Surrealism: Research

SURREALISM(1924-1945)is a 20th century style and movement in art and literature in which images and events that are not connected, are put together in a strange or impossible way, like a DREAM, to try to express what is happening deep in the mind.

The surrealist movement flourished in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which thrived before World War I (Dadaism: an early 20th century movement in art, literature, music and film which made fun of social and artistic conventions). If Dadaism produced a committed socio-critical style of painting in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, artists in France transformed the Dadaist principle of the illogical, the irrational and the random in their painting, in order to reunite the conscious and unconscious realms of experience completely. They too no longer believed in visible reality, and were in search of an all-encompassing reality, a 'super-reality' ('sur', Fr. 'over, super'). Surrealism did not remain restricted to visual art, but found literary form as an 'attitude towards reality', that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in an absolute reality, a 'SURREALITY'.

The conviction that alongside the visible world there exist repressed areas of experience which can be called forth in dream images or hallucinatory phenomena and pictorial suggestions, linked an international movement of artists - visual artists and writers - in spirit. Their outstanding painter-figures were the Spaniards Salvador Dali and Joan Miro, the German Max Ernst, the Belgian Rene Magritte, the Greek-born Italian Giorgio de Chirico and the Mexican Frida Kahlo, to name but a few. In very different ways, they explored the realms of the Surreal artistically, but they were always concerned with 'replacing the real outside world with the reality of the mind'. 

Giogio de Chirico, The Great Metaphysicist, 1916.
Giorgio de Chirico tried to break through the consciousness-governed thought processes with a tension-laden, irritating world of imagery, painting highly unreal pictorial situations in a realistic manner. De Chirico named his works, in which supernatural forces seem to prevail, 'pittura metafisica' - 'metaphysical painting'. The Surrealists received crucial stimulation from the enigmatic magic-realist paintings that de Chirico painted as early as the first decade of the century.

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931.
For Dali, clocks, normalised instruments of measurement, represented the reality principle, while soft, 'edible' objects belonged to the pleasure principle. Dali's paintings show a connection between the perception of time and the perception of space. The clocks, flowing through space and time, prompt thoughts of the 'flow' of time, and give the impression of a time and space of memory dissolving into the distance, a zone invaded by the inexplicable, and one which unconsciously influences the experience of the present.

Rene Magritte, This is not a pipe, 1928-29.
This is Magritte's famous depiction of a pipe beneath which he wrote 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe - This is not a pipe' (but only the picture of a pipe), he wanted to prompt a thought process in the viewer, at the end of which his understanding of the world would have changed. For Magritte, painting was primarily an 'art of thinking'. With his confusing pictures, the painter called the relationship between appearance and reality, between painting and depiction, into the consciousness.

Rene Magritte, The Realm of Light, 1954.
Magritte questioned and shook the foundations of the order of things in his art. Dead objects have eyes, reflections disappear, nocturnal streets are spanned by bright day-time skies. The world seems to develop holes; the safety of orientation and the reliability of the familiar disappear. In many pictures Magritte achieved this effect by means of surprising combinations of objects whose materiality or scale has been transformed. Between these objects flashes a 'poetic spark', as the Surrealists put it, which means that the accidental, the sudden and absurd inspiration is invested with inexplicable meaning. A similar thing happens with Magritte's titles: they are Surrealist in that they have nothing whatsoever to do with the images. But associations sometimes help to span fleeting bridges over the emerging chasm.

References: Anna C. Krausse, The Story of Painting From The Renaissance To The Present, 2005