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 Tzaras ideas
The Surrealist movement gained momentum
after the Dada
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 elites 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 mans 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
childrens 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
Ren 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.