Chapter 13 Summary

Chapter 13, "The Influence of Modern Art" covers Cubism, Futurism, the Dada movement, Surrealism and Expressionism.

Cubism is an approach to painting and design as an exploration of space and a way of expressing human emotions. Picasso was the first innovator of this style with his series of paintings that featured Iberian and African tribal art in relation to the human body, boldly chiseled geometric planes of African sculpture, masks and fabric. Cubism uses figures in abstracted geometric planes, breaks classic norms of the human figure, and a shifting of perspectives on 2D planes. This style pushed design into more geometric abstraction and created new attitudes about pictorial space.
Futurism is a style that is fueled by enthusiasm for war, the machine age, speed and modern life. It spawned new painterly typography, "parole in liberta," that emphasized the noise and speed of the words it was portraying through contrasts in color, size, shape, weight, typefaces, etc.
Dada was a reaction to the WWI carnage, so it was anti-art, anti-tradition and strongly negative and destructive and anarchistic. It focused on chance placement and absurd titles, showing art and life as processes of random choice combined with willful choice. Dadaists aimed to mock and defame a society gone insane. It contributed to the concept of letterforms as concrete visual shapes, not just phonetic symbols.
Surrealism, "super reality," was a way of thinking, knowing, feeling and living that had poetic faith in the human spirit; it searched for the "more real than the real world behind the real."
Expressionism depicted subjective emotions and personal responses to subjects and events, not an objective reality. Color, proportion and lines were exaggerated and distorted; colors were intense and often contrasted. It saw art as an ideal form, a beacon for change in social reform and human condition.

I was inspired by the abstract textures and forms that most of these movements used, although many times I just stare at a piece of art and can't see the correlation between the subject and what it is trying to convey. I think that was the point these artists were trying to make sometimes...?

How exactly did surrealism influence the graphic design world? To me, it seems more of an influence on philosophical thinking and writing more than an influence on painting, etc.