Political activism had been dominant as a strand of European art since immediately after World War II. From 1948 to 1951 certain artists who had previously been sympathetic to prewar French Surrealism and its Marxist commitments joined together as COBRA, a name derived from the opening letters of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, the cities where its members worked. Essentially, they developed a collectivist ethos, publishing a magazine and producing abstract paintings that relied heavily on Surrealist “automatist” techniques. In France the Dada/Surrealism tradition also spawned two highly politicized cultural movements: Lettrism and Situationism. The latter of these, founded in 1957, ...(100 of 73439 words)