It’ll be a huge injustice if we place ‘Surrealism’ under a specific theme. It is anything and everything.
Is it Bold? Yes.
Lowbrow? Probably.
Intense? Definitely.
It is more than just an artistic style, it is an artistic movement and a way of life.
The brainchild of a critically acclaimed French poet, André Breton, Surrealism is a philosophical and psychological artistic movement. Set off in the 20th century, the primary aim of the movement, according to Berton, was ‘to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality’. The surrealists believed that the source of their creativity and art was their unconscious mind, and they focused more on exploring the hidden life in their heads to break free from the shackles of society. The bedrock of this movement was irrationalism and absurdity and so the surrealists strongly retaliated against the rules imposed on them by society because they believed that they stemmed from rationality and logic.
Surrealism art is wrapped around the phrase “beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder”. The artists find beauty in the most bizarre objects; they experiment with the most unconventional objects, and they give life to their deepest thoughts. The movement was majorly influenced by automatism, because of which artists were able to create dream-like imagery. This movement noticed some extravagant work by artists Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo and many more. In short, Surrealism can be best described as “strangeness on canvas”.
THE RISE OF SURREALISM
Poet, Guilliame Apollinaire coined the term “Surreal” and defined it as anything that stemmed out of the unconscious mind or something that was an independent reality. But the movement itself came into the picture in 1924 with the release of the “Manifesto of Surrealism” by André Breton. It contained the psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious mind by the well known psychologist Sigmund Freud. Although it originated in Paris, this movement spread across different countries in Europe during the early 1930s and by the 1940s it had entered the United States of America.
While many artists embraced this as a literary movement, artists like Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Giorgio de Chirico chose a more visual approach and started depicting the idea of surrealism through artworks and paintings. In fact, for many artists, this movement became an outlet for their thoughts especially, during World War II. It allowed the artists to tap into the intimate and raw parts of their mind and create some vividly shocking imageries.
INFLUENCE OF SURREALISM
Undoubtedly, Surrealism has been the most powerful artistic movements the world has ever come across. Artists till date apply the concepts of Surrealism in their work to explore the psychological and philosophical aspects of the mind. It has become a symbol of resistance and cultural opposition and is thus seen to be involved in many feminist art movements. For instance, female artists like Claude Cahun and Meret Oppenheim used Surrealistic strategies in their work to shed some light on the prevalence of gender discrimination in their society which helped in the upliftment of women around them.
SURREALISM IN TODAY’S WORLD
While this art form cannot be defined by specific boundaries, it won’t be right to call it “vague”. It focuses on the mind, the character and the soul of the artists. The original masters gave us a plethora of ideas and opinions to learn from. It gave birth to another art form, “Absurdity” which like Surrealism has its own rules which can lightly be translated to 'no rules. 'Contemporary artists of today’s time namely Anatole Krasnyansky and Michael Cheval have depicted the concept of Surrealism in many of their modern day paintings. Their so called “absurd” paintings are symbolic of the past which portray how surrealism helped artists pave their way through stringent rules and regulations.
This art form keeps changing from time to time and can be interpreted in different ways. It is extremely versatile and can be expressed via paintings, sculptures, music and literature. In other words, it can be anything and everything.
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