The Surrealist artists – among them André Breton, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte – turned their backs on the rationalism and realism of so much art, instead exploring the unconscious as a means of accessing their creative imaginations. They were greatly influenced by the rise of psychoanalysis spearheaded by Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century (see here). Magritte summed up the movement like this: ‘To be a surrealist . . . means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.’
Surrealism emerged out of the Dadaist movement, which was responsible for producing often incongruous works that challenged cultural and aesthetic assumptions – most notoriously, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (see Conceptualism here). However, the Surrealist emphasis on the imagination also recalled Romanticism, while its embracing of fantastical imagery was foreshadowed by the likes of Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516).
The imagery employed by the Surrealists was, necessarily given its origins, disparate – from the bowler hats of Magritte to the melting clocks of Dalí and the birds of Max Ernst. Their works, though, could be at once playful and highly disconcerting. For Dalí, surrealism was ‘destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision’, while Breton claimed: ‘The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.’
There were also significant experiments in film – most famously Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) – and the influence of the movement was widespread. Jackson Pollock, for instance, experimented with automatism, while in film David Lynch continues to carry the surrealist flame.
Art and the unconscious
The birth of Surrealism can be dated to 1924 when Breton wrote The Surrealist Manifesto. He described Surrealism as ‘psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought.’ This was a call to create art by channelling the unconscious at the expense of conscious reason. His ideas sprang out of the theories of Freud, who in works such as The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) had argued that the unconscious is the seat of our true feelings and desires.
‘Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.’
René Magritte