Metamorphism

Term applied to the process by which one shape is transformed into another, especially in SURREALISM and other tendencies in 20th-century art. The concept of metamorphosis, encompassing literary sources from Ovid through Dante Alighieri to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was revived in the early 19th century. For the ancient Greeks, as outlined by Ovid, it concerned the miraculous process of the transformation from the world of nature to another sphere of existence; in Goethe's reformulation of metamorphosis in terms of the evolution of organic life (1790), however, it means a law of formation. Being based on the principles of 'polarity' and 'enhancement', it rules the transformation of nature and defines art as an enhanced 'second nature'.

See the Abbreviations for further details.