Surrealism

Surrealism was a movement in visual art and literature that flourished in Europe between World Wars I and II. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics previously and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Surrealists endeavoured to bypass social conventions and education to explore the subconscious through a number of techniques, including automatic drawing, a spontaneous uncensored recording of chaotic images that “erupt” into the consciousness of the artist; and exquisite corpse, whereby an artist draws a part of the human body (a head, for example), folds the paper, and passes it to the next artist, who adds the next part (a torso, perhaps), and so on, until a collective composition is complete.

Surrealism has no unified style, but, in painting, one can distinguish a range of possibilities falling between two extremes. At one pole, the viewer is confronted by a world that is completely defined and minutely depicted but that makes no rational sense: realistically painted images are removed from their normal contexts and reassembled within an ambiguous, paradoxical, or shocking framework. It is exemplified in the works of such artists as René Magritte and Salvador Dalí. At the other pole, variously called organic, emblematic, or absolute Surrealism, the viewer is confronted with abstract images, usually biomorphic, that are suggestive but indefinite. This approach is exemplified by artists such as Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró.

Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which, before World War I, produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason. Surrealism’s emphasis, however, was not on negation but on positive expression. It did not inherit Dada’s nihilistic, antirationalist critiques of society and its unrestrained attacks on formal artistic conventions. However, Surrealism did adopt Dada’s preoccupation with the bizarre, the irrational, and the fantastic as well as Dada artists’ reliance on accident and chance.

The major Surrealist painters were Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux, and Joan Miró. Frida Kahlo and Pablo Picasso are sometimes included on this list but they never officially joined the Surrealist group. Each artist sought his or her own means of self-exploration. In the poetry of André Breton, Paul Éluard, Pierre Reverdy, and others, Surrealism manifested itself in a juxtaposition of words that was startling because it was determined not by logical but by psychological—that is, unconscious—thought processes.

Poet Guillaume Apollinaire first used the term “surrealist” in 1917 to describe Jean Cocteau’s ballet Parade, and the word appeared in his own play Les Mamelles de Tirésias. André Breton, who later founded the Surrealist movement, adopted the term for the Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), and his definition is translated as “pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express…the real process of thought. It is the dictation of thought, free from any control by the reason and of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.” The word surreal became a part of everyday language in subsequent decades and entered the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1967. The dictionary defines it as “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream.”