SURREALISM
(ABDULLAEVA UMA
3,3g)
Surrealism is a
cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its
visual artworks and writings.
Surrealism works
feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur;
however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression
of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an
artefact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was
above all a revolutionary movement.
Surrealism
developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important
center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread
around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and
music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and
practice, philosophy, and social theory.
The word
surrealist was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the
preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, which was written in 1903 and
first performed in 1917.
World War I
scattered the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and in the
interim many became involved with Dada, believing that excessive rational
thought and bourgeois values had brought the conflict of the war upon the
world. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings
and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities
continued.
During the war,
André Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a
neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic methods with
soldiers suffering from shell-shock. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché,
Breton felt that Vaché was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder
Alfred Jarry. He admired the young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain
for established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, "In literature, I
was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with
Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most
Back in Paris,
Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature
along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. They began experimenting with
automatic writing—spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and
published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton
and Soupault delved deeper into automatism and wrote The Magnetic Fields
(1920).
Continuing to
write, they attracted more artists and writers; they came to believe that
automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada attack on
prevailing values. The group grew to include Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René
Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise,[2] Pierre Naville, Roger
Vitrac, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges
Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André
Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy.[3]
Cover of the first issue of La Révolution
surréaliste, December 1924.
As they developed
their philosophy, they believed that Surrealism would advocate the idea that
ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense
of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination according to
the Hegelian Dialectic. They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work
of such theorists as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse.
Freud's work with
free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance
to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. They embraced
idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness. Later,
Salvador Dalí explained it as: "There is only one difference between a
madman and me. I am not mad."
Beside the use of
dream analysis, they emphasized that "one could combine inside the same
frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling
effects."[4] Breton included the idea of the startling juxtapositions in
his 1924 manifesto, taking it in turn from a 1918 essay by poet Pierre Reverdy,
which said: "a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The
more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true,
the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic
reality.".[5]
The group aimed
to revolutionize human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and
political aspects. They wanted to free people from false rationality, and
restrictive customs and structures. Breton proclaimed that the true aim of
Surrealism was "long live the social revolution, and it alone!" To
this goal, at various times Surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism.
Surrealist Manifesto
Breton wrote the
manifesto of 1924 that defines the purposes of the group. He included citations
of the influences on Surrealism, examples of Surrealist works and discussion of
Surrealist automatism. He defined Surrealism as:
Dictionary:
Surrealism, n. 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.
Shortly after
releasing the first Surrealist Manifesto, the Surrealists published the
inaugural issue of La Révolution surréaliste. Publication continued into 1929.
As the first directors, Naville and Péret modeled the format of the journal on
the conservative scientific review La Nature. To the Surrealists' delight, the
journal was consistently scandalous and revolutionary. While the focus was on
writing, the journal also included reproductions of art, among them works by
Giorgio de Chirico, Ernst, Masson, and Man Ray.
The Bureau of
Surrealist Research (Centrale Surréaliste) was the center for Surrealist
writers and artists to meet, hold discussions, and conduct interviews. They
investigated speech under trance.
The movement in the mid-1920s was
characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative
drawing games, discussed the theories of Surrealism, and developed a variety of
techniques such as automatic drawing. Breton initially doubted that visual arts
could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less
malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the
discovery of such techniques as frottage and decalcomania.
Soon more visual
artists became involved, including Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Joan Miró,
Francis Picabia, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Alberto Giacometti,
Valentine Hugo, Méret Oppenheim, Toyen, Kansuke Yamamoto and later after the
second war: Enrico Donati. Though Breton admired Pablo Picasso and Marcel
Duchamp and courted them to join the movement, they remained peripheral.[7]
More writers also joined, including former Dadaist Tristan Tzara, René Char,
and Georges Sadoul.
In 1925 an
autonomous Surrealist group formed in Brussels. The group included the
musician, poet, and artist E. L. T. Mesens, painter and writer René Magritte,
Paul Nougé, Marcel Lecomte, and André Souris. In 1927 they were joined by the
writer Louis Scutenaire. They corresponded regularly with the Paris group, and
in 1927 both Goemans and Magritte moved to Paris and frequented Breton's
circle.[3] The artists, with their roots in Dada and Cubism, the abstraction of
Wassily Kandinsky, Expressionism, and Post-Impressionism, also reached to older
"bloodlines" such as Hieronymus Bosch, and the so-called primitive
and naive arts.
André Masson's
automatic drawings of 1923, 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. Another example is Giacometti's 1925 Torso, which
marked his movement to simplified forms and inspiration from preclassical
sculpture.
However, a
striking example of the line used to divide Dada and Surrealism among art
experts is the pairing of 1925's Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax
in Person (Von minimax dadamax selbst konstruiertes maschinchen)[8] with The
Kiss (Le Baiser)[9] from 1927 by Max Ernst. The first is generally held to have
a distance, and erotic subtext, whereas the second presents an erotic act
openly and directly. In the second the influence of Miró and the drawing style
of Picasso is visible with the use of fluid curving and intersecting lines and
colour, whereas the first takes a directness that would later be influential in
movements such as Pop art.
Giorgio de
Chirico's The Red Tower (La Tour Rouge) (1913), Guggenheim Museum
Giorgio de
Chirico, and his previous development of metaphysical art, was one of the
important joining figures between the philosophical and visual aspects of
Surrealism. Between 1911 and 1917, he adopted an unornamented depictional style
whose surface would be adopted by others later. The Red Tower (La tour rouge)
from 1913 shows the stark colour contrasts and illustrative style later adopted
by Surrealist painters. His 1914 The Nostalgia of the Poet (La Nostalgie du
poete)[10] has the figure turned away from the viewer, and the juxtaposition of
a bust with glasses and a fish as a relief defies conventional explanation. He
was also a writer whose novel Hebdomeros presents a series of dreamscapes with
an unusual use of punctuation, syntax, and grammar designed to create an
atmosphere and frame around its images. His images, including set designs for
the Ballets Russes, would create a decorative form of Surrealism, and he would
be an influence on the two artists who would be even more closely associated
with Surrealism in the public mind: Dalí and Magritte. He would, however, leave
the Surrealist group in 1928.
In 1924, Miró and
Masson applied Surrealism to painting, explicitly leading to the La Peinture
Surrealiste exhibition of 1925, held at Gallerie Pierre in Paris, and
displaying works by Masson, Man Ray, Paul Klee, Miró, and others. The show
confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts (though it had
been initially debated whether this was possible), and techniques from Dada,
such as photomontage, were used. The following year, on March 26, 1926 Galerie
Surréaliste opened with an exhibition by Man Ray. Breton published Surrealism
and Painting in 1928 which summarized the movement to that point, though he
continued to update the work until the 1960s.
Major exhibitions in the
1920s
1925 - La
Peinture Surrealiste - The first ever Surrealist exhibition at Gallerie Pierre
in Paris. Displayed works by Masson, Man Ray, Klee, Miró, and others. The show
confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts (though it had
been initially debated whether this was possible), techniques from Dada, such
as photomontage were used.
The first
Surrealist work, according to leader Breton, was Les Champs Magnétiques
(May–June 1919). Littérature contained automatist works and accounts of dreams.
The magazine and the portfolio both showed their disdain for literal meanings
given to objects and focused rather on the undertones, the poetic undercurrents
present. Not only did they give emphasis to the poetic undercurrents, but also
to the connotations and the overtones which "exist in ambiguous
relationships to the visual images."
Because
Surrealist writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize their thoughts and the
images they present, some people find much of their work difficult to parse.
This notion however is a superficial comprehension, prompted no doubt by
Breton's initial emphasis on automatic writing as the main route toward a
higher reality. But—as in Breton's case—much of what is presented as purely
automatic is actually edited and very "thought out". Breton himself
later admitted that automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and
other elements were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of visual
artists in the movement forced the issue, since automatic painting required a
rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus such elements as collage were
introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling juxtapositions as
revealed in Pierre Reverdy's poetry. And—as in Magritte's case (where there is
no obvious recourse to either automatic techniques or collage)—the very notion
of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation in and of itself. Surrealism
was meant to be always in flux—to be more modern than modern—and so it was
natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new challenges
arose.
Surrealists
revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym Comte de
Lautréamont, and for the line "beautiful as the chance meeting on a
dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", and Arthur Rimbaud,
two late 19th century writers believed to be the precursors of Surrealism.
Examples of
Surrealist literature are Crevel's Mr. Knife Miss Fork (1931), Aragon's Irene's
Cunt (1927), Breton's Sur la route de San Romano (1948), Péret's Death to the
Pigs (1929), and Artaud's Le Pese-Nerfs (1926).
The word
surrealist was first used by Guillaume Apollinaire to describe his 1917 play
Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias), which was later adapted
into an opera by Francis Poulenc.
Antonin Artaud,
an early Surrealist, rejected the majority of Western theatre as a perversion
of its original intent, which he felt should be a mystical, metaphysical
experience. He thought that rational discourse comprised "falsehood and
illusion." Theorising a new theatrical form that would be immediate and
direct, that would link the unconscious minds of performers and spectators in a
sort of ritual event, Artaud created the Theatre of Cruelty, in which emotions,
feelings, and the metaphysical were expressed not through language but
physically, creating a mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely
related to the world of dreams.
The other major
theatre practitioner to have experimented with surrealism in the theatre is the
Spanish playwright and director Federico García Lorca, particularly in his
plays The Public (1930), When Five Years Pass (1931), and Play Without a Title
(1935). Other surrealist plays include Aragon's Backs to the Wall (1925) and
Roger Vitrac's The Mysteries of Love (1927) and Victor, or The Children Take
Over (192813). Gertrude Stein's opera Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938)
has also been described as "American Surrealism", though it is also
related to a theatrical form of cubism
In the 1920s
several composers were influenced by Surrealism, or by individuals in the
Surrealist movement. Among them were Bohuslav Martinů, André Souris, and Edgard
Varèse, who stated that his work Arcana was drawn from a dream
sequence.[citation needed] Souris in particular was associated with the
movement: he had a long relationship with Magritte, and worked on Paul Nouge's
publication Adieu Marie.
Germaine
Tailleferre of the French group Les Six wrote several works which could be
considered to be inspired by Surrealism[citation needed], including the 1948
Ballet Paris-Magie (scenario by Lise Deharme), the Operas La Petite Sirène
(book by Philippe Soupault) and Le Maître (book by Eugène Ionesco).[citation
needed] Tailleferre also wrote popular songs to texts by Claude Marci, the wife
of Henri Jeanson, whose portrait had been painted by Magritte in the 1930s.
