Surrealism: What It Is And Characteristics Of This Artistic Movement
The first to use the word “surrealism” was, curiously, none of the members of the surrealist group. It was Guillaume Apollinaire who, in 1917, coined the term to refer to Tiresias’s tits (The mamelles of Tiresias), one of his plays, which he called “surreal drama.” Apollinaire died the following year, a victim of the (mis)named Spanish Flu, without knowing that he had sown the future. Years later, the surrealist group would be formed.
But what was surrealism, exactly?? What do we know about him? Do we really know its meaning and its essential objective, beyond rumors and legends? We propose a journey to the heart of the surrealist movement, the latest avant-garde and the one that lasted the longest over time.
everyone knows the great interest of the surrealist movement in the world of dreams Obviously influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, the surrealists advocated bringing to light the most hidden recesses of the human psyche. The intention was not only to create commotion (the famous épater le bourgeoiswhich means something like “scandalizing the bourgeois”), but also providing humanity with a path of liberation from anguish, obsession and paranoia.
Although poets such as Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) or Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) had already made reference to the épater In the mid-19th century and, later, radical groups such as the Dadaists continued to cling to the idea of scandalizing the corseted bourgeoisie, surrealism went much further. Because the surrealist current is not content only with causing surprise and rejection, but proposes a solution to the existential anguish that human beings experience And that solution, that answer, will only be obtained through the absolute liberation of the psyche, of that subconscious trapped between conventions, moral norms and deeply repressed desires.
Thus, broadly speaking, we can say that the essence of surrealism is an attempt to disinhibit the human being by rescuing his buried fears and desires ; that is, through a journey to his darker and, in some way, more “animal” self. Surrealism deals with general themes; topics that can influence the greatest number of people, such as, for example, the conflict between men and women, sex and repressed envy, fear of death, etc.
The objective is to “awaken” the great mass, shake it, get it out of its mind. To do this, the surrealists use images whose only logic is the logic of dreams, disordered, paradoxical, contradictory and discontinuous. In literature, the compositions will be fragmentary, written at high speed, often without punctuation marks, following the famous surrealist “automatism”, which we will discuss in another point.
We have already mentioned that the first to name a work “surrealist” was the poet and playwright Guillaume Apollinaire. More or less around the same time (that is, during the First World War) Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) made canvases with a marked surrealist character, which he called “metaphysical painting” and which would greatly influence the “official” surrealist group. ”.
De Chirico’s landscapes, arid, deserted, imbued with a suffocating loneliness, with ruins and impossible perspectives, seem, indeed, taken from a dream. Not in vain, André Breton, the undisputed leader of the surrealists and author of their manifestos, considered the painter the most important artist of the movement.
In 1924 the first surrealist manifesto appeared, signed, among others, by the aforementioned André Breton (1896-1966), French writer and poet. In the manifesto, Breton defines surrealism as a “pure psychic automatism,” in which there is no “regulatory intervention of reason.” That is to say, the artist must allow himself to be carried away by the musings of his subconscious; Authentic creation occurs when the restrictions of the higher self are annulled and everything is left in the hands of the most hidden part of our mind, so that the true being flows freely.
For Breton, poetic composition is inevitably linked to “automatic writing”, the procedure by which the author writes the first thing that comes to mind, without hindering the organic flow of his ideas. In this sense (as in many other things) surrealism owes a lot to the Dada movement, which had already advocated something similar: Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist leader, proposed cutting out words and phrases from newspapers and magazines, placing them in a bag and extracting them continuation. In any case, there is a clear difference between both “automatic” procedures; While that of Dadaism is mechanical and closely linked to chance, that of surrealism starts from the human psyche itself.
From 1925 onwards, surrealism clearly adhered to politics In fact, the majority of its members (including André Breton) manifest clear communist sympathies, to the point that he himself and some of his companions (Aragon, Éluard and Péret) join the French Communist Party. From then on, the political position of the group, especially that of its leader, became radicalized.
Breton no longer understands surrealism if it is not a vehicle of social activity, and this social activity is linked to the fight against capitalism. Other members, such as the young Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) are reluctant to get involved in politics so openly. An indecision that, by the way, earns him rejection from the group.
And surrealist painting?
At first, as has been seen, the surrealist movement was limited to literary creation. This makes sense if we return to the idea of “automatic writing”, because how to do the same with a painting?
Surrealist painting was always figurative painting; That is, it represented concrete elements and moved significantly away from abstractionism. But representing concrete elements is in contradiction with the spontaneous creation that the surrealists spoke of since it requires an idea, prior planning, processing of the conscious self.
How, then, to make surrealist painting? Dalí, for example, proposed what he called the multiple or paranoid image, through which an object, without any prior modification, became before the viewer’s eyes another different object with which it had nothing to do. A clear example of this is his canvas Appearance of a face and a fruit bowl on a beach (1938). In the painting we clearly see a vase with pears. But, almost magically, that vase becomes a face, and the landscape in the background transforms into a dog… and so on. Dalí maintained that images were directly proportional to the degree of paranoid-obsessive capacity of the viewer.
For his part, Max Ernst (1891-1976) captures the surrealist language through silent but disturbing forests and landscapes, where everything is confused before the eyes of the beholder. René Magritte (1898-1967) displays a very detailed realism, but introduces impossible scenes in his works which, indeed, seem taken from a dream world.
There were, however, some painters who followed the postulates of spontaneous and unhindered creation. For example, Joan Miró (1893-1983), whose works, in appearance, have nothing figurative; and André Masson (1896-1987), who lets his brush drag on obsessions transformed into symbols. Masson was also a pioneer in the use of innovative materials for his frames, such as gum arabic and sand.
Surrealism in cinema
Surrealism in the performing arts had a distinguished representative in Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the first playwright who expressed surrealist principles in theater Artaud considered that theater should represent a catharsis for the audience, in the ancient Greek way, and to do so he used disturbing noises and strange mixtures of lights and sounds. Despite enrolling in the surrealist postulates, Artaud was never part of Breton’s group, partly due to his reclusive and solitary character. Suffering from serious mental disorders, he died in an asylum at the age of 51.
Cinema, that great innovation of the 20th century, was the next stage (and never better said) on which the surrealists took up. One of the most notable filmmakers was Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) who said that “the first movie we see in our lives are our dreams.” In collaboration with Salvador Dalí, who arrived in Paris that year, he created An Andalusian Dog (1929), which is considered the summit of surrealist cinema.
The film manages to perfectly reproduce what a dream is: a succession of images with little or no connection between them, objects that are first one thing and then another, jumps in time, contradictions. Furthermore, and as it could not be otherwise, the film puts its finger on the sore spot and presents the sexual inhibitions of the corseted bourgeoisie of the moment. In this sense, it is related to the script that the aforementioned Artaud wrote for the cinema and which was translated into the film La concha y el cleric, where an ecclesiastic feverishly pursues the woman who is the object of his desires.
Surrealism before surrealism
It is interesting to end this article with a point: many of the movements in art history were not new when they were created We explain ourselves. Long before Impressionism, there were painters, such as Velázquez, Goya and, above all, Turner, who already played with loose brushstrokes to convey the effects of light. Obviously, they cannot be called impressionists, but let’s understand each other; Monet and company had discovered nothing new. They simply formalized it and turned it into a style, an artistic movement.
The same thing happens with surrealism. Because who can deny that Hieronymus Bosch is a surrealist painter? Yes, he lived in the 16th century, a chronology very far from André Breton and his company. But let’s look at his work. Let’s look at The garden of delights (1500-1505), The hay cart (1512-1515) or The Temptations of Saint Anthony the Abbot (1510-1515); The scenes have a strong dreamlike, dream (or, rather, nightmare) load. In fact, some of the “Bosconian” landscapes are greatly reminiscent of Dalí who, by the way, had the project of writing a book on “surrealism before surrealism.” It seems he never finished it.
We find many other “surrealists” who lived before surrealism Pieter Brueghel the Elder (ca. 1526-1569), in his The triumph of death, displays a chilling landscape, arid, unknown, populated by skeletons fighting to take the souls of the living. And, already in the 19th century, we have a Goya driven mad by his deafness and by the disasters of war, whose black paintings not only have something surrealist about them, but are also precursors of German Expressionism.
For his part, Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825) displays the darkest romanticism with works such as The nightmarewhere a young girl is tormented by an incubus, and William Blake (1757-1827), illustrates Paradise lost, by Milton, with watercolors that show disturbing and strange visions. Nothing new under the sun.
