Surrealism
Surrealism is an art movement that grew out of Dadaism, the works of Sigmund Freud and contemporary philosophy and politics after WWI.
Dadaism, and surrealism, were not exceptional in early twentieth century Europe. At the end of the nineteenth century the poet and playright Alfred Jarry had entertained the Parisian public with his “Pataphysical Science” which was an early form of Surrealism. He was an inspiration to many poets and intellectuals, especially Guillaume Apollinaire, the famous Italian born French poet. It was Apollinaire who first coined the term “surrealism” in 1917 in a programme for the ballet "Parade" and shortly after to describe one of his own plays, “The Breasts of Tiresias”.
Surrealism was developed by two groups. The first was led by Yvan Goll, a Franco-German poet, and was a direct development from Dadaism. Goll had been part of the Dada group in Zurich and was friends with Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp. The second was led by Andre Breton, a poet and novelist. Both groups produced manifestos of Surrealism in 1924. The groups merged and splintered fluidly after 1924.
Breton was born in Tinchebray in Normandy and studied medicine until the outbreak of World War I when he became a psychiatric medical orderly. During this work he met Jaques Vache, a writer who was influenced by Jarry's pataphysics.
"In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most" (Andre Breton. (1924) Les pas perdus. L'imaginaire Gallimard)
After the war he co-founded the Journal “Litterature” in 1919. In 1920 he co-authored, with Philippe Soupault, the article “The Magnetic Fields” which used the technique of automatic writing, or “psychic automatism" as Breton called it, to create literature. In psychic automatism the author allows the words to emerge spontaneously and Breton used the new language of Freudianism to suggest that it exposed the subconscious mind.
In 1924 Breton was instrumental in setting up the “Bureaux of Surrealist Research” which acted as a locus for recording dreams and furthering the surrealist project through the publication of the journal “La Revolution Surrealiste”. In 1924 Breton wrote the “Surrealist Manifesto” in which he defined Surrealism:
SURREALISM, n. 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. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
He also described the technique of Surrealist writing:
“Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything. Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you're writing and be tempted to reread what you have written. The first sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling is the truth that with every passing second there is a sentence unknown to our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard. ....”
Psychic automatism was based on the Freud's psychoanalytic technique of “free association”. However, Breton was aware of the earlier, occult use of automatic writing. Breton understood the occult as being due to myths generated by the subconscious mind and regarded Lucifer as an inspiration to Poetry and Liberty. In his Manifesto he says:
“All that results from listening to oneself, from reading what one has written, is the suspension of the occult, that admirable help”
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| Surrealists 1933: Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, André Breton, Hans Arp, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, René Crevel and Man Ray |
Max Ernst (1891-1976)
Max Ernst was born in Cologne and studied the unlikely combination of philosophy, art history, literature, psychology and psychiatry at the University of Bonn.
Ernst fought in the First World War and married Luise Straus, a History of Art student, in 1918. They had a son in 1920. Ernst deserted his family, moving to France in 1922 as part of a menage a trois with the art dealer Paul Eluard and his wife Gala.
The extension of surrealism from written automatism to artistic automatism was probably the result of the discovery by the Surrealists of a nineteenth century novel called “Les Chants de Maldoror” (The Songs of Maldoror, 1869), written by Comte de Lautréamont, the pseudonym of the Uruguayan-born French writer Isidore-Lucien Ducasse. This novel describes a man who is determined to be evil and has a certain, gothic fascination, however, more importantly it juxtaposes objects in a thoroughly unexpected manner. The pink face of a child is described in relation to a razor, dogs are mixed with elephants, glow worms with women etc.
Ernst described Lautreamont's “chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” as a classic example of surrealism. Ernst said that it was clear that the more arbitrary the elements that were brought together the more dramatic and poetic the results.
One of his first surrealist paintings was Family Excursions in 1919:
By 1922 Ernst was creating full blown surrealist work:
Ernst’s inscription on the back of the "Men Shall Know Nothing of This" reads: ‘The picture is curious because of its symmetry. The two sexes balance one another.’ Although it looks more like something that dared not speak its name.
Leonora Carrington (1917-2011)
Chorley born Leonora was inspired by the Surrealist movement. She met Max Ernst in London in 1937 and began an affair with him. Ernst left his wife and they moved to the South of France to live together. Ernst was arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 and escaped to America. Leonora fled to Spain where she had a nervous breakdown. She ended up in Mexico where she became an acclaimed artist and Mexican ciizen.
Francis Picabia 1879-1953
We have come across Picabia before, in our study of Dadaism. He was one of the leading Dada artists and was an important connection between New York and Zurich Dada. Picabia changed his style to a more surreal style in the 1920s.
In the mid 1920s Picabia created a series of “Match Women” in collage and oils that combine sky, objects and the female form.
Georgio de Chirico (1888-1978)
Georgio de Chirico was born in Greece to Italian parents and at the age of 18 went to Munich to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. De Chirico founded the “Metaphysical School” of painting shortly before WWI and his work during this metaphysical period (1909-1919 had a profound influence on the Surrealist movement.
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol (1904-1989) - Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali was a Spanish artist from Figueres in Catalonia. His father was a lawyer and his mother encouraged his artistic talents. He studied art in Madrid at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. In Madrid he became friends with Luis Bunuel, who became a famous film director and Federico Garcia Lorca, who became a famous poet.
He visited Paris in 1926 and in 1929 joined Breton's surrealist group. He also met his future muse and wife, Gala Eluard in 1929. They began living together almost immediately and married in 1934.
Perhaps his most famous Surrealist painting is The Persistence of Memory which he painted in 1931 and which contains the Surreal juxtaposition of ants, clocks, eyelashes in a landscape. Most strikingly it portrays the clocks as having a flexible, almost liquid form.
By the 1950s Dali was using dream-like imagery rather than a strictly Surrealist composition. The Temptation of St Anthony is a transition between the styles..
It is interesting that, as Mark Ruffner points out ( http://allthingsruffnerian.blogspot.co.uk/p/art-history-is-not-linear.html ), many styles and artworks are echoes of what has gone before:
The sixteenth century Garden of Lust has similarities with Dali's 1929 “The Great Masturbator”
Rene Magritte 1898-1967
Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium. His father was a textile merchant and his mother had been a milliner. His mother encouraged his art and he began drawing lessons at the age of 12. His mother had suicidal tendencies and was locked in her room by her husband. When Magritte was 13 his mother succeeded in drowning herself. From 1916 o the end of WWI he studied at Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. His early work was impressionist and he worked as a draughtsman at a wallpaper factory (1922-23) and as a poster and advertisement designer from 1923-26. His first exhibition was in Brussels in 1927 and this was a critical failure. He moved to Paris in 1927 and met Andre Breton. In 1930 he returned to Brussels and founded an advertising agency with his brother.
Magritte was sponsored by the wealthy, British, bisexual patron of the arts, Edward James and stayed with him to paint in his London home.
Magritte lived in Brussels during the German occupation and after the war made a living out of forging famous paintings and banknotes.
The Treachery of Images is his first important surrealist work. Obviously the picture is not a pipe.
Paintings of paintings, such as The Human Condition, are a fairly common theme in Magritte's art.
Magritte said of The Son of Man: “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. “
Joan Miró i Ferrà (1893-1883)
Joan Miro was a Catalan artist who was born in Barcelona. He joined the Surrealist Group in 1924., his paintings are some of the most abstract of surrealist works.
Yves Tanguy (1900-1955)
Tanguy was a French painter whose parents came from Brittany. His father was a navy captain who died when Yves was 8 years old. Between 1918 and 1922 he worked in the merchant navy and served in the army. He was profoundly influenced by De Chirico and joined the Surrealist group in 1925. Tanguy was particularly impressed by the idea of automatism and much of his work is amongst the purest examples of this technique.
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