Surrealism

Surrealism. Movement in art and literature flourishing in the 1920s and 1930s, characterized by a fascination with the bizarre, the incongruous, and the irrational. It was closely related to Dada, its principal source; several artists figured successively in both movements, each of which was conceived as a revolutionary mode of thought and action—a way of life rather than a set of stylistic attitudes. Both were strongly anti-rationalist and much concerned with creating effects that were disturbing or shocking, but whereas Dada was essentially nihilist, Surrealism was positive in spirit.

The movement originated in France. Its founder and chief spokesman was the writer André Breton, who believed that the world had been corrupted by excessive materialism and rationalism and wanted to assert the importance of emotional and imaginative values. He officially launched the movement with his first Manifeste du surréalisme, published in 1924; however, it had been taking shape for a few years before this and the term ‘surréalisme’ had been coined by Apollinaire in 1917. The central idea of the movement was to release the creative powers of the unconscious mind, or as Breton put it, ‘to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality’. Essentially it aimed at breaching the dominance of reason and conscious control by releasing primitive urges and imagery, and Breton and other members of the movement drew liberally on Freud's theories concerning the unconscious and its relation to dreams. The way in which they set about exploration of submerged impulses and imagery varied greatly (in spite of Breton's demands there was little doctrinal unity, and defections, expulsions, and personal attacks are a feature of the history of the movement). Some artists, for example Ernst and Masson, cultivated various spontaneous techniques such as frottage in an effort to eliminate conscious control. At the other extreme, Dalí, Magritte, and others painted in a scrupulously detailed manner to give a hallucinatory sense of reality to scenes that make no rational sense.

Paris remained the centre of Surrealism until the Second World War, when the emigration of many European artists to the USA made New York the new hub of its activity. It made an impact in many other places and indeed became the most widely disseminated and controversial aesthetic movement of the 1920s and 1930s, spread partly by a series of major international exhibitions. Two of the most important took place in 1936: the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London, and ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Surrealism did not take root in Germany (Ernst, the major German Surrealist, lived mostly in France and the USA), but it flourished vigorously in Belgium—in the work particularly of Magritte, the most inspired of all Surrealist painters, and Delvaux, the most long-lived upholder of the tradition. Many artists who were not in sympathy with the political aims of Surrealism (for a time it was associated with the French Communist Party), and who were never formal members of the movement, nevertheless found its ideas stimulating and were influenced by its imagery. In Britain, Henry Moore and Paul Nash were among the major artists who went through a Surrealist phase. The English Surrealist Group was founded in 1936, but it was social rather than revolutionary in its aims.

Although it broke up as an organized movement during the war and by this time had spent its main force, the spirit of Surrealism lived on. With its stress on the marvellous and the poetic, it offered an alternative approach to the formalism of Cubism and various types of abstract art, and its methods and techniques continued to influence artists in many countries. It was, for example, a fundamental source for Abstract Expressionism. Among the artists who have most unwaveringly kept the Surrealist spirit alive is the British painter Conroy Maddox (1912– ), who in 1978 said, ‘No other movement has had more to say about the human condition, or has so determinedly put liberty, both poetic and political, above all else.’