From the Literary to the Pictorial
This metaphysical prologue should help you in furthering your knowledge, by study and research, about one of the most intriguing art movements of the XX century. As you will see, it will give you only a sketchy panorama of some of the principal characters and events without any elaboration or explanation in the hope that, after reading it, you will visit a book store or a library. Remember that you might spend a life acquiring assets and then lose them, but the knowledge you acquire you will never; therefore, take care of your health, accumulate wealth and, above all, strive to gain wisdom.
Surrealism is a term applied to Art as well as to Literature.
The
Surrealists claimed as their own writers, poets, and philosophers who lived even before Guillame Apollinaire coined the term in 1917 and
André Breton, as the principal theoretician and chief propagator of the movement, immortalized it in his
First Surrealist Manifesto published in 1924. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Isidore Ducasse better known as le Conte de Lautréamont (1846-1870), and Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) are some of the poets who preceeded the birth of
DADA. Founded in Zürich in the spring of 1916 by Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Richard Hulsenbeck, Marcel Janko and Tristan Tzara at a little bar known as
Cabaret Voltaire,
DADA is considered to be the pre-Surrealist phase.
Seeking a synthesis of the dreams, as revoked at dawn, and reality, as it disappears at sunset, the
surrealists landed on the shifting sands of the subconscious (Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939) along the shores of the sea of knowledge where rests the concrete manifestation of reality (Friedrich Hegel, 1870-1931). Hegel's metaphor became Breton's credo.
The Precursors
It was the inspiration of the
Surrealists to avoid presenting or representing reality and to put the emphasis on invention and creativity by uncovering the poetic aspect of life with its kaleidoscopic multidimensional images and by tapping the hallucinatory power of the irrational and every other possible source of metaphysical energy. The
Surrealists had empathy with the artists of previous generations who shared their vision and used reality only to enhance imagination. From Hieronymus Van Aeken Bosh (1450-1516) with his erotic, sadistic and sarcastic themes, and Pieter Bruegel, senior (1528-1569) with his fantastic paintings of the hallucination of sick peasants, to Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) with his worlds of dreams and Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) with his allegorical figures composed of animal and vegetable imagery; from Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) with his dream eroticism and Jean-Ignace Gérard Grandville (1803-1847) with his distinctly humorous dream fantasy to Gustave Doré (1832-1883), painter, litographer and wood engraver of the fantastic, the bizarre and the sublime and Arnold Börklin (1827-1901) with his mythological and dreamlike landscapes. Some others were: Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), John Everett Millais (1829-1896), Odilon Redon (1840-1916), Henry Rousseau (1840-1916) and
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918).
The Beginning
Surrealism affirmed the supremacy of the unconscious over the conscious, and preferred allegorical composition to the shallow imitation of nature. Dealing with the fantastic, every painting conjured up a dream world inhabited by unworldly mysterious figures, elongated objects, melting watches, unexplained shadows entering the field of vision... From Breton's
First Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and his
Second Surrealist Manifesto in 1929, quite a few painters adhered to the Movement and some of them were also poets and writers (
De Chirico, Mesens,
Dalí).
The following artists who joined Breton in the first five years (1924-1929) will give you an idea of the range and main attributes of shock and fascination of an art form that never stops to amaze every gallerygoer and museumgoer in almost every continent. Before I give you the names, I feel that it is my duty to remind you to go to the librry and get the books that have colour reporductions so that you may assess what I have been saying. And the names of the artists are: Hans Arp,
Marc Chagall,
Salvador Dalí,
Giorgio De Chirico,
Marcel Duchamp,
Max Ernst,
Paul Klee,
René Magritte,
Joan Miró, Francis Picabia,
Pablo Picasso,
Man Ray,
Kurt Schwitters and
Yves Tanguy. Yes, Picasso flirted with Surrealism from 1925 to 1944.
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