We explain what surrealism is and when this movement arises. Movement characteristics. Representatives and authors.
What is surrealism?
Surrealism is known as an important artistic and aesthetic movement born in France in the 1920s, from the legacy of the Dadaist movement and the influence of the French writer André Breton, considered its founder and main exponent. This movement enjoyed wide popularity for decades and had literary, cinematographic and plastic arts.
The term surreal comes from French, and is attributed to the French writer Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917, in his dramatic work Tiresias's boobs. It literally means "above" (south-) of realism (realism), which implies that the surrealists were trying to create a art that went beyond the limiting perspectives of the realism.
Surrealism was nourished by very diverse aesthetic and philosophical sources, ranging from poetry avant-garde of Rimbaud, Lautréamont and Alfred Jarry, the paint Bosch, the Dadaist explorations and above all the influence of the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, whose perspective on the human mind and the dynamics of dreams served as the basis for the surrealists.
Far from being a stable and uniform movement, surrealism took root in the search and innovation in terms of artistic techniques, construction of objects and pictorial perspectives. In the literary field, it represented an enormous revolution in language, forcing him to break with the rules of the understandable and to embrace strangeness, through methods such as automatic writing (free from conscious planning) and dreamlike poetic visions.
It was a school of great importance in Europe and the Americas, being adopted by various political and social tendencies as an artistic mechanism of liberation, capable of giving a voice to the silenced and saying everything that was normally silent. Surrealism had its heyday before the Second World War, at which time most of its European followers moved to the United States and Latin America, where the surrealist seed will bear its last fruits.
Characteristics of surrealism
Surrealism aspired to break down the barriers of the conscious mind, approaching what Sigmund Freud called "the unconscious." To this end, he aspired to suspend the artist's control over the making of his work, through automatic painting and writing techniques, or aiming at the reproduction of the ambient of dreams, through relationships, proportions and inventions difficult to translate into ordinary language. In the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 written by Bretón, it is defined as:
“Pure psychic automatism, by means of which it is attempted to express, verbally, in writing or in any other way, the real functioning of the thought. It is a dictate of thought, without the regulatory intervention of reason, oblivious to any aesthetic or moral concern”.
Among other creations typical of the surrealists is the "exquisite corpse", in which they combine verses from various authors to compose a single poem, without agreeing on a single meaning.
Representatives and authors of surrealism
Surrealism counted among its ranks some of the most famous European artists of the first half of the 20th century. However, it was so widespread and accepted in Europe and other latitudes that it is not possible to list all its authors and representatives.A summary of the most significant would include the names of:
In the literature:
- Andre Breton (1896-1966). French writer and poet, founder of the movement.
- Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). French poet, playwright and actor, creator of the “theater of cruelty”.
- Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936). Spanish poet and playwright, assassinated and disappeared by the ranks of the Franco regime.
- William Apollinaire (1880-1918). French poet, novelist and essayist, famous for his calligrams.
- Jacques Prevert (1900-1977). French poet and playwright, film scriptwriter and communist militant.
- Rene Char (1907-1988). French poet, he moved away from surrealism in 1938.
- Octavio Paz (1914-1998). Mexican poet and essayist, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.
In the plastic arts:
- Salvador Dali (1904-1989). Spanish painter, sculptor and writer, he was one of the most famous surrealists in the world.
- Rene Magritte (1898-1967). Belgian painter who gave surrealism a conceptual charge, famous for his painting "this is not a pipe".
- Joan Miró (1893-1983). Spanish painter, sculptor and engraver, his work delved into the universe of childhood and local Catalan traditions.
- Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). French painter and chess player, famous for his work Font (delivered to an exhibition under the pseudonym R. MUTT) consisting of a urinal.
- Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). Mexican painter famous for her self-referential and feminist work, as well as her love affair with Mexican muralist Diego de Rivera.
In the cinema:
- Luis Bunuel (1900-1983). Spanish film director, known for his short film an Andalusian dog and his numerous collaborations with Dalí.
- Jean Cocteau (1889-1963). French poet, novelist, playwright, painter and filmmaker.