Surrealism

Surrealism

Surrealist art and literature that flourished between the world wars I and II was an artists attempted to portray, express or interpret the workings of the subconsious mind: in painting it found expression in two techniques, the naturalistic (Dali) and the abstract( Miro).

Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. Andre Breton , a trained psychiatrist, along with French poets Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, and Philippe Soupault, were influenced by the psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud and the political ideas of Karl Marx .Freud's work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness.

Andre Breton officially founded the surrealism movement in 1924 when he wrote Le Manifeste du Surrealisme(The Surrealist Manifesto). In it, he defined Surrealism as "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."

That same year the 'Bureau of Surrealist Research' was established and began publishing the journal La Révolution surréaliste.. The Bureau of Surrealist Research (Centrale Surréaliste) was the center for Surrealist writers and artists to meet, hold discussions, and conduct interviews.

The movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games, discussed the theories of Surrealism, and developed a variety of techniques such as automatic drawing. Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage and decalcomania.

Andre Masson's automatic drawings of 1923, are often used as the point of the acceptance of visual arts and the break from Dada, since they reflect the influence of the idea of the unconscious mind.

In 1924, Joan Miro and Andre Masson applied Surrealism to painting. The first Surrealist exhibition, La Peinture Surrealiste, was held at Gallerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. It displayed works by Masson, Man Ray, Paul Klee, Miró, and others. The show confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts , and techniques from Dada, such as photomontage, were used. The following year, on March 26, 1926 Galerie Surréaliste opened with an exhibition by Man Ray. Breton published Surrealism and Painting in 1928 which summarized the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the 1960s

Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory. Salvador Dalí and Rene Magritte created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.The characteristics of this style,a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological,came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modern period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality".

The organized Surrealist movement in Europe dissolved with the onset of World War II. Breton, Dalí, Ernst, Masson, and others, left Europe for New York. The movement found renewal in the United States at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, Art of This Century, and the Julien Levy Gallery. In 1940, Breton organized the fourth International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City.,

However, following the war, the group's ideas were challenged by the rise of Existentialism. And in the arts, the Abstract Expressionists usurped their dominance by pioneering new techniques for representing the unconscious. Breton became increasingly interested in revolutionary political activism as the movement's primary goal. The result was the dispersal of the original movement into smaller factions of artists. The Bretonians, such as Roberto Matta, believed that art was inherently political. Others, like Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning, remained in America to separate from Breton. Salvador Dalí, retreated to Spain, believing in the centrality of the individual in art.

'Forest and Dove' , 1927 , 100 cm × 82 cm , oil on canvas.

Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism.

Constantly experimenting, in 1925 Ernst invented a graphic art technique called frottage , which uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images.With Joan Miro's help, Ernst pioneered the 'grattage' technique, in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. He uses this technique in his famous painting Forest and Dove.

Forest and Dove depicts a nocturnal scene of a forest of bizarre, abstract trees. In the thick of the forest is a childlike depiction of a dove.

Ernst developed a fascination with birds that was prevalent in his work. His alter ego in paintings, which he called Loplop, was a bird. He suggested that this alter-ego was an extension of himself stemming from an early confusion of birds and humans. He said that one night when he was young he woke up and found that his beloved bird had died, and a few minutes later his father announced that his sister was born.  

'Carnival of Harlequin' , 1925 , 66 x 93 cm ,Oil on canvas

Joan Miro (April 20, 1893 – December 25, 1983) was a Catalan Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.

Miro's work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike and because of his interest in automatism.Through the mid-1920s Miro developed the pictorial sign language which would be central throughout the rest of his career.Paintings where abstracted pictorial signs, rather than realistic representations with the use of flat shapes and lines (mostly black or strongly colored) to suggest the subject. In Harlequin's Carnival, there is a clear continuation of the line begun with The Tilled Field.

Joan Miro was among the first artists to develop automatic drawing as a way to undo established techniques in painting and with André Masson, represented the beginning of Surrealism as an art movement.

Miro chose not to become an official member of the Surrealists in order to be free to experiment with other artistic styles, ranging from automatic drawing and surrealism, expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, and Color Field painting.

Miró has been a significant influence on late 20th-century art, in particular the American abstract expressionist art

'The Treachery of Images' , 1929 , 63.5 cm × 93.98 cm , oil on canvas

Rene Magritte (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images that fell under the umbrella of surrealism. His work challenges observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality.

The painting The Treachery of Images depicts a pipe. Below it, Magritte painted, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe.", French for "This is not a pipe." ,which seems a contradiction. The painting is merely an image of a pipe. Hence, the description, "this is not a pipe."

Magritte's style of surrealism is more representational than the "automatic" style of artists such as Joan Miro.Magritte's use of ordinary objects in unfamiliar spaces is joined to his desire to create poetic imagery.

Rene Magritte described his paintings as "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."

'The Persistence of Memory' , 1931 , oil on canvas , 92 x 60 cm

Salvador Dali(May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989) was a prominent Spanish surrealist painter born in Figueres, in the Catalonia region of Spain.

'The Persistence of Memory' epitomizes Dalí's theory of "softness" and "hardness", which was central to his thinking at the time. As Dawn Ades wrote, "The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order".

Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work.He was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose behaviory, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork,

Salvador Dalí explained it as: "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad."

Bibliography 

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Krausse , A , 1995 , 'The story of painting :the renaissance to the present' , h.f.ulliman , Germany

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DVD and TV

'The Challenge : A tribute to Modern art' , 1977 , DVD , Quantum Leap , United States