Background
The horrors of the First World War shattered Western faith in reason and progress. Dada, born in wartime Zurich, mocked and tore down established art and logic, and the poet André Breton, part of the Paris Dada group, sought a new creative principle beyond destruction. In his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism he defined surrealism as "psychic automatism in its pure state," the "dictation of thought in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern."
Intellectual basis: Freud and dreams
Breton, who encountered psychoanalysis while studying medicine, was deeply influenced by Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Dreams and the unconscious reveal repressed desires, and Breton believed that the seemingly contradictory states of dream and reality could be resolved into an absolute reality, a "surreality." Surrealism presented itself as a revolutionary movement aiming to change life and society, not just art, and for a time allied with the Communist Party.
Key techniques
- Automatism: writing or drawing rapidly without censoring thought. Breton and Soupault's Les Champs magnétiques (1920) was its literary starting point.
- Frottage and decalcomania: Max Ernst rubbed paper over wood grain (frottage) or pressed and lifted paint (decalcomania), drawing images out of chance forms.
- Dépaysement: removing objects from their usual context and placing them in incongruous settings to create strangeness and shock, summed up by Lautréamont's "chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella."
- Paranoiac-critical method: Salvador Dalí's technique of deliberately creating double images in which one form can be read as several.
Key artists and works
- Salvador Dalí: The Persistence of Memory (1931), with its melting watches, depicted dream time with photographic realism.
- René Magritte: The Treachery of Images (1929) wrote "This is not a pipe" beneath a painted pipe, questioning the relation of image, language and reality.
- Joan Miró and André Masson: near-automatic abstract forms expressing the unconscious.
- Giorgio de Chirico: his "metaphysical painting" of empty squares and long shadows made him a forerunner of the movement.
Influence and assessment
When many surrealists fled to the United States during the Second World War, automatism influenced Abstract Expressionism, and surrealist imagery spread into advertising, film, photography and fashion. Like Impressionism it broke with faithful representation, but it took the inner unconscious rather than visual impressions as its subject. Breton's dogmatic expulsions of members, the treatment of women mainly as muses, and heavy reliance on psychoanalysis have drawn criticism.
See also: Postmodernism
References
- Breton, A. (1924). Manifeste du surréalisme. Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire (Simon Kra).
- Nadeau, M. (1965). The History of Surrealism (R. Howard, Trans.). New York: Macmillan. (Original work published 1964)
- Freud, S. (1900). Die Traumdeutung. Leipzig und Wien: Franz Deuticke.