SURREALISM Above the reality Surrealism The term surrealism

SURREALISM Above the reality

Surrealism • The term surrealism indicates a specific thought and movement in literature, the arts, and theatre, which tries to integrate: the confused realms of imagination and reality.

• According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconcious realms of experience. • Thus, the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality. ”

• Drawing on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination.

• Breton drafted the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, declaring Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism.

Breton defined surrealism as: ‘Pure psychic automatism. . . the dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all moral or aesthetic concerns’.

In art, automatism: • refers to creating art without conscious thought, accessing material from the unconscious mind as part of the creative process.

• The proponents of surrealism endeavor to mix up the differences of conscious and unconscious thought through writing and painting by using irrational juxtaposition of images.

• This technique of presenting images helps the readers and the audiences connect with the confused state of mind of that time, and of the people living after the two world wars.

• Surrealism aimed to revolutionise human experience, rejecting a rational vision of life in favour of one that asserted the value of the unconscious and dreams.

• The word ‘surrealist’ suggesting ‘beyond reality’ was coined by the French avantgarde poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, in a play written in 1903 and performed in 1917.

• Many surrealist artists used automatic drawing or writing to unlock ideas and images from their unconscious minds, and others sought to depict dream worlds or hidden psychological tensions.

• Attractive to writers, artists, photographers and filmmakers from around the world who shared this aggressive rejection of conventional artistic and moral values, surrealism quickly became an international movement.

The major surrealist painter: Salvador Dali • Freudian theory underpins Dalí's attempts at forging a visual language capable of rendering his dreams and hallucinations.

• At the other pole the viewer is confronted by a world that is completely defined and minutely depicted but that makes no rational sense: fully recognizable, realistically painted images are removed from their normal contexts and reassembled within an ambiguous, paradoxical, or shocking framework.

• The work aims to provoke a sympathetic response in the viewer, forcing him to acknowledge the inherent “sense” of the irrational and logically inexplicable.

• Obsessive themes of eroticism, death, and decay permeate Dalí's work, reflecting his familiarity with and synthesis of the psychoanalytical theories of his time.