From the elements of art to the great goddess Durga — Smarthistory is adding new content every week.
Prehistoric to contemporary
videos + essays
Saintly violence? Santiago on Horseback
Santiago became an important saint in New Spain, recast to convey Spanish dominance over the Indigenous population in the sixteenth century.
Surrealist Techniques: Subversive Realism
Everything is, in the end, a question of representation (in words or images) in which we choose to believe, or not.
The Bauhaus and Bau
For Bauhaus designers, beauty was achieved through careful choices of materials, proportions, textures, and colors for the functional features of the objects.
Surrealist Techniques: Automatism
Automatism was a group of techniques used by the Surrealists to facilitate the direct and uncontrolled outpouring of unconscious thought.
Purism
Purism replaced what they described as Cubism’s decorative, vague, and contingent forms with mathematically-designed compositions of perfected ideal forms.
Surrealism and Psychoanalysis
The Surrealists were interested in the unconscious as a creative source.
Surrealism: Origins and Precursors
The goal of Surrealist writings and art was to “ruin” the logical, practical, and moral reasoning that structures human understanding of reality.
Dada Readymades
The purpose of the readymade is fundamentally conceptual. Any objection that the object is not beautiful, or did not require any skill to make, misses the point.
Dada Politics
The Dadaists were effective in creating devastating social and political criticism in postwar Germany.
