SURREALISM
Giorgio de Chirico
Max Ernst
Joan Miro
Paul Klee
Salvador Dali
Rene Magritte
• Surrealism was a style of art and literature
that stressed the subconscious or non
rational significance of imagery arrived at
by automatism or the exploitation of
chance effects, or unexpected
juxtapositions.
• Surrealism was not only an art movement,
but a philosophy that embraced literature,
music, cinema, and popular culture.
Surrealist poets experimented with
Automatism, a form of writing that had
poets trying to record their thoughts,
without conscious control and without any
conscious regard for aesthetic or moral
considerations.
• Surrealist artists thought of their images as
visual poems.
• Surrealism flourished in Europe between
World Wars I and II. It grew principally out
of the earlier Dada movement, which
before World War I produced works of
anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but
Surrealism’s emphasis was not on
negation but on positive expression.
• The movement was a reaction against the
destruction wrought by the "rationalism"
that had guided European culture and
politics in the past and had culminated in
the horrors of World War I.
• According to the major spokesman of the
movement, the poet and critic André
Breton, who published "The Surrealist
Manifesto" in 1924, Surrealism united
conscious and unconscious realms of
experience so that the world of dream and
fantasy would be joined to the everyday
rational world in "an absolute reality, a
surreality."
• Drawing heavily on theories adapted from
Sigmund Freud, (the Swiss psychiatrist)
Breton saw the unconscious as the
wellspring of the imagination. He defined
genius in terms of accessibility to this
normally untapped realm, which, he
believed, could be attained by poets and
painters.
Marc Chagall – 1887 - 1985
• The Russian painter Marc Chagall was an
early inspiration for the Surrealist
movement. While he always kept one foot
planted in the real Russian soil that
produced him, he was one of the first to
free his visual imagination “from the bonds
of reason and convention,” and his work
served as inspiration for the Surrealists.
• Chagall
• I and the Village
Marc Chagall - Birthday
Giorgio de Chirico – 1888 - 1978
• De Chirico was an Italian painter whose works
from the period 1909 to 1919, were to have an
influence on the Surrealist movement that would
form a few years later.
• De Chirico read and admired the writing of
Nietzsche, the nihilist philosopher; when De
Chirico travelled through the city of Turin, on his
way to Paris in 1911, he felt he had found
Nietzsche’s city, and created several disquieting
paintings of desolate urban landscapes.
Giorgio De Chirico (Italian)
• Melancholy and the
Mystery of the Street
De Chirico – Italian Piazza
• Salvador Dali is often
the first name we
associate with
Surrealism, but he did
not join the movement
until 1929, five years
after its founding, and
he was kicked out of
the movement in
1939, because of his
fascist leanings.
• Dali was something of
an exhibitionist; he
loved to gain publicity
by shocking or
provoking his critics.
• He spent the war
years (WWII) in
America, where he
made a fortune
working with
advertisers and with
Disney.
Salvador Dali – The Enigma of
Hitler - 1939
• Salvador Dali
• The Enigma of Time
Dali - Apparition of the Aphrodite of
Cnidus
Salvador Dali – Geopolitical Child
• Salvador Dali
• The Burning Giraffe
• Here we see one of
Dali’s motifs, the
drawers that suggest
the hidden contents of
the human
subconscious
The City of Drawers
• The Drawers of the
Psyche
Salvador Dali
Space Elephant
Dali returned to this
spindly legged
elephant motif over
and over again. The
fragile legs seem
incapable of
supporting the weight
of the animal.
• (just for you George)
Salvador Dali – Alice in
Wonderland
• Lewis Carol’s story of
the girl who fell down
a rabbit hole held a
special fascination for
Dali, as Alice’s
journey is a voyage
into the
subconscious, the
realm of surrealism.
• Dali
• Illustration from Alice
in Wonderland
• Dali
• - from Alice in
Wonderland
Rene Magritte
1898 - 1967
• Magritte loved to use the props of
normalcy in order to upend, invert and
collapse them, leading the viewer into the
unknown territory where life leaves off and
art begins. "The mind loves the unknown,"
he avowed, "it loves images whose
meaning is unknown, since the meaning of
the mind itself is unknown."
Magritte – The Treachery of Images
– 1928/29
• The Treachery of Images is perhaps
Magritte’s best known work. Magritte is
reminding the viewer that an image is just
an image.
• Magritte
• Attempting the
Impossible
• Here again, Magritte
warns of the
impossibility of
creating an ideal
reality through art.
• Magritte's work frequently displays a
juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual
context, giving new meanings to familiar things.
• Magritte described his paintings as "visible
images which conceal nothing; they evoke
mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my
pictures, one asks oneself this simple question,
'What does that mean?'. It does not mean
anything, because mystery means nothing
either, it is unknowable."
Magritte – The Tomb of the
Wrestlers
Magritte – Golconde 1953
• Time Transfixed
• 1939
• Magritte
• Presence
Magritte – The False Mirror
Magritte – The Tempest
• 1912, Magritte’s mother committed suicide by
drowning herself in the River Sambre. According
to a legend, 13-year-old Magritte was present
when her body was retrieved from the water, but
recent research has discredited this story, which
may have originated with the family nurse.
Supposedly, when his mother was found, her
dress was covering her face, an image that has
been suggested as the source of several
paintings Magritte painted in 1927–1928 of
people with cloth obscuring their faces, including
Les Amants.
Magritte –Les Amants (The Lovers)
• Magritte's constant play with reality and
illusion has been attributed to the early
death of his mother. Psychoanalysts who
have examined bereaved children have
said that Magritte's back and forth play
with reality and illusion reflects his
"constant shifting back and forth from what
he wishes—'mother is alive'—to what he
knows—'mother is dead' "