- The name was coined by Apollinaire in 1917 for a ballet and play and was later adopted by Breton in 1924 in his Surrealism Manifesto.
- The movement was largely anti-war, as many had been involved in the First World War and saw the horrific damage it had caused.
- After WW1 many artists looked beyond naturalism and there was a growing interest in the internal rather than external.
- It was highly influenced by the works of Sigmund Freud and his psychological research into the significance of one’s dreams. They had a growing interest in the psychological subconscious and what could be revealed through it.
- Due to their interest in the subconscious Surrealists also found a great interest in repressed sexual desires, due to their sexual morality a great many Surrealists were also anti-Catholic.
- There was, due to their interest in repressed sexual desires, a large amount of symbolism in the works for the Surrealists; many phallic symbols were incorporated into their paintings, as well as those referring to female sexual organs in the forms of various orifices.
- Another strong influence of the movement was the absurd, they ridiculed reason and juxtaposed elements in unusual ways that we would not, at first, expect to see them in.
- The Dada movement was also interested in these ideas and the two movements co-existed for a time, although Surrealists found Dada too negative and so the two groups drifted from one another.
- Surrealism covered all the arts including literature and film. Some of the most well known Surrealist painters are German born Max Ernst, Belgian Rene Magritte and Spanish Salvador Dalí.
- Painters of the movement did not confine themselves to the fine arts and those such as Dalí designed furniture such as his Mae West Lips Sofa.
- Many of the Surrealists employed new techniques that were, at the time, unheard of in high art. One such technique was the use of chance. To this end artists would apply their materials, such as paint or glue, in a seemingly random fashion.
- Another of these new techniques was automatic writing and drawing, this would involve the “absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern” as suggested by Breton.
- Some artists went as far to include writing in their works such as in Miro’s 1926 work “Love”
- The Surrealists became obsessed with painting women as objects of desire; they used Freudian symbols to refer back to their childhoods and references to paranoia.
- Their style can be identified for its use of the pairing of unfamiliar elements in order to shock and seek originality. Beauty was a concept that the Surrealists based on desire, the uncanny and the original.
- In 1940 when France became occupied by Germany during the Second World War, the Surrealists moved from Paris to New York – the growing art capital of the world. However, after the war, in 1947 Breton and Duchamp brought Surrealism back to Paris where they retained control over the style until Breton’s death in 1966 where it dispersed.
- Dalí was first introduced to the Surrealists in 1929, and by 1930 was making large contributions to the movement including being heavily involved in the publishing of the magazine “Surrealism” where he developed his paranoiac critical method.
- After his affiliation with the Surrealists he moved to New York and became the first celebrity artist.
- He was particularly influenced by psychology and even met with Sigmund Freud in 1939, this had a huge influence on his work and this was when he began his Dream Paintings. This involved Dalí looking to his dreams and his subconscious for subject matter.
- One of his works that shows an interest in the unconscious and one’s repressed sexual desires is The Lugubrious Game of 10 years earlier (dated 1929).
- It is a classic Dalí image of sexual persecution and an obsession with castration and masturbation. It was the centrepiece of Dalí’s first exhibition at the Camille Goeman Gallery in November of 1929.
- The painting evokes an imagined scene through the plain background and low horizon, due to a lack of realistic architecture that might indicate a location the scene remains ambiguous and it might be assumed that the scene comes from Dalí’s own subconscious although this is very subjective.
- Using the dream narrative, Dalí juxtaposed incongruous elements and monstrous forms.
- The central figure has exploded into fragments; the head has been torn open to reveal stones, shells and hats. The figure is lacking in a sense of coherent unity.
- The elements that are exposed from its torn open head can be seen as the figure’s thoughts. Many of these elements, namely the trilbies and the creases in them, are subtle references to female genitalia, evoking a sense of sexual repression and the desire for sexual gratification.
- The title of the work can be considered to be quite telling as “lugubrious” refers to something that is “cheerless” or “dismal”, the juxtaposition of this with “game” is almost a contradiction and could be considered a reference to the combining of unexpected elements that features in his work as one would not expect a game to be cheerless.
- However, if we take the meaning to be a cheerless game it could be a reflection on the guilt of masturbation which seems to be a theme of this painting, exemplified in the statue in the left of the canvas, the enlarged right hand could be considered a symbol for masturbation, considering that the figure holds his head in his left hand in shame we can assume that this figure hold a guilt of masturbation.
- In the lower right, a man stares spellbound by the vision in front of him. Wearing a suit coat, he is embraced by a strange, androgynous creature that has one male leg and one seemingly female leg. The figures face is buried into the shoulder of the first. The man holds out one hand with a bloodstained cloth, between his legs we see that his shorts have been pulled tight and he appears to have soiled himself, these two factors indicate castration and shame.
- This may refer to the Freudian concept of a boy’s fear of castration by his father that is highlighted in the Oedipus complex.
- This work employs a great deal of symbolism that is easily read and accessible; there is a mixture of elements that we would not expect to see together fitting the Surrealist style. Dalí said of his work that he utilised “sickly images of concrete irrationality”.
- Rene Magritte was a Belgian artist with a seemingly non-artistic art background.
- He, like Dalí, enjoyed the juxtaposition of unusual elements and unexpected contexts.
- He said was known to have said, “I detest decorative art…current affairs…and drugs” whilst some of the Surrealists had abused drugs in the interest of investigating their subconscious, Magritte disagreed with this.
- Magritte believed that the subconscious could be accessed without this. Some of his works feature a female figure whose face is masked by white fabric; this can be seen as a reference to his mother’s suicide. She jumped from a bridge into a body of water, when she was removed nightgown was covering her face.
- Another reference to his personal life that can be seen in his works is that all of his nude paintings are based on his wife, whom he met aged 14.
- In 1916, aged 18, he moved to Brussels to study art at an academy school, although he felt he had nothing in common with academy artists.
- Although, dabbling with Futurist works, they did not sell. Giorgio di Chirico founded metaphysical painting; this style of art was about vision rather than the representational.
- This was a huge influence on his move towards Surrealism, particularly on works such as Pipe, he said of this “a picture is not to be confused with something tangible”, this is indicative of his interest in perception.
- He claimed the viewer experienced “unease” when looking at his works. He said that there was something “compelling” about seeing out of context juxtapositions such as “a rock suspended in the sky” as it poses questions such as “why does it not fall?” and following this “what makes a rock fall?”
- He said that he set himself against pessimism and wanted “to find joy”.
- His painting The Reckless Sleeper of 1928, reflects his interest in the subconscious and Freudian ideas about our dreams, in fact Freudian imagery is used in the piece to evoke particular hidden or repressed desires.
- The sleeping figure is presented in half of a horizontally split canvas, the sleeper is in some kind of hollow geometric structure – this could refer to someone who is trapped or indeed someone who feels they are restricted.
- Below this third of the canvas is a large grey form that appears to be in front of a dark blue background. Embedded in the grey are six objects, symbolic ones, that are can be seen to be arranged in two upturned “u” lines of three, or alternatively as five elements that surround one: the blue ribbon.
- In terms of Freudian symbolism, these objects may evoke ideas relating to fetish symbols: the physical embodiment of a mental obsession or desire.
- It is possible that the mirror symbolises vanity, the hat sexual desire, the bird death, the apple temptation and the lit candle truth and life.
- The many other possible meanings of these objects accentuate the sense of unease and disorientation of the viewer that Magritte sought from the spectators of his work.
- The fact the dream symbols appear below the sleeper might imply that they are negative or what he sees as unacceptable desires.
- Max Ernst was a German Surrealist who was a great advocate of automatic drawing and he employed this technique in many of his works. In this sense his works are very reminiscent of those of Dada.
- Although his works are evocative of the Dada style he did make further artistic decisions after he had completed his automatic drawings rather than simply leaving that to be the finished work as a Dadaist might.
- There was a sense of the illogical when it came to the composition of his works which was often dictated by his automatic drawing, which would, in a sense, act as a frame for the rest of the work.
- His 1940 work Europe After the Rain II is a post-apocalyptic yet classical depiction of a landscape; it is a eulogy for the loss of European civilization after the Second World War.
- This piece was created through decalcomania where paint is applied to one surface then transferred (by pressing) to another surface, the second surface being that to be used as a canvas, the landscape would then have been created by artistic editing of what had been printed onto the canvas and detailing what had been left to create a narrative scene.
- The golden brown colour used uniformly across the work is reminiscent of cinders, which is apt as it evokes the sense of the burning destruction that occurred leaving the scene in its broken state of disarray.
- The male figure in the image is said to be called Lop Lop, an enigmatic self-portrait of Ernst.
- He turns his back on the land he has known, which is evocative of Ernst’s own position as he moved to America from France whilst completing this piece.
- Although the figure is dressed like a gladiator although he did not fight in the war it implies some kind of heroism, perhaps this is done in irony to the fact he didn’t fight in the war, or perhaps is a link to his many escapes from being arrested by Nazi forces causing his fleeing to America, even leaving his wife in France.
- There is an interesting amalgamation of man made forms that have been destroyed and organic growth in the foreground, the juxtaposition of these elements adds to the state of non-reality that the scene is in.
- When we look closer at the broken forms there are visual clues alluding to some kind of human forms residing within them. The reasoning for their placing here seems obscure and in that sense is quite typical of the subjective nature of the style. This is because of the works being so tightly linked to one person’s specific psychological response or feeling from within the artist, therefore some aspects of the image that may not at first be obvious to the viewer may hold significant meaning in the mind of the artist.
- The viewer may see these forms as those lost during the war or even those who remain stuck in the old ways unable to move on from the war as Ernst did when he fled to America.
- Merret Oppenheim was a famous Surrealist affiliated with the likes of Picasso, who had given her inspiration with regard to her most well known piece Fur Breakfast of 1936.
- As a female Surrealist she still sought to represent repressed sexual desires, but perhaps in a way that was not derogatory to women, or in a way that might allude to them as passive objects to facilitate male sexual gratification.
- Oppenheim featured as a model for a series of photographs taken by iconic photographer Man Ray for the Surrealist magazine Minotaur.
- Her work Fur Breakfast can be considered particularly striking if not for the extremely sexual connotations of the work but also for it use of found objects, a real cup, saucer and spoon cover in fur.
- Duchamp paved the way for artists to use found objects in their work through his extremely influential work Bottle Rack of 1914 and Fountain three years later.
- This was extremely controversial as it did not show the skill of the artists hand, rather the skill is in the idea of using a particular material, in this case extremely out of context, in a sense the some of the first conceptual works where the idea behind the piece is fundamental.
- Taking into account the sexual connotations of the piece, it acts as a fetish symbol, the cup acting as female genitalia and the spoon as the male counterpart.
- The covering of these objects in fur is representative of pubic hair.
- The reference to the sexual can be seen as a reflection of primitive desires associated with the id part of the human psyche.
- Surrealists considered women to be more in tune with this part of the psyche and therefore, possibly more able to express it.
- Man Ray photographed her work Fur Breakfast the year it was made depicting the spoon aside from the cup and saucer, this could indicate some kind of separation or lack of sexual contact between the genital symbols. The implicature in the photograph is that the spoon is to be lifted and placed inside the cup evoking sexual intercourse.
- Another photographic image of the piece was by Dora Maar, here the set up of the piece is the same but the cup and saucer are displayed on a napkin of some description. A strong light source has been used to create strong, high contrast dramatic shadows that are reminiscent of Dalí’s works.
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