Artistic movement dating from the last days of World War I and ending in 1966 (some like Maurice Nadeau, the movement’s semi-official historian, would say it is alive still) with the death of Breton, André, the unofficial Pope of Surrealism. Its peak period was the two decades between the two World Wars, the tumultuous years which saw the stock market crash in 1929 and fascism take power in Italy, Spain, and Germany. It was also a period of hope for the international Left, with whom Surrealism sympathized. Although it began as a literary movement, it is doubtless better known for its striking visuals---none more so than the excruciatingly vivid, eye-slicing scene in Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s 1929 film Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) which was Dalí’s debut on the Parisian scene. The movement’s playful aesthetic is captured in Comte de Lautréamont’s definition of beauty in Chants de Maldoror (1868), which became a kind of Surrealist slogan or watchword: ‘the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’. The word ‘Surrealism’ was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917, but it was Breton who gave the term the meaning we recognize today in the first Surrealist Manifesto (1924). Surrealism, he said, is pure psychic automatism, which through writing or any other artistic means, expresses the true functioning of thought, by which he meant thought unconstrained by reason, or by moral, ethical, or aesthetic considerations. Influenced by Freud, Sigmund’s Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (1901), translated as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1914), Surrealism wanted to get in touch with the untutored creativity of the unconscious itself and dissolve the dividing line between art and life. Interestingly, Freud himself was unimpressed by Surrealism, and did not warm to Breton when the two met in Vienna in 1921. Surrealism adapted Freud’s therapeutic technique of free association to develop its two signature artistic procedures: automatic writing (a stream of consciousness flow of words, thoughts, and ideas written down without regard for syntax or sense) and collage (random combinations of images and materials). German cultural critic, Benjamin, Walter, writing in 1929, described the often quite provocative results of these techniques as inspiring a ‘profane illumination’. Virtually every medium of art experimented with Surrealist techniques during the movement’s heyday, leading to the production of several memorable works, with the exception of music which never found a way of accommodating itself to its emphasis on chance and randomness. In literature, Surrealism yielded Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1924) and André Breton’s Nadja (1928); in cinema it was the aforementioned Buñuel who led the way, but even Alfred Hitchcock experimented with Surrealism (he hired Dalí to design a dream sequence for his 1945Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck feature, Spellbound); in photography it was Man Ray, Lee Miller (Man Ray’s model and muse), Eugène Atget, and Max Ernst who set the standard; in the visual arts it was undoubtedly Dalí who captured the limelight, but no less important were René Magritte, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Yves Tanguy; in the plastic arts, it was Marcel Duchamp who created the best-known works; while in theatre it was undoubtedly Artaud, Antonin who was the most notorious, though he later denounced Surrealism (itself a very Surrealist thing to do, judging by the frequency of the denunciations and expulsions the group experienced). Surrealism was a direct influence on three major figures in critical theory: Bataille, Georges, Lefebvre, Henri, and Lacan, Jacques; and a distant, but not insignificant influence on Baudrillard, Jean and Debord, Guy. Further Reading: W. Benjamin ‘Surrealism’ in Reflections (1978). M. Gale Dada and Surrealism (1997). D. Hopkins Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (2004). M. Nadeau Histoire du Surréalism (1964), translated as The History of Surrealism (1968).
http://www.surrealism.org/ • A brief overview of the Surrealist movement and short biographies of famous Surrealists.
http://www.surrealist.com/ • A history of Surrealism and Surreal art, as well as information about famous Surrealists.
http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/ • The website of the Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies, which comprises the Universities of Essex, Manchester, and Tate.