ART LEGACY
AS SURREALISM TURNS 100, HERE’S A LOOK AT ITS ENDURING LEGACY
Few movements in art history have had as lasting a legacy as Surrealism, which utterly transformed our manner of thinking and seeing. In its time, it garnered a remarkable degree of public recognition, and its influence on artists continues to be felt today.
This year marks the centennial of the birth of Surrealism with the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto in October 1924. Actually, make that manifestos, plural, as two tracts appearing within weeks of each other vied for the title.
The first was written by Yvan Goll (1891– 1950), a French-german poet with close ties to the German Expressionists; the other, more famous treatise was penned by André Breton (1896–1966), a French poet and critic whose talent for tireless self-promotion contributed to his ascension as Surrealism’s de facto leader and ideological enforcer.
Neither Goll nor Breton mentioned art in their respective statements. Moreover, neither actually coined the term Surrealism. That distinction belongs to Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), a poet and prime proponent of the Parisian avant-garde, who used it in a 1917 letter to the Belgian critic Paul Dermée to describe the experimental ballet Parade (1917).
What was Surrealism?
Breton defined Surrealism as a way to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality. He recast it as an artistic enterprise with his 1928 publication Surrealism and Painting. By then, artists such as Jean Arp, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, René Magritte, Joan Miró, and Yves Tanguy had been drawn into his orbit.
Stylistically, Surrealism ranged from the quasi-abstraction of Miró to Magritte’s deadpan realism. Originally centred in Paris, it became global in scope, spilling over to the Americas and Asia. Reacting to the carnage of World War I, the movement attacked rationalism and social decorum, upending longstanding artistic precepts and subverting conventional sexual mores with misogynistic élan. Even so, Surrealism attracted a significant cohort of female artists, among them Meret Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, Claude Cahun, and Leonora Carrington.
The Surrealists reveled in a discontinuity best summarised by a line from the 1868 novel Les Chants de Maldoror, which described a ‘chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.’ This idea became
Surrealism’s credo, codified by the collaborative genre known as the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse).
Resembling a game of telephone, but played with drawings, cadavre exquis involved passing a piece of paper around a group of artists. Each would render part of a figure, then hide it by folding the sheet over. Other participants would follow suit, and the result when revealed was predictably disjointed.
Surrealism, Freud, and Automatism
Surrealism was deeply indebted to Sigmund Freud. His belief that the mind could be unlocked through psychoanalytical methods such as the interpretation of dreams made a huge impact on Breton, who’d attended medical school and developed an interest in mental illness before he became a writer.
Serving in the French army’s medical corps on the Western Front in World War I, Breton was stationed at a ward in Nantes that treated soldiers for shell shock (what we would today call PTSD), where he applied Freud’s theories while caring for patients.
Breton believed the subconscious could unshackle art from its conventions through automatism, a process that surrendered deliberation to an unimpeded flow of imagination. He described it as ‘a pure state by which one proposes to express . . . the actual functioning of thought . . . in the absence of any control exercised by reason’. Here again he was indebted to Freud, who pioneered free association, which encouraged patients to relay feelings, memories, and reveries in an unregulated rush of words.
André Masson (1896–1987) developed the artistic application of this method with a series of drawings begun in 1924, characterised by agglomerations of lines produced in a fugue state. Automatism would eventually become foundational to Abstract Expressionism in the post– World War II era.
Proto-surrealism
While we think of Surrealism as a 20th-century phenomenon, its roots in art reach much farther back. For much of European art history, depictions of heaven and hell were a constant theme, and in this respect, portrayals of otherworldly planes intersecting our own were an accepted fact of pictorial organisation.
Surrealism could be considered a backlash to large historical forces—the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution - that developed in Europe between the 17th and 19th centuries. The former held that religion and faith must relinquish themselves to the power of reason, effectively severing a connection between the physical and metaphysical that Surrealism would later try to repair.
Surrealism rejected Enlightenment beliefs, but it wasn’t the first movement to do so. In the early 19th century, Romanticism swept across the Continent, its proponents arguing that relying on reason alone shortchanged individual agency by ignoring sensation, both good and bad. Among the artists within its ranks were three—william Blake, Henry Fuseli, and Francisco Goya—whose work could be considered proto-surrealistic.