Stylistic Elements Of Surrealism

the human eye. Visualize having the ability to completely free your imagination, letting your thoughts and desires wander to form exotic scenes or locations. These unfamiliar worlds lay deep inside of the brain as subconscious thoughts, usually undetected by the person with them in his or her possession. With the help of the intriguing art movement known as Surrealism, however, these subconscious thoughts are finally able to be brought to fruition. Surrealism is a unique style of art that originated in France with the help of brilliant writer André Breton (Chilvers 599). He defined surrealism and its principles as a “purely psychic automatism through which we undertake to express, in words, writing, or any other activity, the actual functioning of thought… Surrealism rests upon belief in the higher reality of specific forms of associations, previously neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams, and in the disinterested play of thinking” (Chilvers 599). He also strongly emphasized that its purpose was “to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality” (Chilvers 599). Surrealism is a 20th century style of painting which rebels against traditional notions of art. In order to understand this genre, it is necessary to examine the movement’s characteristics, representative

Surrealist paintings are described as dreamlike and fantastical. Much of Dalí’s paintings were images he had dreamed up. He said that he would paint what almost seem like photographs from his dreams. Dalí took Sigmund Freud’s idea that dreams are symbolic. Objects can symbolize something as well as take on a pun on the word. Much of the

To begin, we will look at the ideals and influences that led to the formation of surrealist ideals,

While contemporary artists often look back on Surrealism as a deeply impactful revolution of thought in art, not everyone agrees with the praise it is given. At its consummation, Surrealism was viewed by many in the art world as the pseudo-intellectual creations of anarchic men. “In 1925, there were few indeed who saw in it anything more than a return to infantilism and nihilism” (Peyre). By the 1940s some surrealists themselves viewed the movement in a negative light, including poet Louis Aragon. Author Anna Balakian states that:

Surrealism was one of the most influential artistic movements of the 20th Century. André Breton consolidated Surrealism as a movement in the early 1920s, trying to achieve the “total liberation of the mind and of all that resembles it[1]” through innovative and varied ideas. Surrealism deeply influenced the world in the era between the two world wars and played a big role in the diffusion and adoption of psychology worldwide. Surrealism faded after World War II, but its revolutionary genius has influenced every artistic movement ever since.

Although there are significant distinctions between Dadaism and Surrealist movement in their focus of interest in exploring the language and the art, they also happen to have similar concept for groundbreaking the norms and sometimes makes it hard for people to differentiate them. Then, here is an artist who manage to cover and is considered to be one of the pioneers for both Dadaism and Surrealism: Max Ernst. Due to the traumatic army experience during the World War 1, Ernst became highly critical of the western culture. His experience of the brutality of the world critically influenced his later works to become quite absurd, yet interesting like those of other Dadaists. In terms of relationship between the word and the image, Ernst created the so-called fatagaga, or Fabrication de Tableaux Gasometriques Garantis, which meant the combination of the artists to create an artwork including imagery and text. These Dadaist collaborative works deemphasized the importance of individual authorship and allowed the artists’ interactions to further development of Dadaism.

Kahlo explored many themes in her work such as race, sex, gender, and her own reality. Kahlo’s deep expression of her life in her paintings does not match up with Surrealist philosophy. Although many of her paintings include surreal elements, she was never freed from her reality. One could argue that the surrealist movement was founded in Europe by a group of men experiencing World War 1, thus surrealism was born through a cultural crisis of identity that Kahlo was not experiencing.

What is reality behind surrealism? What is surrealism? Why surrealism? Surrealism is a workmanship development that started in Paris in 1917. The primary event of "surrealism" was in the year 1917. It was initially used to characterize a vaudeville play called 'Les Mamelles de Tiresias' which was delivered by Guillaume Apollinaire. However Apollinaire didn't make an arrangement of standards for his definition, which got to be well known with individuals who enjoyed Apollinaire

Wassily Kandinsky has been part of my fascination and love for art for approximately ten years now. Beginning when I was a freshman in high school, and every year as part of our art classes, my instructor would do small units on art theory and highlight artists throughout those units, Kandinsky included. While my talents, in particular, are somewhat limited to what I can represent, Kandinsky was the first to break Western art’s most “important rule:” that art need to depict anything (Frank, 396). As the first to break away from art being representational, Kandinsky opened other avenues of expression, as well (Wassily-Kandinsky.org). Surrealism, the movement I am most fascinated by, is something I believe is a natural extension from art representing nothing, to art representing multiple things.

The Surrealists believed that the conscious mind repressed the power of imagination and dreams, weakening it by norms or taboos. They utilized unusual and untraditional techniques and phenomena to achieve subconscious creativity, eradicating the line between dream and reality.

Like the Dadaists, the surrealists used many methods to free the creative process from reliance on the kind of conscious control they believed that the society had shaped too much. Surrealists used automatism-the creation of art without conscious control-and various types of planned accidents to provoke reactions closely related to subconscious experience. The Spanish artist Joan Miro was a master of this approach. Although

Each artist of the Dada era had a new way of expressing Freud?s ideas. They also felt that art was a powerful means of self-revelation, and that the images came from ones subconscious mind had a truth of its own. As Marcel Duchamp mocked the Mona Lisa by drawing a Padilla 3 mustache on her, stated that the painting was a lewd message set by the conventional way of thinking. Since the Dada artist did not believe in western culture this made sense, because people only want believe what is told to them, instead of what is true. The Dada movement marked a meeting of people to have ?noise concerts? where they recited poems in a free association verse. In these poetry readings the artist perceived how they felt about the world. As World War I began the Dadaist perceived it as a world gone mad. Not only did they express their work in unconventional ways; they used the subconscious as a way of making their views true. Although the Dada era was short lived it influenced and questioned the traditional concepts of the western world. These techniques set an agenda for a new trial by error art form of this same era. The spirit of Freud in the Dadaist era never really died, it is shown today as ?Pop art? or sometimes known as neo-Dada art forms. Also this revolution of thinking and art paved the way for the Surrealist movement. The Surrealist movement of the 1920?s through 1930?s captivated the world with its bizarre way of thinking. Just as the Dadaist used

The surrealist artists believed the dream state and subconscious mind to be an untapped and very fertile creative fount of inspiration. The symbolism of dreams and the expressive images generated by the subconscious were far more thought provoking than the representational, logical images of the conscious mind. The surrealist artists were creating art out of what others thought to be garbled and unintelligible. They were in effect taking a concept created to heal and using it to create art instead. They were on to something with this. No matter what the medium or the style used, a bit of the self becomes visible and evident in the result. Art therapy is one of the modern descendants of this movement.

The surrealist movement holds emotional authenticity and social activism as the highest ideals. Influenced by the work of Freud and Jung, the arts are viewed as psychic manifestations that go deeper than external reality. Spontaneous techniques, like psychic automatism (i.e. automatic writing and drawing), generate images from the unconscious and result in content similar to dream experiences and contemplating these images provides a new experience of reality (McNiff, 2009).

Most of us connect surrealism with art and images from Dali and his generation. However, the artists of the surrealist movement regard their work as an expression of the original philosophical movement with the works being an artefact that philosophy. André Breton was clearly in his view that surrealism was above all, a revolutionary and radical philosophical movement, explaining that is not a matter of aesthetics, but rather a way of thinking, a point of view (Waldberg 1997; Pass 2011:29-30).