Surrealism is an art and literary movement that developed in Europe, with Paris as its center, in the years following World War I. Although the term “Surrealism” was coined in 1917 by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, with the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, written by the author André Breton, Surrealism was born. Its intention was, according to Breton, to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality,” or surreality. He defined surrealism in the manifesto as “pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.” The movement employed many of the tenets of Dada that preceded it, such as hostility towards the established social order, and disdain for the bourgeois society that created the First World War. Many Dada artists joined the Surrealists after Breton’s manifesto which emphasized automatism, chance, and liberation from reason’s constraints. It is also significant that Breton viewed Surrealism as a revolutionary movement, drawing on the writings of Karl Marx. By the 1930s, many of the Surrealists identified themselves with communism.
Breton wanted to combine the intellectual threads of Romanticism, psychoanalysis, and revolution. The manifesto was a critique of bourgeois rationality. Surrealist images were derived from the philosophical and cultural tradition of Romanticism, in which the imagination is represented as limitless in its potential. Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the eighteenth century. The movement stressed the importance of subjectivity, imagination, and appreciation of nature in society and culture in response to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Major Romantic artists included Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and Francisco Goya, who challenged Neoclassical norms by employing dramatic landscapes, intense emotions, and historical events and highlighted the sublime in nature and human psychology. Breton added to the Romantic conception of imagination a psychoanalytic representation of the mind divided between the conscious part and the hidden unconscious repository of instinct, experience, and desire. Theories and therapeutic techniques developed by Sigmund Freud were employed to enable the imagination to “reclaim its rights.”
Surrealism’s dominant motivation was to bring the aspects of outer and inner “reality” together into a single position. Influences on and origins of Surrealism were post-WWI disillusionment; Dadaism, an anti-establishment artistic movement with anti-rationalist attitudes; and Sigmund Freud, who published psychoanalytic theories on dreams and the unconscious. Key concepts and goals of Surrealism were liberation: freedom of thought from constraints of reason, societal norms, and logic, and challenging the perception of reality; subconscious exploration: accessing hidden depths of the mind, dreams, and desires as the source of true creativity; and surreality: creating a higher reality where dream and waking life merge.
Formally, Surrealism developed along two lines to unlock the power of the unconscious mind: 1) Biomorphic Surrealism with automatism, and 2) Naturalistic Surrealism, which presented recognizable scenes that seem to have metamorphosed into a dream or a nightmare image. Biomorphic Surrealism uses abstract, organic shapes resembling living forms (like cells, plants, or organisms) to express the subconscious. These forms were often created through automatic techniques to bypass conscious thought. The images contrast with rationalism and draw inspiration from nature. Joan Miró and Jean Arp are known for creating biomorphic works. Artists wanted to connect to Surrealism’s aim to unlock the subconscious by using automatism to create art without conscious control. Automatism is the creation of art without conscious control, accessing material from the unconscious mind as part of the creative process.
The word automatism comes from physiology, where it describes bodily movements that are not consciously controlled like breathing or sleepwalking. Sigmund Freud used free association and automatic drawing or writing to explore the unconscious mind of his patients. Freud’s theories strongly influenced André Breton in writing the Surrealist Manifesto. Breton and other writers produced the earliest examples of automatism in their automatic writings; they tried to write as quickly as possible without consciously intervening to guide the hand. The artist Max Ernst invented Surrealist collage which was the first example of automatism in visual art. Ernst also used techniques such as frottage (rubbing) and grattage (scraping) to create chance textures within his work. Joan Miró, André Masson, as well as Ernst developed various forms of automatic drawing and painting. Breton called Miró “the most Surrealist of us all” because his work contained elements of fantasy and hallucination and his creative process was to switch back and forth between unconscious and conscious image making. Yves Tanguy, whose work used elements of biomorphism and naturalism, also depicted otherworldly landscapes populated by eerie, bone-like biomorphic shapes that were painted with extreme precision.
Salvador Dalí and René Magritte were the two artists most identified with Naturalistic Surrealism. Dalí’s painting, The Persistence of Memory, along with Magritte’s work, The Treachery of Images, are perhaps the most recognizable Surrealist paintings. Dalí invented and employed what he called the paranoiac-critical method which aimed “to materialize the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialistic fury of precision…in order that the world of imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident…as that of the exterior world of phenomenal reality.” The Persistence of Memory, painted in 1931, illustrates Dalí’s method. The artist presents a dreamlike scene populated with limp and decaying clocks. Dalí paints realistic, recognizable objects and figures, but places them in illogical, dreamlike, and uncanny scenarios that question reality. The painting relies on traditional, detailed techniques to depict impossible situations, making the bizarre feel tangible and unsettling. The clocks in this painting seem organic, decaying and covered with ants and a fly. One watch has melted over a biomorphic form that resembles the profile of the artist. Despite the bizarre and uncanny nature of the scene, the artist has achieved a convincing illusion of reality, that makes the surreal elements more jarring. The limp watches suggest the inevitable decay of the passing of time.
Similarly, René Magritte employs traditional illusionism in The Treachery of Images, of 1929. The work features a trompe l’oeil depiction of a pipe, underneath which reads: Ceci n’est pas un pipe (This is not a pipe). Magritte presents the dreamlike disassociation of word and image. His painting is disruptive because it subverts viewers’ expectations based on logic and common sense. The danger of relying on rationality is apparent in the work. The discrepancy between word and image challenges the assumptions underlying the reading of a work or art. Like the other Surrealists’ work, Magritte’s painting confronts viewers’ reliance on the conscious and the rational.
Breton originally believed that the visual arts could not be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less open to chance and automatism. This was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage, grattage, and decalcomania (a technique to generate unexpected textures and forms by pressing wet paint or ink between surfaces, like paper or glass, and pulling them apart, or by printing designs on special paper for later transfer, used by Max Ernst for dreamlike landscapes, resulting in organic, unpredictable patterns or ready-made decorative transfers). André Masson’s 1923 automatic drawings are often used as the point of the acceptance of visual arts and the break from Dada, since they reflect the influence of the idea of the unconscious mind. And Giorgio de Chirico, with his stark color contrasts and uncanny townscapes, was an important influence on Dalí and Magritte. The Surrealist revolution—it was a politically engaged movement—came to represent a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological. The characteristics of this style stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modern era, combined with reaching more deeply into the psyche.
By Jennifer McCormick