Hello friends here I am writing this blog as an assignment. Which is given by Department of English, M.K.B.U. and I am writing this assignment on following topic.
∆ Short Note on Surrealism :
∆ Introduction :
Surrealism is a cultural and artistic movement that emerged in the early 20th century, primarily in Europe. It was founded by the French writer André Breton, who defined it as "pure psychic automatism" and sought to liberate the unconscious mind from the constraints of rational thought and societal norms.
Surrealist art is characterized by the use of dreamlike imagery, unexpected juxtapositions of objects and concepts, and an emphasis on the subconscious mind. Surrealist artists sought to challenge traditional notions of art and create new forms of expression that reflected the irrational and fantastic aspects of human experience.
In addition to visual art, Surrealism had a significant impact on literature, film, and philosophy. Surrealist writers often used automatic writing and other techniques to access the unconscious mind, while Surrealist filmmakers created dreamlike and surreal narratives that challenged conventional storytelling techniques.
∆ What is Surrealism ?
Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early ’20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious. Officially consecrated in Paris in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by the poet and critic André Breton (1896–1966), Surrealism became an international intellectual and political movement. Breton, a trained psychiatrist, along with French poets Louis Aragon (1897–1982), Paul Éluard (1895–1952), and Philippe Soupault (1897–1990), were influenced by the psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the political ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883). Using Freudian methods of free association, their poetry and prose drew upon the private world of the mind, traditionally restricted by reason and societal limitations, to produce surprising, unexpected imagery. The cerebral and irrational tenets of Surrealism find their ancestry in the clever and whimsical disregard for tradition fostered by Dadaism a decade earlier.
Surrealist poets were at first reluctant to align themselves with visual artists because they believed that the laborious processes of painting, drawing, and sculpting were at odds with the spontaneity of uninhibited expression. However, Breton and his followers did not altogether ignore visual art. They held high regard for artists such as Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Francis Picabia (1879–1953), and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) because of the analytic, provocative, and erotic qualities of their work. For example, Duchamp’s conceptually complex Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23; Philadelphia Museum of Art) was admired by Surrealists and is considered a precursor to the movement because of its bizarrely juxtaposed and erotically charged objects. In 1925, Breton substantiated his support for visual expression by reproducing the works of artists such as Picasso in the journal La Révolution Surréaliste and organizing exhibitions that prominently featured painting and drawing.
The visual artists who first worked with Surrealist techniques and imagery were the German Max Ernst (1891–1976), the Frenchman André Masson (1896–1987), the Spaniard Joan Miró (1893–1983), and the American Man Ray (1890–1976). Masson’s free-association drawings of 1924 are curving, continuous lines out of which emerge strange and symbolic figures that are products of an uninhibited mind. Breton considered Masson’s drawings akin to his automatism in poetry.
Max Ernst -
A German artist, Ernst was known for his use of collage and frottage techniques to create abstract and otherworldly images. His works often had a dark and surreal quality. Some of his most famous works include "The Robing of the Bride" (1937), "Celebes" (1921), and "The Eye of Silence" (1943).
About 1937, Ernst, a former Dadaist, began to experiment with two unpredictable processes called decalcomania and grattage. Decalcomania is the technique of pressing a sheet of paper onto a painted surface and peeling it off again, while grattage is the process of scraping pigment across a canvas that is laid on top of a textured surface. Ernst used a combination of these techniques in The Barbarians (1999.363.21) of 1937, a composition of sparring anthropomorphic figures in a deserted postapocalyptic landscape that exemplifies the recurrent themes of violence and annihilation found in Surrealist art.
René Magritte -
In 1927, the Belgian artist René Magritte (1898–1967) moved from Brussels to Paris and became a leading figure in the visual Surrealist movement. Influenced by de Chirico’s paintings between 1910 and 1920, Magritte painted erotically explicit objects juxtaposed in dreamlike surroundings. His work defined a split between the visual automatism fostered by Masson and Miró (and originally with words by Breton) and a new form of illusionistic Surrealism practiced by the Spaniard Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), the Belgian Paul Delvaux (1897–1994), and the French-American Yves Tanguy (1900–1955). In The Eternally Obvious (2002.456.12a–e), Magritte’s artistic display of a dismembered female nude is emotionally shocking. In The Satin Tuning Fork (1999.363.80), Tanguy filled an illusionistic space with unidentifiable, yet sexually suggestive, objects rendered with great precision. The painting’s mysterious lighting, long shadows, deep receding space, and sense of loneliness also recall the ominous settings of de Chirico.
Magritte was a Belgian Surrealist artist known for his witty and thought-provoking paintings. He often used ordinary objects in unexpected ways to challenge the viewer's perceptions of reality. Some of his most famous works include "The Treachery of Images" (1929), which features a pipe with the words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe") written beneath it, and "The Son of Man" (1964), which features a man with a green apple covering his face.
Salvador Dalí -
Perhaps the most famous Surrealist artist, Dalí was known for his eccentric behavior and flamboyant personality. His works often featured melting clocks and distorted, dreamlike landscapes. Some of his most famous works include "The Persistence of Memory" (1931), "The Elephants" (1948), and "The Hallucinogenic Toreador" (1970).
In 1929, Dalí moved from Spain to Paris and made his first Surrealist paintings. He expanded on Magritte’s dream imagery with his own erotically charged, hallucinatory visions. In The Accommodations of Desire (1999.363.16) of 1929, Dalí employed Freudian symbols, such as ants, to symbolize his overwhelming sexual desire. In 1930, Breton praised Dalí’s representations of the unconscious in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism. They became the main collaborators on the review Minotaure (1933–39), a primarily Surrealist-oriented publication founded in Paris.
Joan Miró -
A Spanish painter, Miró was known for his colorful and abstract works that often had a childlike quality. He used bold lines and geometric shapes to create playful and whimsical images. Some of his most famous works include "The Tilled Field" (1923-24), "Harlequin's Carnival" (1924-25), and "Blue II" (1961).
These are just a few of the most famous Surrealists and their works, but the movement had many other talented artists who also made significant contributions to the world of art.
∆ Man Ray and the Cinema pur : Four Surrealist films :
Man Ray was one of the leading artists of the avant garde of 1920s and 1930s Paris. A key figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements, his works spanned various media, including film. He was a leading exponent of the Cinéma Pur, or “Pure Cinema,” which rejected such “bourgeois” conceits as character, setting and plot. Today we present Man Ray’s four influential films of the 1920s.
•Le Retour à la Raison was completed in 1923. The title means “Return to Reason,” and it’s basically a kinetic extension of Man Ray’s still photography. Many of the images in Le Retour are animated photograms, a technique in which opaque, or partially opaque, objects are arranged directly on top of a sheet of photographic paper and exposed to light. The technique is as old as photography itself, but Man Ray had a gift for self-promotion, so he called them “rayographs.” For Le Retour, Man Ray sprinkled objects like salt and pepper and pins onto the photographic paper. He also filmed live-action sequences of an amusement park carousel and other subjects, including the nude torso of his model and lover, Kiki of Montparnasse.
The 16-minute Emak-Bakia contains some of the same images and visual techniques as Le Retour à la Raison, including rayographs, double images and negative images. But the live-action sequences are more inventive, with dream-like distortions and tilted camera angles. The effect is surreal. “In reply to critics who would like to linger on the merits or defects of the film,” wrote Man Ray in the program notes, “one can reply simply by translating the title ‘Emak Bakia,’ an old Basque expression, which was chosen because it sounds prettily and means: ‘Give us a rest.'”
•L’Etoile de Mer (“The Sea Star”) was a collaboration between Man Ray and the surrealist poet Robert Desnos. It features Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) and André de la Rivière. The distorted, out-of-focus images were made by shooting into mirrors and through rough glass. The film is more sensual than Man Ray’s earlier works.
The longest of Man Ray’s films, Les Mystères du Château de Dé (the version above has apparently been shortened by seven minutes) follows a pair of travelers on a journey from Paris to the Villa Noailles in Hyères, which features a triangular Cubist garden designed by Gabriel Geuvrikain. “Made as an architectural document and inspired by the poetry of Mallarmé,” writes Kim Knowles in A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray, “Les Mystères du Château de Dé is the film in which Man Ray most clearly demonstrates his interdisciplinary attitude, particularly in its reference to Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.”
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