Day 25: Surrealism

Surrealism came about in 1924 as an artistic style where artists and writers used their subconscious minds to create art that was mostly…illogical. If you think about the dreams that you have that come from your subconscious mind as you’re sleeping, a lot of them probably don’t make much sense either. Surrealists were influenced by Freud and Jung, too, who were extremely deep thinkers.

André Breton, the founder of surrealism, wrote the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 (Le Manifesto du Surréalisme). In it, he explained surrealism as “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.” If you’ve ever read something a Surrealist writer has written, you understand the idea of automatic writing because a lot of it doesn’t make much sense and contains words put together that come to mind at the time of writing. The same happened for the visual artists of the time. The most famous of these artists is Salvador Dalí, but there were many others who participated in this style such as René Magritte (my personal favorite Surrealist), Joan Miró, and Max Ernst.

Salvador Dalí

The Persistence of Memory, 1931

The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which
Can Be Used as a Table, 1934

Shirley Temple, The Youngest Most Sacred
Monster of the Cinema of Her Time, 1939

Max Ernst

Forest and Dove, 1927

L'Ange du Foyer, 1937

Napoleon in the Wilderness, 1941

René Magritte

The Treachery of Images, 1928-29
(This is not a pipe.)

Not to Be Reproduced (Portrait of Edward James), 1937

The Son of Man, 1964

Joan Miró

Harlequin's Carnival, 1924-25

Woman Encircled by the Flight of a Bird, 1941

The Flight of the Dragonfly in Front of the Sun, 1968