Dark toys : surrealism and the culture of childhood / David Hopkins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hopkins, David, 1955- author.

Contributor:

Adam H. Fetterolf Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Surrealism.

Children in art.

Toys in art.

Physical Description:

viii, 342 pages, 64 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, 2021.

Summary:

We all have memories of the object-world of childhood. For many of us, playthings and images from those days continue to resonate. Rereading a swathe of modern and contemporary artistic production through the lens of its engagement with childhood, this book blends in-depth art historical analysis with sustained theoretical exploration of topics such as surrealist temporality, toys, play, nostalgia, memory, and 20th-century constructions of the child. The result is an entirely new approach to the surrealist tradition via its engagement with "childish things." Providing what the author describes as a "long history of surrealism," this book plots a trajectory from surrealism itself to the art of the 1980s and 1990s, through to the present day. It addresses a range of figures from Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer, Joseph Cornell, and Helen Levitt, at one end of the spectrum, to Louise Bourgeois, Eduardo Paolozzi, Claes Oldenburg, Susan Hiller, Martin Sharp, Helen Chadwick, Mike Kelley, and Jeff Koons, at the other.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. The Surrealist Toy

2. Illustration and Vulgarity

3. Nostalgia and Perversity: Rereading Bellmer and Cornell

4. `The Play of Children and the Odour of Cedarwood': Childhood, Primitivism, and the Ludic, 1942

1943

5. The Pop Toy: Materials and Historicity

6. Surrealism and Counterculture: The Liberated Child from Fourier to Oz

7. Dark Toys: Late Surrealism and Late Twentieth-Century Childhood.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Adam H. Fetterolf Fund.

ISBN:

9780300225747

0300225741

OCLC:

1184234237

Publisher Number:

99989346069