his old friend and a master ceramist Josep Llorens Artigas he fulfilled the commission of two walls for UNESCO headquarters in Paris (1956-58). The walls are 3 meters high and 15 and 7.5 meters long. The dominant Sun Wall and the more intimate Moon Wall with their bright colors make a sharp contrast to the gray cement of the buildings. For this work Miró was awarded the Guggenheim International Award, which President Eisenhower handed over to him in 1959.

The following years Miró created a series of monumental ceramic murals, which decorate the dining room in Harvard Harkness Center (1960-61), building of the Ecole Supérieure de Sciences économiques in St. Gall, Switzerland (1964), fence of the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the airport in Barcelona (1970), the Glass pavilion for the World Fair in Osaka (1970) and others. In the 1950-70s Miró also got interested in sculpture. Miró made models for sculpture out of materials he found, man-made or natural; sometimes those models were later cast in bronze. The paintings of this period became “emptier” again: Woman in Front of the Sun. 1950; Catalan Peasant in the Moonlight, 1968; triptych Blue: Blue II, Blue III. 1961; The Lark’s Wing. 1967. These works can be characterized by the use of a few pure colors, big simple forms, exceptional laconism in combination with the energy of poetic expression.

Miró produced a massive output. He left at least 2,000 oil paintings, 500 sculptures, 400 ceramic objects, and 5,000 drawings and collages. He had an immense influence on post-war art in the United States. In 1975 the Fundació Joan Miró was opened in Centre d’Estudis d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona. In 1992 the artist's studio in Palma de Majorca was turned into his museum.

René François Ghislain Magritte (November 21, 1898 - August 15, 1967) was a Surrealist artist, born in Lessines, Belgium.  In March 1912 his mother died by drowning, a personal tragedy that affected the artist throughout life. From 1916 he studied intermittently at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels where his family settled in 1918. For income, he designed wallpapers. In the early 1920s he began a long and fruitful collaboration with the Surrealists, first in Brussels where a local group had is own reviews and meetings, and then in Paris where he spent three years from 1927 to 1930. Inspired by the example of Giorgio de Chirico and the collages of Max Ernst, the strange dream-like images in Magritte's pictures, painted in the most matter-of-fact style, had a profound effect on the course of Surrealist painting. In 1930 he returned to Brussels where he remained for the rest of his life. IN 1936 he was represented in the Museum of Modern Art's 'Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism' exhibition and the 'International Surrealist Exhibition' in London. During the 1940s he had a number of solo exhibitions in Brussels, London and Paris, and in 1954 was given a large retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Two major retrospective exhibitions of his work were held in the 1960s, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and at the Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, and reflect Magritte's growing importance to a new generation of artists. Magritte died in Brussels on 15 August 1967.

Salvador Dali  (May 11, 1904 - January 23, 1989) was a surrealist painter born at Figueras (Catalonia). He was the son of a prosperous notary and spent his youth in the coastal fishing village of Cadaques where his parents built a studio for him. He showed talent for painting as a young man and attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid.

It was through magazines and publications that Dali, while still in Spain around 1927, discovered surrealism. In 1929 he arrived in Paris and shortly became part of the Paris Surrealist Group led by Andre Breton. In 1930 Dali met Gala Eluard, married to the poet Paul Eluard, and Gala was to become his lifetime companion and mu

Dali influenced the scene with his personal flavor of surrealism. The basis of Dali’s Work was a personally inspired system which he called the ‘Paranoiac Critical’ method. This method which Dali explained in the first issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution (1930) is, he wrote, ‘a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the interpretative-critical association of delirious phenomena.’ This method was really an extension of Dali’s own fevered personality, the nature of which he summed up when he said, at an opening on an exhibition of his in work in 1934, ‘The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.’

Dali’s painting, Persistence of Memory (1931) is one of the best known surrealist works. He did not maintain a relationship with the Paris Surrealists for long due to personality clashes and differences in politics. In 1934 he was officially expelled from the Paris Surrealist group, but he continued to exhibit works in international surrealist exhibitions throughout the decade.

 

 1939 he moved to Del Monte, California. From 1949 to 1950 Dali’s art went through a MysticalInPeriod which was followed by a Nuclear Period. He called this period his “classical” style in which he was preoccupied with science, history, and religion. The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave Dali a major exhibition in 1941. He made The Sacrament of the Last Supper which is now in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington D.C.

In 1974 Dali opened the Teatro Museo Dali in Figures, Spain. This was followed by retrospectives in Paris and London at the end of the decade. After the death of his wife, Gala, in 1982, Dali’s health began to fail. He lived as an invalid near his Teatro Museo and died in 1989.

se for Dali’s artwork.