SURREALISM

Revision
 Origin
• It was an artistic movement that brought
together artists, thinkers and researchers
• They were involved in a hunt of sense of
expression of the unconscious
• They were searching for the definition of n
– New aesthetic
– New humankind
– New social order
 Origin
• Their forerunners were the Italian Metaphysical
painters
• It came into being after the French poet Andre
Breton 1 published Manifeste du Surrealisme
• Breton suggested that rational thought was
repressive to the powers of creativity and
imagination and thus inimical to artistic
expression
• Breton admired Freud and its concept of the
subconscious
 Beginnings
• It is closely related to some forms of
abstract art
• At the end of World War I Tristan Tzara,
leader of the Dada, wanted to attack
society through scandal
• He believed that society that creates the
monstrosity of war do not deserve art so he
decided to create an anti-art, full of
ugliness instead of beauty.
 Beginnings
• Tzara wanted to offend the new industrial
commercial world of the bourgeoisie.
• His victims did not feel insulted
• They saw this art as a reaction against old
art
• The result was the opposite to its original
one because anti-art became art.
 Beginnings
• One group of artists did not follow Tzara´s ideas
• The Surrealist movement gained momentum after
the Dadaá
• It was led by Breton
• The artists researched and studied the work of
Freud and Jung
• Some of the artists expressed themselves
– In the abstract tradition
– In the symbolic tradition
 Groups
• The two forms of expression formed two
distinct trends:
–Automatism
–Veristic
• There are two different interpretations of
Freud and Jung
 Automatists
• Artists interpreted it as referring to a suppression
of consciousness in favour of the subconscious
• They were more focused on feeling and less
analytical
• They understood Automatism as the automatic
way in which the images of the subconscious
reach the conscience.
• They believed that images should not be
burdened with meaning.
 Automatism
• They saw the academic discipline of art as
intolerant of the free expression of feeling
• They felt form which had dominated the
history of art, was a culprit in that
intolerance
• They believed abstractionism was the only
way to bring to life the images of the
subconscious.
 Automatism
• Coming from the Dada tradition, these
artist:
– Linked scandal
– Insult
– Irreverence toward the elite´s with freedom
• They continued to believe that lack of form
was a way to rebel against them.
 Veristic Surrealists
• They interpreted automatism to mean
allowing the images of the subconscious to
surface undisturbed so that their meaning
could be deciphered through analysis
• They wanted to faithfully represent these
images as a link between:
– The abstract spiritual realities
– The real forms of the material world.
 Veristic Surrealists
• To them the object stood as a metaphor for
an inner reality
• Through metaphor the concrete world
could be understood, not only by looking at
the objects, but also by looking into them.
 Veristic Surrealists
• They saw academic discipline and form as
the means to represent the images of the
subconscious with veracity
• The images would easily dissolve into the
unknown
• They hoped to find a way to follow the
images of the subconscious until the
conscience could understand their
meaning.
 Veristic Surrealists
• The language of the subconscious is the
image
• The consciousness had to learn to decode
that language so it could translate it into its
own language of words.
• Later they branched out into three other
groups.
 Struggle of Surrealism
• For the automatists the approach to the
mystery of nature is to never become
conscious of the mystery
• The Veristic Surrealist quest is none other
than the one described by Breton as the
cause of freedom and the transformation of
man´s consciousness
 Struggle of Surrealism
• In the works of surrealist we find
– The legacy of
• Bosch
• Brueguel
• William Blake
• The Symbolic painters of the 19th century
– The perennial questioning of philosophy
– The search of psychology
– The spirit of mysticism
 Struggle of Surrealism
• It is a work based on the desire to permit
the forces that created the world to
illuminate our vision
• They must allow us to consciously develop
our human potential.
 Struggle of Surrealism
• Veristic surrealist recognize the difficulties
that their movement has faced during the
second half of the twentieth century as it
attempted to become a major cultural force
• The United States wholeheartedly
embraced abstraction and modernism.
 Struggle of Surrealism
• They shared the belief of abstract artist that
– the chaos of action painting and automatism
were expression of freedom and
– that form, subjugation and inhibition walked
hand in hand
• The American art establishment looked at
the image of form with mistrust until the
advent of Pop Art.
 Struggle of Surrealism
• The Surrealism had to fight against:
– Pop-Art
– Photorealism
• Veristic Surrealism is the only historical
artistic expression still in want of
recognition as a cultural force in the
twentieth century
 Characteristics
• It was highly influenced by the
psychoanalysis:
– Images are as confusing and startling as those
of dreams
– Can have a realistic, though irrational style,
precisely describing dreamlike fantasies.
 Characteristics

• They were influenced by:

• Symbolism
• Metaphysical Painting of Giorgio
de Chirico
• Dadaism
 Characteristics
• Some of them have a more abstract style.
• In this case they invented spontaneous
techniques, modelled upon the
psychotherapeutic procedure of free
association as a means to eliminate
conscious control in order to express the
working of the unconscious mind, such as
exquisite corpse.
 Exquisite Corpse
• There were aleatoric techniques for
producing visual or literally art
• This activity was frequently considered as
a game.
• It is based upon an old parlour game in
which players take turns writing on a sheet
of paper folded it to conceal part of the
writing and them pass it to the next player
for another contribution.
 Exquisite Corpse
• This technique was used by artists to
produce drawings and collages.
• The first efforts are reminiscent of
children’s books that allow the making of
pictures with multiple ages divided at
various levels, involved assigning a section
of a body to each player
 Exquisite Corpse
• A majority resulted in images that only
vaguely resembled the human form.
• Some participants in early exquisite
corpses were Tanguy, Miro and Man Ray.
• Later adaptations have involved using
other means of passing the work around,
using different media.
 Artists
• Some of the better known representatives of this
movement are:
• Max Ernst
• Frida Kahlo
• Marc Chagall
• Joan Miro
• Man Ray
• Salvador Dali
• René Magritte
• Yves Tanguy
• Oscar Dominguez
 Techniques
• Surrealism has the same lack of prejudice
of Dadaism both in the use of photographic
procedures and object production out of
their normal use.
• Traditional techniques, because those can
be appropriate for depicting imaginations
 Max Ernst
• He reached to the deepest critic of the form
as a depiction and the style as something
unitary.
• He used any technique that would be
useful for transmitting his ideas. He used:
– Collage
– Frottage
• His work is frequently a pile of rubbish of
bourgeois culture.
 Joan Miro
• He used symbolic keys to depict the
unconscious.
• His principle is not the organic world.
• His world is simple, clear
• His mythology is easy, transparent.
• His painting is unstressed, freely chromatic,
without equilibrium among signs and
colours
 Hans Arp
• He was previously involved in the Dadaism.
• He depicted organic forms, both in painting
and sculpture.
• He used:
– Geometric shapes
– Orthogonal images
– Continuously curve forms, concave and
convex.
 Yves Tanguy

• He invented the anti-Nature:

– Never ending landscapes,
– Planet like settings
– Lack of light and sun
– Remains of an organic life:
• Bones
• Mummified fruits
• Fossils and shells
 Salvador Dali
• His view is full of sexual connotations.
• Highly rhetorical works.
• Mix of lubricous and holy
• He overcame cynically the bolshevism.
• Ambiguous mix of reaction and anarchy.
• Very complicated compositions.
 Rene Magritte
• He is the artist who worked in a deepest
way the lack of logic of the image.
• He invented the anti-history
• He discovered the non-sense of the
normal.
• He created with great detail and realism
images of ambiguous significance that
could have a double sense
 Expansion
• Other artist contributed to the expansion of
the Surrealism, equally in Europe and in
the United States.
• Soon it appeared as a way of eluding the
reality of the problems through:
– Ambiguity
– Paradox
 Expansion
• The movement gained prestige with the
adhesion of artists such as Picasso.
• The analytical cubism, discomposing the
objects did a similar work as that of the
Surrealism.
•