Salvador Dali, Dream Caused By the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944)
Dali, a Surrealist painter of the twentieth century, needs no lengthy introduction for one to easily recognize his bizarre, dreamlike, “surreal”, imagery that truly defined him as an artist. Instead of a boring history lesson on Salvador Dali, I prefer to explore the ideology behind his works and explore their possible meanings. With this particular painting we again see a painting that right off the bat looks crazy and weird, something only the subconscious or dream world could create. Dali is arguably the most famous artist creating these types of works, for he held nothing back when it came to unleashing the automatic. Sigmund Freud was a large inspiration for Dali’s dreamscape paintings and although we may never involve ourselves so deeply into psychoanalysis, I believe the surrealist ideal doesn’t require us to do so in order to gain insight and take something from the painting. The ideal is that basically all facets of life are teetering between a balance of the real, the tangible, things that makes sense and also the intangible, the subconscious, dreams, the weird, wacky, and unexplainable. Without one or the other, life isn’t balanced. What is significant about this “balance” in my opinion is in the war torn times of the early twentieth century, when surrealism was developed, people needed balance, they needed stability to be comfortable. So the idea that surrealism or Dali’s paintings are a rejection of the normal or using nonsense to combat the normal is almost in my opinion correct. However I don’t believe the motive was to just turn everything into dream worlds and reject all that is normal like many see surrealism to be, I believe that his work was intended to be almost like a safe haven for those looking to escape the monotony of everyday life. I believe Salvador Dali is a genius and amazing surrealist artist because he was able to recreate the subconscious and the dream like places and by doing so he forces the viewer away from the “norm” even if it is just for a moment, to provide that balance.
Although the “true end” of surrealism is hotly debated, most scholars agree that surrealism continues to be a significant and influential even into modern times. Expressed in such varied forms as art, theater, literature, film and even music, it is hard to determine just how Surrealism as a movement can ever truly “end”. That being said, the peak of the movement is considered by many to have occurred shortly after the split of 1929, and continued into the mid-1930’s, when Salvador Dali came into popularity. It was during this time that exhibitions were held throughout Europe and Surrealist art really came into the public eye. Once World War II began in the 1940’s, however, many artists fled Europe and many journals were disbanded. Despite this breakdown in communications, many artists continued working in the Surreal style for years to come, and their work greatly influenced artists throughout the century.
from Mom and Pop Art, 1999
from Treehouse of Horror IV, October 1993
Paintings such as Magritte’s Son of Man and Dali’s The Persistence of Memory have come to characterize the Surrealist movement in many people’s minds, and have become famous to such a point that even the common man who claims to know nothing of art can recognize them. For instance, although your average joe may not be able to identify Rene Magritte as the creator of Son of Man, he will likely recognize the image from its references in pop culture. From Michael Jackson music videos to episodes of The Simpsons or Futurama, Surrealist art has left a legacy which will not soon be forgotten. The Simpsons, often known for including subtle academic humor in their shows have even gone further into the depths of Surrealism. In one episode, Mom and Pop Art (1999) Homer falls asleep while in an art museum and finds himself in a world filled with melting clocks (The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali 1931), exploring the subconscious nature of Surreal art. While these works are nearly a century old, they have remained relevant throughout the generations when they are prominently featured in current pop culture.
Tim Burton, 1992
Surrealism has also bled into the movements in the “postmodern” era (present times). For instance, present-day artist and cinematic genius Tim Burton recently held an exhibition of his work at MoMA in Los Angeles, where he was heralded as a forerunner of “Pop Surrealism”. The term, coined in the 1970’s, refers to “lowbrow” cartoon-like imagery not typically associated with the fine arts, such as graphic novels (comics) and animated cartoons. His movies, including Beetlejuice (1988) and Edward Scissorhands (1990) are two popular examples of his dreamlike characters and landscapes. One of the featured pieces of the 800-piece exhibition is the polaroid Untitled (A Christmas Photo). This strange image of what appears to be a chihuahua with antlers is jarring in its dissonance. The image of such a small dog with oversized elk antlers displays similar techniques to Surrealist painters like Rene Magritte who juxtaposed incongruous elements in order to create a surreal image.
Top: Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton (1988) Bottom: The Red Tower, Giorgio De Chirico (1913)
To the right I have included a still from the movie Edward Scissorhands (1988) next to an early surreal landscape by Giorgio de Chirico, The Red Tower. The two share a similar focal point technique which highlights the disproportionately sized building in the center. These skewed dimensions are reminiscent of a dreamscape, bending space in an impossible manner although the objects around them appear to be “normal”. This inversion of the Renaissance focal point technique which is used classically to convey depth is a hallmark of Surreal landscapes.
Landscapes and the focal point technique were often used by Salvador Dali. In The Persistence of Memory (1931) and The First Days of Spring (1929), Dali employs a classical backdrop for his otherwise surreal subjects, causing the viewer to become somewhat disoriented. In the latter, Dali also employs another common Surrealist trend: Collage. In order to best achieve the skewed proportions of a dream, many artists would collage cut images over a painted backdrop, as we can see on the right. This technique has persisted, as is evidenced by the movie poster for Time Bandits, an English movie released in 1981. The plot involves a young boy with an incredible imagination who goes on a historical time-traveling adventure, and the cover art reflects the “trapdoors” which seem to take him through time and space. When viewed side-by-side the similarities between the collaging techniques become apparent. Both of the images have a seemingly realistic skyline, but the other elements are seemingly independent of one another, yet are arranged in collage to interact. The image of the pirate ship atop the swimming man’s head is especially provocative of surrealist notions of the subconscious, inviting a mental adventure into lands unknown.
Left: Time Bandits, 1981 Right: The First Days of Spring, Salvador Dali 1929
All in all, it seems that although the Surrealist Movement has dwindled considerably, the art and techniques created, as well as the ideas which inspired them, are still relevant to society today, and will hopefully remain so for years to come.
“Surrealism, as many of us had conceived of it for years… I hope will be considered as having tried nothing better than to cast a conduction wire between the far too distant worlds of waking and sleep, exterior and interior reality, reason and madness, the assurance of knowledge and love, of life for life and the revolution”
Rene Magritte, The Philosophy in the Bedroom (1962)
The Rene Magritte painting The Philosophy in the Bedroom is discussed in the brief but eloquent article Magritte: The Uncanny and the Image by Silvano Levy. Levy applies Freud’s theory of the uncanny to Magritte’s work in relation to the traditional Surrealist concept of the image. For clarification, in his writing on the matter, Freud defines the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”
The author defines the Surrealist concept of the image as “a correlation between elements which are apparently unrelated or even irreconcilable.” This is certainly not the case of the elements that comprise the image found in The Philosophy in the Bedroom. The night dress and the body underneath it are very much related, one suited exactly for the other, technically disqualifying it from being an orthodox Surrealist image according to Andre Breton’s first manifesto.
But, Levy argues that because of mixing the secret with the familiar and violating taboo, the elements of the painting are not separated by “objective distance” but rather by “subjective dissociation,” which causes shock associated with the uncanny and the realization of repressed parts of the psyche. Thus, “convention, rather than objective necessity, imposes a disjunction in the ordering of conscious reality.” Plainly put, the work seems to be orthodoxically Surrealist in its effect, if not in its method.
Perhaps, Levy’s exquisite and articulate explanation is only part of the experience evoked by viewing the painting. These sober and rigorous interpretations risk detracting from what I feel is a rather playful painting. Of course, the piece initially has a slightly jarring effect, but this shock is surely and immediately outweighed by wit. I’ve been looking at it for days and I still find it funny, if not altogether ridiculous. With that being said, Magritte, much to his compliment, leaves ample intellectual room for both pedantic rhetoric and brash humor.
La Révolution surréaliste and Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution were two very important periodicals for the Surrealist group around André Breton in Paris. Why were journals so important for the development of an artistic movement or group in the early 1920’s ?
They were the primary source of distribution the creative community could refer to. “The journal was a vehicle for promoting emerging styles, establishing new theories and creating a context for understanding new visual forms” (Hofmann 131). For the surrealists the periodicals provided a forum for their experiments with automatic writings, imagery and their dream interpretations. In addition, the form of a journal is ideal when trying to achieve a combination of a way of publishing images and texts alongside. Here they could be juxtaposed in an efficient way. La Révolution surréaliste was published from 1924 until 1929, when the second Manifesto by Breton was published in its last issue and the split between Bataille and Breton took place (see the Division). Nevertheless, the journal had been very successful. It’s layout imitated the style of a scientific magazine named La Nature. This should identify the journal as not simply an aesthetic booklet, but a source of experimental research based on theoretical approaches inspired by people such as Freud and later Hegel, Marx and Trotsky.
Man Ray, monument à D.A.F. de Sade, 1933 published in LSASDLR
Furthermore, the format of a scientific paper gave the images contained in the journal an effect of evidence rather than being of pure aesthetic nature. Throughout it’s existence the journal was “consistently and incessantly scandalous and revolutionary”, it dealt with the darker sides of men’s psyches including suicide, death, violence, sexual perversion and anticlerical attitudes.
Breton was clearly the most important figure to start the movement and the Journal itself, emerging out of Littérature.
cadavre exquis, André Breton, Valentine Hugo, Tristan Tzara? 1926
However, his prominent role as main and only director was only established after the fourth issue. After this, the journal contained more poems and illustrations then before and became more political at the same time. The later issues showed the surrealist invention of the game called “Le Cadavre exquis”. This exquisite Corpse is a drawing built of a collective participation on a folded paper. Every participant draws one body part without seeing what the others have already done before. In this way, a new surrealist being was created. In the twelfth and last issue the second Manifesto was published which led to a re-naming of the journal to Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution. This journal, now completely under the reign of André Breton sympathizes with Communist Ideology. Automatic writings virtually disappeared and very few dream recitals were published in it. What was more prominent were political and theoretical texts. Additionally, what is interesting, is that a discourse between Breton and Freud emerged in which Breton criticized Freud of not having referred to all his sources and Freud declares that he does not understand what the Surrealism is meant to be. All in all, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution had only six issues in between 1930 and 1933 and was less popular than the first version of the journal, which might be caused by its growing provocative outline. Many members explored the writings of the Marquis de Sade which had been brought to them by Guillaume Apollinaire. Sade’s work consisted of erotic writings which had a strong focus on pornography combined with philosophical thinking. Sexual fantasies, often violent, were depicted and described, which served the Surrealists as inspiration. The revolution the Surrealists were talking about or looking for was not only to be found in the breaking with bourgeois values and traditions, but also with the political system and imperialistic politics, which became more clear in the later journal. Both periodicals however were platforms for new and different thoughts and lay the ground for the development of an international Surrealism.
see
Hofmann, Irene E. . Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection. Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies Vol. 22, No. 2, Mary Reynolds and the Spirit of Surrealism (1996), pp. 130-149+197
Ades, Dawn. Dada and surrealism reviewed / [London] : Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978.
The manifesto demonstrates the huge influence the Dada movement had due to heavy use of absurdist humor that was popular during that time. The document begins by defining Surrealism as automatism in its purest state where an individual is free to express in any means the functioning of thought, and allowing the thought to take control without restricting it by any form of reason. The idea behind this method was so it could be easier to create different means of analyzing and interpreting human psyche. Breaking the traditional social norms of interpretation allows for different modes of consciousness to take shape. It contains many different applications of surrealist thought to different forms of literature and poetry, while emphasizing the fact that these concepts were free to be applied to any form of expression, and did not necessarily have to restricted and exclusive to art. Although Surrealism is most commonly associated with paintings and drawings, it could extend to many different types of expressions, which was one of the primary aims of Surrealism itself. As we can see from Matthew’s article, Breton’s optimistic assurance that surrealism “is what will be” clarifies that affirmation by confirming that the full flowering of surrealism is not to be sought in a statement like the Manifesto itself, but in the response it solicits. After all, Surrealism is all about the individual response to a certain stimuli and the manner in which it is interpreted through any means of expression. He concludes the Manifesto by stating that Surrealist thought and activity follows no strict plan or pattern, as it is all open to individual interpretation, and that at the end of the day, non-conforming is the name of the game. What made Surrealism so popular was the fact that an individual was free to interpret quite literally everything in whichever manner they felt most comfortable, or whichever manner resonated with them the most. There was no clear cut right or wrong way in which something could be interpreted, or expressed for that matter. The open ended nature of Surrealism further resonated with people due to the fact that it operated on a universal plane relative to it’s dreamy atmosphere. This near universality allowed for people, regardless of class, age, or gender, to find some form of connection with whatever it is they were looking at.
As Surrealism developed over about a decade in the 1920’s, it explored new ways of representing the world and reality under the first surrealist manifesto. The majority of new “Surrealist” art was found mostly in poetry and writing, figured by some artists the best or only true way of representing the automatic subconscious. This idea however was rejected by many and thus painting, collage, etc. were also developed in the Surrealist aspect. Anything that represented the new, more automatic, basic, or unreasonable could fall under this Surrealist movement.
Surrealism progressively developed into the 1930’s. During this time the unique qualities and true beauty of surrealism were being understood. Lautreamont provides a simile to the beauty of Surrealism, “Beautiful as the chance to encounter a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” “This un expecting, arbitrary beauty, these dumbfounding juxtapositions, are the very voice of Surrealism.” That is the beauty of Surrealism; to be able to view the randomness and ultimate imagery that the subconscious can provide, and to understand/accept that not everything is rational and that life is a wash of reality and fantasy. It’s now that Breton and a few others, came up with the Second Surrealist Manifesto, which “proceeds towards an evaluation of the Surrealist spirt.”. The beauty now being invoked by surrealism art was the focus, and that beauty was arguably explored the most by the new Surrealist artist of that time Salvador Dali.
Salvador Dali, Lugubrious Game (1929)
Dali, a spanish artist, formally became a Surrealist around 1929, which is also about the time when the second manifesto came about. Dali was known to be “deeply interested in insanity, hysteria, trance phenomena, every symptom of mania..”, which allowed him to steer Surrealism in this new direction where before others had only approached in the “most tentative fashion”. “He gives full rein to dreams and hallucinations which he represent in the most faithful and meticulous way.” Simply put Dali was willing to represent the extreme version of the First Surrealist Manifesto, the true subconscious with all its offensiveness, with all the immoral implications, something that either wasn’t excepted ten years earlier with the first manifesto or something that couldn’t be expected without this understanding of the ideology and beauty of the movement that the Second Manifesto brought about.
Images from: artstor.org
In the Light of Surrealism
Georges Hugnet and Margaret Scolari
The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art , Vol. 4, No. 2/3, Dada and Surrealism: Essays by Georges Hugnet (Nov. – Dec., 1936), pp. 19-32
Rene Magritte is Belgian artist who was involved in the Surrealist movement after meeting Breton in Paris around 1927. Many of his works show normal, everyday objects, however, they are given new meanings because of the unusual way he organizes them. He paints real objects, yet it is not meant to be a representation of that object in reality, but rather, paint on a canvas. For example, Magritte paints a pipe and titles it”Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, which translates as “This is not a pipe”. The painting itself is not a physical pipe, but nothing more than a painting of one. Paintings are not meant to be representative of reality and in many cases it is purposeful to call attention to the fact that it is paint. An apple on the canvas is a painting of an apple and Magritte points out that we can never catch the item itself, no matter how accurately it is depicted.
Magritte does not exemplify the automatism of Surrealism and his early interest in abstraction shaped his Surrealist paintings. He described the period following World War II as ‘surrealism in the sunlight’. Magritte said “the art of putting colors side by side in such a way that their real aspect is effaced, so that familiar objects—the sky, people, trees, mountains, furniture, the stars, solid structures, graffiti—become united in a single poetically disciplined image. The poetry of this image dispenses with any symbolic significance, old or new.”
Several of Magritte’s most famous paintings include a man in a top hat, in which his face is never visible. It is either covered by an apple, a bird, or turned away. He also did a work of two lovers, both with their faces covered by a white cloth. This theme of no personal identity is illustrated in many of his works. Every one of his paintings illustrates the the Surrealist ideas put forth in Breton’s manifesto because they each represent a dream like state. There is quality that they surpass reality and we can see into the mind of Magritte.
The Surrealist movement took place under the First Manifesto by Breton for most of the 1920s. A division occurred in 1929 between Breton and Bataille, “where a single month saw the publication of both Breton’s ‘Second Manifesto’ of Surrealism in La Revolution Surrealiste and Bataille’s ‘Le “Jeu lugubre”’ in Documents. Breton criticized Bataille for his ‘vulgar materialism’, which went against what he described surrealism as being actual functioning thought in the first manifesto. Breton saw a clear connection between both the ideas on dreams by Freud and the Communist ideals of Marx. Breton did not agree with Bataille on the basis of Marxism. Bataille’s approach to surrealism did not have Marx in the equation. Breton goes on to write the second manifesto, in which he condemns men like Bataille whom he believes threatened the ideals of surrealism and his own authority. Breton writes, “ What we are witnessing is an obnoxious return to old anti-dialectal materialism, which this time is trying to force its way gratuitously through Freud”. In addition to Bataille, Breton shuns several other artists that were apart of surrealism from the start and the first manifesto. Bataille was interested in a type of materialism in which he argues for the concept of an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilizes all foundations. His interest goes on to include bassasse, or baseness. This is a mechanism that caused decay or the process through which form is undone. Some of Bataille’s ideologies come from a place of cruelty and belief in sacrifice. He admired Manet for ‘destroying’ the subject of painting. Breton and Bataille both had different ideas as to the direction they would like to see surrealism go, despite sharing similar notions of Freud’s unconscious mind and dream state. It seems as though both men were threatened by one another and Breton was not willing to give up his title as creator of the Surrealist movement. Breton writes in the Second Manifesto, “It is to be noted that M. Bataille misuses adjectives with a passion: befouled, senile, rank, sordid, lewd, doddering, and that these words, far from serving him to disparage an unbearable state of affairs, are those through which his delight is most lyrically expressed”. The clearest way to analyze the split is one between poetry and action, Breton on the poetry side and Bataille on the action side. Breton created Surrealism as a movement based on ‘pure psychic automatism’ and automatic writing, in addition to exploration, through poetry and prose, the psychic dimension of the human mind. The split resulted in a second manifesto by Breton and can mark the point in which the surrealist movement becomes much more vast and spread out. The result is a lot more artists trying new things because it is less of an exclusive club.
Man Ray (Philadelphia 1890 – Paris 1976) drifts fuses melts floats
It’s a fusion of the unconscious and conscious, the sleeping and wakening. He experiments with different media and art forms, he paints, photographs, creates films, new techniques and objects which mix the appearance of dream and reality. One popular motif of surrealist expression is clearly the drifting / fusing of objects or forms (comparable to Dalí’s soft watches ?), which visualizes the aim of finding the connection point of dream and reality, subconscious and conscious.
Man Ray – Kiki de Montparnasse 1924
Man Ray was born as Emmanuel Radnitsky in Philadelphia but grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He experimented with different art forms and enrolled in the Ferrer Center a modern alternative art school in 1911 when it opened its doors where he met Marcel Duchamp. They became friends and worked together on so called readymades and objects. Duchamp introduced Man Ray to the Dadaists in Paris, when he moved there in 1921. He met the writers André Breton, Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon who were already publishing a Dadaist pamphlet called Littérature, which would eventually lead to the development of the surrealist group and their journal La Revolution Surréaliste. (see Overview)
Man Ray was not primarily a photographer. He “considered himself first and foremost a painter, [but] Man Ray also made sculptures, films and photographs.” (Garcia 9). Similar to Duchamp you cannot clearly categorize Man Ray as an artist of a certain movement. Nevertheless, he was part of the surrealist group around André Breton in Paris, but always “maintained a great degree of autonomy” (Garcia 9). He firstly used photography as a device for documentation. He documented for example his own works and meetings of the artists. Therefore, he was listed as the official photographer for the journal La Revolution Surréaliste . He earned most of his living by taking portrait pictures of members of the artistic scene and celebrities in Paris. His photographs were regularly published in magazines such as Vanity Fair and the Vogue. Man Ray worked closely together with André Breton, not only during the productions of La Revolution surréaliste, but his photographs were also used to illustrate Breton’s work Nadja. He is said to have left the group after Breton published the second manifesto, which focuses on a communist ideology and excludes several members. However, he remained in contact with the artists. More of his work was still published in the modified journal Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution.
Tomorrow 1924
Jane Livingston writes in her article “Man Ray and Surrealist Photography” that Man Ray cannot “squarely [be thrust] into the surrealist camp”, but because he finally remained “tangent to the movement fails to diminish the irrefutable importance of Man Ray’s presence among the surrealists, and especially his photographic contributions to their various manifestations”. In her view, “Man Ray succeeded in eroticizing his objects, creating enduring poetic incarnations of surrealisms Sadist desire without violating his own classically grounded modernist aestheticism” (Krauss 147). The photographs chosen here show the ambiguity of being beautiful and uncannily distorted at the same time. The female bodies appear as objects to look at. The camera catches a certain feeling of power over these women, which may symbolize Man Ray’s need for dominance.
Some of his photographs can be interpreted as visualizations of the ideas of surrealism. André Breton : “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, a surreality, if one may so speak” (Art in Theory 450)
Man Ray, The Primacy of Matter over Thought (1929)
This surreality which is often connected to the “dizzying effects of desire” (Montagu 44) show in the pictures above. One of Man Rays favorite motifs was the female body. He took a lot of famous pictures of his current partners such as Kiki de Montparnasse or Lee Miller. The work included in this post “The Primacy of Matter over Thought”, above, displays a nude (Kiki de Montparnasse) lying on what seems to be a bare floor. Her body appears very white in contrast to the surroundings. With the help of a technique called solarisation her body according to Montagu seems to “float above the background”. However, the indefinable mass which loosens the edges of her body can also be described as a certain kind of dissolving into nonentity. In any case, the picture evokes a feeling of uncertainty and instability concerning our perception of reality. It could be taken out of a dream. Certainly this dream would be rather a male than a female dream, dealing with sexual desires and the male gaze at the female body as an object rather than a personality.
besides photography :
untitled 1924
Man Ray found by accident the photogram another technique of capturing an object’s form on paper. He named his discovery after him “rayograph”, which works by placing objects directly on photosensitized paper and exposing it to light. The objects will appear white, while the surface which was touched by the light turns black, which gives the object a ghostly touch.
Man Ray also engages in experimental film, in Emak Bakia (Give us a Break or Leave us alone) from 1926, the images itself float. He calls his film a cinépoème, the two realities of film and poem are mixed. He creates a rhythm or metric system by juxtaposing images rather than words. The viewer not only observes a dreamlike story line, but falls into a state of some kind of trance himself while watching.
Garcia, Erin C. Man Ray in Paris / Los Angeles : J. Paul Getty Museum, c2011.
Krauss, Rosalind E. L’amour fou : photography and surrealism / Washington, D.C. : Corcoran Gallery of Art ; New York : Abbeville Press, c1985.
Montagu, Jemima. The surrealists : revolutionaries in art & writing 1919-35 / London : Tate Pub., c2002.
The Surrealist Perspective 