Surrealism
Surrealism, often misinterpreted as an artistic movement, had its beginning in 1924, with the publication of André Breton's [First] Surrealist Manifesto. In the Manifesto Breton defines surrealism as "pure psychic automatism" ("automatism" is spontaneous creative production without (conscious) moral or aesthetic self-censorship). (By Breton's admission, however, as well as by the subsequent development of the movement, this was a definition capable of considerable expansion.) At first this automatism was only conceived in the realm or writing and language. (Breton and Philippe Soupault would write the first automatic book, Les Champs Magnetiques, in 1919. It was only later that automatic drawing was developed by Andre Masson, and automatic drawing and painting, as well as other automatistic methods, such as decalcomania, frottage, fumage, grattage and parsemage became significant parts of surrealist practice. It was a movement which transformed post-World War I visual art, writing, poetry and film. (Examples of surrealist film are Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or.)
Although surrealism is related to the earlier Dada movement, and many of its initial members came from Dada, it is significantly broader in scope than the Dada movement. While Dada was more nihilistic, surrealism is more positive in nature.
These artists, including Louis Aragon, Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Miro, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Giacometti, Valentine, Hugo, Oppenheim, Man Ray, Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, Raymond Queneau, made up the "in crowd" of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.
Often described as French, surrealism was in fact international from almost the earliest period (with a Czech group, for instance). Some of the most significant surrealist theorists and the most radical of surrealist methods have hailed from countries other than France (cubomania being invented by Romanian surrealist Gherasim Luca, for example).
Though surrealism is often identified in the popular mind, particularly in the United States of America, with the paintings of Salvador Dali, Dali was in fact expelled from the surrealist movement in the late 1930s for his far-right-wing tendencies, and in fact his painting after that time has little significance for surrealism and moved farther and farther away from it.
The movement successively drifted left, adherence to the Moscow communist party line became a requirement, and Breton (who would later denounce that same party line) purged those who disagreed with him as the movement gradually splintered and drifted apart, only to reunite in exile in New York in the early forties during World War Two.
Although it is often falsely stated that surrealism ended either during or shortly after the Second World War, or with the death of Breton in 1966, the 1960s in fact saw a dramatic expansion of international surrealism, including the founding of the Surrealist Movement in the United States by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont. For instance, in 1986 the Surrealist Group in Stockholm was founded.
Surrealism continues today around much of the world.
Must read:
- André Breton, "Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism" (Gallimard 1952) (Paragon House English rev. ed. 1993).
- "What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings of André Breton" (edited and with an Introduction by Franklin Rosemont).
External link:
- Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group
- GROUPE DE PARIS DU MOUVEMENT SURREALISTE
- The Surrealist Movement in the United States