Surrealism

Surrealism is an artistic and cultural movement begun in the 20th century, whose hallmark is non-realistic juxtapositions and imagery: combinations of the fantastic and the real, or the real recreated in unreal ways, or the real in unreal juxtapositions; surrealism, like Dada, was intentionally startling and often comedic or humorous. The dreamlike (sometimes nightmarish) imagery was intended to show super-reality.

Politically, the movement emerged from radical political movements, particularly Marxist communism but drawn significantly from the more anarchist Dada movement. However, while the Surrealism Movement was begun as a radical political art project, the term surrealism has come to describe an artistic style that has been employed much more broadly than the original political movement. For example, Salvador Dalí, became a fascist sympathizer, and although the Surrealist Movement felt he had left the movement, Dalí's work is widely described as surrealist. (Dalí is likely one of the major factors leading to the apolitical use of the term "surrealism".)

Recently, some artists have attempted to reclaim surrealism as a political art movement (see, e.g., Louise Bourgeois and some of the Situationists), but many people use it simply to describe an aesthetic style. Interestingly, in the late 20th century, the anti-colonialist strains of surrealism have been combined and rethreaded with other fantastic art movements (e.g., magical real and mythic arts) in new forms of fantastic political art. (See, e.g., Luisa Valenzuela's The Lizard's Tail.)

As an avant-garde radical political movement in art, surrealism drew from and was inspired by many modern trends beyond political movements. Significantly influential art movements include Dada, as well as Cubism, Expressionism, futurism, and Impressionism, and earlier fantastic artists (such as Hieronymous Bosch). Other movements, better described as cultural or philosophical, included psychoanalysis (Freud and Jung's work in particular), pataphysics, metaphysics and spiritualist movements of the preceding decades ....

The term was apparently coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917 in program notes for the ballet Parade. It was picked up as the name of a movement, which began to crystallize when the "Surrealist Manifesto" was published in 1924, written largely by André Breton. Surrealism quickly spread from literature to other arts, including painting, photography, montage and collage, music, film, games, and performance art, often drawing significantly and blurring with the Dada movement.

Women were significant players in the surrealist movement, although are still often underrepresented in histories of the movement. It is perhaps not surprising that the surrealist most associated with sexism is Dalí, a "little-s" surrealist, rather than a Movement Surrealist.

Surrealist feminism in literature

• Leonora Carrington. The Hearing Trumpet. Definitively surreal, from one of the mistresses of the genre ...
• Bertha Harris. Lover
• Jacqueline Harpman. I Who Have Never Known Men. Not surreal in the same way, really, as anything else ...
• Anna Livia. Minimax
• Anna Livia. Bulldozer Rising

Surrealist feminist and female artists

• Eileen Agar, 1899-1991
• Claude Cahun, 1894-1954
• Léonor Fini, 1907-1996
• Frida Kahlo
• Suzanne Malherbe, 1892-1972
• Méret Oppenheim
• Dorothea Tanning
• Remedios Varo

• Louise Bourgeois

References

• Xavière Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité (1971)
• Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red (1990)
• Helena Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism (1988)
• Germaine Greer, "Double Vision", The Guardian, March 5, 2007 (about surrealist women)
• Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement
• Surrealist Games (Shambhala; boxed set)