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- Title
Dream Homes: Surrealism in Chicago.
- Authors
Mileaf, Janine
- Abstract
For many Americans in the mid-twentieth century, the term "dream home" conjured the image of a split-level ranch with a yard on four sides and an attached garage. Using a related phrase in the same years, the French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard proposed the "oneiric house," a home that dwells in imagination and daydream. He wrote about the concept in his seminal text The Poetics of Space, published in France in 1958 and translated into English in 1964. However distinct, these ideas together offer a starting ground for deciphering the preponderance of "fantastic," or fantasy-based, painting focused on the home that arose in Chicago's Surrealist circles. While they never formed as a self-conscious movement, Ivan Albright, Gertrude Abercrombie, Eldzier Cortor, Julio de Diego, Harold Noecker, Dorothea Tanning, Julia Thecla, and John Wilde each contributed to a local version of Surrealism that emphasized the realistic and meticulous handling of psychic subject matter. For these artists, the home became a contested symbol of one's relation to society, especially in the urban contexts in which many of them worked. Their distorted portrayals of home signaled a creative and nonconforming stance toward the aspirations of the mainstream.
- Subjects
SURREALISM; FRENCH philosophers; CORTOR, Eldzier, 1916-2015; THECLA, Julia, 1896-1973; WILDE, John
- Publication
Space Between: Literature & Culture, 1914-1945, 2018, Vol 14, Issue 2018, p1
- ISSN
1551-9309
- Publication type
Article