SURREALISM

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SURREALISM

• Giorgio de Chirico
• Max Ernst
• Joan Miro
• Paul Klee
• Salvador Dali
• Rene Magritte

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Surrealist artists thought of their images as
  visual poems.

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• 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 Surrealisms emphasis was not
  on negation but on positive expression.

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• 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.

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• 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."

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• 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.

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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.

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• Chagall
• I and the Village

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Marc Chagall - Birthday
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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
  Nietzsches city, and created several disquieting
  paintings of desolate urban landscapes.

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Giorgio De Chirico (Italian)

• Melancholy and the Mystery of the Street

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De Chirico Italian Piazza
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• 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.

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• 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.

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Salvador Dali The Enigma of Hitler - 1939
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• Salvador Dali
• The Enigma of Time

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Dali - Apparition of the Aphrodite of Cnidus
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Salvador Dali Geopolitical Child
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• Salvador Dali
• The Burning Giraffe
• Here we see one of Dalis motifs, the drawers
  that suggest the hidden contents of the human
  subconscious

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The City of Drawers
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• The Drawers of the Psyche

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• 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.

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• (just for you George)

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Salvador Dali Alice in Wonderland

• Lewis Carols story of the girl who fell down a
  rabbit hole held a special fascination for Dali,
  as Alices journey is a voyage into the
  subconscious, the realm of surrealism.

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• Dali
• Illustration from Alice in Wonderland

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• Dali
• - from Alice in Wonderland

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• Rene Magritte
• 1898 - 1967

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• 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."

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Magritte The Treachery of Images 1928/29
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• The Treachery of Images is perhaps Magrittes
  best known work. Magritte is reminding the
  viewer that an image is just an image.

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• Magritte
• Attempting the Impossible
• Here again, Magritte warns of the impossibility
  of creating an ideal reality through art.

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• 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."

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Magritte The Tomb of the Wrestlers
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Magritte Golconde 1953
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• Time Transfixed
• 1939

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• Magritte
• Presence

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Magritte The False Mirror
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Magritte The Tempest
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• 1912, Magrittes 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 19271928 of people with
  cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants.

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Magritte Les Amants (The Lovers)
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• 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' "