What Is Surrealism? | Artsy

During the 1936 International Surrealist Exposition, held in London, guest speaker Salvador Dal addressed his audience costumed head-to-toe in an old-fashioned scuba suit, with two dogs on leashes in one hand and a billiard cue in the other. Mid-lecture, constrained by the scuba mask, the Spanish artist began to suffocate and flailed his arms for help. The audience, unfazed, assumed his gesticulations were all part of the performance. As art legend has it, the Surrealist poet David Gascoyne eventually rescued Dal, who upon recovery remarked, I just wanted to show that I was plunging deeply into the human mind. Dal then finished his speechand his accompanying slides, to no ones surprise, were all presented upside down.

This anecdote underscores the most absurdist, even clownish, elements of the Surrealist movement, epitomized by Dalwho was considered something of a joke figure by the early 20th-century art establishment. But the art movement was actually far more diverse than is widely known, spanning various disciplines, styles, and geographies from 1924 until its end in 1966.

Founded by the poet Andr Breton in Paris in 1924, Surrealism was an artistic and literary movement. It proposed that the Enlightenmentthe influential 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement that championed reason and individualismhad suppressed the superior qualities of the irrational, unconscious mind. Surrealisms goal was to liberate thought, language, and human experience from the oppressive boundaries of rationalism.

Breton had studied medicine and psychiatry and was well-versed in the psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud. He was particularly interested in the idea that the unconscious mindwhich produced dreamswas the source of artistic creativity. A devoted Marxist, Breton also intended Surrealism to be a revolutionary movement capable of unleashing the minds of the masses from the rational order of society. But how could they achieve this liberation of the human mind?

Automatism, a practice that is akin to free association or a stream of consciousness, gave the Surrealists the means to produce unconscious artwork.Surrealist artistAndr Massons mixed-media canvasBattle of Fishes(1926) is an early example of automatic painting. To begin, Masson took gessoa tacky substance typically used to prime supports for paintingand let it freely fall across the surface of his canvas. He then threw sand over it, letting the grains stick to the adhesive at random, and doodled and painted around the resulting forms. Artists employing automatic methods embraced the element of chance, often to surprising results. Massons end product features two prehistoric fish, jaws dripping with blood, fighting it out in the primordial ooze: an unconscious demonstration of the inherent violence of nature.

Not every Surrealist chose to create such abstract works, however. Many Surrealists recognized that the representation of a things actual appearance in the physical world might more effectively conjure associations for the viewer wherein a deeper, unconscious reality revealed itself. Artists like Dal and the Belgian painterRen Magrittecreated hyper-realistic, dreamlike visions that are windows into a strange world beyond waking life. MagrittesLa Clairvoyance(1936), for instance, in which an artist paints a bird in flight while he looks at an egg sitting atop a table, suggests a dreamscape or a hallucinatory state.

Though Surrealism is indeed most associated with such flamboyant and irreverent figures as Dal, Breton recruited a wide group of artists and intellectuals already active in Paris to write for and exhibit under his banner.

Building on the anti-rational tradition ofDada, Surrealism counted among its members such major Dada figures asTristan Tzara,Francis Picabia,Jean Arp,Max Ernst, andMarcel Duchamp. By 1924, this group was augmented by other artists and literary figures, including the writers Paul luard, Robert Desnos, Georges Bataille, and Antonin Artaud; the paintersJoan MirandYves Tanguy; the sculptorsAlberto GiacomettiandMeret Oppenheim; and the filmmakers Ren Clair,Jean Cocteau, and Luis Buuel.

But Breton was notoriously fickle about who he admitted to the movement, and he had a habit of excommunicating members who he felt no longer shared his particular view of Surrealism. Desnos and Masson, for example, were tossed out of the group via Bretons Second Manifesto of Surrealism in 1930 for their unwillingness to support his political aims. Bataille, whose Surrealist viewpoint differed considerably from Bretons, went on to form his own influential splinter group, the College of Sociology, which published journals and held exhibitions throughout the 1930s.

As an interwar movement beginning in Paris in the 1920s, Surrealism responded to a post-World War I period that saw the slow reconstruction of major French cities, the height of the French colonial empire abroad, and the rise of fascism across Europe.

By 1937, however, most of the major figures in Surrealism had been forced to leave Europe to escape Nazi persecution. Max ErnstsEurope After the RainII(194042) reflects this fraught moment with a post-apocalyptic vision created at the height of World War II. A partially abstract work formed by decalcomaniaa technique that entailed painting on glass, then pressing that painted glass to the canvas to allow chance elements to remainEurope After the Rainsuggests bombed-out buildings, the corpses of humans and animals, and eroded geological formations in the aftermath of a great cataclysm.

The emigration of Surrealists to various sites of refuge during World War II did, however, spread the movements influence across the Atlantic, where it would take firm root in the Americas. As Surrealism gained traction in the 1930s and 40s, it brought automatic practices and an interest in psychology and mythology to a new generation of artists.Jackson Pollocks Surrealist-inspiredGuardians of the Secret(1943) exists somewhere between his earlierSocial Realistworks and the later drip paintings that would make him famous: it includes a recumbent jackal, two totemic forms, and a frieze of calligraphic pseudo-script.

In Latin America, Surrealism found its voice in the work of artists likeFrida Kahlo, whose highly personal artistic style paralleled aspects of Surrealism without owing it any specific intellectual debt. InArbol de la Esperanza(1946), which translates to tree of hope, Kahlo doesnt depict an actual tree, but rather a dual self-portrait set in an unfamiliar landscape, a tableau that suggests both the 1925 bus accident that rendered her infertile, and the possibility of renewal. While its depiction of fantastic subject matter is reminiscent of works byMagritte or Dal, Kahlos painting celebrates the everyday artistry of traditional Mexicanex votopainting.

The psychological and mythological underpinnings of Surrealism also enabled non-European artistslikeWifredo Lam, a painter of Afro-Cuban and Chinese descent who studied in Madrid and Paris in the 1920s and 30sto delve into the native traditions of their own countries. LamsLes Noces(1947) intricately weaves the Cubist-Surrealist forms of artists likePablo Picassoand Joan Mir into a representation of the Afro-Cuban ritual Santera.

Surrealism represents a crucible of avant-garde ideas and techniques that contemporary artists are still using today, including the introduction of chance elements into works of art. These methods opened up a new mode of painterly practice pursued by theAbstract Expressionists. The element of chance has also proven integral to performance art, as in the unscriptedHappeningsof the 1950s, and even to computer art based on randomization. The Surrealist focus on dreams, psychoanalysis, and fantastic imagery has provided fodder fora number of artists working today, such asGlenn Brown, who has also directly appropriated Dals art in his own painting.

Surrealisms desire to break free of reason led it to question the most basic foundation of artistic production: the idea that art is the product of a single artists creative imagination. As an antidote to this, Breton promoted the cadavre exquis, or exquisite corpse, as a technique for collectively creating art, one that is still played as a game widely today. It involves starting a sentence, sketch, or collage, and then giving it to another person to continuewithout letting that person see what has already been written, drawn, or placed. The term derived from a simple game of creating collective prose that resulted in the sentence, The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.

Given the methods embrace of chance and tendency to produce humorous, absurd, or unsettling images, it soon became a viable technique for creating exactly the type of unconscious, collective work that the Surrealists sought. Exquisite Corpse 27 (ca. 2011), a work completed by Ghada Amer, Will Cotton, and Carry Leibowitz, is a contemporary example of the sort of stylistically and thematically disconnected work that can arise from this Surrealist method.

The historian and music critic Greil Marcus has gone so far as to characterize Surrealism as one chapter in a series of revolutionary attempts to liberate thought that stretches from the blasphemies of medieval heretics up to the 1960s and beyond. In this light, Surrealism can be understood as the progenitor of the later, Marx-inspired art movement Situationism, 1960s countercultural protests, and even punk: a project of breaking down the rational order that society imposes on individuals.

Header image: Salvador Dal, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Salvador Dal, Fundaci Gala-Salvador Dal, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2016. Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

Photographs of Joan Mir and Max Ernst via Wikimedia Commons.

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What Is Surrealism? | Artsy