Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. Its intention was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality.André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme, various editions , Bibliothèque nationale de France.Ian Chilvers, The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 611, . It produced works of painting, writing, photography, theatre, filmmaking, music, comedy and other media as well.
Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur. However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost (for instance, of the "pure psychic automatism" Breton speaks of in the first Surrealist Manifesto), with the works themselves being secondary, i.e., artifacts of surrealist experimentation. Leader Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. At the time, the movement was associated with political causes such as communism and anarchism. It was influenced by the Dada movement of the 1910s.
The term "Surrealism" originated with Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917."The movement started in 1917, that year of war and revolution, when the term was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and when three young intellectuals, André Breton, Philipp Soupault and Louis Aragon, met each other in Paris and found that they shared the same overriding artistic principle: any art, in future, was only possible if it denied the validity of bourgeois sense and morals."— page 11 In: Haslam, Malcolm. The Real World of the Surrealists. New York: Galley Press / W.H.Smith Publishers, 1978."Guillaume Apollinaire having coined the term surréalisme in the spring of 1917, subtitled his play Le Mamelles de Tirésias, performed just before his death the following year, Drame surréaliste. It was in fact Apollinaire who first introduced Breton to Philippe Soupault at his 125 Boulevard St. Germaine apartment, meeting-place for most of the significant avant-garde figures of the day." p. 39 in David Gascoyne's Translator's Introduction to "The Magnetic Fields," included with "The Immaculate Conception," in Breton, André. The Automatic Message. Translated by David Gascoyne, Antony Melville, & Jon Graham. (London and Geurnsey: Atlas Press, 1997). & CIP available from The British Library. However, the Surrealist movement was not officially established until after October 1924, when the Surrealist Manifesto published by Breton succeeded in claiming the term for his group over a rival faction led by Yvan Goll, who had published his own surrealist manifesto two weeks prior.Yvan Goll's manifesto preceded Breton's by fourteen days, although Breton eventually succeeded in claiming the term for his group. See Matthew S. Witkovsky, "Surrealism in the Plural: Guillaume Apollinaire, Ivan Goll and Devětsil in the 1920s" Papers of Surrealism, 2, Summer 2004, pp. 1–14. The most important center of the movement was Paris, France. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, impacting the visual arts, literature, theatre, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social and cultural theories.
Founding of the movement
The word surrealism was first coined in March 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire.Hargrove, Nancy (1998). "The Great Parade: Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, Massine, Diaghilev—and T.S. Eliot". Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 31 (1). He wrote in a letter to Paul Dermée: "All things considered, I think in fact it is better to adopt surrealism than supernaturalism, which I first used." [Tout bien examiné, je crois en effet qu'il vaut mieux adopter surréalisme que surnaturalisme que j'avais d'abord employé].Jean-Paul Clébert, Dictionnaire du surréalisme, A.T.P. & Le Seuil, Chamalières, p. 17, 1996.
Apollinaire used the term in his program notes for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Parade, which premiered 18 May 1917. Parade had a one-act scenario by Jean Cocteau and was performed with music by Erik Satie. Cocteau described the ballet as "realistic". Apollinaire went further, describing Parade as "surrealistic":Tracy A. Doyle, Erik Satie's ballet Parade: an arrangement for woodwind quintet and percussion with Historical Summary, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1998, Louisiana State University, August 2005, pp. 51–66.
This new alliance—I say new, because until now scenery and costumes were linked only by factitious bonds—has given rise, in Parade, to a kind of surrealism, which I consider to be the point of departure for a whole series of manifestations of the New Spirit that is making itself felt today and that will certainly appeal to our best minds. We may expect it to bring about profound changes in our arts and manners through universal joyfulness, for it is only natural, after all, that they keep pace with scientific and industrial progress. (Apollinaire, 1917)Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou, Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 211.
The term was taken up again by Apollinaire, both as subtitle and in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias: Drame surréaliste,Gascoyne, p. 39. which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917.Sams, p. 282.
World War I scattered the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and in the interim, many became involved with Dada, believing that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought the conflict of the war upon the world. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued.
During the war, André Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from shell-shock. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché, Breton felt that Vaché was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry. He admired the young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, "In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most."Breton, "Vaché is surrealist in me", in Surrealist Manifesto.
Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. They began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault continued writing evolving their techniques of automatism and published The Magnetic Fields (1920).
By October 1924, two rival Surrealist groups had formed to publish a Surrealist Manifesto. Each claimed to be successors of a revolution launched by Appolinaire. One group, led by Yvan Goll consisted of Pierre Albert-Birot, Paul Dermée, Céline Arnauld, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pierre Reverdy, Marcel Arland, Joseph Delteil, Jean Painlevé and Robert Delaunay, among others.Gérard Durozoi, An excerpt from History of the Surrealist Movement, Chapter Two, 1924–1929, Salvation for Us Is Nowhere, translation by Alison Anderson, U of Chicago Press, pp. 63–74, 2002. . The group led by André Breton claimed that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than those of Dada, as led by Tzara, who was now among their rivals. Breton's group grew to include writers and artists from various media such as Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise,Dalí, Salvador, Diary of a Genius quoted in The Columbia World of Quotations (1996) Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, Yves Tanguy, and Dora MaarDawn Ades, with Matthew Gale: "Surrealism", The Oxford Companion to Western Art. Ed. Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford University Press, 2001. Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, 2007. Accessed 15 March 2007, GroveArt.com
As they developed their philosophy, they believed that Surrealism would advocate the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination according to the Hegelian Dialectic. They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse.
Freud's concepts of free association, dream analysis and accessing the unconscious were of crucial importance to the Surrealists in advancing their project to liberate the imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness. As Dalí later proclaimed, "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad."
Beside the use of dream analysis, they emphasized that "one could combine inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects." Breton included the idea of the startling juxtapositions in his 1924 manifesto, taking it in turn from a 1918 essay by poet Pierre Reverdy, which said: "a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be−the greater its emotional power and poetic reality."Breton (1924) Manifesto of Surrealism . Pierre Reverdy's comment was published in his journal Nord-Sud, March 1918
The group aimed to revolutionize human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects. They wanted to free people from false rationality, and restrictive customs and structures. Breton proclaimed that the true aim of Surrealism was "long live the social revolution, and it alone!" To this goal, at various times Surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism.
In 1924, two Surrealist factions declared their philosophy in two separate Surrealist Manifestos. That same year the Bureau of Surrealist Research was established and began publishing the journal La Révolution surréaliste.
Surrealist Manifestos
Leading up to 1924, two rival surrealist groups had formed. Each group claimed to be successors of a revolution launched by Apollinaire. One group, led by Yvan Goll, consisted of Pierre Albert-Birot, Paul Dermée, Céline Arnauld, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pierre Reverdy, Marcel Arland, Joseph Delteil, Jean Painlevé and Robert Delaunay, among others.
The other group, led by Breton, included Aragon, Desnos, Éluard, Baron, Crevel, Malkine, Jacques-André Boiffard and Jean Carrive, among others.André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, transl. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, 1971), p. 26.
Yvan Goll published the Manifeste du surréalisme, 1 October 1924, in his first and only issue of Surréalisme two weeks prior to the release of Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme, published by Éditions du Sagittaire, 15 October 1924.