Surrealism was an artistic movement that brought together artists interested in expressing unconscious thoughts and dreams. It was led by Andre Breton and drew inspiration from Freudian psychoanalysis. There were two main trends - the Automatists who focused on free expression through abstraction, and the Veristic Surrealists who sought to represent unconscious images realistically. Notable Surrealist artists included Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Rene Magritte, and Max Ernst, each with their own unique styles exploring the surreal, paradoxical nature of dreams.

1. SURREALISM
Revision

2. Origin
• It was an artistic movement that brought
together artists, thinkers and researchers
• They were involved in a hunt of sense of
expression of the unconscious
• They were searching for the definition of n
– New aesthetic
– New humankind
– New social order

3. Origin
• Their forerunners were the Italian Metaphysical
painters
• It came into being after the French poet Andre
Breton 1 published Manifeste du Surrealisme
• Breton suggested that rational thought was
repressive to the powers of creativity and
imagination and thus inimical to artistic
expression
• Breton admired Freud and its concept of the
subconscious

4. Beginnings
• It is closely related to some forms of
abstract art
• At the end of World War I Tristan Tzara,
leader of the Dada, wanted to attack
society through scandal
• He believed that society that creates the
monstrosity of war do not deserve art so
he decided to create an anti-art, full of
ugliness instead of beauty.

5. Beginnings
• Tzara wanted to offend the new industrial
commercial world of the bourgeoisie.
• His victims did not feel insulted
• They saw this art as a reaction against old
art
• The result was the opposite to its original
one because anti-art became art.

6. Beginnings
• One group of artists did not follow Tzara´s ideas
• The Surrealist movement gained momentum
after the Dadaá
• It was led by Breton
• The artists researched and studied the work of
Freud and Jung
• Some of the artists expressed themselves
– In the abstract tradition
– In the symbolic tradition

7. Groups
• The two forms of expression formed two
distinct trends:
–Automatism
–Veristic
• There are two different interpretations of
Freud and Jung

8. Automatists
• Artists interpreted it as referring to a suppression
of consciousness in favour of the subconscious
• They were more focused on feeling and less
analytical
• They understood Automatism as the automatic
way in which the images of the subconscious
reach the conscience.
• They believed that images should not be
burdened with meaning.

9. Automatism
• They saw the academic discipline of art as
intolerant of the free expression of feeling
• They felt form which had dominated the
history of art, was a culprit in that
intolerance
• They believed abstractionism was the only
way to bring to life the images of the
subconscious.

10. Automatism
• Coming from the Dada tradition, these
artist:
– Linked scandal
– Insult
– Irreverence toward the elite´s with freedom
• They continued to believe that lack of form
was a way to rebel against them.

11. Veristic Surrealists
• They interpreted automatism to mean
allowing the images of the subconscious
to surface undisturbed so that their
meaning could be deciphered through
analysis
• They wanted to faithfully represent these
images as a link between:
– The abstract spiritual realities
– The real forms of the material world.

12. Veristic Surrealists
• To them the object stood as a metaphor
for an inner reality
• Through metaphor the concrete world
could be understood, not only by looking
at the objects, but also by looking into
them.

13. Veristic Surrealists
• They saw academic discipline and form as
the means to represent the images of the
subconscious with veracity
• The images would easily dissolve into the
unknown
• They hoped to find a way to follow the
images of the subconscious until the
conscience could understand their
meaning.

14. Veristic Surrealists
• The language of the subconscious is the
image
• The consciousness had to learn to decode
that language so it could translate it into its
own language of words.
• Later they branched out into three other
groups.

15. Struggle of Surrealism
• For the automatists the approach to the
mystery of nature is to never become
conscious of the mystery
• The Veristic Surrealist quest is none other
than the one described by Breton as the
cause of freedom and the transformation
of man´s consciousness

16. Struggle of Surrealism
• In the works of surrealist we find
– The legacy of
• Bosch
• Brueguel
• William Blake
• The Symbolic painters of the 19th
century
– The perennial questioning of philosophy
– The search of psychology
– The spirit of mysticism

17. Struggle of Surrealism
• It is a work based on the desire to permit
the forces that created the world to
illuminate our vision
• They must allow us to consciously develop
our human potential.

18. Struggle of Surrealism
• Veristic surrealist recognize the difficulties
that their movement has faced during the
second half of the twentieth century as it
attempted to become a major cultural
force
• The United States wholeheartedly
embraced abstraction and modernism.

19. Struggle of Surrealism
• They shared the belief of abstract artist
that
– the chaos of action painting and automatism
were expression of freedom and
– that form, subjugation and inhibition walked
hand in hand
• The American art establishment looked at
the image of form with mistrust until the
advent of Pop Art.

20. Struggle of Surrealism
• The Surrealism had to fight against:
– Pop-Art
– Photorealism
• Veristic Surrealism is the only historical
artistic expression still in want of
recognition as a cultural force in the
twentieth century

21. Characteristics
• It was highly influenced by the
psychoanalysis:
– Images are as confusing and startling as
those of dreams
– Can have a realistic, though irrational style,
precisely describing dreamlike fantasies.

22. Characteristics
• They were influenced by:
•Symbolism
•Metaphysical Painting of Giorgio
de Chirico
•Dadaism

23. Characteristics
• Some of them have a more abstract style.
• In this case they invented spontaneous
techniques, modelled upon the
psychotherapeutic procedure of free
association as a means to eliminate
conscious control in order to express the
working of the unconscious mind, such as
exquisite corpse.

24. Exquisite Corpse
• There were aleatoric techniques for
producing visual or literally art
• This activity was frequently considered as
a game.
• It is based upon an old parlour game in
which players take turns writing on a sheet
of paper folded it to conceal part of the
writing and them pass it to the next player
for another contribution.

25. Exquisite Corpse
• This technique was used by artists to
produce drawings and collages.
• The first efforts are reminiscent of
children’s books that allow the making of
pictures with multiple ages divided at
various levels, involved assigning a
section of a body to each player

26. Exquisite Corpse
• A majority resulted in images that only
vaguely resembled the human form.
• Some participants in early exquisite
corpses were Tanguy, Miro and Man Ray.
• Later adaptations have involved using
other means of passing the work around,
using different media.

27. Techniques
• Surrealism has the same lack of prejudice
of Dadaism both in the use of
photographic procedures and object
production out of their normal use.
• Traditional techniques, because those can
be appropriate for depicting imaginations

28. Artists
• Some of the better known representatives of this
movement are:
• Max Ernst
• Frida Kahlo
• Marc Chagall
• Joan Miro
• Man Ray
• Salvador Dali
• René Magritte
• Yves Tanguy
• Oscar Dominguez

29. Joan Miro
• He used symbolic keys to depict the
unconscious.
• His principle is not the organic world.
• His world is simple, clear
• His mythology is easy, transparent.
• His painting is unstressed, freely
chromatic, without equilibrium among
signs and colours

30. Miró

31. Salvador Dali
• His view is full of sexual connotations.
• Highly rhetorical works.
• Mix of lubricous and holy
• He overcame cynically the bolshevism.
• Ambiguous mix of reaction and anarchy.
• Very complicated compositions.

32. Dalí

33. Rene Magritte
• He is the artist who worked in a deepest
way the lack of logic of the image.
• He invented the anti-history
• He discovered the non-sense of the
normal.
• He created with great detail and realism
images of ambiguous significance that
could have a double sense

34. Magritte

35. Max Ernst
• He reached to the deepest critic of the
form as a depiction and the style as
something unitary.
• He used any technique that would be
useful for transmitting his ideas. He used:
– Collage
– Frottage
• His work is frequently a pile of rubbish of
bourgeois culture.

36. Hans Arp
• He was previously involved in the
Dadaism.
• He depicted organic forms, both in
painting and sculpture.
• He used:
– Geometric shapes
– Orthogonal images
– Continuously curve forms, concave and
convex.

37. Yves Tanguy
• He invented the anti-Nature:
–Never ending landscapes,
–Planet like settings
–Lack of light and sun
–Remains of an organic life:
• Bones
• Mummified fruits
• Fossils and shells

38. Expansion
• Other artist contributed to the expansion of
the Surrealism, equally in Europe and in
the United States.
• Soon it appeared as a way of eluding the
reality of the problems through:
– Ambiguity
– Paradox

39. Expansion
• The movement gained prestige with the
adhesion of artists such as Picasso.
• The analytical cubism, discomposing the
objects did a similar work as that of the
Surrealism.
•

40. Oscar Dominguez
Tanguy

41. Chagall
Frida Kahlo