We explain what surrealism is, how it originated and its impact on the different arts. Also, what are its characteristics and authors.
The surrealists wanted to overcome the limits of consciousness.
What is surrealism?
Surrealism was an important artistic and aesthetic movement that emerged in France During the first and second decades of the 20th century, as a consequence of the Dada movement and the enormous influence of the writer André Breton, considered its founder and greatest exponent.
Surrealism enjoyed wide popularity during later decades, both in Europe and America, and It manifested itself in literary, plastic and cinematographic forms.
Far from being stable and uniform, the surrealist movement He dedicated himself to the search for new artistic forms and the innovation of its languages, objects and perspectives.
This represented an enormous linguistic, pictorial and narrative revolution, breaking with the rules of what is understandable and predictable.
The artistic use of was common random, automatic methods (free from conscious planning) and the recording of the dream for later use as artistic inspiration.
See also: Avant-garde
Definition of surrealism
Surrealism sought to approach what Freud called the “unconscious.”
Surrealism was above all an aesthetic and philosophical movementwhich aspired to break the barriers of the conscious mind.
The objective was approach what Sigmund Freud called unconscious and considered the source of dreams.
Therefore it could also be the source of all the arts.
The surrealists They wanted to disrupt the artist’s control over the creation of the work.applying automatic painting and writing techniques, reproducing the environment of dreams, or promoting certain trance states.
In it Surrealist Manifesto from 1924written by André Bretón, is defined as:
“Pure psychic automatism, by means of which one attempts to express, verbally, in writing or in any other way, the real functioning of thought. It is a dictation of thought, without the regulatory intervention of reason, alien to any aesthetic or moral concern.”
What does Surrealism mean?
The term “surrealist” It is originally from FrenchIt is attributed to the avant-garde French writer Guillaume Apollinaire, in his dramatic work Tiresias’s titsfrom 1917.
This word literally means “above” (south-) of realism (realism)since the surrealists aspired to create an art that would overcome or escape the limiting perspectives of human consciousness and its artistic expression: realism.
History of surrealism
Tzara, Arp, Dalí, Ernst and other surrealist artists met in Paris.
This movement It emerged from very diverse aesthetic and philosophical sourcesranging from the poetry of Rimbaud, Lautréamont and Alfred Jarry, the painting of Hieronymus Bosch and Dadaist experiments.
In particular, it arose from the powerful influence that Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories in society.
The perspective of the human mind as a place with hidden corners and the possibility of a language of dreams served as a basis for the surrealists.
The first surrealist exhibition took place in Paris in 1938.and the movement had a rapid peak prior to World War II.
At that time most of its representatives in Europe They moved to the United States and different countries in Latin America.
Thus the European movement ended, but sowing a seed that would sprout just a decade laterwith a new wave of surrealist authors from the American continent.
Surrealist literature
Surrealism was born as a literary trendwhich rescued the experiences with the meaninglessness of Dada poetry, whose maxim seemed to be the destruction of ordered language and the linguistic expression of emptiness.
It could be said that Dadaism is a nihilistic brother of surrealismwhile the latter opted for a rather romantic variant: considering the secret interiority of the poet as the literary work itself.
Among the literary techniques used by the surrealists was the exquisite corpse, where a poem was composed in pieces written by various authors.
Another important technique was automatic writing, in which The poet simply emptied the secret words from his head without thinking much about it.
Furthermore, the theater of the absurd reproduced dreamlike, ridiculous, incomprehensible situations.
surreal painting
Some surrealist methods involved chance, improvisation, and the unexpected.
Surrealist painting was nourished by automatism which surrealist literature put into practice, especially between 1923 and 1924, during Breton’s heyday.
Subsequently A cubist variant emerged, promoted by Pablo Picasso in 1929which many opposed because they considered that it undermined the credibility of surrealism.
Painters like Salvador Dalí, on the other hand, They undertook a so-called “critical-paranoid method” which consisted of staring at a surface until the mind made shapes or silhouettes emerge.
Other techniques used were he frottage (rubbing a pencil on a sheet of paper placed on an object)decalcomania (applying paint on two sheets, gluing them and tearing them off before they dry, to obtain strange shapes).
Other methods They involved chance, improvisation and the unforeseen..
Surrealism in cinema
Surrealist cinema put at the service of the reproduction of dreams the various advantages of audiovisual media.
Its aesthetics It oscillated between dreamlike stories like those of Buñuelloaded with symbols, absurdity and repetitions, often in collaboration with Dalí, and other types of audiovisual approaches with less narrative content, such as Duchamp’s geometric experiments.
The influence of surrealist cinema can be traced in numerous later creators such as David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky or Jan Svankmajer.
Surrealist sculpture
Miró’s bird-women are still in Barcelona today.
surreal sculpture opted for ambiguous formsnot entirely abstract, but tending towards the simple, if not the childish.
This is the case of Miró’s bird-women, or Jean Arp’s polymorphic sculpturesusing metallic and ceramic materials, above all.
Main themes of surrealism
Surrealism showed the mysterious and incomprehensible, like dreams.
The surrealism did not stick to a set of specific topicssince its exploration aimed to achieve a liberation of the human mind similar to that experienced during sleep or trance.
That’s why His works tended towards the absurdto the incomprehensible, the mysterious, that is, the dreamlike.
This means that His works include incomprehensible landscapescontradictory figures, sinister (nightmarish) or fantastic representations.
His favorite topics were taken from the traditional imaginationreligious or mystical stories, if not everyday life. His main source of inspiration, however, was often the artist’s own dreams or hallucinations.
Why is surrealism important?
Surrealism was an artistic and aesthetic school of great significance in Europe and the Americas.
Until now, The West had pursued the rationalist dream and Cartesian positivism: the appreciation of human reason as the definitive instrument of civilization.
The 20th century was responsible for breaking with that idea.and surrealism contributed to that rupture from art.
Its aesthetics It was adopted by various political and social tendencieswho interpreted it as an artistic gesture of liberation, capable of giving voice to the silenced, of saying what was normally kept quiet or repressed, and which could only appear in dreams.
Representatives of surrealism
Frida Kahlo is one of the surrealist artists of Latin America.
Some of the most famous European artists of the 20th century were surrealists, but there were so many of them and surrealism was so widespread and accepted in other latitudes, that it is difficult to list all its authors and representatives.
Among the most significant are:
- André Bretón (1896-1966). French writer and poet, founder of surrealism.
- Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). French poet and playwright, creator of the “theater of cruelty.”
- Federico García Lorca (1898-1936). Spanish poet and playwright murdered during the Spanish Civil War.
- Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). French poet, novelist and essayist, well known for his calligrams (visual poetry).
- Joan Miró (1893-1983). Spanish painter, sculptor and engraver, whose works explored the world of children and Catalan traditions.
- Salvador Dalí (1904-1989). Spanish painter, sculptor and writer, one of the most famous surrealists in the world.
- René Magritte (1898-1967). Belgian painter famous for his painting with the phrase “this is not a pipe.”
- Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). French painter and chess player, well known for his work Fountain (under the pseudonym R. MUTT) which consisted of putting a urinal in a museum.
- Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). Mexican painter of self-referential and feminist work, partner of the Mexican muralist Diego de Rivera.
- Luis Buñuel (1900-1983). Spanish film director, famous for his short film An Andalusian dog from 1929 and his collaborations with Salvador Dalí.