Surrealism, Dada and Soviet Constructivism

This lecture will concentrate upon the lasting legacies of the 1920s, in cultural terms. 

Arising from the turmoils and horrors of the First World War, Dada represented a traumatised reaction against the very notion of ‘high culture’. Dada artists stridently and anarchically parodied the production, exhibition and admiration of ‘works of art’ of any kind. For Dada, art, culture, even language itself had become irremediably tainted by the industrialised mass slaughter of the trenches, so that from now onward, chaos, anarchy, and radical insurrection were to be the watchwords of post-war art. How did this chaotic ‘anti-art’ movement come to co-exist alongside the sleek utopianism of 1920s Modernism? Which, in the end, devoured which?

Surrealism grew out of the Dada movement. It retained the Dada fascination with the random and the spontaneous in art: yet it sought to anchor that randomness in a new appreciation of psychoanalysis - and in particular the works of Sigmund Freud. So can we see the burgeoning Surrealism of the 1920s as representing a synthesis between Dada and Modernism?

Soviet Constructivism represented an attempt, on the part of the new Leninist Soviet Union, to harness visual and technical ideas and methods derived from western European Modernism - particularly as developed and practiced in the German Bauhaus - to the political and ideological requirements of the Soviet state. How successful was this endeavour? And could it have ever survived the death of Lenin, and the coming to power of Stalin…?

Artists whose works will be featured include Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Renee Magritte, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenco, and El Lissitzky.

How and when to watch

Each lecture will last approximately 1 hour, followed by questions.

Please join in good time before each lecture to ensure that you have no connection problems. We recommend joining 10-15 minutes before the start time.

Register for the whole series or individual lectures

You can register for this lecture by clicking 'Book now' on this page, or you can register for the whole series here.

Please note: enrolments for this lecture close on 29 April at 23:59. The complete series will close at 23:59 GMT on 25 March 2027.