GENERAL DESCRIPTION
Surrealism, an early-20th-century literary and artistic movement, aimed to liberate the emotions and desires of the subconscious from the rational mind and its socially-enforced norms and taboos. In order to break with the rational, surrealist poets and artists adopted fantastic, dream-like imagery, created surprising juxtapositions, and relied on chance. The French poet André Breton wrote the "Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1924, which defined the movement as "pure psychic automatism by which is intended to express... the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations ... Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream."
Informed by the symbolist movement of the 19th century and the immediate antecedent of dada, surrealist artists adopted various techniques to incorporate chance and remove the limitations of the conscious mind. Decalcomania was a method by which watercolor paints were pressed between two sheets of paper. Frottage was the child's technique of putting a piece of paper over a textured surface and rubbing it with a pencil [see an example of frottage in crayon by Max Ernst: 1951.112.6]. Similarly, "Exquisite Corpse" was a parlor game modified so that a player would make a drawing, fold the paper to conceal it, and pass it on to the next player for his or her contribution. These techniques allowed artists to distance themselves from the traditional subjects and conventions of art, and thus to open themselves to the hidden thoughts of the subconscious. Meanwhile, some surrealists adopted a precisely delineated, naturalistic style in order to create visions which approached but somehow contradicted reality. René Magritte's convincing illusions are perhaps the best example of this [1981.9].
Surrealism has had a major impact on both the art world and popular visual culture. Its influences are evident in Pop art, Abstract Expressionism, and time-based media installations, and in contemporary film, music, and advertising.
Adapted from
- Anne Bromberg, "Development of Abstraction," DMA Unpublished material, 1987.
- "Seeing Contemporary Art," DMA Unpublished material, c. 1995.
- DMA Unpublished material, n.d.
NOTES
ES- made revision to final sentence at the request of Queta Watson and Hayley Caldwell--because it contained grammatical errors. 7/9/2019
Activity:
The Surrealists were fascinated by the effects of accident. Some of these artists developed a game that utilized "chance" for creative interest.
Assign a section of a body to each of four players. Each of the players will draw his/her assigned body part.
a. The Head
b. From the Neck to the Waist
c. From the Waist to the Knees
d. From the Knees to the Ground
When the first person finishes, he/she folds the paper to conceal all but the bottom points of the drawing and passes it to the next person. That person makes his/her addition, conceals the work, and passes it on. When the drawing is finished, have the group choose a title.
Adapted From:
Ken Kelsey, Gail Davitt, Mary Ann Allday, Barbara Barrett, and Troy Smythe, Contemporary Art and Design at the Dallas Museum of Art, Teaching Packet, 1995, 5 and 32.
(Moved teaching idea out of general description, 11/16/18, CLC).
Further excerpts from general description notes:
Notes from education file- materials for Contemporary Extravaganza, 2000:
Surrealists:
According to Krasner, a negative effect ofthe Surrealists was.... :
Lee Krasner stated that "the decline of women artists" can be attributed "to the misogyny of the Surrealists," who were not present in the US during the 1930s. she said it was later, "during the 1940s and 1950s" that the Surrealists' "condescending attitude toward women began to rub off on the members of the New York School" (Archives of American Art, NY. Lee Krasner papers. Reel 3196)
Public exhibitions/magazines spreading Surrealist awareness and influence in US:
1931: Wadsworth Athenaeum at Hartford held first exclusively surrealist exhibition in America (all examples were Eur.)
1932: first examples of art by members of the official surrealist group shown at Julien Levy's
Madison Avenue gallery (works by Man Ray, Dali, Ernst, Tanguy and Chirico, among
others)
1936: MoMA NY: Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (a few Amer. included)
1942: Breton and Duchamp organized a large exhibition, "First Papers of Surrealism," in which "the principles of the movement--the expression ofhte unconscious through free association and spontaneous imagery--were demonstrated in techniques such as illusionism, automatism, dacalcomania, and rubbings." (American Art Since 1945: From the Collection of the MoMA, p. 8)
• 1942-47: Guggenheim's Art ofThis Century gallery. "Showcase for leading abstract and
Surrealist artists." (Am. Art Since 1945, p. 8)
• View and VVV: Magazines focused on Surrealist activity; Put out by David Hare with
Breton, Ernst, and later Duchamp as advisors. It "served as a forum for the exchange of
ideas between the European expatriates and avant-garde American writers and poets; along with major texts by Breton" (also published other Americans like Motherwell) (Rubins. Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, 160)
Content:
• Surrealists had turned to "three kinds of expression that had been around for a long time, but had not been taken seriously -- child art, the art of the mad, and "primitive" art..."(Robert Hughes. The Shock ofthe New. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. p. 227)
AbExs' attraction to the Surrealists: (These interests all overlap)
(When the Surrealists came to the US, they were showing at the same galleries as the Abstract Expressionists-Art ofThis Century, Sidney Janis-and therefore spreading ideas to these young American artists)
1. Liberation of form:
• interested in Surrealists "fascination with free, unbridled and uncensored art" (Hughes, ?227)
• Gorky, most directly inspired--was considered by the Surrealists to be one ofthem; had seen Kandinsky's expressionistic abstractions, Miro's spatial arrangements of biomorphic forms, Masson's automatic paintings and drawings, in which the brush or pen, theoretically uncontrolled by the intellect, exploits accidental imagery. (Legg, 8)
• Troy's notes: Andre Breton, one ofthe most influential leaders ofthe group worked as an intern at a psychiatric center treating shell-shocked victims during WWI. He viewed his work analyzing dreams there as a basis for later surrealism... interpretation, yes, always, but above all liberation from constraints--logic, morality, and the rest--with the aim of recovering their original powers of spirit.
2. Automatism:
• the AbEx's main interest in the Surrealists was the technique of "psychic automatism"
(Breton named it) and "the procedures of invoking an image by chance association and
random doodling" (Hughes, 260)
• (Hughes, p.260 cont.)..."If one's work remained hospitable to chance effects, drips,
unforeseen combinations, and unintended images, if it was open-ended and 'discovered' in the process of making rather than decided in advance and then arrived at, it would be permeable to the unconscious." (This idea was key to the thoughts behind the AbExs)
3. Content:
• "the forms of the Surrealists, charged as they were with a variety of only vaguely definable associations, provided an example of 'content' as opposed to the merely decorative or formal art of late Cubism. Since American artists were rebelling against the purely formal in their determination to make a universally meaningful statement that would not only decorate but inform--if not ideally uplift--they felt they had a lot to learn from the Surrealists." (Rose, 70)
• Salvador Dali--had almost predicted manner that AbEx's would "present their ambiguous forms, with their loosely defined, perhaps even subliminal, multivalent associations." (Rose, 71)
4. Unconsious:
• "As it had been for the Surrealists, the Unconscious became the field of most fertile
exploration in terms of imagery for many of the Abstract Expressionists such as Gorky,
Pollock, Motherwell, Baziotes, and the early Rothko and Gottlieb." (Rose, 70)
• Troy's notes: While influenced by Freud, they viewed neurosis, not as an illness as Freud did, but as something to be explored and preserved. The unconscious and the irrational contained for the Surrealists the areas of human experience most closely aligned to the truth-dreams seemed to be a more direct access to that truth and were therefore explored regularly.
• Freuds stress on sexual component of unconscious--influence on Motherwell and Gorky
• Jung's theory of'collective archetypes'--influence on Pollock; Jungian analysis: had an
emphasis on "mythic symbolism and automatism to free the unconscious" (Am. Art Since
1945, p. 13)
• Pollock started going to a Jungian analyst around early 1940s and thereafter did many
drawings as part of his therapy (Rose, 70) he "was involved in excavating the buried content of the unconscious that linked modem man to his most ancient ancestors"
• Pollock: "What [Pollock] really took from Surrealism was an idea--automatism--rather than a manner." (quoted from Rubins, p. 177; taken from Richard Hamilton. "Duchamp," Art International (Zurich), January 1964, pp.22-28)
• Pollock, as a means of liberation, had begun to "drip liquid paint and draw with a stick rather than a brush. Spilling and dripping "was hardly a novel idea, but Pollock was the first to use it consistently in order to facilitate extended spontaneous drawing." (Rubins, 178)
Examples at the DMA:
1. Gorky:
2. Miro:
3. de Chirico: Horsemen Fighting, Rome, 1948 (litho) (early assoc. with Surrealists)
4. Breton: Untitled (Chromolitho, threads, sequins, and ink)
5. Magritte: The Light ofCoincidence, 1933
6. Magritte: Persian Letters, 1958
7. Tanguy: Untitled, 1942 (etching)
An art style of the early 20th century that focused on fantasy, dream-world imagery, and the irrational juxtaposition of images, words, and things. Surrealists wanted to liberate the riches of the subconscious mind from the "prison" of the rational mind. This occasionally included relying on imagery arrived at by the process of automatism.
Educaiton file, style esssay:
Surrealism
Jean (Hans) Arp, Victor Brauner, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Julio Gonzales, Arshile Gorky, Frida Kahlo, Rene Magritte, Andre Masson, Matta, Joan Miro, HenryMoore, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray I Yves Tanguy,
Active in Europe, Latin-America, and the United States, 1925-1945
The French poet Andre Breton wrote the "Manifest of Surrealism" (1924), which is Surrealism's birth certificate. Breton defined it as "pure psychic automatism by which is intended to express... the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations ... Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream." Breton ran the Surrealist with legendary high-handedness, "anointing" so called official Surrealist artists and writers and "excommunicating" those who rebelled.
Influenced by the hallucinatory writings of the nineteenth-century poets Comte de Lauireamont and Arthur Rimbaud, surrealism began as a trend in literature not in the visual arts. It brought together rebellious experiments with irrationality and absurdity and added to them a heavy dose of Psychoanalytic thinking which helped popularize the Freudian fascination with sex, dreams, and the unconscious. In terms of visual art, Surrealism's nineteenth- century forebear was Symbolism, and its immediate antecedent was Dada. Breton was an active participant in Dada circles in Paris during the early 1920s and the two movements were linked by the artists Jean Arp and Max Ernst.
The Dada contributions to surrealism included experimentation with chance and the accidental as well as keen interest in found objects, biomorphism, and automatism (free association captured in drawing or writing). The surrealist developed a variety of games and techniques involving chance and automatic effects. Decalomania was a method by which watercolor paints were pressed between two sheets of paper. Frottage was the childs technique of putting a piece of paper over a textured surface and rubbing it with a pencil. Coulage was a way of making paintings by pouring rather than brushing paint onto canvas. "Exquisite Corpse" was a parlor game modified so that a player would make a drawing, fold the paper to conceal it, and pass it on to the next player for his or her contribution. Each of these techniques yielded startling results, which Ernst and others avidly incorporated into their work.
The first group of Surrealist artists rendered their paintings in a precisely delineated, naturalistic style that some have some have termed Fantastic Art. A variant of this approach suggested by Magritte's disquieting depictions of everyday objects is sometimes known as Magic Realism, but the distinction is neither easy-nor desirable-to maintain. The second Surrealist style was the automatism favored by Masson and
Miro.
Anne Bromberg, "Development of Abstraction," Docent notes, Education files, 1987.
Both the Dadaists and Surrealists sought to restore to art a basis in the individual psyche and to reintroduce its poetic elements. They rejected traditional art, pre-World War I Utopian thought, idealistic abstraction, and formalized Cubism. They wanted to open art to the hidden feelings of man: irrationality, dream, the subconscious and chance, which would bring people in contact with a deeper reality than previously acknowledged. This general rejection of past art also led to an openness to all materials and means of expression. In attempting to widen man's awareness of the true functioning of the mind, and to go beyond rational thought, they had to sharply attack the existing conceptions of reality and art.
In the First Surrealist Manifesto, published in 1924, Andre Breton, the movement's self-declared high priest and arbiter, defined Surrealism as an international, interdisciplinary movement involving "pure psychic automatism." Automatism, indicating the dominance of the unconscious over rational or aesthetic decisions, became a basic issue for certain Surrealist painters. Another important inspiration for the Surrealists were Freud's theories of dreams and the subconscious.
The two branches of Surrealism are the abstract, including Miro, Masson, Matta and Arp; and the illusionistic or figurative, whose principal exponents were Dali, Magritte and Tanguy. The abstract Surrealists often used biomorphic imagery--that evoking plant or organic forms--combined by chance or automatism with the conscious aesthetic elements of space, form, line and texture. The illusionistic Surrealists created visions which approached but somehow contradicted reality, as in the famous melting pocket watches in Dali's The Persistence of Memory. The illusionistic Surrealists were interested purely in the evocative power of the image and did not share the abstract Surrealists' interest in the aesthetic problems of abstract form.
In trying to open their art to all parts of the mind, the Surrealists did not in fact accept all facets of the inner life, but often preferred to dwell upon its negative aspects--such as the grotesque, sexually disturbing, morbid or bizarre. Max Ernst here is a typical artist. Surrealism was to have many descendants in later 20th century art.
ASSOCIATED CONTENT CHUNKS
AUDIO ASSETS
VIDEO ASSETS
IMAGE ASSETS
WEB RESOURCES
- MoMA Learning~Explore different aspects of Surrealism through artists and works.
- Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History~Learn more about the origins of surrealism and its evolution with visual arts.
- MoMA~View several examples of decalcomania.
- The Art Institute of Chicago Art Access~This activity uses a word game to practice one of the creative methods of Surrealist artists and look closely at works of art.
- MOMA Learning~See an example of a collaborative "Exquisite Corpse" drawing.
- Tate~Learn about Salvador Dalí, the famous surrealist painter, and his work with film.
- YouTube~See excerpts and a review of the experimental surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, from New York Times film critic A. O. Scott.
ARCHIVAL RESOURCES
FUN FACTS
TEACHING IDEAS
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apply to objects where public_notes contains surreal
apply to objects where constituent_id equals 1832
apply to objects where constituent_id equals 266
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General Description
Surrealism, an early-20th-century literary and artistic movement, aimed to liberate the emotions and desires of the subconscious from the rational mind and its socially-enforced norms and taboos. In order to break with the rational, surrealist poets and artists adopted fantastic, dream-like imagery, created surprising juxtapositions, and relied on chance. The French poet André Breton wrote the "Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1924, which defined the movement as "pure psychic automatism by which is intended to express... the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations ... Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream."
Informed by the symbolist movement of the 19th century and the immediate antecedent of dada, surrealist artists adopted various techniques to incorporate chance and remove the limitations of the conscious mind. Decalcomania was a method by which watercolor paints were pressed between two sheets of paper. Frottage was the child's technique of putting a piece of paper over a textured surface and rubbing it with a pencil [see an example of frottage in crayon by Max Ernst: 1951.112.6]. Similarly, "Exquisite Corpse" was a parlor game modified so that a player would make a drawing, fold the paper to conceal it, and pass it on to the next player for his or her contribution. These techniques allowed artists to distance themselves from the traditional subjects and conventions of art, and thus to open themselves to the hidden thoughts of the subconscious. Meanwhile, some surrealists adopted a precisely delineated, naturalistic style in order to create visions which approached but somehow contradicted reality. René Magritte's convincing illusions are perhaps the best example of this [1981.9].
Surrealism has had a major impact on both the art world and popular visual culture. Its influences are evident in Pop art, Abstract Expressionism, and time-based media installations, and in contemporary film, music, and advertising.
Adapted from
- Anne Bromberg, "Development of Abstraction," DMA Unpublished material, 1987.
- "Seeing Contemporary Art," DMA Unpublished material, c. 1995.
- DMA Unpublished material, n.d.
Fun Facts
Archival Resources
Web Resources
- MoMA Learning~Explore different aspects of Surrealism through artists and works.
- Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History~Learn more about the origins of surrealism and its evolution with visual arts.
- MoMA~View several examples of decalcomania.
- The Art Institute of Chicago Art Access~This activity uses a word game to practice one of the creative methods of Surrealist artists and look closely at works of art.
- MOMA Learning~See an example of a collaborative "Exquisite Corpse" drawing.
- Tate~Learn about Salvador Dalí, the famous surrealist painter, and his work with film.
- YouTube~See excerpts and a review of the experimental surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, from New York Times film critic A. O. Scott.
Notes
ES- made revision to final sentence at the request of Queta Watson and Hayley Caldwell--because it contained grammatical errors. 7/9/2019
Activity:
The Surrealists were fascinated by the effects of accident. Some of these artists developed a game that utilized "chance" for creative interest.
Assign a section of a body to each of four players. Each of the players will draw his/her assigned body part.
a. The Head
b. From the Neck to the Waist
c. From the Waist to the Knees
d. From the Knees to the Ground
When the first person finishes, he/she folds the paper to conceal all but the bottom points of the drawing and passes it to the next person. That person makes his/her addition, conceals the work, and passes it on. When the drawing is finished, have the group choose a title.
Adapted From:
Ken Kelsey, Gail Davitt, Mary Ann Allday, Barbara Barrett, and Troy Smythe, Contemporary Art and Design at the Dallas Museum of Art, Teaching Packet, 1995, 5 and 32.
(Moved teaching idea out of general description, 11/16/18, CLC).
Further excerpts from general description notes:
Notes from education file- materials for Contemporary Extravaganza, 2000:
Surrealists:
According to Krasner, a negative effect ofthe Surrealists was.... :
Lee Krasner stated that "the decline of women artists" can be attributed "to the misogyny of the Surrealists," who were not present in the US during the 1930s. she said it was later, "during the 1940s and 1950s" that the Surrealists' "condescending attitude toward women began to rub off on the members of the New York School" (Archives of American Art, NY. Lee Krasner papers. Reel 3196)
Public exhibitions/magazines spreading Surrealist awareness and influence in US:
1931: Wadsworth Athenaeum at Hartford held first exclusively surrealist exhibition in America (all examples were Eur.)
1932: first examples of art by members of the official surrealist group shown at Julien Levy's
Madison Avenue gallery (works by Man Ray, Dali, Ernst, Tanguy and Chirico, among
others)
1936: MoMA NY: Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (a few Amer. included)
1942: Breton and Duchamp organized a large exhibition, "First Papers of Surrealism," in which "the principles of the movement--the expression ofhte unconscious through free association and spontaneous imagery--were demonstrated in techniques such as illusionism, automatism, dacalcomania, and rubbings." (American Art Since 1945: From the Collection of the MoMA, p. 8)
• 1942-47: Guggenheim's Art ofThis Century gallery. "Showcase for leading abstract and
Surrealist artists." (Am. Art Since 1945, p. 8)
• View and VVV: Magazines focused on Surrealist activity; Put out by David Hare with
Breton, Ernst, and later Duchamp as advisors. It "served as a forum for the exchange of
ideas between the European expatriates and avant-garde American writers and poets; along with major texts by Breton" (also published other Americans like Motherwell) (Rubins. Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, 160)
Content:
• Surrealists had turned to "three kinds of expression that had been around for a long time, but had not been taken seriously -- child art, the art of the mad, and "primitive" art..."(Robert Hughes. The Shock ofthe New. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. p. 227)
AbExs' attraction to the Surrealists: (These interests all overlap)
(When the Surrealists came to the US, they were showing at the same galleries as the Abstract Expressionists-Art ofThis Century, Sidney Janis-and therefore spreading ideas to these young American artists)
1. Liberation of form:
• interested in Surrealists "fascination with free, unbridled and uncensored art" (Hughes, ?227)
• Gorky, most directly inspired--was considered by the Surrealists to be one ofthem; had seen Kandinsky's expressionistic abstractions, Miro's spatial arrangements of biomorphic forms, Masson's automatic paintings and drawings, in which the brush or pen, theoretically uncontrolled by the intellect, exploits accidental imagery. (Legg, 8)
• Troy's notes: Andre Breton, one ofthe most influential leaders ofthe group worked as an intern at a psychiatric center treating shell-shocked victims during WWI. He viewed his work analyzing dreams there as a basis for later surrealism... interpretation, yes, always, but above all liberation from constraints--logic, morality, and the rest--with the aim of recovering their original powers of spirit.
2. Automatism:
• the AbEx's main interest in the Surrealists was the technique of "psychic automatism"
(Breton named it) and "the procedures of invoking an image by chance association and
random doodling" (Hughes, 260)
• (Hughes, p.260 cont.)..."If one's work remained hospitable to chance effects, drips,
unforeseen combinations, and unintended images, if it was open-ended and 'discovered' in the process of making rather than decided in advance and then arrived at, it would be permeable to the unconscious." (This idea was key to the thoughts behind the AbExs)
3. Content:
• "the forms of the Surrealists, charged as they were with a variety of only vaguely definable associations, provided an example of 'content' as opposed to the merely decorative or formal art of late Cubism. Since American artists were rebelling against the purely formal in their determination to make a universally meaningful statement that would not only decorate but inform--if not ideally uplift--they felt they had a lot to learn from the Surrealists." (Rose, 70)
• Salvador Dali--had almost predicted manner that AbEx's would "present their ambiguous forms, with their loosely defined, perhaps even subliminal, multivalent associations." (Rose, 71)
4. Unconsious:
• "As it had been for the Surrealists, the Unconscious became the field of most fertile
exploration in terms of imagery for many of the Abstract Expressionists such as Gorky,
Pollock, Motherwell, Baziotes, and the early Rothko and Gottlieb." (Rose, 70)
• Troy's notes: While influenced by Freud, they viewed neurosis, not as an illness as Freud did, but as something to be explored and preserved. The unconscious and the irrational contained for the Surrealists the areas of human experience most closely aligned to the truth-dreams seemed to be a more direct access to that truth and were therefore explored regularly.
• Freuds stress on sexual component of unconscious--influence on Motherwell and Gorky
• Jung's theory of'collective archetypes'--influence on Pollock; Jungian analysis: had an
emphasis on "mythic symbolism and automatism to free the unconscious" (Am. Art Since
1945, p. 13)
• Pollock started going to a Jungian analyst around early 1940s and thereafter did many
drawings as part of his therapy (Rose, 70) he "was involved in excavating the buried content of the unconscious that linked modem man to his most ancient ancestors"
• Pollock: "What [Pollock] really took from Surrealism was an idea--automatism--rather than a manner." (quoted from Rubins, p. 177; taken from Richard Hamilton. "Duchamp," Art International (Zurich), January 1964, pp.22-28)
• Pollock, as a means of liberation, had begun to "drip liquid paint and draw with a stick rather than a brush. Spilling and dripping "was hardly a novel idea, but Pollock was the first to use it consistently in order to facilitate extended spontaneous drawing." (Rubins, 178)
Examples at the DMA:
1. Gorky:
2. Miro:
3. de Chirico: Horsemen Fighting, Rome, 1948 (litho) (early assoc. with Surrealists)
4. Breton: Untitled (Chromolitho, threads, sequins, and ink)
5. Magritte: The Light ofCoincidence, 1933
6. Magritte: Persian Letters, 1958
7. Tanguy: Untitled, 1942 (etching)
An art style of the early 20th century that focused on fantasy, dream-world imagery, and the irrational juxtaposition of images, words, and things. Surrealists wanted to liberate the riches of the subconscious mind from the "prison" of the rational mind. This occasionally included relying on imagery arrived at by the process of automatism.
Educaiton file, style esssay:
Surrealism
Jean (Hans) Arp, Victor Brauner, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Julio Gonzales, Arshile Gorky, Frida Kahlo, Rene Magritte, Andre Masson, Matta, Joan Miro, HenryMoore, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray I Yves Tanguy,
Active in Europe, Latin-America, and the United States, 1925-1945
The French poet Andre Breton wrote the "Manifest of Surrealism" (1924), which is Surrealism's birth certificate. Breton defined it as "pure psychic automatism by which is intended to express... the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations ... Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream." Breton ran the Surrealist with legendary high-handedness, "anointing" so called official Surrealist artists and writers and "excommunicating" those who rebelled.
Influenced by the hallucinatory writings of the nineteenth-century poets Comte de Lauireamont and Arthur Rimbaud, surrealism began as a trend in literature not in the visual arts. It brought together rebellious experiments with irrationality and absurdity and added to them a heavy dose of Psychoanalytic thinking which helped popularize the Freudian fascination with sex, dreams, and the unconscious. In terms of visual art, Surrealism's nineteenth- century forebear was Symbolism, and its immediate antecedent was Dada. Breton was an active participant in Dada circles in Paris during the early 1920s and the two movements were linked by the artists Jean Arp and Max Ernst.
The Dada contributions to surrealism included experimentation with chance and the accidental as well as keen interest in found objects, biomorphism, and automatism (free association captured in drawing or writing). The surrealist developed a variety of games and techniques involving chance and automatic effects. Decalomania was a method by which watercolor paints were pressed between two sheets of paper. Frottage was the childs technique of putting a piece of paper over a textured surface and rubbing it with a pencil. Coulage was a way of making paintings by pouring rather than brushing paint onto canvas. "Exquisite Corpse" was a parlor game modified so that a player would make a drawing, fold the paper to conceal it, and pass it on to the next player for his or her contribution. Each of these techniques yielded startling results, which Ernst and others avidly incorporated into their work.
The first group of Surrealist artists rendered their paintings in a precisely delineated, naturalistic style that some have some have termed Fantastic Art. A variant of this approach suggested by Magritte's disquieting depictions of everyday objects is sometimes known as Magic Realism, but the distinction is neither easy-nor desirable-to maintain. The second Surrealist style was the automatism favored by Masson and
Miro.
Anne Bromberg, "Development of Abstraction," Docent notes, Education files, 1987.
Both the Dadaists and Surrealists sought to restore to art a basis in the individual psyche and to reintroduce its poetic elements. They rejected traditional art, pre-World War I Utopian thought, idealistic abstraction, and formalized Cubism. They wanted to open art to the hidden feelings of man: irrationality, dream, the subconscious and chance, which would bring people in contact with a deeper reality than previously acknowledged. This general rejection of past art also led to an openness to all materials and means of expression. In attempting to widen man's awareness of the true functioning of the mind, and to go beyond rational thought, they had to sharply attack the existing conceptions of reality and art.
In the First Surrealist Manifesto, published in 1924, Andre Breton, the movement's self-declared high priest and arbiter, defined Surrealism as an international, interdisciplinary movement involving "pure psychic automatism." Automatism, indicating the dominance of the unconscious over rational or aesthetic decisions, became a basic issue for certain Surrealist painters. Another important inspiration for the Surrealists were Freud's theories of dreams and the subconscious.
The two branches of Surrealism are the abstract, including Miro, Masson, Matta and Arp; and the illusionistic or figurative, whose principal exponents were Dali, Magritte and Tanguy. The abstract Surrealists often used biomorphic imagery--that evoking plant or organic forms--combined by chance or automatism with the conscious aesthetic elements of space, form, line and texture. The illusionistic Surrealists created visions which approached but somehow contradicted reality, as in the famous melting pocket watches in Dali's The Persistence of Memory. The illusionistic Surrealists were interested purely in the evocative power of the image and did not share the abstract Surrealists' interest in the aesthetic problems of abstract form.
In trying to open their art to all parts of the mind, the Surrealists did not in fact accept all facets of the inner life, but often preferred to dwell upon its negative aspects--such as the grotesque, sexually disturbing, morbid or bizarre. Max Ernst here is a typical artist. Surrealism was to have many descendants in later 20th century art.
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