surrealism

Movement in art, literature, and film that developed out of Dada around 1922. Led by André Breton, who produced the Surrealist Manifesto (1924), the surrealists were inspired by the thoughts and visions of the subconscious mind. They explored varied styles and techniques, and the movement became the dominant force in Western art between World Wars I and II.

Surrealism followed Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious and his ‘free association’ technique for bypassing the conscious mind. Although there was no specific surrealist style, artworks fall into two main categories: those that use conventional techniques to depict fantastic, enigmatic images, such as Salvador Dalí's melting watches in his Persistence of Memory (1931); and those that use inventive techniques, such as frottage (rubbing of a raised surface) developed by Max Ernst. Pablo Picasso worked along surrealist lines for a time in the early 1920s. André Masson experimented in automatic drawing; Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Yves Tanguy created emotive, semi-abstract forms; while Dali and René Magritte painted their dreamlike images in a realistic style. The poets Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard and the film-maker Luis Buñuel were also part of the movement.

André Breton was known as the ‘pope’ of surrealism and, unlike other art movements that have often rejected being labelled, Breton assertively led the surrealists, going so far as to ‘anoint’ official surrealists and to ‘excommunicate’ those who were seen to rebel against the movement's principles.

In the visual arts, surrealism was a revolt against the purely aesthetic and abstract values of modern art. Instead it stressed the value of instinctive expression (sometimes referred to as ‘automatism’) and seeking to interpret the workings of the subconscious mind. Fantastic and unusual relations of form and imagery acquired a special significance as suggesting the dream world of the mind and stimulating the sense of wonder. The movement was partly influenced by the attacks on traditional art by Dadaism in the later stages of World War I and the years immediately following, and was the subject of much theoretical debate in Paris in the 1920s, when it was fostered by the poets André Breton and Paul Eluard, but reached its zenith in the 1930s and with the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936. Surrealism claimed a long ancestry in art, reaching back to the fantasy and symbolism of Hieronymous Bosch, and apparent in Henry Fuseli and Odilon Redon. Outstanding as a precursor in the 20th century was Giorgio de Chirico, while Paul Klee and Marc Chagall were hailed as kindred spirits. Other artists closely connected with the movement were Hans (Jean) Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, and Man Ray.

The irrational impulse and the ‘anti-art’ character of the movement appear in the cultivation of the ‘found object’. While it did not survive World War II in any coherent shape, surrealism had a liberating influence on a number of artists of the present time, among them Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, and the younger school of sculpture.