In Anglo-American formalism, surrealism was considered a deviant art movement: improperly visual and impertinently literary, relatively inattentive Line to the imperatives of form, and mostly indifferent to the laws of genre, a paradoxical avant-garde concerned with infantile states and outmoded forms, not properly modernist at all. For neo-avant-garde artists who challenged this hegemony three decades ago, its very deviance might have made surrealism an attractive object. But such was not the case. Since this formalist model of modernism was staked on the autonomy of modern art as separate from social practice and grounded in visual experience, its antagonist, the neo-avant-garde account of modernism, stressed the two movements, dada and constructivism, that appeared most opposed to this visualist autonomy—that sought to destroy the separate institution of art in an anarchic attack on its formal conventions, as did dada, or to transform it according to the materialist practices of a revolutionary society, as did constructivism. Again surrealism was lost in the shuffle. To the neo-avant-gardists who challenged the formalist account in the 1950s and 1960s, it too appeared corrupt: technically kitschy, philosophically subjective, hypocritically elitist. Hence when artists involved in pop and minimalism turned away from the likes of Picasso and Matisse, they turned to such figures as Duchamp and Rodchenko, not to precedents like Ernst and Giacometti.

1. Select the sentence that suggests a point of view that, while reasonable to anticipate, was not embraced.





2. Consider each of the choices separately and select all that apply.

The passage suggests which of the following about surrealism as an art movement?

❑ Through its lack of attention to form and indifference to genre, surrealism is understood as an impertinent, but sometimes infantile, form of modernism.
❑ Although surrealism did not always follow the very rules of form opposed by some critics of formal conventions, surrealism was rejected by those critics as dishonest.
❑ Those in the neo-avant-garde movement believed that artists such as Duchamp succeeded in a way that surrealist artists had not.



3. The passage suggests that those sharing a neo-avant-garde point of view objected to which of the following about the formalist model of modernism?

A. its overly cautious approach to modern art
B. its use of deviant states and forms
C. its view of art as a distinct institution
D. its embrace of materialist practices
E. its representation of antiquated ideals