Surrealism
What is it?
A little history…
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The beginnings of Dada
correspond to the outbreak of
World War I.
Many Dadaists believed that the
'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois
capitalist society had led people
into war.
Dada artists wanted to show their
rejection of this reality through
their art work.
According to its proponents, Dada
was not art, it was "anti-art." For
everything that art stood for, Dada
was to represent the opposite.
Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar
Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany
Hannah Höch (1889-1978)
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Surrealism developed out
of the Dada activities of
World War I and the most
important center of the
movement was Paris.
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Andre Breton was the
founding leader – he
wanted to people to know
that it was a revolutionary
movement.
Surrealists explored the
direct expression of the
unconscious unobscured
by rational thought.
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The_Persistence_of_Memory
Salvador Dalí. (Spanish, 1904-1989)
Definition…
• As Surrealists developed
their philosophy they felt
that while Dada rejected
categories and labels,
Surrealism would
advocate the idea that
ordinary and depictive
expressions are vital and
important, but that the
sense of their
arrangement must be
open to the full range of
imagination
• Surrealism was influenced by Sigmund Freud's
psychoanalytical theories, but the movement was also
very much a reaction against the "reason" that had led
Europe into the devastations of World War I.
• According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and
critic André Breton, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious
and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world
of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world
in "an absolute reality, a surreality.
Sam Flores
Vladimir Kalinin
Sammy Charnine
Sammy Charnine
Pop Surrealism:
•Also known as Lowbrow art.
• An underground visual art
movement that arose in the Los
Angeles, California, area in the late
1970s.
•Origins in the underground comix
world, punk music, hot-rod street
culture, and other subcultures.
•Lowbrow art often has a sense of
humor - sometimes the humor is
gleeful, sometimes impish, and
sometimes it's a sarcastic comment.
Johannah O’ Donnell
It’s not just for painters…
• Surrealism has made
its way into
photography!
• Much is
possible with
the help of
digital editing
programs!
This hyper-real surreal look is very trendy
right now, especially in advertising!
More examples…
• Surrealism requirements (yes, one
element can count for 2 requirements):
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• A cohesive composition that moves across
the page, and tells a story
One example of exaggerated size/proportion
• 3 different images of yourself expressing 3
different emotions
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One example of
breaking the laws
of physics/matter
(gravity, melting,
Time, fire, etc)
• One example of blending one object into
another
• One example of object replacement
(butterflies instead of windmill blades, for
example)