What is Surrealism? Dreams, the unconscious and the great names

Surrealism is an art and literary movement founded in Paris in 1924, when the poet André Breton published the first Surrealist manifesto. The Surrealists wanted to release dreams and the unconscious, and they created enigmatic pictures in which ordinary objects meet in unexpected ways. Well-known names are Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Joan Miró.

Facts

The background: war, Dada and Freud

Surrealism grew out of Dadaism, the protest movement that during the First World War mocked the reason and culture that had led to the slaughter in the trenches. After the war a group of young poets and artists in Paris wanted to go further and seek a new reality, a sur-réalité, a reality above reality. The word had been used as early as 1917 by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

Sigmund Freud's theories about dreams and the unconscious were an important inspiration. If reason had failed, perhaps truth was to be found in dreams, in chance and in the thoughts we do not control. In 1924 André Breton gathered the ideas in the Manifeste du surréalisme.

Two paths: automatism and dream images

The Surrealists worked in two ways. One was automatism: drawing or painting without thinking, so that the unconscious could take over the hand. Joan Miró painted floating signs and forms, and Max Ernst invented frottage, rubbing pencil over paper laid on floorboards and leaves and letting pictures emerge from the patterns.

The other was the painted dream image, executed with almost photographic precision. The unreal becomes more uncanny when it is sharply rendered. This is where Salvador Dalí and René Magritte belong, as does the forerunner Giorgio de Chirico with his empty, shadowy squares.

The famous works

Dalí's The Persistence of Memory of 1931, with melting pocket watches in a desolate coastal landscape, is perhaps the best-known Surrealist picture. Dalí called his method paranoiac-critical: he deliberately induced delusions and double images.

In 1929 Magritte painted The Treachery of Images, a carefully painted pipe with the words Ceci n'est pas une pipe, this is not a pipe. The picture asks a simple but dizzying question about the relationship between image, word and reality. In 1936 Meret Oppenheim covered a coffee cup with fur, an object that is both enticing and unpleasant.

Was Frida Kahlo a Surrealist?

Breton admired Frida Kahlo and counted her among the Surrealists when he visited Mexico in 1938. Her pictures, such as The Two Fridas of 1939, have the logic of dreams: two versions of herself sit hand in hand with hearts joined by a blood vessel.

Kahlo herself rejected the label. She said that she did not paint dreams but her own reality: her body, her pain and her Mexican identity. The question shows how broad Surrealism became, and how hard it is to draw boundaries for a movement built on the unexpected.

Surrealism in Sweden and afterwards

In Sweden Surrealism was championed by the Halmstad Group, six artists from Halmstad who formed the group in 1929. Erik Olson and Esaias Thorén painted dream landscapes by the sea with a strong feeling for the coast of Halland. The period is in the app under Swedish art of the 1930s.

Surrealism spread around the world in the 1930s with large exhibitions in London in 1936 and Paris in 1938. The Second World War scattered the group, and several of the artists fled to New York, where their ideas about the unconscious and the spontaneous gesture contributed to Abstract Expressionism. Read more in the guide to abstract art.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who wrote the Surrealist manifesto in 1924?