Surrealism

I am currently studying art history as well as cinema, and since our class readings only skimmed the surface of Surrealism in art, I thought that I would take this opportunity to delve a little deeper into a subject that I really enjoy.

The aggressive momentum of the Dada movement that emerged during WWI was very short lived. In 1924 The First Surrealist Manifesto was published in France; a text that was written in an absurdist style, and which showed different examples of Surrealism through art, poetry, and literature. Most of the artists who were previously associated with Dada joined the Surrealism movement and explored ways to express the world of dreams and the unconscious through art. Not surprisingly, the Surrealists found ways to incorporate many of the Dadaist’s improvisational techniques. They believed that these methods were imperative to engage the elements of fantasy and to activate the unconscious forces that reside deep within every human being. The Surrealist’s main desire was to explore the inner world of the psyche, where fantasy thrived. The Surrealists had a special interest in the nature of dreams, inspired in part by the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. They viewed dreams as providing the arena in which people could move beyond their environment’s constricting forces to reunite with the deeper selves that society had long suppressed. One of the leading Surrealist thinkers, Andre Breton, wrote “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought…. I believe in the future resolution of the states of dream and reality, in appearance so contradictory, in a sort of absolute realty, or surreality.” So basically the Surrealists ultimate motivation was to unite the aspects of outer and inner “reality” together into a single position.

   

  The projection in visible form of this new conception also required new techniques of pictorial construction. The Surrealists adapted some Dada devices and invented new methods such as automatic writing (this was just spontaneous writing using free association) not to reveal a world without meaning, but more to provoke reactions of a subconscious experience. At this point Surrealism began to develop along two different lines. In Naturalistic Surrealism, artists present recognizable scenes that seem to have metamorphosed into a dream or nightmare image. Artists like Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte are examples of artists who embraced the naturalistic style. Other artists gravitated to the contrasting style of Biomorphic Surrealism. Biomorphic art is said to be the creation of art without conscious control. It focuses on the power of natural life and uses organic shapes, with shapeless and vaguely spherical hints of the forms of biology.

 There are a few really unique artists who are associated with Surrealist movement that our “Surrealism folder” did not highlight. One of these is a Swiss artist named Meret Oppenheim. Sculpture especially appealed Oppenheim because of its concrete tangibility, which in turn made his art all the more disquieting. Oppenheimer’s functional fur-covered teapot captures the Surrealist flair for transformation.

Giorgio De Chirico was an Italian painter who referred to his works as “metaphysical”. Chirico found hidden reality in the late autumn afternoons, when the long shadows of setting sun transformed open town squares into spaces where the buildings evoked a disquieting sense of foreboding.

Joan Miro was Spanish artist who was most famous for using the Biomorphic style of Surrealist art. Although Miro resisted association with both the Dada and Surrealist movements, Andre Breton called him “the most surrealist of all”. Miro devised a new painting method where he began by making a scattered collage composition with assembled fragments cut from a catalogue and freely reshaped to create black silhouettes with dramatic accents of white and vermillion.