Surrealism

The surrealism is an artistic movement that André Breton defines as a " pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, or in writing, or in any other manner, the real operation of the thought. Dictation of the thought, in the absence of any control exerted by the reason, apart from any esthetic concern or morale.
Surrealism rests on the belief in the higher reality of certain forms of associations neglected until him, with the absolute power of the dream, the play not involved in the thought. It tends to ruin all the other psychic mechanisms definitively and to replace them in the resolution of the main issues of the life '' ".

It is in a letter of Guillaume Apollinaire with Paul Dermée, of March 1917, that for the first time the substantive " appears; surréalisme" : " Any examined good, I believe indeed whom it is to better adopt surrealism that supernaturalism that I had initially employed. Surrealism does not exist yet in the dictionaries, and it will be more convenient to handle than supernaturalism already employed by Misters Philosophes."

Surrealism finds its origin in multiple artistic steps of second half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century: the supernaturalism of Gerard de Nerval and romantic German, the supernaturalism of Emmanuel Swedenborg and Charles Baudelaire, the symbolism of Stephan Mallarmé. As for the first plastic works, they continue the inventions of the Cubisme. This adventure (" an inexorable attitude of sedition and défi" ) by the appropriation of the thought of the poet Arthur Rimbaud (" passes; to change the vie" ), of that of the philosopher Karl Marx (" to transform the monde" ) and of the searchs for Sigmund Freud: Breton was particularly influenced by the test “ the dream and its interpretation ”, published in France in 1900. It withdrew the conviction of the major bond from it linking the real-world and the sensitive world of the dreams. Breton, the analogy between the dreamer and the poet, present at Baudelaire, is exceeded. He regards surrealism as a research of the union of reality and the imaginary one: " I believe in the future resolution of these two states, seemingly so contradictory, which are the dream and reality, in a kind of reality absolue." “Proclamation of surrealism” (1924).

Evolution

Surrealism explores novel methods of creation which leave the free field to unconscious and forces the désinhibition of conditionings: automatic writing, accounts dictated during the forced sleep, exquisite Corpses, request of the objective chance. The movement grants to its literary productions and plastic, the statute of scientific experimentation .

An international adventure

Surrealism knows a particular fortune in the French-speaking literature Belgian. Paul Nougé, whose poetry presents a very marked ludic aspect, founds in 1924 a surrealist center with Brussels with the poets Camille Goemans, Marcel Lecomte… Another important group, “Rupture”, is created in 1932, with Louvière, the personality of Achille Chavée.

The Belgian surrealism takes its distances with regard to the automatic writing and from the political commitment of the Parisian group. The writer and collagist E.L.T. Mesens was the friend of Rene Magritte, the poets Paul Colinet, Louis Scutenaire and André Souris and later Marcel Mariën also belongs to the current.

Surrealism will exert a stimulative action on the development of Spanish poetry , but at the end of the Années 1920 only and in spite of the mistrust caused by irrationalism inherent in the concept of writing automatic. Ramón Gómez of Serna defines its strange bringings together, “greguerias”, like “humor + metaphor”. The current “ultraïste” will determine a change of tone among poets of the “Génération of 27”, Lorca, Alberti, Aleixandre and Cernuda.

The surrealist principles are found in Scandinavia and the USSR. The Czech “poetism” can be regarded as a first phase of surrealism. He affirms himself as of 1924 with a proclamation published by Karel Teige, which conceives poetry like an integral creation, giving free course to imagination and the ludic direction. Its most eminent representatives were Jaroslav Seifert and especially Vítězslav Nezval, whose Soupault underlined the audacity of the images and symbols. The Yugoslav surrealist movement maintains close contacts with the French current thanks to Marko Ristić.

In spite of a loss of prestige starting from 1940, surrealism existed like groups until the Années 1960, by progressively renewing departures and exclusions.

Surrealism entered finally in policy thanks to the Alternative Orange, an artistic group of opposition Polish, formed to the principles of the Années 1980, whose founder Major (Commander) Waldemar Fydrych had proclaimed the Proclamation of Socialist Surrealism . This group, which organized Happening S, painted absurd Graffiti in the shape of imps on the walls of the cities and was one of the most picturesque elements of the Polish opposition against Communism, largely used surrealist esthetics in its terminology and the place given to the spontaneous act.

The automatic writing

By the automatic writing, the surrealist ones wanted to give a voice to the major desires, driven back by that of the company, this “violent and treacherous schoolmistress”, according to the word of Michel de Montaigne. The surrealist object thus obtained initially causes to disconcert the spirit, therefore “to put it in its wrong”. Can occur the resurgence of the major forces then, the spirit “revives with exaltation the best share of its childhood”. One seizes of all his being the connection which links the opposite objects, the surrealist image authentically is a symbol . Looking further into the thought of Baudelaire, André Breton compares, in Arcane 17 , the step of surrealism and that of the esotericism: it offers “the immense interest to maintain in a dynamic state the system of comparison, this unlimited field, available to the man, who delivers the reports/ratios likely to him to connect the objects seemingly most distant and discovers universal symbolism partially to him. ”

The painter max Ernst, on his side, discovers for his art a method similar to the automatic writing, method that already Léonard de Vinci had outlined. Struck by a floor of inn whose washings had accentuated the grooves, it poses on them a sheet randomly and rubs with the black lead. “By attentively looking at the drawings thus obtained, the dark parts and the others clearer, I was surprised sudden intensification of my faculties visionaries and incredible succession of contradictory images. ”

To change the man

The movement Dada was antibourgeois, antinationalist and agitator. But, with the eyes of surrealist, the artist has a political responsibility and morals, its work is suitable for transform the Man. “We do not accept the laws of the Economy or of the Exchange, we do not accept the slavery of Work, and in a field even broader we declare ourselves in insurrection against the History. ” (leaflet the Revolution initially and always ). These principles lead to the political commitment: certain surrealist writers adhere, temporarily, with the French Communist party.

No party, however, answered exactly the aspirations of the surrealist ones, which was at the origin of the tensions with the French Communist party. André Breton does not have enough strong words to fade “the wretched word of engagement which sweats a servility of which poetry and art have horror. ” As of 1930, however, Louis Aragon agreed to subject his literary activity “to the discipline and the control of the Communist party”. The war made that Robert Desnos and Paul Eluard followed it in this way during a few years. Judgment of the exploitation of the Man by the Man, the Militarism, colonial oppression, the priests for their work whom they judge obscurantist, and soon Nazisme, will of a social revolution; and later, finally, denunciation of the pragmatism of the Soviet Union, such is the topics of a fight that, Guerre of Morocco to the Guerre of Algeria, the surrealist ones carried out inlassablement. They tried the synthesis of the historical Matérialisme and the Mysticisme, while being located at the crossroads of the Anarchisme, and the Marxism, firmly opposed to all Fascisms and the religions.

Characters of the surrealist constellation (list):

The surrealist ones:

Artists influenced by Surrealism:

Friendly artists of the surrealist ones:

See too

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