Surealism.

Surrealism.

Andre Breton

This movement originated in France. The writer Andre Breton was its founder and chief spokesman. He published  the 'Manifeste du surrealism in 1924, and this was the official launching of this movement. It has been taking shape for few years  before this and the term 'surrealism' had been coined  in 1917 by Apollinaire.

Encouraged by many such experiments, Breton defined Surrealism:

SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations. (Flanagan, 1962, p.278)

The artists of the surrealism had a fascination with the bizarre, the incongruous, and the irrational. It was closely related to Dada, in fact Dada was the pediment of the Surrealism movement. Both movements were anti-rational and much concerned with creating disturbing and shocking effects. The element which makes these two movements different is  that Dada was essentially nihilist while Surrealism was positive in spirit.

The main idea of the Surrealism was to release the creative powers of the unconscious. Breton said,''To resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.'' (Chilvers, 2009, p.611)

Surrealism aimed to create art which was 'automatic', (Little, 2004, p.118) this means that it had emerged directly from the unconscious without being shaped by reason, morality or aesthetic judgements.

A lot of artists from this movement drew liberally on Freud's theories. Sigmund Freud (1900, 1905) emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind, and a primary assumption of Freudian theory is that the unconscious mind governs behaviour to a greater degree than people suspect. Indeed, the goal of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious.

These artists rejected most accepted truths and conventions considering them as uncreative. Surrealists considered Naturalism and Realism as fundamentally bourgeois, because for them these two artistic movements confused truth with objects and treated both life and art as though they were old furniture.

'attempting the impossible',
Magritte

Dalli and Magritte accompanied by other artists painted in a detailed style to give a hallucinatory sense of reality to scenes that make no rational sense. Magritte's art work, 'Attempting the impossible' attempts the standard task of the academies, the painting of a nude, but Magritte realized that what he does is not copying reality but rather creating a new reality, much as we do in our dreams.

 On the other hand Miro's painting contained bio-morphic shaped which could be amoeba, viruses, or thoughts 'glimpsed in the psyche's uncharted synaptic spaces.' (Little, 2004, p.118)

personage throwing a stone at a bird,
Miro

Paris remained the centre of surrealism until the second world war, than after a lot of European artists emigrated to the USA and this made New York the new hub of its activity. This movement made impacts in other places too and this made the movement widely disseminated and controversial art movement of the 1920s and 1930s. This movement moved fast partly because a series of major international exhibitions. Two of the most important exhibitions took place in 1936: ''The International Surrealist Exhibition'' at the New Burlington Galleries in London, and ''Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism'' at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Bibliography


Chilvers.I, 2009,Dictionary of art and artists,4th edition, New York:Oxford university Press.

Flanagan, G.A.,1962, Understand and Enjoy Modern Art,New York: Thomas Y.Crowell Company.

Gombrich, E.H.,2010, The Story of Art, 16th edition, London: Phaidon Press Limited.

Little,S.,2004, isms understanding art,London:Herbert Press.

Simply Psychology, 2013, Sigmund Freud, [online], Available at: < http://www.simplypsychology.ord/Sigmund-Freud.html >[Accessed 20 November 2014]