Surrealism

At the turn of the 20th century, one of the most critical Modernist texts was published: Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Freud’s insights on the unconscious mind, subjectivity, and dreamscapes were an attempt to understand what was beyond objective truth, posing a critical approach to Western rationality that would pronounce itself through movements such as Dadaism.

But it was not until after WWI that poet and wartime psychiatrist André Breton would more apparently incorporate psychoanalysis into the loose, chaotic logics of Dada through his first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), in which he describes his newfound movement as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought.” Today we explore the boundaries between reality and imagination, and learn how the Surrealists helped us recognize that the conscious and unconscious were not so different.

Indeed, Breton viewed this dichotomy as a type of Hegelian-Marxist dialectics for which his movement provided synthesis, noting he “believe[s] in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.”

This is exemplified in one of the most identifiable Surrealist paintings, Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931). While the setting and objects are rendered naturalistically (one can discern a desert landscape, a tree, ants, etc.), the overall composition is fantastical. Elements of nature clash with geometric shapes, and the stopwatches – symbolic of linear, Western industrial time – melt as if they were organic. Dalí thus blends the natural world with unreal elements and mannerisms to depict his dreamscape, a statement on the mind’s manipulation of memory and perception.

Because Surrealism aims to tap into the individual subconscious, the art produced was quite varied; however, the Surrealists still had distinct techniques. For example, Joan Miró’s The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) (1924) follows in the vein of Kandinsky, utilizing biomorphism (forms that resemble organisms) and juxtaposition (the showing contrast by concepts placed side by side) through color and shape to create his uncanny worlds.

Automatism, or the unhinged flow of thought or action, was another mode for Surrealists to tap into the stream-of-consciousness of the psyche. While this is evident in Breton’s writing and Miró’s drawing, Max Ernst’s artwork incorporated methods of chance such as collage and frottage in experimental new ways. In The Barbarians (1937), Ernst employs decalcomania, pressing objects and paper against the canvas, followed by a scraping procedure called grattage, creating a thick, idiosyncratic texture. The anthropomorphic birds are a common symbol in Ernst’s work, dreamed up and derived from a childhood trauma.

The underlying effect of all Surrealist art is to estrange the familiar to the point of dreamlike perplexity. René Magritte is famous for such visual distortions and wordplays, manifested in his piece The False Mirror (1928). The viewer struggles to differentiate between reflection and depth, art and sight, defying the agency of optics through illusion. The Surrealist photographer Man Ray famously noted that this painting “sees as much as itself is seen.” Meret Oppenheim’s Luncheon in Fur (1936) similarly gives the everyday new perspective by covering mundane, pristine objects with fur, giving in an animalistic appearance. Through assemblage, Oppenheim disturbs an object of feminine domesticity and reimagines it in order to shock and disturb audiences.

The official Surrealist movement and its thrust as an art form fizzled around the beginning of World War II, but its impact on art, particularly its incorporation of the fantastical, uncanny, and psychologically puzzling, continues to be felt today.

Quotes

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” – Salvador Dalí

"Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality." – John Lennon

"Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life." – Brad Holland

Recommended books

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

Dali by Robert Descharnes, Gilles Néret

Interaction of Color by Josef Albers

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