Surrealism has produced some of the most salient and pored over images of the 20th century. The Surrealists were deeply ambitious about the potential role their art could play in unbridling potent societal forces, but unlike analogous avant-garde modernist movements such as Dada, the works all have an enduringly popular appeal and viewers feel instantly drawn to the imaginative qualities of the works.
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The central tenet of surrealism was the desire to release the unconscious as a medium to explore hidden aspects of the imagination and to offer a subjective, deeper form of truth to each painter and viewer. Largely seen as evolving from the theoretical basis produced by psychoanalysis, and heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud and his examination of subconscious desires and dreams, the surrealists believed in the endless possibilities offered by liberating the mind from its rational and conscious state.
Salvador Dali became properly involved with surrealism towards the end of the 1920’s when he became acquainted with both the writings of Sigmund Freud – in particular those on the interrelation of sexuality and subconscious imagery – as well as his association with the Paris Surrealists. After this point, his work eventually became the most enduring vision of the movement and his legacy as one of the great surrealist painters is arguably unparalleled. His renderings of unreal landscapes with everyday objects and natural features metamorphosed into unfamiliar and physically impossible versions of themselves now decorate the walls of major museums around the world. Arguably the poster of surrealism, the enigmatic painting: The Persistence of Memory (1931) is one such example, where wilted watches adorn an unquiet landscape.
Strange creatures beside a blue sea: René Magritte (1898-1967)
Magritte is another icon of surrealism, especially for French surrealist painters.
Woman dazzled by the light: Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973)
Unlike many of the other artists described here, Picasso was a radical experimenter and restless in his search for novel visual vocabularies to depict scenes in ever different styles. He cannot, therefore, be described as solely a ‘surrealist’, however, it is important to recognize his involvement in the scene and how some of his works crossed into the surreal. Picasso’s intimacy with André Breton catalysed this, and led to his inclusion in the fourth issue of Révolution surréaliste in 1925, the same year he exhibited his Cubist works at the first Surrealist group show. Picasso’s lover Dora Maar, seated on a chair, is painted in the Surrealist style, using bright colors broken lines and several perspectives.
Days of being wild: Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954)
‘They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.’ - Frida Kahlo
Life on a farm in Catalonia, Spain. Joan Miró (1893 – 1983)
Towards the middle of the 1920s, Joan Miró had permanently moved to Paris, after formally joining the Surrealist movement in 1924. He was deeply involved with the experiments of other practitioners, sharing a studio with André Masson and Max Ernst. A truly enigmatic figure, who pioneered his own deeply personal visual vocabulary of biomorphic, playful forms, his work has been often been interpreted as one incarnation of Surrealism, albeit with an individualistic angle, and evidently closely related to other modernist movements such as Fauvism and Expressionism.
Enigmatic nocturnal landscape of the American southwest: Max Ernst (1891 – 1976)
Max Ernst was first a key member of Dada before he became closely involved with Surrealism in Paris. One of his foremost contributions to the movement was his introduction of the décalcomanie technique, an inventive exercise in manipulating paint. This transfer process, using gouache or some other water-based medium, laying one on top of the other, can be repeated to create increasingly chance-based and intricate compositions. The Phases of the Night is a “multidimensional time-space continuum”: a complex, enigmatic, panoramic nocturnal landscape of the humble village of Sedona (Arizona), dedicated to the woman in his life, Dorothea Tanning (further on the list).
Solarized visions: Man Ray (1890 – 1976)
In the early 1920’s, Man Ray moved to Paris and became associated with the Dada and then Surrealist circles of artists and writers. Ray’s photographic works are considered his most profound achievement, particularly technical experiments with the medium, such as his "camera-less" photographs, which he called solarization and rayographs (a combination of the word photograph and his name). These experiments with photography allowed him access to the beating heart of the Parisian Surrealist movement which was led by André Breton. Man Ray was evidently in tune with many of the formal and theoretical concerns of the other surrealists, and works such as Double Profile, Solarized demonstrates this through their transmutation of the familiar to the uncanny. Man Ray was also involved in the media output of the surrealists through their journals in the 1920s and 1930s. “I do not photograph nature,” he once said. “I photograph my visions.
Dawn and dusk, day and night at the same time: Giorgio de Chirico (1888 – 1978)
De Chirico was known for establishing the Scuola Metafisica, a movement which was much admired by the surrealists. This term defined much of his work done during the 1910’s, before he was formally affiliated with the surrealist movement. Breton referred to de Chirico as ‘a sentry’ of the movement, and his works seemed to contain an uncanny sensibility owing to their dreamlike landscapes coupled with unexplainable combinations of quotidian objects framed in bizarre ways. De Chirico himself, however, never invested himself fully in the movement, and in fact pined after a wholescale return to principles of skilled draftsmen-ship within art, a move that supposedly alienated the surrealists and their quest for meaning within art. De Chirico’s best-known paintings feature classically architectural backdrops, complete with clearly elongated shadows and jarring perspective. The work Sgombero su piazza d’Italia belongs to the artist’s most iconic series of metaphysical works: monumental yet mysterious scene.
Strangeness on the sand: Dora Maar (1907-1997)
Cheerful life under the sea: Marc Chagall (1887 – 1985)
Born in Vitebsk, Marc Chagall was an artist who although had no formal ties with the movement, went on to have an huge impact on Surrealism. Breton heavily favoured his works, claiming that ‘no work was ever so resolutely magical’ as his. Chagall was later officially invited to join the movement, but decided to turn down the offer. Chagall always claimed, like Kahlo, that there was no level of metaphor running through his paintings and that what he saw shouldn’t be defined as symbolism. Chagall’s work was a mythic mix of nostalgic references to his native Belarus, references to his wife Bella and a general investigation into soft layers of coloured form. Circus performers were ideal characters to populate Chagall's dream-like compositions.
The story of a small school of fish and a child: Yves Tanguy (1900 – 1955)
Tanguy’s paintings are often mistaken for Dali’s, a testament to how intimately they fit within the surrealist canon. Tanguy was in fact working earlier than Dali, and the younger artist admits his debt to Tanguy. Beyond his work, Tanguy embodied many of the qualities surrealist artists have become associated with in the popular imagination, known for his highly eccentric behaviour. His most well-known works depict landscapes with biomorphic, rock-like formations and shifting, almost liquefied surfaces in hazy, pastel coloured environments resembling some cosmic outpost. Tanguy’s debt to the imaginative landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico is apparent in the perplexing array of imagery included in this artwork.
Bathing with sharks: Lee Miller (1907 – 1977)
Surrealism in Britain had a few major exponents, one of whom was Lee Miller, an American born artist who later settled in Britain, and whose home Farley Farmhouse became a centre for the movement and other avant-garde artistic activities.
Dreaming on the coast of Dorset: Paul Nash (1889 – 1946)
Nash is perhaps the best-known exponent of British surrealism, with his melding of distinctly English, folkick and mythic sites with strange, distorted perspectives and objects becoming much loved works in Britain and elsewhere. Acclaimed originally for his war paintings of the First World War, Nash’s subsequent explorations into novel depictions of landscape see his closest ties to the surrealist group. In these works his style became increasingly symbolic and surreal, juxtaposing Surrealists’ fascination with Freud’s theories of the power of dreams to reveal the unconscious (the spheres) amongst an otherwise material landscape (the hawk).
Cover image: Giorgio de Chirico, The Uncertainty of the Poet, 1913.
Written by Max Lunn and Petra Chiodi
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