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SOME OF THE SURREALIST ARTISTS:
Miro
Arp
Duchamp
Masson
Matta
deChirico
Magritte
Delvaux
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WHAT IS SURREALISM?
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Surrealism
- The Surrealists' aim was to use the arts as a counter to the ordered and restricted ways of civilization by opening up the super-reality of fantasy, dream and imagination which, they claimed, is man's true habitat.
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The Story of Modern Art
by Norbert Lynton (Phaidon) 1980
ISBN 0 7148 2421 6 (hardback)
!SBN 0 7148 2422 4 (paperback)
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Click on the names above to visit sites featuring these artists
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Surrealism - a definition from the Collins School Dictionary:
(adjective)
Surrealism
began in the 1920s. It involves the putting together of strange images and things that are not normally seen together.
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Surrealist
(adjective),
surrealistic
(adjective).
[From French
surréalisme
meaning 'beyond realism']
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HOW IT ALL BEGAN...
Surrealism,
like other movements in art history, was influenced by precursors such as DADA, and therefore inevitably by politics. Socialism, in the eyes of
Andre Breton
and other Surrealist members, seemed to offer an answer to the ills of early twentieth century Europe.
Breton was also influenced by the writings of
Carl Yung
and the research of
Freud
.
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Breton spent part of the First World War as an orderly at a front-line hospital, dealing with the victims of psychological and psychiatric injury.
He was amazed to hear the story of one soldier who had cut himself off from reality whilst facing the enemy in the trenches. He had heard how the soldier had stood upon the battlements inviting the enemy to shoot at him. The soldier refused to believe that the horrors of the war could be real. He refused to accept the reality of the blood and death and serious injuries that he witnessed around him each day. He chose to shut them out. Breton was fascinated with this possibility. The soldier had chosen to refute the reality of the 'normal' world for the 'safer' reality of his imagination.
Andre Breton (a poet, considered to be the leader of the movement) blamed the older generation for the troubles that haunted the world in the early part of the twentieth century (with good reason).
The First World War was horrific and Breton wanted to distance himself from it. He believed that a better world existed through dreams and imagination. Breton wanted to subvert society. The 'normal' behaviour of citizens failed to protect them from the horrors of the war. Breton felt it was time to shake civilization from the reality of life.
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Michael S. Bell
, a specialist in American Art, researched the surrealist phenomena while he was assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco fifteen years ago. He came to the conclusion that two very distinct trends of surrealism had developed. One could be qualified as
Automatism
, and the other as
Veristic
Surrealism.
http://www.bway.net/~monique/
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AUTOMATISM:
An attempt to remove the conscious controls of the brain from the process of painting and poetry.
VERISTIC:
A more representational, academic method of producing images images of the inner subjective, rather than the outer objective world.
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AUTOMATISM:
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VERISTIC:
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Perhaps this is the most illusive of the forms of Surrealism.
To be successful It is necessary to remove the process of producing art or poetry from the conscious mind.
Many methods were considered to achieve this - from drugs to systems of automatic writing and painting, but always the conscious mind found a way through to influence the work. For example - the choice of materials.
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Perhaps Salvador Dali is the best example of this style of Surrealism. Dali constructed strange dreamlike images by juxtaposing many unconnected objects in altered states.
...Veristic Surrealism got thrown out with pre-impressionistic academic art without much second thought, and is still in danger of that fate...
Michael S. Bell
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IRRATIONALITY
(the joys of
anti-rational speculation)
.
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How could they capture irrationality?
The conscious mind constantly intervened.
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In writing
- they played games of using random words - much in the same way as we can now play with sentences from a box of magnetic fridge poetry.
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True automatism is perhaps impossible to achieve. Even thinking about producing an automatistic image or poem introduces the element of thought at some stage in that process - thereby defeating the object.
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In Art
- perhaps the closest any artists came to automatism would be
Jackson Pollock
's drip painting.
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WHAT HAPPENED TO SURREALISM?
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Check out some 'Welsh' work influenced by Surrealism:
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Surrealism still exists in many forms.
Many artists all over the world still use some, if not all, of the principles, ideals, and techniques of Surrealism to produce an eclectic range of work, unified by the influence of the Surrealist movement.
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Ceri Richards
Keith Bayliss
William Brown
Tony Goble
Jon Ratigan
Jean Walcot
Nigel Williams
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Further Reading:
The History of Surrealism
By Maurice Nadeau, Richard Howard (Translator)
Reprint Edition, Paperback, Belknap Pr, 1989, ISBN:
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Manifestoes of Surrealism
By Andre Breton
Paperback, Univ of Michigan Pr, 1972, ISBN:
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Converstations: The Autobiography of Surrealism
By Andre Breton, Mark Polizzotti (Translator)
Reissue Edition, Paperback, Shooting Star Pr, 1995, ISBN:
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Dada & Surrealist Art & Their Inheritors: The Gabrielle Keiller Bequest
By Elizabeth Cowling
Paperback, Antique Collectors Club, 1997, ISBN:
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Dali and Postmodernism: This Is Not an Essence
By Marc J. Lafountain
Paperback, State Univ of New York Pr, 1994, ISBN:
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Max Ernst; Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism
By William Camfield
Paperback, Prestel, 1998, ISBN:
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Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement
By Whitney Chadwick
Reprint Edition, Paperback, Thames & Hudson, 1991, ISBN:
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Surrealism: The Dream of Revolution
By Richard Leslie
Hardcover, Smithmark Publishing, 1997, ISBN:
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Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute
By Anna Balakian
Reprint Edition, Paperback, University of Chicago Press, 1986, ISBN:
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Surrealist Poetry in English
By Edward B. Germain
Paperback, Penguin USA, 1993, ISBN:
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Acknowledgments:
http://www.bway.net/~monique/
is a site we can recommend for further reading and information and links to asociated sites of interest
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