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The Surrealists
The Surrealists
POSTED JULY 16, 2019
Surrealism was a cultural movement that arose in Paris around 1920. It grew out of the anti-war Dada movement, but emerging as it did during a decade of peace and prosperity, had very different goals.
Surrealism was a cultural movement that arose in Paris around 1920. It grew out of the anti-war Dada movement, but emerging as it did during a decade of peace and prosperity, had very different goals.
Surrealism is essentially a cerebral retreat of survivors who do not want to look back. The Surrealist poets, writers, and visual artists stage an psychological retreat from reality, either past or present, and seek what the poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, called “sur-reality,” or a realism outside and beyond perceived reality. The regressive nature of Surrealism could be understood as healing and reconstructive, replacing an aggressive and public voice with a private exploration into the recesses of the unconscious.(1)
André Breton, considered the movement's leader, outlined its aims in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), affirming the supremacy of the “disinterested play of thought” and the “omnipotence of dreams” rather than reason and logic. Breton and his colleagues were inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the power of unconscious thought. Surrealist poets believed that through “automatic writing” and hypnosis, artists could free their imaginations to reveal deeper truths.(2)
André Breton, considered the movement's leader, outlined its aims in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), affirming the supremacy of the “disinterested play of thought” and the “omnipotence of dreams” rather than reason and logic. Breton and his colleagues were inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the power of unconscious thought. Surrealist poets believed that through “automatic writing” and hypnosis, artists could free their imaginations to reveal deeper truths.(2)
Surrealist artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects, and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself. Its aim was to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality". 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.(3)
Surrealist artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects, and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself. Its aim was to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality". 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.(3)
"It's the sweet law of men" - Paul Éluard
It’s the sweet law of men
They make wine from grapes
They make fire from coal
They make men from kisses
It’s the true law of men
Kept intact despite
the misery and war
despite danger of death
It’s the warm law of men
To change water to light
Dream to reality
Enemies to friends
A law old and new
That perfects itself
From the child’s heart’s depths
To reason’s heights.
Afternoon - Pierre Reverdy
In the morning that comes up behind the roof, in the shelter of the bridge, in the corner of the cypresses that rise above the wall, a rooster has crowed. In the bell tower that rips the air with its shining point, the notes ring out and already the morning din can be heard in the street; the only street that goes from the river to the mountain dividing the woods. One looks for some other words but the ideas are always just as dark, just as simple and singularly painful. There is hardly more than the eyes, the open air, the grass and the water in the distance with, around every bend, a well or a cool basin. In the right-hand corner the last house with a larger head at the window. The trees are extremely alive and all those familiar companions walk along the demolished wall that is crushed into the thorns with bursts of laughter. Above the ravine the din augments, swells, and if the car passes on the upper road one no longer knows if it is the flowers or the little bells that are chiming. Under the blazing sun, when the landscape is on fire, the traveler crosses the stream on a very narrow bridge, before a dark hole where the trees line the water that falls asleep in the afternoon. And, against the trembling background of the woods, the motionless man.
C - Louis Aragon
I have crossed the bridges of Cé
It was there that it all began
A song of times past
Speaks of a wounded knight
Of a rose upon the road
And of a bodice unlaced
Of the castle of a mad duke
And of the swans in its moats
Of the meadow where will dance
An eternal fiancée
And like cold milk I drank
The long lay of false glories
The Loire carries off my thoughts
Along with the overturned cars
And the defused weapons
And the tears not rubbed away
Oh my France, oh my abandoned one
I have crossed the bridges of Cé.
Cuckoo-Clock - Robert Desnos (opening lines)
Everything was as if in a childlike picture
The moon wore an opera hat whose eight reflections bounced on the surface of the ponds
A ghost in a well-tailored shroud
Smoked a cigar at the window of its apartment,
On the last floor of a castle keep
Where the omniscient rook told cats their fortune...
If you only knew - Robert Desnos
Far from me and like the stars, the sea and all the trappings of poetic myth,
Far from me but here all the same without your knowing,
Far from me and even more silent because I imagine you endlessly.
Far from me, my lovely mirage and eternal dream, you cannot know.
If you only knew.
Far from me and even farther yet from being unaware of me and still unaware.
Far from me because you undoubtedly do not love me or, what amounts to the
same thing, that I doubt you do.
Far from me because you consciously ignore my passionate desires.
Far from me because you are cruel.
If you only knew.
Far from me, joyful as a flower dancing in the river at the tip of its aquatic stem,
sad as seven p.m. in a mushroom bed.
Far from me yet silent in my presence and still joyful like a stork-shaped hour
falling from on high.
Far from me at the moment when the stills are singing, at the moment when the
silent and loud sea curls up on its white pillows.
If you only knew.
Far from me, o my ever-present torment, far from me in the magnificent noise of
oyster shells crushed by a night owl passing a restaurant at first light.
If you only knew.
Far from me, willed, physical mirage.
Far from me there's an island that turns aside when ships pass.
Far from me a calm herd of cattle takes the wrong path, pulls up stubbornly at the
edge of a steep cliff, far from me, cruel woman.
Far from me, a shooting star falls into the poet's nightly bottle.
He corks it right away and from then on watches the star enclosed in the glass, the
constellations born on its walls, far from me, you are so far from me.
If you only knew.
Far from me a house has just been built.
A bricklayer in white coveralls at the top of the scaffolding sings a very sad little
song and, suddenly, in the tray full of mortar, the future of the house appears:
lovers' kisses and double suicides nakedness in the bedrooms strange beautiful
women
and their midnight dreams, voluptuous secrets caught in the act by the parquet
floors.
Far from me, If you only knew.
If you only knew how I love you and, though you do not love me, how happy I
am, how strong and proud I am, with your image in my mind,
to leave the universe.
How happy I am to die for it.
If you only knew how the world has yielded to me.
And you, beautiful unyielding woman, how you too are my prisoner.
O you, far-from-me, who I yield to.
If you only knew.
Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" (1931, 9.5 in x 13 in) is perhaps the most well-known Surrealist painting. A" dreamscape", it presents realistically drawn objects in an unrealistic way: the cliffs of Catalonia bordering on a flat, wave-less sea, a dead tree emerging from a tabletop, the melting clocks, one of which is being devoured by ants. A barren desert landscape partly in shadow has an end of the day feeling of desolation. The bizarre sleeping/dreaming form with the long eyelashes and draped in a melting timepiece has been interpreted by some to be a representation of Dali himself.
The painting epitomizes Dalí 's theories of 'softness' and 'hardness', which were central to his thinking at the time. His message is, that our subliminal unconscious mind is present in what we do in our daily lives and has more power over us than man-made objects of the conscious world. In this, time has no importance; objects created by humans, such as the watches, are wholly transitory. (4)
Dali never explained the painting, but among the interpretations offered by art critics is one by Dawn Adès that "The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order". This interpretation suggests that Dalí was incorporating an understanding of the world introduced by Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity. (3)
Two paintings by Rene Magritte:
Left "The Difficult Crossing " (1926 version)
Below left: "The Treachery of Images" (1929)
"The Difficult Crossing" contains a number of curious elements, some of which are common to many of Magritte's works.
The baluster (the object which looks like the bishop from a chess set) is given the anthropomorphic feature of a single eye. In other Magritte paintings it seems to play an inanimate role analogous to a tree or plant.
Another common feature of Magritte's works seen here is the ambiguity between windows and paintings. The back of the room shows a boat in a thunderstorm, but the viewer is left to wonder if the depiction is a painting or the view out a window.
Near the baluster stands a table. On the top, a disembodied hand is holding a red bird, as if clutching it. The front right leg of the table resembles a human leg. (3)
"The Treachery of Images" is a painting of a pipe with the words "This is not a pipe" (Ceci n'est pas une pipe) scrawled below the image.
Magritte highlights the idea that an image of a pipe is not the same thing as the pipe itself (or the letters p-i-p-e). It is a representation of a pipe, once removed from the object to which it refers. He also forces us to consider our own reaction to the painting by suggesting that our compulsion to call the image a pipe reveals our predisposition to confuse the image with the thing it represents. We see the sign (the image of the pipe) as the signified in a process much like our tendency to see the word as the unambiguous sign of a thing. (5)
(3) Wikipedia
(4) Dali Universe website
Attribution notes:
Fair use notice: Images and quotes on this website may be subject to copyright. Their inclusion on this site is within the fair use doctrine of copyright law.
The Difficult Crossing is from Wikipedia, which presents this non-free-media rationale for its inclusion.
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