WEEK 2.2 TELL ME SOMETHING ABOUT SURREALISM

The Persistence of Memory, oil on canvas, by Slavador Dali, 1931

   In the previous post I wrote a brief of Jan Svankmajer biography as his work which he self-labeled as surrealism. Now, what is Surrealism? Surrealism, movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew gradually out of the earlier Dada movement, which happen before the World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism’s emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. 

   The word 'surrealist' (suggesting 'beyond reality') was invented by the French avant-garde poe Guillaume Appoillinaire in a play written in 1903 and staged in 1917. However, it was Andre Breton, the leader of a new grouping of poets and artist in Paris, who, in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924) interpreted surrealism as a pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally in writing, or any manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercise by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.

    Surrealism emphasis on content and free form which provide a major alternative to the contemporary, highly formalistic Cubist movement and was highly responsible for perpetuating in modern painting the traditional emphasis on content.