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Rene Magritte     Salvador Dali     |
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is
best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members. It
was an artistic movement that brought together artists, thinkers and
researchers in hunt of sense of expression of the unconscious.
Surrealists were searching for the definition of new aesthetic, new
humankind and a new social order. Surrealist artists wanted their work
to be a link between the abstract spiritual realities and the real forms
of the material world. To them, the object stood as a metaphor for an
inner reality. Through their craft, whether it be painting, sculpting or
drawing, artists could bring the inner realities of the subconscious to
the conscious mind, so that their meaning could be deciphered through
analysis. Just as Michelangelo and
Leonardo advanced the knowledge
of the body's anatomy, surrealist artists strive to chart the anatomy of
the psyche. The surrealist movement of visual art flourished in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason. Surrealism emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past. The artistic movement Surrealism came into being after the French poet Andre Breton 1924 published the first Manifeste du surrealisme. In this book Breton suggested that rational thought was repressive to the powers of creativity and imagination and thus inimical to artistic expression. Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surrealism." Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike. The images found in surrealist works are as confusing and startling as those of dreams. Surrealist works can have a realistic, though irrational style, precisely describing dreamlike fantasies, as in the works of René Magritte and Salvador Dali. Surrealism sometimes had a more abstract style, as in the works of Joan Miró, Max Ernst, and Oscar Dominguez, who invented spontaneous techniques, modeled upon the psychotherapeutic procedure of "free association" as a means to eliminate conscious control in order to express the workings of the unconscious mind. The Surrealists aimed to revolutionize human experience, including its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects, by freeing people from what they saw as false rationality, and restrictive customs and structures. Breton proclaimed, the true aim of Surrealism is "long live the social revolution, and it alone!" To this goal, at various times surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism. The Surrealist movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games and discussed the theories of Surrealism. The Surrealists developed a variety of techniques such as automatic drawing. Soon more visual artists joined Surrealism including Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dali, Enrico Donati, Alberto Giacometti, and Valentine Hugo. Though Breton admired Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and courted them to join the movement, they remained peripheral. |
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