Surrealism

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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 as viewed through the subconscious.

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's association with surrealism 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 (first) "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. Penelope Rosemont's recent anthology collecting the writings of women in the surrealist movement is a significant corrective.

As an explicitly political movement, the Surrealist movement was anti-sexist. Also, its explorations of fantastic and psychic imagery, and the movement's ties to anti-colonial and revolutionary movements around the world, brought in new waves of imagery not tied to teh historically male-dominated European classical tradition. Feminine imagery was explicitly explored, although some feminist artists have critiqued surrealist obsession with female bodies as more of the same-old, same-old.[1] The use of feminine imagery in connection with the subconscious or the primitive has also been viewed as a fundamentally sexist critique.[2] Nevertheless, Penelope Rosemont (among others) has made a strong case that the Surrealist Movement had more active female participants than any other modern art movement except the feminist art movement, and while not immune to the sexism that pervaded modern art, was more open both to women and feminism.

Surrealist feminists and women in literature

Surrealist feminist and female artists


References

  • Susan L. Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art
  • Dawn Ades, "Notes on Two Women Surrealist Painters: Eileen Agar and Ithelle Colquhoun", The Oxford Art Journal, April 1980
  • Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminine Aesthetics (1989) (exclusion of women from art history; not surrealism-specific)
  • Louisa Buck, "Faceless Femme Fatales: Unearthing Surrealist Women Using Bodies as Source and Subject", Women's Art Magazine, Nov-Dec 1992, No. 49, pp. 16-17.
  • Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg, eds., Surrealism and Women (1990) (ISBN 0-262-53098-8)
  • Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985)
  • Whitney Chadwick, Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation
  • Whitney Chadwick, "The Muse as Artist: Women in the Surrealist Movement," Art in America, July 1985, pp. 120-129.
  • Whitney Chadwick, "Carrington, Mexico and Surrealism", Women's Art Magazine, March-April 1992, No. 45, pp. 26-29.
  • Katy Deepwell and Deborah Sugg, "Emmy Bridgwater", Women's Art Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 1990, No. 37, pp. 14-16.
  • David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935; an important original survey)
  • Xavière Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité (1971)
  • Edward B. Germain, English and American Surrealist Poetry (1978)
  • Germaine Greer, "Double Vision", The Guardian, March 5, 2007 (about surrealist women)
  • Janet A. Kaplan, Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys (2000)
  • Leon Kochnitzky, "Shepherdess of the Sphinxes", View, June 1943 (on Leonor Fini)
  • Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red (1990)
  • Helena Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism (1988)
  • Franklin Rosemont, Andre Breton and the First Principles of Surrealism (1978)
  • Penelope Rosemont, Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (1998) (writings)
  • Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender Politics and the Avant-Garde (1990)
  • Marina Warner, "The Goddess Rising: Carrington and Women", Women's Art Magazine, March/April 1992, no. 45, pp. 26-29.
  • Surrealist Games (Shambhala; boxed set)
  1. ↑ See, e.g., Greer 2007.
  2. ↑ Template:Cite
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