Surrealism Research Paper
Surrealism : Art World Responses To Surrealism
Surrealism In Art
Surrealism Essay
Surrealism : An Art Movement
Max Ernst: Surrealist Art
Art History Of Surrealism
Surrealism Essay
Early 1920s Surrealism
Surrealism Impact
Research Paper On Surrealism
Surrealism and Film Essay
Essay on Surrealism and Salvador Dali
Surrealism Essay
Surrealism And Surrealism
Essay On Surrealism
Essay on Surrealism and Salvador Dali
2. Surrealism : Art World Responses To Surrealism
Art World Responses to Surrealism While contemporary artists often look back on Surrealism as a
deeply impactful revolution of thought in art, not everyone agrees with the praise it is given. At its
consummation, Surrealism was viewed by many in the art world as the pseudo–intellectual creations
of anarchic men. "In 1925, there were few indeed who saw in it anything more than a return to
infantilism and nihilism" (Peyre). By the 1940s some surrealists themselves viewed the movement in
a negative light, including poet Louis Aragon. Author Anna Balakian states that: "[in] the April 1947
issue of Europe, in an article about the surrealist Desnos, Aragon [proclaimed] that with the passing
of surrealism will also pass the excessive liberty that the surrealists including himself had given to
words; and he [urged] a return to the elementary language of common sense. He [believed] that he
has now learned once more to call things by their right names" (Balakian). Similarly, in 1948
Balakian described the work of the Surrealists with a patronizing tone, stating that due to the realistic
imagery required in Naturalistic Surrealism, the works produced were uninteresting in their
application, becoming "... a smooth, academic, almost banal way of using the painter's material"
(Hodin). However, there were supporters of the movement during its time. Published in 1935 in A
Short Survey of Surrealism, author David Gascoyne praised the movement for its revolutionary
ideals, stating, "Already
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3. Surrealism In Art
Art has always been utilized throughout centuries as an outlet of expression and has the ability
to convey a message in a way that words cannot. At first glance, art may seem ordinary or too
different to understand, but the meaning that lays behind the surface of a canvas has the power to
impact an audience. Throughout the 1940's, America was enduring monumental moments that
were reflected through art. It was an era of growth for not only specific artistic styles, but for
artist themselves. Dr. Wingate mentions that during the 1940's, art and political action were
linked together. Consequently, some of the most iconic paintings and photographs in history
were born. Above all, it was a time period where art was able to blossom while the nation faced
adversity. During Dr.Wingate's lecture, she mentioned how the 1940's was a strange time period
for art. Local events in Germany had a profound impact on the way art was developed during and
after World War II. Consequently, while art in Europe was focused on abstract art, surrealism art
began to flourish in America. A life post World War II was hard to swallow as people were still
finding ways to cope with the repercussions of a war. Artist began to express their grief through
surrealism. In order to describe surrealism, Dr.Wingate compares it to automatic writing. She
proceeds to state that Surrealists were inspired by the concept of automatic writing because its goal
is to generate thought without concerning itself with
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6. Max Ernst: Surrealist Art
Surrealism
Surrealism was created in the early 1920s in Paris, France. Surrealists created strange creatures and
painted scenes that don't make much sense. They painted dreams as reality and were very creative
with their work. They took everyday objects and turned them into much more.
One Surrealist painter was Max Ernst. Ernst was born on April 2, 1891 in Bruhl, Germany and
died on April 1,1976 in Paris, France. Creating his own style, he used pictures from medical and
technical magazines to help create extreme collages. After producing many collages, he then moved
to Paris where he continued painting. Ernst created his very own technique called frottage. Frottage
is when he would take two pieces of paper and rub graphite on them,...show more content...
In this piece, I see four spaced out rows of hats.The first row of hats are mostly all connected with
hats besides the middle which is connected with a black cylinder. The other three rows are
connected by colors of the rainbow. Some of the paint strokes aren't going the same direction.
Another piece of art by him is called "Dada Gauguin". This piece of art shows a solid color man,
without a face or clothes, standing in front of what looks like a mirror. Next to the man is what
looks like a bush with the same colored man standing in it. The background appears to be the sky
because of the white spots that appear as clouds. The strange man seems to be standing on a black
road.
A very interesting piece created by Max Ernst was a piece called "Pieta or Revolution by Night".
They say that this painting is supposed to show his relationship with his father. It shows a man
dressed in all brown on his knees with his eyes closed. The man is holding a boy about the size of
him. The boy is dressed in a white shirt and red pants but he has no shoes on his feet. The
background is a brick wall, but on one side of it shows a sad looking man struggling to walk up the
stairs. The man seems to be the same man that is holding the
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7. Art History Of Surrealism
Surrealism is about expressing the unconscious mind. It is not about what is but rather what could
be. I chose the art movement because I have been fascinated with it since high school. I researched
Surrealism for my art journal, and upon finding Rene Magritte's works, I fell in love. I love that
Surrealism pushes viewers to not just question themselves but to question the world around them.
Each Surrealism piece shows a world that cannot exist anywhere but within ourselves, and
Surrealism artists are the vessel through which we can experience these worlds. I find that I much
prefer the Surrealist worlds of make believe to any other. In 1924, Dadaism gave birth to Surrealism,
and it flourished in Europe between World War I and World War II. Founded by Andre Breton,
Surrealism was an artistic and literary art movement that, unlike Dadaism, expressed positive
philosophy and proposed enlightenment. Profoundly influenced by Sigmund Freud, Breton became
obsessed with the unconscious mind; he believed the unconscious mind, the source dreams, was the
basis of all artistic creativity. Surrealist artists believed that the rational mind blocked the power of
the imagination, and they strived to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock this power. By
doing so, Surrealists hoped to unify the world of dream and fantasy to that of the everyday rational
world. The Surrealism art movement allowed artists to express themselves in ways never thought
possible, and although Surrealism was
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9. Early 1920s Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe in the early
1920s. Through this movement, the surrealist artists aimed to interpret the previously conflicting
conditions of dream and reality. Encouraged by their discontent with the rationalism and literary
realism that had guided European culture, the surrealists concluded that the rational mind repressed
the power of the imagination. Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious areas
of experience that re could be found on the street and in everyday life. The Surrealists' desire to
embrace the unconscious mind, and their particular interests, went on to model many later
movements, and their style continuous to be influential to this
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11. Research Paper On Surrealism
Surrealism was both an artistic and literary movement that originated in Paris in 1924. Andre Breton
founded the movement and also written the Surrealist Manifesto. The Surrealist Manifesto defines
surrealism as "pure psychic automatism by means of which one intends to express, either verbally, or
in writing, or in any other manner, the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the
absence of any control exercised by reason, free of any aesthetic or moral concern" (Breton). Breton
and surrealists believed that the imagination stemmed from the subconscious. That is why their
works evoke the appearance of dreams.
Breton also explains the Surrealist Manifesto that Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist credited
with the theory of psychoanalysis, influenced surrealism (Breton). Breton was fascinated with Freud
analysis on the connection between dreams and the subconscious. According to Leon Hoffman in an
interview with the American Psychoanalytic Association on Freud's book, Interpretation of Dreams,
Freud believes that a person's subconscious is communicating with their conscious through their
dreams (Hoffman). As it relates to surrealism, surrealists use psychoanalysis as a tool to produce
their artworks. Psychoanalysis was a way to free...show more content...
Pierre Roy was an artist I took influences from in one of my drawings. Roy was a French surrealist
who painted La Fortune au repos. He painted what looks to be a wheel, wooden post, and a
bamboo stick. He enlarged the objects and placed them in a landscape. Changing an object's size
and displacing the object are two common characteristics of the movement's style. For my drawing,
I enlarged the woman's torso cast from the closet and placed it in the middle of the ocean. The cast
was meant to be a land form that took the shape of a woman's torso. I wanted to represent a form
that is found in
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12. The effect surrealism has on the reader and the reading experience is immense. Surrealism takes the
reader to a world where they are justified imagining a plot beyond the bounds of reality. Surrealism
is the principle of applying fantastical, whimsical, and irrational characters and conflicts to the plot
of a narrative. When readers dive into this environment, they must be able to solve the creative ways
in which authors choose to represent certain themes. Haruki Murakami's surrealism affects the
structural elements of his narratives and unlocks the embodied themes of their respective stories.
Using these surrealistic elements, Murakami tackles themes of grief, identity, self hatred, and guilt.
Murakami's novella The Strange Library contains an extreme presence of surrealistic elements in
regards to the plotline and text structure. In the story, an old man takes the protagonist as hostage in
an obscure labyrinth–like library where the protagonist befriends characters like a talking
"sheepman" and a girl with no voice. Adding to these imaginative details in the plotline, the
structure also contains elements different than that of a normal story. Conventions such as font
sizes, text colors, and images were inconsistent and disorganized. These additions were deliberate
and essential to the text. All of these surrealistic elements aim to portray the theme of grief. At the
end of the story the protagonist confesses, "My mother died last Tuesday... I lie here by myself in
the dark at two o'clock in the morning and think about that cell in the library basement. About
how it feels to be alone, and the depth of the darkness surrounding me" (Murakami ch. 26).
Because of the death of an important figure in the protagonist's life, readers can assume the
character is experiencing grief. His grief emerged in the form of these surreal characters and
situations. The girl with no voice, for example, replaced the role of a gravitational female figure in
his life, which was previously his mother. Moreover, Murakami took the theme of grief and
personified its presence in the narrative in order to emphasize the complexity of the protagonist's
loss. A series of Murakami's works were combined into a collection called Blind
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13. Surrealism and Film Essay
Surrealism is a movement that built off of the burgeoning look into art, psychology, and the
workings of the mind. Popularly associated with the works of Salvador Dali, Surrealist art takes
imagery and ideology and creates correlation where there is none, creating new forms of art. In this
essay I will look to explore the inception of the surrealist movement, including the Surrealist
Manifesto, to stress the importance of these artists and their work in the 20th century and beyond. I
also will look to films from our European Cinema course to express how films incorporate the
influence of surrealism both intentionally and unintentionally.
To begin, we will look at the ideals and influences that led to the formation of surrealist ideals,
...show more content...
Coupled with the use of unusual concepts of artistic expression, as well as experiments in form and
content, surrealism sought to exploit the unrealized and unexplored spaces of art in often shocking
and controversial ways.
Often inspired by the repression of unconscious observations, surrealist art and writing often contains
no discernable organization or structure, and is open to the imagination and the "world of the private
mind" (metmuseum), an antithesis of traditional art based on rationality, reason, and societal norms.
These concepts were what the surrealists sought to upend in their manifesto, and thus much of their
work, such as Rene Magritte's "La Trahison des Images" or Marcel Duchamp's "Bride Stripped Bare
by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)" sought to "overturn the world view of scientific
positivism, exposing the dogmatic conceptions of vision and language, the supposed guarantors of
truth and being, as arbitrary, deceptive tools of modernity's oppressive "rational" ideology"
(sensesofcinema). Additionally, surrealism intended to capture "freedom" of the mind and
imagination that modern logic and reason suppressed through constraints of social norms and
expectations. These modern patterns of thought, in the eyes of surrealists, were influenced by social
doctrine (surrealism lecture) and thus needed to be undermined in order to discover the true
unconscious perception of reality
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14. Essay on Surrealism and Salvador Dali
Surrealism and Salvador Dali
Surrealism is defined as an art style developed in the
1920's in Europe, characterized by using the subconscious
as a source of creativity to liberate pictorial subjects and
ideas. Surrealist paintings often depict unexpected or
irrational objects in an atmosphere or fantasy , creating a
dreamlike scenario ( www.progressiveart.com 2004). The word
Surrealism was created in 1917 by the writer Guillaune
Apollinaire. He used it to describe two instances of
artistic innovation ( Bradley 6). In 1924, in the
Manifeste du Surrealisme which launched the surrealist
movement, the writer Andre Brenton and his friend Philippe
Soupault adopted the word,"baptized by the name of...show more content...
Another popular Dali paintings from the 1930's
is "The Atavism of Dusk" .Sex, cannibalism and death were
linked in Dali's mind. By paranoiac association , precisely
these anxieties were inspired by Millet's painting
depicting the piety of two laborers. In The Atavism of Dusk
Dali expressed more explicitly this irrational significance
which he divined in The Angelus. The posture of the two
peasants is reproduced faithfully. The male stands to the
15. left , his hat concealing his sexual arousal, but his face
has been transformed into a skull, an image which invokes
the consequences of his fatal sexual encounter with the
female peasant standing at the right. The threat posed by
the woman is evident in the way she assumes the attitude of
a praying mantis. This alludes to the practice of the
female insect of the species devouring the male after
coition (Dali 63).
4
Dali also created "The Wearing of Furniture–Nutrition"
in the 1930's. This painting represents a further variation
in the capacity of the paranoiac critical method to
"interpret"reality by establishing irrational connections
between disparate elements. Unlike Dali's image , in which
several elements may be recognized within a single
configuration, here the same configuration is repeated in
various parts of
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16. Surrealism Essay
This essay will examine the relationship between surrealism and artist film, cinema and gallery
work. An art film is a motion picture originally created for a confined audience as opposed to a mass
market. Art films provide opportunities to display unique conventions independent from mainstream
film.They're clear differences between the two movements film presents a clear purpose of action
opposed to the social realism style often seen in art films where the focal points are the imagination
and cognitive thoughts of characters and a prominent display of the directors' diction. 'Dictionary:
Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in
writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning...show more content...
However, there is a flaw in this method to transmit Surrealism, as art films are only accessible to
a limited market and are thus unable to expose the unconscious and adapt it with rational life.
This makes it impossible to achieve the goal of successfully changing or influencing social
attitudes and behaviour. Cinema is a valuabe creative genre and can be a global form of
commuinication. No words are needed to explore various cultures or dispute political perspective.
Film enables viewers the chance to see the same message in many different ways. Films are also
cultural expression created by particular cultures in order to affect said culture or potray said
culture. The 1928 L'Etoile de Mer (The Starfish) is directed by Man Ray and is based on a poem
written by Robert Desnos. The film represents the Surreal movement by illustrating the change in
direction of artistic vision. The film focuses on examining the different emotions and moods present
throughout a love story but also opposes narrative apprehension and challenges the views on love
depicted in mainstream representation. L'Etoile de
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17. Surrealism And Surrealism
In 1925, the original surrealists forged a clear and resounding document, stating, among other things,
that the surrealist movement is a revolution, unarguably. They asserted that their movement was not
one of poetic form. Furthermore, that it was not even a literary movement. They firmly established,
in the infancy of Surrealism, that it was not an aesthetic endeavour. It was "a revolution of the
mind." Surrealist actions and thoughts function "in the absence of any aesthetic or moral concern."
This idea was thoroughly tested with the many events to come. It was tested when Salvador Dali
went so far with a lack of moral concern as to support Hitler himself, earning himself an
excommunication, after a characteristically dramatic trial. It was tested when Andre Breton,
honorary founder of Surrealism, stated that "The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a
loaded gun and firing into it randomly." This has since, regrettably, been forgotten. We have
forgotten, somehow, the broken bones, the muddied faces, the chaos, and the legitimate taboos in
which Surrealism languished. We have forgotten how, historically, we have stared in the face that
which no one else dared to glance at. We have cast aside that which hurts us, for we do not care to
include it in our reality. We have also become much more tolerant, since Breton's death in 1966, of
that which is not actually surrealist. At the risk of sounding anti–progress, I say that the movement
has become less pure
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18. Essay On Surrealism
Surrealism. I In this Essay I will Discuss and analyze the Modern Art movement that was will talk
about the history of surrealism and how it came about and how it impacted culture. I will also
focus largely on a particular Spanish Surrealist artist named Salvador Dali who is widely known
as the poster boy for Surrealism as well as being an eccentric and interesting character. Surrealism as
a theme has always interested me usually because of weird and strange dream like visuals I have
mostly seen in Film and Television. I chose to write mostly about Salvador Dali as I have always
been a fan of his work and when I was much younger I was at an exhibition of some of his paintings
whilst on Holiday in Andorra. I will discuss some of Dali's work and compare it with other
examples of Surrealist work I find that uses the same principles and ideas such as Movies and
certain Directors and their work.
I will also be analyzing his style the similar Principles of Sigmund Freud's Theories about dream
interpretation which was widely considered to have had a big...show more content...
The Surrealist group carried on and developed ideas from the Dada movement which was a protest
and reaction to World War 1. According to 'Understanding Modern Art' by Bohm– Duchen and
Cook' The Word Surreality means ''beyond or above reality'' which I agree to and especially in
terms of the artwork I will be discussing this is a very true point and it makes sense when you read
into the work and analyze it. The Surrealists wanted to connect the worlds of dreams and reality to
make a new reality, be it in any media. A lot of surrealist work can be disturbing and bizarre but it
can also be playful like the way dali often put things together that normally wouldn't be seen with
each other like his famous lobster phone. (figure
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19. Essay on Surrealism and Salvador Dali
Surrealism and Salvador Dali Salvador Dali, was born Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali i Domenech
on Monday, 11 May 1904, in the small Spanish town of Figueres, in the foothills of the Pyrenees,
approximately sixteen miles from the French border in a region known as Catalonia. His parents
supported his talent and built him his first studio while he was still a child in their summer home at
Cadaques. Dali went on to attend the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, Spain. He was
married to Gala Eluard in 1934 and died on 23 January 1989 in a hospital in Figueres
(Etherington–Smith, 12).
Dali never limited himself to one style or particular medium. Beginning with his early
impressionistic works, greatest inspiration....show more content...
They believed that automatism "would reveal the true and individual nature of anyone who
practiced it, far more completely than could any of his conscious creations. For automatism was the
most perfect means for reaching laid his foundation for his own Surrealistic art in his youth through
his 'critical paranoia' method. This contribution of his was an alternate manner in which to view or
perceive reality. It was no new concept; it could be traced back to Leonardo da Vinci and his
practice of staring at stains on walls, clouds, streams, etc. and seeing different figures in them
(Stangos, 138). Anyone who looks at a cloud and sees something other than just a cloud uses this
technique.
Dali however gave this method a different twist. Dali linked his paranoiac–critical method, the
ability to look at any object and see another, with paranoia, which was characterized then by
chronic delusions and hallucinations. Dali himself was not paranoid but was able to place himself
in paranoid states. In one of his more famous statements he said, "The only difference between
myself and a madman is that I am not mad." He was able to look at reality and dream of new ideas
and paint them, which he called his "hand–painted dream photographs." (The Persistence of
Memory, 163)
Through his paranoiac–critical method, Dali was able to look at everyday objects and attach a
subjective meaning based on his obsessions, phobias and conflicts. The result was a new,
imaginative visual
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