Surrealism: what it is and characteristics of this artistic movement

The first to use the word "surrealism" was, curiously, none of the members of the surrealist group. It was Guillaume Apollinaire who, in 1917, coined the term to refer to Tiresias's tits (Les mamelles de Tiresias), one of his plays, which he called “surreal drama”. Apollinaire died the following year, a victim of the (mis)named Spanish Flu, unaware that he had planted the future. Years later, the surrealist group would be formed.

But what was surrealism, exactly?? What do we know about him? Do we really know its meaning and its essential objective, beyond rumors and legends? We propose a trip to the heart of the surrealist movement, the latest avant-garde and the one that lasted the longest.

Characteristics of surrealism

everybody knows the great interest of the surrealist movement in the world of dreams. Obviously influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, the surrealists advocated bringing to light the most hidden recesses of the human psyche. The intention was not just to create commotion (the famous

épater le bourgeois, which comes to mean something like “scandalizing the bourgeois”), but also providing humanity with a path of liberation from anguish, obsession and paranoia.

Although poets such as Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) or Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) had already made reference to the épater In the mid-19th century and, later, radical groups such as the Dadaists continued to cling to the idea of ​​shocking the corseted bourgeoisie, Surrealism went much further. Because the surreal current is not content only to cause surprise and rejection, but rather proposes a solution to the existential anguish that the human being lives. And that solution, that answer, will only be obtained through the absolute liberation of the psyche, of that subconscious trapped between conventions, moral norms and deeply repressed desires.

Thus, broadly speaking, we can say that the essence of surrealism is an attempt to disinhibit the human being by rescuing their buried fears and desires; that is, through a journey to his darkest and, somehow, more "animal" self. Surrealism deals with themes of a general nature; topics that can influence the greatest number of people, such as the conflict between men and women, sex and repressed envy, fear of death, etc.

The objective is to "wake up" the great masses, shake them, get them out of their boxes. To do this, the surrealists use images whose only logic is the logic of dreams, disordered, paradoxical, contradictory and discontinuous. In literature, the compositions will be fragmentary, written at great speed, often without punctuation marks, following the famous Surrealist “automatism”, which we will discuss in another point.

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From psychic postulates to social struggle

We have already commented that the first to name a work “surrealist” was the poet and playwright Guillaume Apollinaire. Around the same time (that is, during the First World War) Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) was making canvases with a marked surrealist character, which he called "metaphysical painting" and which would greatly influence the surrealist group "official".

De Chirico's landscapes, arid, deserted, imbued with a suffocating solitude, with ruins and impossible perspectives seem, indeed, taken from a dream. Not surprisingly, André Breton, the undisputed leader of the surrealists and author of his manifestos, considered the painter the most important artist of the movement.

The first Surrealist manifesto appeared in 1924., signed, among others, by the aforementioned André Breton (1896-1966), French writer and poet. In the manifesto, Breton defines surrealism as a "pure psychic automatism", in which there is no "regulatory intervention of reason". That is to say, the artist must allow himself to be carried away by the lucubrations of his subconscious; the authentic creation occurs when the restrictions of the higher self are annulled and everything is left in the hands of the most hidden of our mind, so that the true being can flow freely.

For Breton, poetic composition is inevitably linked to “automatic writing”, the procedure by which the author writes the first thing that comes to mind, without hindering the organic flow of his ideas. In this sense (as in many other things) Surrealism owes a lot to the Dada movement, which had already advocated something similar: Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist leader, proposed cutting words and phrases from newspapers and magazines, placing them in a bag and then extracting them. In any case, there is a clear difference between both "automatic" procedures; while that of Dadaism is mechanical and closely linked to chance, that of Surrealism stems from the human psyche itself.

From 1925, surrealism clearly adheres to politics. In fact, most of its members (including André Breton) manifest clear communist sympathies, to the point of point that he himself and some of his companions (Aragon, Éluard and Péret) join the Communist Party French. From then on, the political position of the group, especially that of its leader, is radicalized.

Breton no longer understands surrealism if it is not a vehicle for social activity, and this social activity is linked to the fight against capitalism. Other members, such as the young Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) are reluctant to become so openly involved in politics. An indecision that, by the way, earns him the rejection of the group.

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And the surreal painting?

At first, as has been seen, the surrealist movement was limited to literary creation. This makes sense if we return to the idea of ​​"automatic writing", because how to do the same with a painting?

Surrealist painting was always a figurative painting; that is to say, it represented concrete elements and moved away significantly from abstractionism. But representing concrete elements is in contradiction with the spontaneous creation of which the surrealists spoke, since it requires an idea, a previous planning, a processing of the conscious self.

How, then, do surreal painting? Dalí, for example, proposed what he called the multiple or paranoid image, through which an object, without any prior modification, became before the eyes of the spectator a different object with which he had nothing to do. A clear example of this is his canvas Apparition of a face and a fruit bowl on a beach (1938). In the painting we clearly see a vase with pears. But, almost magically, that vase turns into a face, and the landscape in the background turns into a dog… and so on. Dalí maintained that the images were directly proportional to the degree of paranoid-obsessive capacity of the spectator.

For his part, Max Ernst (1891-1976) captures the surreal language through forests and silent but disturbing landscapes, where everything is confused before the eyes of the one who looks at it. René Magritte (1898-1967) shows off a very detailed realism, but introduces impossible scenes into his works that, indeed, seem taken from a dream world.

There were, however, some painters who followed the postulates of spontaneous and unrestrained creation. For example, Joan Miró (1893-1983), whose works, apparently, have nothing figurative; and André Masson (1896-1987), who lets his brush drag through obsessions transformed into symbols. Masson was also a pioneer in the use of innovative materials for his frames, such as gum arabic and sand.

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Surrealism in the cinema

Surrealism in the performing arts had a distinguished representative in Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the first playwright who embodied surrealist principles in the theater. Artaud considered that the theater should represent a catharsis for the public, in the old Greek style, and for this he used disturbing noises and strange mixtures of lights and sounds. Despite signing up for Surrealist postulates, Artaud was never part of Breton's group, partly because of his reclusive and solitary character. Suffering from serious mental disorders, he died in a mental hospital at the age of 51.

The cinema, that great innovation of the 20th century, was the next stage (and never better said) to which the surrealists climbed. One of the most prominent filmmakers was Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) who said that "the first movie we see in our lives are our dreams." In collaboration with Salvador Dalí, who arrived in Paris that year, he created Un perro andaluz (1929), which is considered the pinnacle of surrealist cinema.

The film manages to perfectly reproduce what a dream is: a succession of images with little or little connection to each other, objects that are first one thing and then another, jumps in time, contradictions. In addition, and how could it be otherwise, the film hits the nail on the head and presents the sexual inhibitions of the corseted bourgeoisie of the moment. In this sense, it is related to the script that the aforementioned Artaud wrote for the cinema and which was translated into the film La concha y el clerigo, where an ecclesiastic feverishly pursues the woman who is the object of his wishes.

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Surrealism before Surrealism

It is interesting to end this article with a remark: many of the movements in art history were not new when they were created. We explain ourselves. Long before Impressionism, there were painters, such as Velázquez, Goya and, above all, Turner, who already played with loose brushstrokes to convey the effects of light. Obviously, you can't call them impressionists, but let's understand each other; Monet and company had discovered nothing new. They simply formalized it and turned it into a style, an artistic trend.

The same thing happens with surrealism. Because who can deny that El Bosco is a surrealist painter? Yes, he lived in the 16th century, a timeline far removed from André Breton and company. But let's look at his work. Let's look at the garden of delights (1500-1505), the hay wagon (1512-1515) or The temptations of San Antonio Abad (1510-1515); the scenes have a strong dreamlike charge, of a dream (or, rather, of a nightmare). In fact, some of the “bosconianos” landscapes are very reminiscent of Dalí who, by the way, had the project of writing a book on “surrealism before surrealism”. It seems that he never finished it.

We find many other "surrealists" who lived before surrealism. Pieter Brueghel the Elder (ca. 1526-1569), in his the triumph of death, he displays a chilling landscape, arid, unknown, populated by skeletons that fight to take the souls of the living. And, already in the 19th century, we have a Goya driven mad by his deafness and by the disasters of war, whose black paintings are not only somewhat surreal, but are also precursors of expressionism German.

For his part, Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825) displays the darkest romanticism with works such as The nightmare, where a young woman is tormented by an incubus, and William Blake (1757-1827), illustrating paradise lost, by Milton, with watercolors showing haunting and strange visions. Nothing new under the sun.