Surrealism

Surrealism: 1920s-1930s

Andre Breton founded the principles behind the literary and artistic movement of Surrealism with his 1924 ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’. Breton highlighted the movement’s aim 'to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality', so paving the way for artists such as Salvador Dali to freely express their creativity without the constraints of convention and reason.

The Pope was considered the epitome of restrictive authority and established order so the Surrealists replaced his leadership with Breton’s, empowering the latter with an ability to ‘excommunicate’ those perceived to be refractory or misguided. In fact, Salvador Dali himself was expelled in 1937 when his style was considered to have become too academic. However, as Breton undertook to establish a political agenda for the improvement of society, the fundamental aims of Surrealism were inevitably being countered. The Surrealists believed that the existence of coincidences and ‘objective chance’ meant true reality could not be logical or ordered, thus their main intention was to discover and free the imagination through the unconscious mind.

Although the movement took its anti-rational platform from Dada, playing with the individual’s perception of reality and Freud’s model of the subconscious, it was more exuberant and light-hearted than Dadaism. The focus was an art of mystery and marvel, thus influences came from primitive art, Oceanic sculptures and the dreamlike visions of the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists, rather than Impressionist art which was seen as too naturalistic and Cubism which was too logical.

Despite their anti-Cubist beliefs, the Surrealists made an exception for Picasso, who chose inventive techniques to form ambiguous images that were more suggestive than figurative. He was viewed, along with Klee and Miro, to produce Surrealist paintings without ever actually becoming contained by the movement and his work was among the most highly regarded by artists of the period.

Surrealism doesn’t demonstrate a prevailing style or technique, but there were repeated concepts designed to capture imagery through mechanical processes in which chance was exploited.

Another popular tendency was that of the Veristic Surrealists, the most notable examples being Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Paul Delvaux and Yves Tanguy. Veristic Surrealism concentrated on depicting detailed illustrations of a world parallel to that experienced in a dream state. Dali invented a method known as ‘critical paranoia’, purposefully drawing hallucinatory apparitions and delusions that might have been cultivated by paranoiacs from his conscious mind. Thus visions of bent watches and figures that are half-human, half chest of drawers have become one of the most recognised symbols of the Surrealist movement.

Rene Magritte took a similar concept by combining people and objects in bizarre juxtapositions, so turning everyday reality into a new surreality. Yves Tanguy produced dreamlike visions using entirely imaginary objects that were no less convincing for their meticulous and consistent detail. Veristic paintings also tend to have flat and glossy surfaces, so providing another illusionary trick on the viewer’s eye by neglecting to remind them that the hallucination is composed of paint.

The final example of a Surrealist method was that known as ‘automatic’ art. Here, the line of the pen or drawing instrument was encouraged to wander across the page at will, without any conscious control coming from the artist. This method was employed by Miro, Klee and Masson, the latter of whom tried to achieve the same results in painting by making random adhesive lines across a canvas and then adding colour with various coatings of coloured sand. When the Surrealist movement came to its conclusion, this approach was adapted in the paintings of New York artist Arshile Gorky, and the expansive abstractions of Jackson Pollock.

Our Art on Demand gallery contains the following surrealism art prints, posters and canvases: