Surrealism
André Breton writes both Surrealism Manifestos in 1924 and 1929 and defines surrealism 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. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern."
Surrealism is much influenced by Freud's psychoanalysis and his studies on sexual impulses and dreams.
«His analysis of dreams as wish-fulfillments provided him with models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and the mechanisms of repression as well as for elaboration of his theory of the unconscious. Freud postulated the existence of libido, an energy with which mental processes and structures are invested and which generates erotic attachments, and a death drive, the source of compulsive repetition, hate, aggression and neurotic guilt.»(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud)
André Breton was a writer and poet and reveals his literary ancestry influences of Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Comte de Lautréamont, Raymond Roussel, and Dante. Other writers and poets join the surrealist movement such as Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon.
André Breton also mad some pieces of art, namely collage and this typographic example:
Surrealism in Art
Surrealist artists believed that the way to free the power of imagination was through the unconscious, released from reason and realism
much influenced by the psichoanalisys of Freud, but also by Karl Marx theories and the contradictions of everyday life that would lead to a revolution.
These influences are, to a certain extent, a contradiction in themselves, since psychoanalysis is focused on the individual neuroses and Marx was concerned with the economic and social well being of the masses, the power to change society residing in the collective.
However, the surrealists thought that revelations could be found on the street and in everyday life. The art expression is surreal, because they juxtapose elements of reality that respect no rational order and the free associations they produce are dreamlike or crazy or simply weird.
Some artists like Dali or Magritte have almost a photographic feature, a clear design of the figure and objects that shocks for joining disconnected elements.
Other artists like Joan Miró express teir art through more abstract organic shapes, Yves Tangui in more doodling lines.
«Tanguy's paintings have a unique, immediately recognizable style of nonrepresentational surrealism. They show vast, abstract landscapes, mostly in a tightly limited palette of colors, only occasionally showing flashes of contrasting color accents. Typically, these alien landscapes are populated with various abstract shapes, sometimes angular and sharp as shards of glass, sometimes with an intriguingly organic look to them, like giant amoebae suddenly turned to stone.» https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Tanguy
Giorgio de Chirico identity feature is the neoclassical representation with the odd juxtaposition of elements that characterize surrealism. We can see in many of his paintings the classical greek-roman architecture elements of columns and façades and statues.
« In the years before World War I, he founded the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. After 1919, he became interested in traditional painting techniques, and worked in a neoclassical or neo-Baroque style, while frequently revisiting the metaphysical themes of his earlier work.»(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_de_Chirico)
«At its basic, the imagery is outlandish, perplexing, and even uncanny, as it is meant to jolt the viewer out of their comforting assumptions. Nature, however, is the most frequent imagery: Max Ernst was obsessed with birds and had a bird alter ego, Salvador Dalí's works often include ants or eggs, and Joan Miró relied strongly on vague biomorphic imagery.» (http://www.theartstory.org/movement-surrealism.htm)
Salvador Dali
«Salvador Dali is among the most versatile and prolific artists of the twentieth century. Though chiefly remembered for his painterly output, in the course of his long career he successfully turned to sculpture, printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and, perhaps most famously, filmmaking in his collaborations with Luis Bunuel and Alfred Hitchcock. Dali was renowned for his flamboyant personality as much as for his undeniable technical virtuosity. In his early use of organic morphology, his work bears the stamp of fellow Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. His paintings also evince a fascination for Classical and Renaissance art, clearly visible through his hyper-realistic style and religious symbolism of his later work. Dali is most often associated with the Surrealist movement, despite his formal expulsion from the group in 1934 for his reactionary political views.» (http://www.theartstory.org/artist-dali-salvador.htm)
Dali painted many famous works, one of them was painted in 1931 «The Persistence of Memory», where in a desert scene apparently disconnected elements float, irrational and illogic objects, melting clocks symbolizing time and mortality, the melting flesh looking like Dali's profile.
An interpretation of the painting in http://legomenon.com/salvador-dali-persistence-of-memory-melting-clocks-meaning.html
Dali's paranoic method is seen in other paintings, commented in the following video analyses of Khan Academy:
In many of his paintings his wife and muse Gala is present. As Dali became famous and his art turned more commercialized he received bad critics like in the case of the Christ painted in the 50's, which had an impact on me when I first watched it. I suppose that the amazing perspective of the Christ looking down to earth (a scene of Port Lligat, home of Dali) really impacts on the viewer.
René Magritte
Magritte, a belgian painter, joins the surrealist group in Paris, but unlike Dali he is an introvert and reclusive person. A TV coverage of a big exhibition on Magritte's work at MoMA gives a global view of his art
Max Ernst
Max Ernst was a german painter and sculptor, profoundly interested in the art of the mentally ill as a means to access primal emotion and unfettered creativity.
An excellent analysis is made in the next video about an early painting of 1921 - Celebes, the elephant of war - directly linked to the dark experience of Max Ernst during WWI, which makes the transition to surrealism, and inspired Breton to found the movement. He is a great promoter of Ernst's collages and paintings.
Surrealism in film - Luis Buñuel
The iconic director of surrealism in film is the spanish Luis Buñuel, who had a long life and filmed since the 20's till the 70's. He was close to Dali and Lorca in his youth in Spain. He had been influenced and impressed with Fritz Lang movie «Destiny» (1921).
His first surrealist silent movie «Le chien andalou», jointly pictured with Dali, is the perfect example of surrealism with the shocking image of an eye being cut by a blade
«Un Chien Andalou shocks at multiple levels, showing acts of irrational physical violence, raw sexual desire, rotting animal carcasses, insects, and a complete violation of the fundamental rules of logical plot. In his Poetics, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle had written that a work of literature or drama must consist of actions that arise logically out of each other, as well as preserve a unity of time and place. These rules of plot structure had dominated Western literature and theatre for centuries. But from the beginning, as they worked on their script at Dalí's home in Cadaques, Buñuel and Dalí agreed that nothing about the film could have a rational explanation. The resulting film has no narrative or linear logic. Skipping arbitrarily through time, "eight years later" and "sixteen years earlier," the film mocks and subverts the "title cards" that were used in silent movies to fill in temporal and narrative breaks.» (http://www.theartstory.org/artist-bunuel-luis.htm)
A later movie of the 70's «The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie»
«The germ of the idea for their next film together, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) came from Buñuel and Serge Silberman discussing uncanny repetition in everyday life; Silberman told an anecdote about how he had invited some friends for dinner at his house, only to forget about it, so that, on the night of the dinner party, he was absent and his wife was in her nightclothes.[216] The film tells of a group of affluent friends who are continually stymied in their attempts to eat a meal together, a situation that a number of critics have contrasted to the opposite dilemma of the characters in The Exterminating Angel, where guests of a dinner party are mysteriously unable to leave after having completed their meal.[157] For this film, Buñuel, Silberman and Carrière assembled a top-flight cast of European performers, "a veritable rogues' gallery of French art-house cinema", according to one critic.[217] For the first time, Buñuel made use of a video-playback monitor, which allowed him to make much more extensive use of crane shots and elaborate tracking shots, and enabled him to cut the film in the camera and eliminate the need for reshoots.[216] Filming required only two months and Buñuel claimed that editing took only one day.[216] When the film was released, Silberman decided to skip the Cannes Festival in order to concentrate on getting it nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, which it won, leading Buñuel to express his contempt for a process that relied on the judgment of, "2500 idiots, including for example the assistant dress designer of the studio." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Bu%C3%B1uel)
Surrealism in the feminine
As usual, female artists seem scarce and less famous than male artists. But in the videos of this week I was introduced to an artist I was not familiar to - Dorothea Tanning, married to Max Ernst, who was impressed with her self-portrait.
rida Khalo, the mexican painter of pain, married to Diego de Rivera, a women with much carisma, also painted «surreal» excruciating pictures of his tragic bus accident ( broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, and a dislocated shoulder), who left her suffering for the rest of her life. She had a turbulent relationship with Rivera and many other love affairs. Her paintings embed mexican culture and tradition. She embedded that tradition also in the way she dressed.
Meret Oppenheim is another female referrence, swiss surrealist artist - https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/art-between-wars/surrealism1/a/meret-oppenheim-object-fur-covered-cup-saucer-and-spoon