History of surrealism

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For the main article, see Surrealism

Cover of the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, December 1924.

In 1917, Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term "surrealism" in the program notes describing the ballet Parade which was a collaborative work by Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso and Léonide Massine: 'From this new alliance, for until now stage sets and costumes on one side and choreography on the other had only a sham bond between them, there has come about, in 'Parade', a kind of super-realism ('sur-réalisme'), in which I see the starting point of a series of manifestations of this new spirit ('esprit nouveau').’ The Surrealist movement mainly originated in the Dada movement. While the movement's most important center was Paris, from the 1920’s through the 1960’s it spread throughout Europe, The Soviet Union, The Americas, (including the Caribbean), Africa, and Asia, and by the 1980s to Australia. The most enduringly significant contribution to this Golden Age of surrealism is Breton's Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, which marks the split from Dada oriented Surrealists centered on Tristan Tzara. Five years earlier, Breton and Philippe Soupault had written the first "automatic book" (spontaneously written), Les Champs Magnétiques. By December of 1924, the publication La Révolution surréaliste edited by Pierre Naville and Benjamin Péret and later by Breton, was started. Also, a Bureau of Surrealist Research began in Paris. In 1926, Louis Aragon wrote Le Paysan de Paris, following the appearance of many Surrealist books, poems, pamphlets, automatic texts and theoretical works published by the Surrealists, including those by René Crevel. Many of the popular artists in Paris throughout the 1920s and 1930s were Surrealists, including René Magritte, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Enrico Donati, Alberto Giacometti, Valentine Hugo, Méret Oppenheim, Man Ray, Toyen, Grégoire Michonze, and Yves Tanguy. Though Breton admired Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and courted them to join the movement, they remained peripheral. The movement at this time was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists would play collaborative drawing games and talk about the theories of Surrealism. The Surrealists developed techniques such as automatic drawing (see surrealist techniques and games). Breton’s followers, along with the Communist Party, were working for the “liberation of man.” However, Breton’s group refused to prioritize the proletarian struggle over radical creation such that their struggles with the Party made the late 1920s a turbulent time for both. Many individuals closely associated with Breton, notably Louis Aragon, left his group to work more closely with the Communists. Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high water mark of the period and was the model for International Exhibitions.

1 Surrealism during World War II
2 Post World War II Surrealism
3 The End of Surrealism?
4 Impact of Surrealism
5 Critiques of Surrealism
6 See also
7 References
8 Sources
9 External links

[edit] Surrealism during World War II

The Second World War overshadowed, for a time, almost all intellectual and artistic production. In 1941, Breton went to the United States, where he co founded the short-lived magazine VVV with Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and the American artist David Hare. It was the American poet Charles Henri Ford and his magazine View which offered Breton a channel for promoting Surrealism in the United States. The View special issue on Duchamp was crucial for the public understanding of Surrealism in America. It stressed his connections to Surrealist methods, offered interpretations of his work by Breton, as well as Breton's view that Duchamp represented the bridge between early modern movements, such as Futurism and Cubism, to Surrealism.

[edit] Post World War II Surrealism

Breton continued to write and espouse the importance of liberating of the human mind, as with the publication The Tower of Light in (1952). Breton's return to France after the Second World War, began a new phase of surrealist activity in Paris, and his critiques of rationalism and dualism found a new audience. Breton's insisted that that Surrealism was an ongoing revolt against the reduction of humanity to market relationships, religious gestures and misery and to espouse the importance of liberating of the human mind.

[edit] The End of Surrealism?

There is no clear consensus about the end of Surrealism, or if there is an end, of the Surrealist movement. Some art historians suggest that WWII effectively disbanded the movement. However, Art historian Sarane Alexandrian (1970) states, "the death of André Breton in 1966 marked the end of Surrealism as an organized movement." There have also been attempts to tie the obituary of the movement to the 1989 death of Salvador Dalí.

Since Breton’s death, many other groups and individuals, not directly connected to Breton, have claimed the Surrealist label. Also, spin-offs of surrealism abound such as the Situationists, the Revolutionary Surrealist Group, contemporary trends such as Massurrealism (see list of sample websites below). Most are artists, writers and thinkers working in a style thought to be represented by or derived from ideas or styles of the so-called "Golden Age of Breton", although many claim to have new ideas.

[edit] Impact of Surrealism

While Surrealism is typically associated with the arts, it has been said to transcend them; Surrealism has had an impact in many other fields. In this sense, Surrealism does not specifically refer only to self-identified "Surrealists", or those sanctioned by Breton, rather, it refers to a range of creative acts of revolt and efforts to liberate imagination.

In addition to Surrealist ideas that are grounded in the ideas of Hegel, Marx and Freud, surrealism is seen by its advocates as being inherently dynamic and as dialectic in its thought. Surrealists have also drawn on sources as seemingly diverse as Clark Ashton Smith, Montague Summers, Horace Walpole, Fantomas, The Residents, Bugs Bunny, comic strips, the obscure poet Samuel Greenberg and the hobo writer and humourist T-Bone Slim. One might say that Surrealist strands may be found in movements such as Free Jazz (Don Cherry, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor etc.) and even in the daily lives of people in confrontation with limiting social conditions. Thought of as the effort of humanity to liberate imagination as an act of insurrection against society, surrealism finds precedents in the alchemists, possibly Dante, Hieronymus Bosch, Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, Comte de Lautreamont and Arthur Rimbaud.

Surrealists believe that non-Western cultures also provide a continued source of inspiration for Surrealist activity because some may strike up a better balance between instrumental reason and the imagination in flight than Western culture. Surrealism has had an identifiable impact on radical and revolutionary politics, both directly -- as in some surrealists joining or allying themselves with radical political groups, movements and parties -- and indirectly -- through the way in which surrealists' emphasis on the intimate link between freeing the imagination and the mind and liberation from repressive and archaic social structures. This was especially visible in the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and the French revolt of May 1968, whose slogan "All power to the imagination" arose directly from French surrealist thought and practice.

[edit] Critiques of Surrealism

Surrealism has been critiqued from several perspectives:

[edit] Feminist

Feminists have in the past critiqued the surrealist movement, claiming that it is fundamentally a male movement and a male fellowship, despite the occasional few celebrated woman surrealist painters and poets. They believe that it adopts typical male attitudes toward women, such as worshipping them symbolically through stereotypes and sexist norms. Women are often made to represent higher values and transformed into objects of desire and of mystery.

One of the pioneers in feminist critique of Surrealism was Xavière Gauthier. Her book Surréalisme et sexualité (1971) inspired further important scholarship related to the marginalization of women in relation to "the avant-garde." However these criticisms are perhaps more so of other avant-garde movements eg. Situationism, where women had a much more subordinate role to the men. Also, despite the theoretical objectification, Surrealism as a living praxis allowed room for women artists and painters in particular to work and produce work on their own terms.

[edit] Freudian

Freud initiated the psychoanalytic critique of surrealism with his remark that what interested him most about the surrealists was not their unconscious but their conscious. His meaning was that the manifestations of and experiments with psychic automatism highlighted by surrealists as the liberation of the unconscious were highly structured by ego activity, similar to the activities of the dream censorship in dreams, and that therefore it was in principle a mistake to regard surrealist poems and other art works as direct manifestations of the unconscious, when they were indeed highly shaped and processed by the ego. In this view, the surrealists may have been producing great works, but they were products of the conscious, not the unconscious mind, and they deceived themselves with regard to what they were doing with the unconscious. In psychoanalysis proper, the unconscious does not just express itself automatically but can only be uncovered through the analysis of resistance and transference in the psychoanalytic process.

[edit] Situationist

While some individuals and groups on the core and fringes of the Situationist International were surrealists themselves, others were very critical of the movement, or indeed what remained of the movement in the late 50s and 60s. The Situationist International could therefore be seen as a break and continuiation of the Surrealist praxis.

[edit] See also

Surrealism in the Arts

Techniques, games and humor

[edit] References

[edit] Sources

André Breton

André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism containing the 1^st, 2^nd and introduction to a possible 3^rd Manifesto, and in addition the novel The Soluble Fish and political aspects of the Surrealist movement. ISBN 0-472-17900-4 .
What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings of André Breton. ISBN 0-87348-822-9 .
André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism (Gallimard 1952) (Paragon House English rev. ed. 1993). ISBN 1-56924-970-9 .
André Breton. The Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism, reprinted in:
- Marguerite Bonnet, ed. (1988). Oeuvres complètes, 1:328. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.

Other sources

Guillaume Appollinaire (1917, 1991). Program note for Parade, printed in Oeuvres en prose complètes, 2:865-866, Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin, eds. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
Gerard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement (translated by Alison Anderson, University of Chicago Press). 2004. ISBN 0-226-17411-5 .
Brotchie, Alastair and Gooding, Mel, eds. A Book of Surrealist Games Berkeley, CA: Shambhala (1995). ISBN 1-57062-084-9 .
Lewis, Helena. Dada Turns Red. Edinburgh, Scotland: University of Ednburgh Press, 1990.
Moebius, Stephan. Die Zauberlehrlinge. Soziologiegeschichte des Collège de Sociologie. Konstanz: UVK 2006. (About the College of Sociology, its members and sociological impacts).
Maurice Nadeau, History of Surrealism (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1989). ISBN 0-674-40345-2 .
Redfield, S.: Creativity Tank. [1].
Alexandrian, Sarane. Surrealist Art London: Thames & Hudson, 1970.
Melly, George Paris and the Surrealists Thames & Hudson. 1991.
Lewis, Helena The Politics Of Surrealism 1988
Caws, Mary Ann Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology 2001 MIT Press

[edit] External links

Academic resources/'Classical' Surrealism:

Manifesto of Surrealism by André Breton. 1924.
(French) Surrealism
What is Surrealism? Lecture by Breton, Brussels 1934
The Surrealism Server
The Surrealist Movement in Serbia +
The radical politics of Surrealism, 1919-1950 — an article looking at Surrealism and Surrealists' connections to anarchist, socialist and working class politics
Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, the 2 Albums, "recomposed photographs", in a rather surrealist spirit.

Surrealist Art Resources and Information:

Surrealist Humor/Comedy:

Modernism
20th century - Modernity - Existentialism
Modernism (music): 20th century classical music - Atonality - Serialism - Jazz
Modernist literature - Modernist poetry
Modern art - Symbolism (arts) - Impressionism - Expressionism - Cubism - Surrealism - Dadaism - Futurism (art) - Fauvism - Pop Art - Minimalism
Modern dance - Expressionist dance
Modern architecture - Brutalism - De Stijl - Functionalism - Futurism - International Style - Organicism - Visionary architecture
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