Andre Breton &

Surrealism
The Son of Man & Attempting the Impossible, Rene Magritte
• Surrealism is an elision of “super” and
“realism”

• Guillaume Apollinaire, who Breton hailed

as “the last great poet,” was the first to
use the term

• Apollinaire created the word to describe a

new drama that did NOT attempt
verisimilitude and that was itself a new
artistic and literary “faith”
“When man wanted to imitate walking he
created the wheel, which does not
resemble a leg. In the same way he has
created Surrealism unconsciously.”

-- Guillaume Apollinaire
• The goal of the early French Surrealist
was to transform perception and
transcend conventional rational thought.

• Andre Breton, often considered the father

of Surrealism and the consummate
surrealist poet, is concerned not only with
the destruction of old conceptions about
human experience and conventional
representations of reality, but also with the
discovery of a "super-reality."
 Origins and Basic
Definitions
• At it’s most basic, Surrealism was
a literary, artistic, philosophical
and political movement
influenced by Freudianism and
dedicated to the expression of
imagination as revealed in
dreams, free of the conscious
control of reason and free of
convention
Seize Septembre & Black Magic, Rene Magritte
“My painting is visible images which
conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and,
indeed, when one sees one of my
pictures, one asks oneself this simple
question, 'What does that mean?'. It does
not mean anything, because mystery
means nothing either, it is unknowable.”

Rene Magritte
Song of Love, Giorgio di Chirico
• Surrealist writers are interested in
the associations and implications
of words rather than their literal
meanings

• Surrealism has—now—come to
refer to a style of expression in
which fantastic visual imagery
from the subconscious mind is
used with no intention of making
the work logically comprehensible.
“Seeking a synthesis of the dreams,
as revoked at dawn, and reality, as
it disappears at sunset, the
surrealists landed on the shifting
sands of the subconscious along
the shores of the sea of knowledge
where rests the concrete
manifestation of reality”
-- Andre Breton
Joan Miro, Carnival of Harlequin, 1924
from The First Surrealist
Manifesto:
• SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its
pure state, by which one proposes to
express --- verbally by means of the written
word, or in any other manner --- the actual
functioning of thought. Dictated by thought,
in the absence of any control exercised by
reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral
concern.
• ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy.
Surrealism is based on the belief in
the superior reality of certain forms of
previously neglected associations, in
the omnipotence of dream in the
disinterested play of thought. It tends
to ruin once and for all all other
psychic mechanisms and to substitute
itself for them in solving all the
principal problems of life.
Max Ernst, "The Robing of the Bride"
• Through radical juxtaposition of images, Breton intends
achieve a different understanding of human experience

• One important question is whether or not this “delivery”

to a new state of consciousness and understanding is
possible for the reader or only the artist/writer creating
the surreal work

• Breton displays numerous detailed and often

incongruous/unexpected/surprising images, stacked one
after another.

• His concern lies with how these images are juxtaposed

and contrasted, i.e. their interplay, with the intention of
creating a montage or collage of image after image that
has the effect of a psychological epiphany
• The disjointed, fractured and often
disturbing juxtapositions create a dream-
like, oneiric world that supposedly
enables the reader (perhaps?) finally and
ultimately to dwell in a thought process in
which perception of this super-reality is
made manifest
Galatea of the Spheres, Salvador Dali
“(Surrealist collage is) the chance encounter
of two distant realities on an unfamiliar
plane . . . or, in short, the cultivation of the
effects of a systematic displacement . . . a
function of our will to the complete
displacement of everything”

-- Max Ernst
• Surrealism intends to overturn logic and
reason by using images and details that
have no apparent rational or sensible
connection.

• Psychic automatism is a condition that

results from the use of juxtaposed images
and pure expression with an emphasis on
luminous detail.
• The emphasis on 'automatic writing'
whereby the interplay of images that
occurs for the reader (perhaps
subconsciously) is privileged over what is
already known or perceived.

• Breton suggest that surrealism is an

attempt to discover and uncover what
transpires in the depths of the minds of all
human beings.
• Surrealism, in a sense, is a device that allows
for psychic automatism, or a thinking and
sensibility that is free from the constraints of
logic and the modalities of culture.

• Breton contends that human experience and

our myriad perceptions of reality are in some
way problematic. He suggests that the
commonly held ideologies and sensibilities that
describe (and in many ways create) our world
are insufficient in representing our actual
existence and our relationship to objective
reality.
• Max Ernst
Fireside Angel
1937

Max Ernst, Fireside Angel,1937

• These inadequacies can be transformed
to the extent that the reader can at least
gain a more lucid and accurate
understanding of the human condition
and our relationship within the universe.

• Breton purports that a super-reality exists

above and beyond the limitations of
objective reality as revealed and
constructed by reason.
• Psychic automatism is akin to the “speech of
thought,” according to Breton

• Surrealist writing is escapist in the sense that it

“alleviates” the thinker from psychological rule
by convention and culture

• For Breton, “poetry emanates from the lives of

human beings”

• The “human attitude” behind the poetry is more

important than the actual work itself
“The only thing I would consider worth
doing is escaping, as much as possible,
from that human type we all share in. . . .
I still see poetry as the terrain on which
the terrible difficulties that consciousness
has with confidence, in a given individual,
have the best chance of being resolved.”

(Breton from The Disdainful Confession)

Salvador Dalí, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, 1936
• He further suggests that our apparently
familiar world is in fact what estranges
and alienates us most.

• Surrealist poetry is an attempt to create a

re-perception of human existence and
reality, in the present moment, which
allows for a more accurate, effectual,
direct, emotional, intense, realistic, and
generally more "human" cosmology.
Poetry is made in bed like love
Its unmade sheets are the dawn of things
The embrace of poetry like the ebrace of
the naked body
Protects while it lasts
Against all access by the misery of the
world
--Andre Breton (from Poemes)