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{{Short description|International cultural movement (1920s–1950s)}}
{{Infobox art movement
| name = Surrealism
| image = MagrittePipe.jpg
| alt = The Treachery of Images, by René Magritte (1929)
| caption = '']'', by ] (1929), featuring the declaration "{{lang|fr|Ceci n'est pas une pipe}}" ({{lit|This is not a pipe}})
| yearsactive = 1920s–1950s
| country = France, Belgium
| majorfigures = ], ], ], ], ], ], ]
| influences = {{hlist|]|]|]|]}}
| influenced = {{hlist|]|]|]}}
}}
{{Surrealism infobox}} {{Surrealism infobox}}
'''Surrealism''' is an ] and ] that developed in Europe in the ] in which artists aimed to allow the ] to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of ] or ] scenes and ideas.<ref>{{cite book |last=Barnes |first=Rachel |title=The 20th-Century art book.|year=2001|publisher=Phaidon Press|location=London|isbn=978-0-7148-3542-6|edition=Reprinted.}}</ref> Its intention was, according to leader ], to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or ''surreality.''<ref>, Bibliothèque nationale de France.</ref><ref>, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 611, {{ISBN|0-19-953294-X}}.</ref><ref name="Manifesto of Surrealism">{{cite web |url=http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.htm |title=André Breton (1924), Manifesto of Surrealism |publisher=Tcf.ua.edu |date=1924-06-08 |access-date=2012-12-06 |archive-date=2010-02-09 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100209063222/http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.htm |url-status=dead }}</ref> It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media as well.


Works of Surrealism feature the ], unexpected ]s and '']''. 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 ]" Breton speaks of in the first Surrealist Manifesto), with the works themselves being secondary, i.e., artifacts of surrealist experimentation.<ref>{{cite book |last= Breton |first= André |title= The Automatic Message.|year=1997|publisher= Atlas Press |location=London|isbn= 978-0-9477-5799-1|edition=First.}}</ref> 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 ] and ]. It was influenced by the ] movement of the 1910s.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/surr/hd_surr.htm |title=Surrealism |first=James |last=Voorhies |website=]}}</ref>
] ''Indefinite Divisibility'' 1942]]


The term "Surrealism" originated with ] in 1917.<ref>"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.</ref><ref>"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). {{ISBN|1-900565-01-3}} & CIP available from ].</ref> However, the Surrealist movement was not officially established until after October 1924, when the ] published by French poet and critic ] succeeded in claiming the term for his group over a rival faction led by ], who had published his own surrealist manifesto two weeks prior.<ref>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.</ref> The most important center of the movement was ], France. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, impacting the ], literature, film, and ] of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.
'''Surrealism'''<ref>A term coined by ] in 1917, see ] for more details</ref> is a ], ] and ] movement asserting that liberation of the human mind, and subsequent liberation of the individual and society, can be achieved by exercising the imaginative faculties of the "unconscious mind" to the attainment of a dream-like state different from, or ultimately "truer" than, everyday reality. Surrealists believe that this more truthful reality can bring about personal, cultural, and social revolution, and a life of freedom, poetry, and uninhibited sexuality. André Breton said that such a revealed truth would be beautific, or in his own words, "beauty will be convulsive or not at all." When the concept of surrealism has been "applied" by associated groups of individuals, it has often been called a "surrealist movement," whether cultural (including artistic) or social.


==Founding of the movement==
In more mundane terms, the word "]" is often used colloquially to describe unexpected ]s or use of ] in art or dialogue.
], ''The Elephant Celebes'', 1921|left]]


The word ''surrealism'' was first coined in March 1917 by ].<ref>Hargrove, Nancy (1998). "The Great Parade: Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, Massine, Diaghilev—and T.S. Eliot". Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 31 (1).</ref> He wrote in a letter to ]: "All things considered, I think in fact it is better to adopt surrealism than supernaturalism, which I first used" .<ref>Jean-Paul Clébert, ''Dictionnaire du surréalisme'', A.T.P. & Le Seuil, Chamalières, p. 17, 1996.</ref>
Surrealist thought emerged around ], partly as an outgrowth of ], with French writer ] as its initial principal ].


Apollinaire used the term in his program notes for ]'s ], '']'', which premiered 18 May 1917. ''Parade'' had a one-act scenario by ] and was performed with music by ]. Cocteau described the ballet as "realistic". Apollinaire went further, describing ''Parade'' as "surrealistic":<ref>, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1998, Louisiana State University, August 2005, pp. 51–66.</ref>
In Breton's ] of ] he defines surrealism as:


<blockquote>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)<ref>Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou, ''Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents'', University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 211.</ref></blockquote>
:'''Dictionary:''' Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.


The term was taken up again by Apollinaire, both as subtitle and in the preface to his play '']'',<ref>Gascoyne, p. 39.</ref> which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917.<ref>Sams, p. 282.</ref>
:'''Encyclopedia:''' Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.


] 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 ] values had brought the conflict of the war upon the world. The Dadaists protested with ] gatherings, performances, writings and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued.
Breton would later qualify the first of these definitions by saying "in the absence of ''conscious'' moral or aesthetic self-censorship," and by his admission through subsequent developments, that these definitions were capable of considerable expansion.


During the war, ], who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a ] hospital where he used ]'s psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from ]. Meeting the young writer ], Breton felt that Vaché was the spiritual son of writer and ] founder ]. 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 ], with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with ], with ], but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most."<ref>Breton, "Vaché is surrealist in me", in '']''.</ref>
Like those involved in ], adherents of surrealism thought that the horrors of ] were the culmination of the ] and the result of rational thinking. Consequently, ] thought and dream-states were seen as the natural antidote to social problems. The surrealist diagnosis of the problem of the ] and ] civilization is that both utilize a restrictive overlay of false rationality, including social and academic convention, on the free functioning of the instinctual urges of the human mind.


Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal '']'' along with ] and ]. They began experimenting with ]—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 '']'' (1920).
While Dada rejected categories and labels and was rooted in negative response to the ], surrealism advocates 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 ]. The ] dialectic and other theories, such as ]ian theory, also played a significant role in the development of surrealist theory, and as in the work of such theorists as ] and ], surrealism contributed to the development of Marxist theory itself.


By October 1924, two rival Surrealist groups had formed to publish a ]. Each claimed to be successors of a revolution launched by Appolinaire. One group, led by ] consisted of ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ] and ], among others.<ref>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. {{ISBN|978-0-226-17411-2}}.</ref> The group led by André Breton claimed that ] 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 ] such as ], ], ], ], ], ],<ref name="Diary of a Genius">], '''' quoted in ''The Columbia World of Quotations'' (1996) {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090406060625/http://www.bartleby.com/66/82/15682.html |date=April 6, 2009 }}</ref> ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], and ], ]<ref name=grove>Dawn Ades, with Matthew Gale: "Surrealism", ''The Oxford Companion to Western Art''. Ed. Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford University Press, 2001. Grove Art Online. ], 2007. Accessed March 15, 2007, {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080516052642/http://www.groveart.com/ |date=2008-05-16 }}</ref><ref name="sadoul mon ami bunuel">{{cite journal|last=Sadoul|first=Georges|title=Mon ami Buñuel|journal=L'Écran Française|date=12–18 December 1951|volume=335|pages=12}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Tate |title=Dora Maar |url=https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/dora-maar/exhibition-guide |access-date=2024-06-24 |website=Tate |language=en-GB}}</ref>
Surrealist philosophy connects with the theories of psychiatrist ] in that Freud asserted that ] thoughts (the thoughts of which one is not aware) motivate human behaviour, and he advocated ] and ] to reveal unconscious thoughts.
]'', December 1924|left]]
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 ]. They also looked to the ] and the work of such theorists as ] and ].{{Citation needed|date=February 2019}}


Freud's work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. They embraced ], 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."<ref name="Diary of a Genius"/>
It is through the practice of ], dream interpretation, and numerous other surrealist methods that surrealists believe the wellspring of imagination and creativity can be accessed. Surrealists look to so-called "]" as an example of expression that is not self-censored.


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."<ref name="PynchonSurralism"/> Breton included the idea of the startling juxtapositions in his 1924 manifesto, taking it in turn from a 1918 essay by poet ], 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."<ref name="Breton (1924)">Breton (1924) '' {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100209063222/http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.htm |date=2010-02-09 }}.'' ]'s comment was published in his journal ''Nord-Sud'', March 1918</ref>
The radical aim of surrealism is to revolutionize human experience, including its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects, by freeing people from what is seen as false rationality, and restrictive customs and structures. As ] proclaimed, the true aim of Surrealism is "long live the social revolution, and it alone!" To this goal, at various times surrealists have aligned with ] and ].


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 ] and ].
Surrealism also embraces ], while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness or darkness of the mind. ], who is considered to have been quite idiosyncratic, explained it as the following: "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad."<ref>Salvador Dali, '''' (1966), quoted in ''The Columbia World of Quotations'' (1996)</ref>


In 1924, two Surrealist factions declared their philosophy in two separate Surrealist Manifestos. That same year the ] was established and began publishing the journal '']''.
Not all surrealists subscribe to all facets of the philosophy. Historically many were not interested in political matters, and this lack of interest created rifts in the surrealism movement.


===Surrealist Manifestos===
:''See also ]''
], ''Surréalisme'', ''Manifeste du surréalisme'',<ref name="Surréalisme">{{Cite web|url=https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/cgi-bin/bluemtn?a=d&d=bmtnaaj19241001-01&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------|title=Surréalisme 1 October 1924 — Princeton Blue Mountain collection|website=bluemountain.princeton.edu}}</ref> Volume 1, Number 1, October 1, 1924, cover by ]]]
{{main|Surrealist Manifesto}}
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 ], consisted of ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ] and ], among others.<ref name="Durozoi">{{Cite web|url=https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/174115.html|title=Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, excerpt|website=press.uchicago.edu}}</ref>


The other group, led by Breton, included Aragon, Desnos, Éluard, Baron, Crevel, Malkine, ] and Jean Carrive, among others.<ref>André Breton, ''Manifestoes of Surrealism'', transl. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, 1971), p. 26.</ref>
==Surrealism in politics==
Surrealism as a political force developed unevenly around the world, in some places more emphasis was on artistic practices, in other places political and in other places still, surrealist praxis looked to supersize both art and politics.


Yvan Goll published the ''Manifeste du surréalisme'', 1 October 1924, in his first and only issue of ''Surréalisme''<ref name="Surréalisme" /> two weeks prior to the release of Breton's ''Manifeste du surréalisme'', published by Éditions du Sagittaire, 15 October 1924.
Politically surrealism was ultra-leftist, ] or ]. The split from Dada has been characterised as a split between anarchists and communists, with the surrealists as communist. Breton and his comrades supported Trotsky and his International Left Opposition for a while, though there was a certain openness to anarchism that manifested more fully after World War II. Some surrealists such as ] aligned with forms of ]. ] supported capitalism and the fascist dictatorship of ] but cannot be said to represent a trend in surrealism in this respect; in fact he was considered, by Breton and his associates, to have betrayed and left surrealism.


Goll and Breton clashed openly, at one point literally fighting, at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées,<ref name="Durozoi" /> over the rights to the term Surrealism. In the end, Breton won the battle through tactical and numerical superiority.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/projects/the-ahrb-centre-for-studies-of-surrealism-and-its-legacies-project(9182d222-4cfe-489b-a944-4998933b322c).html|title=The AHRB Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies. &#124; Research Explorer &#124; The University of Manchester|website=www.research.manchester.ac.uk}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ERMoAyKPKqsC&q=the+first+surrealist+manifesto%2C+Yvan+goll&pg=PA8|title=Yvan Goll—Claire Goll: Texts and Contexts|first1=Eric|last1=Robertson|first2=Robert|last2=Vilain|date=April 6, 1997|publisher=Rodopi|isbn=0854571833|via=Google Books}}</ref> Though the quarrel over the anteriority of Surrealism concluded with the victory of Breton, the history of surrealism from that moment would remain marked by fractures, resignations, and resounding excommunications, with each surrealist having their own view of the issue and goals, and accepting more or less the definitions laid out by André Breton.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.lettresvolees.fr/eluard/surrealisme.html|title=Man Ray / Paul Eluard – Les Mains libres – 1937 – Qu'est-ce que le surréalisme ?|website=www.lettresvolees.fr}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=01gJAajH9m0C&q=manifeste+du+surr%C3%A9alisme%2C+%22La+r%C3%A9alit%C3%A9+est+la+base+de+tout+grand+art%22&pg=PA472|title=La création artistique espagnole à l'épreuve de la modernité esthétique européenne, 1898–1931|first=Denis|last=Vigneron|date=April 6, 2009|publisher=Editions Publibook|isbn=9782748348347|via=Google Books}}</ref>
Surrealists have often sought to link their efforts with political ideals and activities. In the '''' for example, members of the Paris-based ] (including André Breton, Louis Aragon, and, Antonin Artaud, as well as some two dozen others) declared their affinity for revolutionary politics. While this was initially a somewhat vague formulation, by the 1930s many surrealists had strongly identified themselves with communism. The foremost document of this tendency within surrealism is the '''' published under the names of Breton and ] but actually co-authored by Breton and ]. <ref>''Dada Turns Red'', Helena Lewis' history of the uneasy relations between Surrealists and Communists from the 1920s through the 1950s was published in 1990 by the University of Edinburgh Press.</ref>


Breton's 1924 ''Surrealist Manifesto'' defines the purposes of Surrealism. He included citations of the influences on Surrealism, examples of Surrealist works, and discussion of Surrealist automatism. He provided the following definitions:
===Black surrealism and negritude===


{{blockquote|'''Dictionary:''' Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.<br /><br />
In ], the ] and the extreme left of the ] came together to support ], leader of the ] uprising against French colonialism in ]. In an open letter to writer and French ambassador to Japan, ], the Paris group announced:
'''Encyclopedia:''' Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.<ref name="Manifesto of Surrealism" />}}


==Expansion==
:"We Surrealists pronounced ourselves in favour of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and defined our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the colour question."
{{Original research section|date=April 2021}}
]'s ''Woman with Her Throat Cut'', 1932 (cast 1949), ]]]
The movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games, discussed the theories of Surrealism, and developed a variety of ] such as ]. Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as ], ]<ref>José Pierre, ''Surrealism'', Heron, 1970</ref> and ].


Soon more visual artists became involved, including ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], and ]. Later, after the ], ], Vinicius Pradella and Denis Fabbri became involved as well. Though Breton admired ] and ] and courted them to join the movement, they remained peripheral.<ref name="tomkins">], ''Duchamp: A Biography''. Henry Holt and Company, Inc, 1996. {{ISBN|0-8050-5789-7}}</ref> More writers also joined, including former Dadaist ], ], and ].
The anticolonial revolutionary and proletarian politics of "Murderous Humanitarianism" (1932) which was drafted mainly by ], signed by ], ], ], ], and the Martiniquan surrealists ] and ] perhaps makes it the original document of what is later called 'black surrealism'<ref>''A Poetics of Anticolonialism'', Nov, 1999 by ]</ref>, although it is the contact between ] and Breton in the 1940s in Martinique that really lead to the communication of what is known as 'black surrealism'.


]. Automatic Drawing. 1924. Ink on paper, 23.5&nbsp;×&nbsp;20.6 cm. ], New York.]]
Anticolonial revolutionary writers of Martinique, a French colony at the time, took up surrealism as a revolutionary method - a critique of European culture and a radical subjective. This linked with other surrealists and was very important for the subsequent development of surrealism as a revolutionary praxis. The journal ], featuring the work of Cesaire along with ], ], ] and others, was first published in ].<ref>Robin DG Kelley, "Poetry and the Political Imagination: Aimé Césaire, Negritude, & the Applications of Surrealism"(July 2001)</ref>
In 1925 an autonomous Surrealist group formed in Brussels. The group included the musician, poet, and artist ], painter and writer ], ], ], and ]. In 1927 they were joined by the writer ]. They corresponded regularly with the Paris group, and in 1927 both Goemans and Magritte moved to Paris and frequented Breton's circle.<ref name="grove"/> The artists, with their roots in ] and ], the abstraction of ], ], and ], also reached to older "bloodlines" or ] such as ], and the so-called primitive and naive arts.


]'s ]s of 1923 are often used as the point of the acceptance of visual arts and the break from Dada, since they reflect the influence of the idea of the ]. Another example is Giacometti's 1925 ''Torso'', which marked his movement to simplified forms and inspiration from preclassical sculpture.
===Post Situationist surrealism===


{{clarify span|date=April 2021|reason=Whose "pairing"? Who is dividing Dada and Surrealism, and along what lines? See Talk.|However, a striking example of the line used to divide Dada and Surrealism among art experts is the pairing of 1925's ]<ref> with reproduction of the painting and further information.</ref> with ''The Kiss (Le Baiser)''<ref> with reproduction of the painting and further information.</ref> from 1927 by Max Ernst.}} {{synthesis span|date=April 2021|reason=See Talk#Creeping SYNTH and OR.|The first is generally held to have a distance, and erotic subtext, whereas the second presents an erotic act openly and directly.}} In the second the influence of ] and the drawing style of ] is visible with the use of fluid curving and intersecting lines and colour, whereas the first takes a directness that would later be influential in movements such as ].
In the 1960s, while the ] leadership - especially ] was critical and distanced himself from surrealism, others such as ] were explicitly using surrealist techniques and methods. The 1968 ] and student revolt in France which was influenced by the Paris based ] included a number of surrealist ideas, and among the slogans the students spray-painted on the walls of the Sorbonne were familiar surrealist ones. ] would commemorate this in a painting entitled ''May 1968.''
], ''The Red Tower (La Tour Rouge)'', 1913, ]]]
Giorgio de Chirico, and his previous development of ], was one of the important joining figures between the philosophical and visual aspects of Surrealism. Between 1911 and 1917, he adopted an unornamented depictional style whose surface would be adopted by others later. ''The Red Tower (La tour rouge)'' from 1913 shows the stark colour contrasts and illustrative style later adopted by Surrealist painters. His 1914 ''The Nostalgia of the Poet (La Nostalgie du poète)''<ref> with reproduction of the painting and further information.</ref> has the figure turned away from the viewer, and the juxtaposition of a bust with glasses and a fish as a relief defies conventional explanation. He was also a writer whose novel '']'' presents a series of dreamscapes with an unusual use of punctuation, syntax, and grammar designed to create an atmosphere and frame its images. His images, including set designs for the ], would create a decorative form of Surrealism, and he would be an influence on the two artists who would be even more closely associated with Surrealism in the public mind: Dalí and Magritte. He would, however, leave the Surrealist group in 1928.


In 1924, Miró and Masson applied Surrealism to painting. The first Surrealist exhibition, ''La Peinture Surrealiste'', was held at Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. It displayed works by Masson, ], ], Miró, and others. The show confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts (though it had been initially debated whether this was possible), and techniques from Dada, such as ], were used. The following year, on March 26, 1926, Galerie Surréaliste opened with an exhibition by Man Ray. Breton published ''Surrealism and Painting'' in 1928 which summarized the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the 1960s.
During the 1980s, behind the ], surrealism entered into politics due to an underground artistic opposition movement known as the ]. The Orange Alternative was created in 1981 by ] alias 'Major', a graduate of history and art history at the University of ], who used surrealist symbolism and terminology in its large scale happenings organized in the major Polish cities during the ] regime and painted surrealist graffiti on spots covering up anti-regime slogans. Major himself was the author of the so-called "Manifest of Socialist Surrealism". In this Manifest, he stated that the socialist (communist) system had become so surrealistic that it could be seen as an expression of art itself.


===Surrealist literature===
== Surrealism in the arts and media ==
{{See also|List of Surrealist poets}}
:''See ] for more information ''
The first Surrealist work, according to leader Breton, was '']'',<ref>Brêton, André. ''Communicating Vessels''. Trans. Mary Ann Caws & Geoffrey T. Harris. London & Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press/Bison Books, 1990.</ref> and the first work written and published by his group of ''Surréalistes'' was '']'' (May–June 1919).<ref>Breton, André. Les Vases communicants. Paris: Gallimard, 1955.</ref> ''Littérature'' contained automatist works and accounts of dreams. The magazine and the portfolio both showed their disdain for literal meanings given to objects and focused rather on the undertones; the poetic undercurrents present. Not only did they give emphasis to the poetic undercurrents, but also to the connotations and the overtones which "exist in ambiguous relationships to the visual images."<ref>Vaneigem, Raoul. A Cavalier History of Surrealism. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oakland: AK Press, 2000.</ref>


Because Surrealist writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize their thoughts and the images they present, some people find much of their work difficult to parse. This notion however is a superficial comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton's initial emphasis on automatic writing as the main route toward a higher reality. But—as in Breton's case—much of what is presented as purely automatic is actually edited and very "thought out". Breton himself later admitted that automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and other elements were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of visual artists in the movement forced the issue, since automatic painting required a rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus, such elements as collage were introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling juxtapositions as revealed in ]'s poetry. And—as in Magritte's case (where there is no obvious recourse to either automatic techniques or collage)—the very notion of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation in and of itself. Surrealism was meant to be always in flux—to be more modern than modern—and so it was natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new challenges arose. Artists such as Max Ernst and his surrealist collages demonstrate this shift to a more modern art form that also comments on society.<ref>{{Cite web|last=DANAE|date=2020-01-13|title=Digital Montage: On Collage and the Legacy of Modernism|url=https://medium.com/digital-art-weekly/digital-montage-on-collage-and-the-legacy-of-modernism-ac9043247c61|access-date=2021-02-24|website=Medium|language=en}}</ref>
] "This is not a pipe." '']'' 1928-9]]
In general usage, the term Surrealism is more often considered a movement in ] than the original cultural and philosophical movement. As with some other movements that had both philosophical and artistic dimensions, such as ] and the relationship between the two usages is complex and a matter of some debate outside the movement. Many Surrealist artists regarded their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, and ] was explicit in his belief that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.


Surrealists revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym ], and for the line "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", and ], two late 19th-century writers believed to be the precursors of Surrealism.
====Early visual arts Surrealism====
Since many of the initial participants in Surrealism originated in the ] movement, a strict demarcation of Surrealist and Dadaist theory and practice can be difficult to draw, although André Breton's statements on the matter leave no doubt of his own clarity on that boundary. Outside the "inner circle" (i.e. in the Academy), this imaginary line is sketched differently by different scholars.


Examples of Surrealist literature are Artaud's ''Le Pèse-Nerfs'' (1926), Aragon's '']'' (1927), Péret's ''Death to the Pigs'' (1929), Crevel's ''Mr. Knife Miss Fork'' (1931), ]'s '']'' (1937), and Breton's ''Sur la route de San Romano'' (1948).
The roots of Surrealism in the visual arts run to both ] and ], as well as the abstraction of ] and ], as well as ], and also partake of older "bloodlines" such as ], and so-called "primitive" and "naive" arts. This only makes sense if one considers Surrealism to be a matter of art, when both Dadaists and Surrealists themselves rejected the notion without hesitation. Dada - especially - declared loudly and often that it was out to destroy art, and Surrealism - although less brutish in its campaign against art-in-itself, made clear its resistance to any idea that it was - in fact - an "art movement" at all. Technique was beside the point, mere ornament or simple retinal stimulation was anathema, as the Surrealists claimed visual arts as a subsidiary of Poetry, and hoped to inflame human desires directly via their images. The fact that the first Surrealists were not visual artists but poets speaks volumes about the poetic and philosophical basis of Surrealism. The truth is, André Breton initially had doubts that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement, since they appeared to be less "malleable" and open to chance and automatism. This "caution" was overcome by the discovery of such "techniques" as frottage, decalcomania, and Dali's own paranoid-critical methods. As the idea of automatism lost sway as the main vehicle for unlocking the unconscious, the visual arts (including sculpture, painting, and film) became more acceptable.


'']'' continued publication into 1929 with most pages densely packed with columns of text, but which also included reproductions of art, among them works by de Chirico, Ernst, Masson, and Man Ray. Other works included books, poems, pamphlets, automatic texts and theoretical tracts.
]'s ]s of ], are often used as a convenient point of difference, since these reflect the influence of the idea of the ].


===Surrealist films===
Another example is ]'s ] ''Torso'', which marked his movement to simplified forms and inspiration from pre-classical sculpture. However, a striking example of the line used to divide Dada and Surrealism among art experts is the pairing of ]'s '']'' with Le Baiser from ] by Max Ernst. The first is generally held to have a distance, and erotic subtext, where as the second presents an erotic act openly and directly. In the second the influence of Miró and Picasso's drawing style is visible with the use of fluid curving and intersecting lines and colour, where as the first takes a directness that would later be influential in movements such as ].
{{Main|Surrealist cinema}}
Early films by Surrealists include:
* '']'' by ] (1924)
* '']'' (''{{langx|fr|La Coquille et le clergyman}}'') by ], scenario by Antonin Artaud (1928)
* '']'' by ] (1928)
* '']'' by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí (1929)
* '']'' by Buñuel and Dalí (1930)
* '']'' (''{{langx|fr|Le sang d'un poète}}'') by Jean Cocteau (1930)


=== Surrealist photography ===
] ''La Tour Rouge (The Red Tower)'' 1913]]
Famous Surrealist photographers are the French ], the American ], the French/Hungarian ], French ] and the Dutch ].<ref name="Moerkerken">{{Cite book |last=Moerkerken |first=Emiel van |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/731109379|title=Emiel van Moerkerken|date=2011|publisher=D'jonge Hond|others=Moerkerken, Bruno van, Vos, Minke |isbn=978-90-8910-221-8 |location=Zwolle |oclc=731109379}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Thynne|first=Lizzie|date=2002-01-01|title=Claude Cahun: an experimental biopic|url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jmpr.2.3.168|journal=Journal of Media Practice|volume=2|issue=3|pages=168–174|doi=10.1386/jmpr.2.3.168|s2cid=191603274|issn=1468-2753}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |last=Ferguson |first=Donna |date=2024-06-16 |title=Rare photographs by Dora Maar cast Picasso's tormented muse in a new light |url=https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jun/16/rare-photographs-dora-maar-picasso-tormented-muse |access-date=2024-06-24 |work=The Observer |language=en-GB |issn=0029-7712}}</ref>


===Surrealist theatre===
] was one of the important joining figures between the philosophical and visual aspects of Surrealism. Between ] and ], he adopted an unornamented depictional style whose surface would be adopted by others later. ''La tour rouge'' from ] shows the stark colour contrasts and illustrative style later adopted by Surrealist painters. His ] ''La Nostalgie du poete'' has the figure turned away from the viewer, and the juxtaposition of a bust with glasses and a fish as a relief defies conventional explanation. He was also a writer. His novel '']'' presents a series of dreamscapes, with an unusual use of punctuation, syntax and grammar, designed to create a particular atmosphere and frame around its images. His images, including set designs for the ], would create a decorative form of visual Surrealism, and he would be an influence on the two that would be even more closely associated with Surrealism in the public mind: ] and ].
The word ''surrealist'' was first used by Apollinaire to describe his 1917 play '']'' ("The Breasts of Tiresias"), which was later ] by ].{{Citation needed|date=February 2021}}


]'s ''The Mysteries of Love'' (1927) and ''Victor, or The Children Take Over'' (1928) are often considered the best examples of Surrealist theatre, despite his expulsion from the movement in 1926.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Rapti|first=Vassiliki|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MOEoDAAAQBAJ&q=Roger+Vitrac:+Un+Reprouv%C3%A9+du+Surr%C3%A9alisme+review&pg=PA3|title=Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond|date=2016-05-13|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-1-317-10309-7|language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Auslander|first=Philip|date=1980|title=Surrealism in the Theatre: The Plays of Roger Vitrac|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3206891|journal=Theatre Journal|volume=32|issue=3|pages=357–369|doi=10.2307/3206891|jstor=3206891|issn=0192-2882}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|url=http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/9781118476215|title=A Companion to Dada and Surrealism: Hopkins/A Companion to Dada and Surrealism|date=2016-05-24|publisher=John Wiley & Sons, Inc|isbn=978-1-118-47621-5|editor-last=Hopkins|editor-first=David|location=Hoboken, NJ|language=en|doi=10.1002/9781118476215}}</ref> The plays were staged at the ], the theatre Vitrac co-founded with ], another early Surrealist who was expelled from the movement.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Jannarone|first=Kimberly|date=2005|title=The Theatre before Its Double: Artaud Directs in the Alfred Jarry Theatre|url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0040557405000153/type/journal_article|journal=Theatre Survey|language=en|volume=46|issue=2|pages=247–273|doi=10.1017/S0040557405000153|s2cid=194096618|issn=0040-5574|via=}}</ref>
In ], ] and ] applied Surrealism theory to painting explicitly leading to the ''La Peinture Surrealiste'' Exposition at Gallerie Pierre in ], which included work by ], Masson, ] and Miró among others. It confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts (though it had been initially debated whether this was possible), techniques from Dada, such as ] were used.


Following his collaboration with Vitrac, Artaud would extend Surrealist thought through his theory of the ]. Artaud rejected the majority of Western theatre as a perversion of its original intent, which he felt should be a mystical, metaphysical experience.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Artaud|first=Antonin|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bmf8CMzu3kIC&q=the+theatre+and+its+double|title=The Theater and Its Double|date=1958|publisher=Grove Press|isbn=978-0-8021-5030-1|language=en}}</ref> Instead, he envisioned a theatre that would be immediate and direct, linking the unconscious minds of performers and spectators in a sort of ritual event, Artaud created in which emotions, feelings, and the metaphysical were expressed not through language but physically, creating a mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely related to the world of dreams.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/Slavonic/Absurd.htm |title=The Theatre Of The Absurd |publisher=Arts.gla.ac.uk |access-date=2009-12-26 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090823075755/http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/Slavonic/Absurd.htm |archive-date=2009-08-23 }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.holycross.edu/departments/theatre/eisser/semiotics.html |title=Artaud and Semiotics |publisher=Holycross.edu |access-date=2009-12-26 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080906153307/http://www.holycross.edu/departments/theatre/eisser/semiotics.html |archive-date=2008-09-06 }}</ref>
] opened on ], ] with an exhibition by ].


The Spanish playwright and director ], also experimented with surrealism, particularly in his plays '']'' (1930), '']'' (1931), and '']'' (1935). Other surrealist plays include Aragon's ''Backs to the Wall'' (1925).<ref>Louis Aragon, ''Backs to the Wall'', in ''The Drama Review'' 18.4 (Dec. 1974): 88–107.</ref> ]'s opera '']'' (1938) has also been described as "American Surrealism", though it is also related to a theatrical form of ].<ref>Bert Cardullo and Robert Knoff, eds. ''Theater of the Avant-Garde 1890–1950: A Critical Anthology''. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2001. 421–495.</ref>
Breton published ''Surrealism and Painting'' in ] which summarized the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the ].


====1930s==== ===Surrealist music===
{{Main|Surrealist music}}
]. '']''. 1931.]]
In the 1920s several composers were influenced by Surrealism, or by individuals in the Surrealist movement. Among them were ], ], ],<ref>{{Cite book|last=Potter|first=Caroline|title=Erik Satie: a Parisian Composer and his World|publisher=Boydell and Brewer|year=2016}}</ref> ],<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Donaldson|first=James|date=2020|title=Reading the Musical Surreal through Poulenc's Fifth Relations|url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twentieth-century-music/article/abs/reading-the-musical-surreal-through-poulencs-fifth-relations/B3BCE174DEAA32D2398FA0D639A871D9|journal=Twentieth-Century Music|volume=17/2|issue=2|pages=127–160|doi=10.1017/S147857222000002X|s2cid=216261062}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|last=Albright|first=Daniel|title=Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts|publisher=University of Chicago Press|year=2000|location=Chicago}}</ref> and ], who stated that his work ''Arcana'' was drawn from a dream sequence.<ref>{{cite web|author=Bernard, Jonathan W|title=Edgard Varése's "Arcana"|website=American Symphony Orchestra|url=http://americansymphony.org/arcana/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170214181019/http://americansymphony.org/arcana/ |archive-date=2017-02-14 }}</ref> Souris in particular was associated with the movement: he had a long relationship with Magritte, and worked on ]'s publication ''Adieu Marie''. Music by composers from across the twentieth century have been associated with surrealist principles, including ],<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Potter|first=Caroline|date=2018|title=Pierre Boulez, Surrealist|url=http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/spazidellamusica/article/view/2997|journal=Gli Spazi della Musica|volume=7}}</ref> ],<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Everett|first=Yayoi Uno|date=2009|title=Signification ofParody and the Grotesque in György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre|journal=Music Theory Spectrum|volume=31/1|pages=26–56|doi=10.1525/mts.2009.31.1.26}}</ref> ], ],<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Sholl|first=Robert|date=2007|title=Love, Mad Love and the "Point sublime": The Surrealist Poetics of Messiaen's Harawi|journal=Messiaen Studies|pages=34–62}}</ref> and ].<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Massey|first=Drew|date=2018|title=Thomas Adès and the Dilemmas of Musical Surrealism|url=http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/spazidellamusica/article/view/2998|journal=Gli Spazi della Musica|volume=7}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news|last=Taruskin|first=Richard|date=1999|title=A Surrealist Composer comes to the Rescue of Modernism|work=The New York Times}}</ref>


] of the French group ] wrote several works which could be considered to be inspired by Surrealism{{Citation needed|date=March 2007}}, including the 1948 ballet ''Paris-Magie'' (scenario by ]), the operas ''La Petite Sirène'' (book by Philippe Soupault) and ''Le Maître'' (book by Eugène Ionesco).<ref> London: Peter Owen, 2014. 467. {{ISBN|978-0-7206-1774-0}}</ref> Tailleferre also wrote popular songs to texts by Claude Marci, the wife of Henri Jeanson, whose portrait had been painted by Magritte in the 1930s.
] and ] created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dalí joined the group in ], and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between ] and ].


Even though Breton by 1946 responded rather negatively to the subject of music with his essay ''Silence is Golden'', later Surrealists, such as ], have been interested in—and found parallels to—Surrealism in the improvisation of ] and the ]. Jazz and blues musicians have occasionally reciprocated this interest. For example, the ] included performances by ].
Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.


==Surrealism and international politics==
] marked a year when several Surrealist painters produced works which marked turning points in their stylistic evolution: Magritte's '']'' is an example of this process, where three large spheres representing bells hanging above a landscape. Another Surrealist landscape from this same year is ]'s '']'', with its molten forms and liquid shapes. Liquid shapes became the trademark of Dalí, particularly in his '']'', which features the image of watches that sag as if they are melting.
Surrealism as a political force developed unevenly around the world: in some places more emphasis was on artistic practices, in other places on political practices, and in other places still, Surrealist praxis looked to supersede both the arts and politics. During the 1930s, the Surrealist idea spread from Europe to North America, South America (founding of the '']'' group in Chile in 1938), ], ], and throughout Asia, as both an artistic idea and as an ideology of political change.<ref name="Bauduin et al">, Routledge, 2017, {{ISBN|1-351-37902-X}}</ref><ref name="Spiteri">, Volume 16 of ''Studies in European cultural transition'', Ashgate, 2003, {{ISBN|0-7546-0989-8}}</ref>


Politically, Surrealism was ], ], or ].<ref name="Bauduin et al" /> The split from Dada has been characterised as a split between anarchists and communists, with the Surrealists as communist. Breton and his comrades supported ] and his ] for a while, though there was an openness to anarchism that manifested more fully after World War II. Some Surrealists, such as ], Mary Low, and Juan Breá, aligned with forms of ]. When the Dutch surrealist photographer ] came to Breton, he did not want to sign the manifesto because he was not a Trotskyist. For Breton being a communist was not enough. Breton denied Van Moerkerken's pictures for a publication afterwards.<ref name="Moerkerken" /> This caused a split in surrealism. Others fought for complete liberty from political ideologies, like ], who, after Trotsky's assassination in Mexico, prepared a schism between art and politics through his counter-surrealist art-magazine '']'' and so prepared the ground for the abstract expressionists. Dalí supported capitalism and the fascist dictatorship of ] but cannot be said to represent a trend in Surrealism in this respect; in fact, he was considered, by Breton and his associates, to have betrayed and left Surrealism. Benjamin Péret, Mary Low, Juan Breá, and Spanish-native ] joined the ] during the ].<ref name="Bauduin et al" /><ref name="Spiteri" />
The characteristics of this style: a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological, came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the ] period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with ones individuality".


Breton's followers, along with the ], were working for the "liberation of man". However, Breton's group refused to prioritize the ] struggle over radical creation such that their struggles with the Party made the late 1920s a turbulent time for both. Many individuals closely associated with Breton, notably Aragon, left his group to work more closely with the Communists.<ref name="Bauduin et al" /><ref name="Spiteri" />
Long after personal, political and professional tensions broke the Surrealist group up, Magritte and Dalí continued to define a visual program in the arts. This program reached beyond painting, to encompass photography as well, as can be seen from a Man Ray self portrait, whose use of assemblage influenced ]'s collage boxes.


Surrealists have often sought to link their efforts with political ideals and activities. In the ''Declaration of January 27, 1925'',<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1925Surrealism.html |title=Modern History Sourcebook: A Surrealist Manifesto, 1925 |publisher=Fordham.edu |date=1925-01-27 |access-date=2009-12-26}}</ref> for example, members of the Paris-based ] (including Breton, Aragon and Artaud, as well as some two dozen others) declared their affinity for revolutionary politics. While this was initially a somewhat vague formulation, by the 1930s many Surrealists had strongly identified themselves with communism. The foremost document of this tendency within Surrealism is the ''Manifesto for a Free Revolutionary Art'',<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.generation-online.org/c/fcsurrealism1.htm|title=Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art – Breton/Trotsky(1938)|website=Generation-online.org}}</ref> published under the names of Breton and ], but actually co-authored by Breton and ].<ref>Lewis, Helena. ''Dada Turns Red''. 1990. University of Edinburgh Press. A history of the uneasy relations between Surrealists and Communists from the 1920s through the 1950s.</ref>
During the ] ], an important art collector married ] and began promoting work by other Surrealists such as ] and the British artist ]. However, by the outbreak of the ], the taste of the ] swung decisively towards ] with the support of key taste makers, including Guggenheim. However, it should not be easily forgotten that Abstract Expressionism itself grew directly out of the meeting of American (particularly New York) artists with European Surrealists self-exiled during WWII. In particular, ] influenced the development of this American art form, which — as Surrealism did — celebrated the instantaneous human act as the well-spring of creativity. The early work of many Abstract Expressionists reveals a tight bond between the more superficial aspects of both movements, and the emergence (at a later date) of aspects of Dadaistic humor in such artists as Rauschenberg sheds an even starker light upon the connection. Up until the emergence of Pop Art, Surrealism can be seen to have been the single most important influence on the sudden growth in American arts, and even in Pop, some of the humor manifested in Surrealism can be found, often turned to a cultural criticism.


However, in 1933 the Surrealists' assertion that a "]" within a capitalist society was impossible led to their break with the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, and the expulsion of Breton, Éluard and Crevel from the Communist Party.<ref name="grove"/>
====World War II and beyond====
]. ''Elle Loge La Folie'', oil on canvas, 1970.]]


In 1925, the Paris Surrealist group and the extreme left of the ] came together to support ], leader of the ] uprising against French colonialism in ]. In an open letter to writer and French ambassador to Japan, ], the Paris group announced:
The coming of the Second World War proved disruptive for surrealism. The works continued. Many Surrealist artists continued to explore their vocabularies, including Magritte. Many members of the Surrealist movement continued to correspond and meet. (In ], Magritte, Duchamp, Ernst, and Man Ray met in Paris.) While Dalí may have been excommunicated by Breton, he neither abandoned his themes from the ], including references to the "persistence of time" in a later painting, nor did he become a depictive "pompier". His classic period did not represent so sharp a break with the past as some descriptions of his work might portray, and some, such as Thirion, argued that there were works of his after this period that continued to have some relevance for the movement.


{{blockquote|We Surrealists pronounced ourselves in favour of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and defined our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the colour question.}}
During the ] Surrealism's influence was also felt in England and America. ] took an interest in biomorphic figures, and in England ], ], ] and ] used or experimented with Surrealist techniques. However, ], one of the first British Surrealists, whose work in this genre dated from ], remained within the movement, organizing an exhibition of current Surrealist work in ], in response to an earlier show which infuriated him because it did not properly represent Surrealism. Maddox's exhibition, titled ''Surrealism Unlimited'', was held in Paris, and attracted international attention. He held his last one-man show in ], dying three years later.


The anticolonial revolutionary and proletarian politics of "Murderous Humanitarianism" (1932) which was drafted mainly by Crevel, signed by Breton, Éluard, Péret, Tanguy, and the Martiniquan Surrealists ] and ] perhaps makes it the original document of what is later called "black Surrealism",<ref>{{cite web |author-link =Robin Kelley|last=Kelley|first= Robin D. G.|date= November 1999|work = Monthly Review |url =https://monthlyreview.org/1999/11/01/a-poetics-of-anticolonialism/|title=A Poetics of Anticolonialism}}</ref> although it is the contact between ] and Breton in the 1940s in ] that really lead to the communication of what is known as "black Surrealism".
Magritte's work became more realistic in its depiction of actual objects, while maintaining the element of juxtaposition, such as in ]'s ''Personal Values'' and ]'s ''Empire of Light''. Magritte continued to produce works which have entered artistic vocabulary, such as ''Castle in the Pyrenees'', which refers back to ''Voix'' from ], in its suspension over a landscape.


Anticolonial revolutionary writers in the ] movement of ], a French colony at the time, took up Surrealism as a revolutionary method – a critique of European culture and a radical subjective. This linked with other Surrealists and was very important for the subsequent development of Surrealism as a revolutionary praxis. The journal '']'', featuring the work of Césaire along with ], ], ], ] and others, was first published in 1941.<ref>] "Poetry and the Political Imagination: Aimé Césaire, Negritude, & the Applications of Surrealism". July 2001</ref>
Other figures from the Surrealist movement were expelled. Several of these artists, like ] (by his own description) "remained close to Surrealism."<ref>Tomkins, Calvin: ''Duchamp: A Biography'', page 364. Henry Holt and Company, Inc, 1996. ISBN 0-8050-5789-7</ref>


In 1938 André Breton traveled with his wife, the painter ], to ] to meet Trotsky (staying as the guest of Diego Rivera's former wife Guadalupe Marin), and there he met ] and saw her paintings for the first time. Breton declared Kahlo to be an "innate" Surrealist painter.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.fridakahlofans.com/chronologyenglish.html |title=Frida Kahlo, Paintings, Chronology, Biography, Bio |publisher=Fridakahlofans.com |access-date=2009-12-26 |archive-date=2010-04-02 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100402091826/http://www.fridakahlofans.com/chronologyenglish.html |url-status=dead }}</ref>
Many new artists explicitly took up the Surrealist banner for themselves. Duchamp continued to produce sculpture and, at his death, was working on an installation with the realistic depiction of a woman viewable only through a peephole. ] and ] continued to work, for example, with Tanning's ''Rainy Day Canape'' from ].


===Internal politics===
During the 1950s a group in Austria called the Fantastic Realists founded by ] developed out of surrealism into a visionary approach to the arts.
In 1929 the satellite group associated with the journal ''Le Grand Jeu'', including ], ] and the Czech painter ], was ostracized. Also in February, Breton asked Surrealists to assess their "degree of moral competence", and theoretical refinements included in the second '']'' excluded anyone reluctant to commit to collective action, a list which included Leiris, Limbour, Morise, Baron, Queneau, Prévert, Desnos, Masson and Boiffard. Excluded members launched a counterattack, sharply criticizing Breton in the pamphlet '']'', which featured a picture of Breton wearing a ]. The pamphlet drew upon an earlier act of subversion by likening Breton to ], whose unquestioned value Breton had challenged in 1924.


The disunion of 1929–30 and the effects of ''Un Cadavre'' had very little negative impact upon Surrealism as Breton saw it, since core figures such as Aragon, Crevel, Dalí and Buñuel remained true to the idea of group action, at least for the time being. The success (or the controversy) of Dalí and Buñuel's film '']'' in December 1930 had a regenerative effect, drawing a number of new recruits, and encouraging countless new artistic works the following year and throughout the 1930s.
During the 1960s the ] was active and produced a prolific range of work including the international anthology series ].


Disgruntled surrealists moved to the periodical '']'', edited by ], whose anti-idealist materialism formed a hybrid Surrealism intending to expose the base instincts of humans.<ref name="grove"/><ref name="pompidou"> {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120918070327/http://www.cnac-gp.fr/education/ressources/ENS-Surrealistart-EN/ENS-Surrealistart-EN.htm |date=2012-09-18 }} from ]. Retrieved March 20, 2007.</ref> To the dismay of many, ''Documents'' fizzled out in 1931, just as Surrealism seemed to be gathering more steam.
Surrealistic art remains enormously popular with museum patrons. In ] ] held an exhibition of Surrealist art that attracted over 170,000 visitors in its run and late in ] and early ] ] of Los Angeles held an exhibition of the ], Magritte's works. Having been one of the most important of movements in the Modern period, Surrealism proceeded to inspire a new generation seeking to expand the vocabulary of art.


There were a number of reconciliations after this period of disunion, such as between Breton and Bataille, while Aragon left the group after committing himself to the ] in 1932. More members were ousted over the years for a variety of infractions, both political and personal, while others left in pursuit of their own style.
===Surrealism in literature & as a school of poetry ===
The first surrealist work, according to Breton, was ''Les Champs Magnétiques'' (] “Magnetic Fields”), which was actually a collaboration with the French poet and novelist ]. But even before that, in ], ], ] and ] had already published the magazine ''Littérature'', which contained automatist works and accounts of dreams. The magazine and the portfolio both showed their disdain for literal meanings given to objects and focused rather on the undertones, the poetic undercurrents present. Not only did they give emphasis to the poetic undercurrents, but also to the connotations and the overtones which “exist in ambiguous relationships to the visual images.”


By the end of World War II, the surrealist group led by André Breton decided to explicitly embrace anarchism. In 1952 Breton wrote "It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself."<ref name="anarchosurrealism">{{cite web|url=http://libcom.org/history/1919-1950-the-politics-of-surrealism |title=1919–1950: The politics of Surrealism by Nick Heath |publisher=Libcom.org |access-date=2009-12-26}}</ref> Breton was consistent in his support for the ] and he continued to offer his solidarity after the ] supporting Fontenis transformed the FA into the Fédération Communiste Libertaire. He was one of the few intellectuals who continued to offer his support to the FCL during the Algerian war when the FCL suffered severe repression and was forced underground. He sheltered Fontenis whilst he was in hiding. He refused to take sides on the splits in the French anarchist movement and both he and Peret expressed solidarity as well with the new ] set up by the synthesist anarchists and worked in the Antifascist Committees of the 60s alongside the FA.<ref name="anarchosurrealism"/>
Because surrealist writers seldom (if ever) appear to organize their thoughts and the images they present, some people find much of their work difficult to "parse". This notion however is a superficial comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton's initial emphasis on automatic writing as the main route toward a higher reality. But — as in Breton's case itself — much of what is presented as purely automatic is actually edited and very "thought out". Breton himself later admitted that automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and other elements were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of visual artists in the movement forced the issue, since "automatic painting" required a rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus such elements as collage were introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling juxtapositions as revealed in Pierre Reverdy's poetry. And — as in Magritte's case (where there is no obvious recourse to either automatic techniques or collage) the very notion of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation in and of itself. Surrealism was meant to be always in flux — to be more modern than modern — and so it was natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new challenges arose.


==Golden age==
Surrealists revived interest in ], known by his pseudonym “Le Comte de Lautréamont” and for the line “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”, and ], two late ] writers believed to be the precursors of Surrealism.
<!-- Commented out: ], '']'' (1931), ], ]]] -->
Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A ] and, according to Breton, their 1936 ] was a high-water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions. Another English Surrealist group developed ], meanwhile, and was distinguished by its opposition to the London surrealists and preferences for surrealism's French heartland. The two groups would reconcile later in the decade.


Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dalí joined the group in 1929 and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.
Examples of surrealist literature are ]'s ''Mr. Knife Miss Fork'', ]'s ''Irene's Cunt'', ]'s ''Sur la route de San Romano'', ]'s ''Death to the Pigs'', and ]'s ''Le Pese-Nerfs''.


Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth; stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.
===Surrealism in music===
:''Main article: ].''
In the ] several composers were influenced by Surrealism, or by individuals in the Surrealist movement. Among these were ], ], and ], who stated that his work ''Arcana'' was drawn from a dream sequence. Souris in particular was associated with the movement: he had a long, if sometimes spotty, relationship with ], and worked on ]'s publication ''Adieu Marie''.


1931 was a year when several Surrealist painters produced works which marked turning points in their stylistic evolution: Magritte's ''Voice of Space (La Voix des airs)''<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/2593?tmpl=component&print=1 |title=Surrealism – Magritte – Voice of Space |publisher=Guggenheim Collection |access-date=2009-12-26 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150319041151/http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/2593?tmpl=component&print=1 |archive-date=2015-03-19 }}</ref> is an example of this process, where three large spheres representing bells hang above a landscape. Another Surrealist landscape from this same year is Yves Tanguy's '']'', with its molten forms and liquid shapes. Liquid shapes became the trademark of Dalí, particularly in his '']'', which features the image of watches that sag as if they were melting.
French composer ] wrote a piece called ''explosante-fixe'' (1972), inspired by Breton's ''mad love''.
] of the French group Les Six wrote several works which could be considered to be inspired by Surrealism, including the 1948 Ballet "Paris-Magie" (scenario by ], who was closely linked to Breton), the Operas "La Petite Sirène" (book by Philippe Soupault) and "Le Maître" (book by Eugène Ionesco). Tailleferre also wrote popular songs to texts by Claude Marci, the wife of Henri Jeanson, whose portrait had been painted by Magritte in the 1930s.
Even though Breton by ] responded rather negatively to the subject of music with his essay ''Silence is Golden,'' later Surrealists have been interested in&mdash;and found parallels to&mdash;Surrealism in the improvisation of ] (as alluded to above), and the ] (Surrealists such as ] have written articles and full-length books on the subject). Jazz and blues musicians have occasionally reciprocated this interest. For example, the ] included such performances by ].
More modern surrealists have found inspiration in genres as diverse as ] and, later, electronic/] such as ], ] and some rock/pop bands such as ]. Both surrealism and, to a lesser extent, dada, experienced a new vogue though association with the ] scene of the 1960s and has been cited as influence by artists such as ], ], ], ] and ] (who has described his work and that of others as "]" or "]"). Direct references to surrealism in album titles include '']'' by ] in 1967 and ''Chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and umbrella'' (a line in ]'s ''Maldoror'') by ]. Surrealism is also prevalent in the work of ] band ] particularly in their concept album ] which incorperated surrealistic illustrations (on its album sleeves) and surreal story and lyrics by leader ].


The characteristics of this style—a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological—came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the ] period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality".
===Surrealism in film===
Surrealist ]s include '']'' and '']'' by ] and ]; Buñuel went on to direct many more, with varying degrees of surrealism. Notable for their surrealist elements amongst Bunuel's later films are '']'', '']'', and '']''.


Between 1930 and 1933, the Surrealist Group in Paris issued the periodical '']'' as the successor of ''La Révolution surréaliste''.
Films by the surrealist movement:
* ''Entr'acte'' by ] (1924)
* ''La Coquille et le clergyman'' by ], screenplay by ] (1927)
* ''Un chien andalou'' by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí (1928)
* ''L'Étoile de mer'' by ] (1928)
* ''L'Âge d'or'' by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí (1930)
* ''Le Sang d'un poète'' by ] (1930)


From 1936 through 1938 ], ], and ] joined the group. Paalen contributed ] and Onslow Ford ] as new pictorial automatic techniques.
Later directors who made surrealistic films:
*] ('']'')
*] ('']'', '']'')
*] ('']'', ])
*] ('']'', '']'')
*] ("]", "]")
*] ('']'')
*] ('']'')
*The ] ('']'')
*] ('']'')
*] ('']'', '']'')
*] ('']'', '']'')


Long after personal, political and professional tensions fragmented the Surrealist group, Magritte and Dalí continued to define a visual program in the arts. This program reached beyond painting, to encompass photography as well, as can be seen from a Man Ray self-portrait, whose use of assemblage influenced ]'s collage boxes.
] (''L'imitation du cinéma''), ] (''Un Soir, un train'') and, more recently, ] ('']'') are notable for being representational of the ] surrealist school in cinema.
], ''L'Ange du Foyer ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme'' (1937), private collection]]
], ] and ] wrote screenplays for surrealistic films.
During the 1930s ], an important American art collector, married Max Ernst and began promoting work by other Surrealists such as Yves Tanguy and the British artist ].
] designed a dream sequence for ]'s film '']''.
There is a strong surrealist influence present in ]'s '']''.
Surrealist and film theorist ] has written books on ], ], ] and the ].
The truest aspects of Surrealism in film are often found in passing frames of a larger film; the sudden emergence of the uncanny into the "normal" which may or may not be further explored in the rest of the film. The original group spent hours going from film to film, often not finishing one before seeking another, partly in hopes of catching just such ] moments, and partly with the idea of "stitching together" a film in their own minds out of the disparate parts.


'''Major exhibitions in the 1930s'''
===Surrealism in television===
* 1936 – '']'' is organised in London by the art historian ], with an introduction by André Breton.
* 1936 – ] in New York shows the exhibition ''], Dada and Surrealism''.
Surrealism on ] has come mainly in the form of comedy (see below), but a few examples serious uses of surreal imagery can be found in '']'', '']'', '']'', '']'' and even '']''.
* 1938 – A new '']'' was held at the Beaux-arts Gallery, Paris, with more than 60 artists from different countries, and showed around 300 paintings, objects, collages, photographs and installations. The Surrealists wanted to create an exhibition which in itself would be a creative act and called on Marcel Duchamp, Wolfgang Paalen, Man Ray and others to do so. At the exhibition's entrance Salvador Dalí placed his ] (an old taxi rigged to produce a steady drizzle of water down the inside of the windows, and a shark-headed creature in the driver's seat and a blond mannequin crawling with live snails in the back) greeted the patrons who were in full evening dress. ''Surrealist Street'' filled one side of the lobby with mannequins dressed by various Surrealists. Paalen and Duchamp designed the main hall to seem like cave with 1,200 coal bags suspended from the ceiling over a coal brazier with a single light bulb which provided the only lighting, as well as the floor covered with humid leaves and mud.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/interviews/hirschhorn/popup_8.html |first=Marcel|last= Duchamp |publisher=Toutfait.com |access-date=|title= Twelve Hundred Coal Bags Suspended from the Ceiling over a Stove}}</ref> The patrons were given flashlights with which to view the art. On the floor Wolfgang Paalen created a small lake with grasses and the aroma of roasting coffee filled the air. Much to the Surrealists' satisfaction the exhibition scandalized the viewers.<ref name="tomkins"/>
] cartoons originated on film in the 1930s and 1940s, but millions more know his famous characters from Saturday morning cartoons replayed during the 1970s: ], ], etc.


===World War II and the Post War period===
Another ] animator, ], was renown for his surrealistic style in both story and visuals. Especially notable are ] and ].
] ''Indefinite Divisibility'', 1942, ], Buffalo, New York]]
World War II created havoc not only for the general population of Europe but especially for the European artists and writers that opposed Fascism and Nazism. Many important artists fled to North America and relative safety in the United States. The art community in ] in particular was already grappling with Surrealist ideas and several artists like ], ], and ] converged closely with the surrealist artists themselves, albeit with some suspicion and reservations. Ideas concerning the unconscious and dream imagery were quickly embraced. By the Second World War, the taste of the American ] in New York swung decisively towards ] with the support of key taste makers, including ], ] and ]. However, it should not be easily forgotten that Abstract Expressionism itself grew directly out of the meeting of American (particularly New York) artists with European Surrealists self-exiled during World War II. In particular, Gorky and Paalen influenced the development of this American art form, which, as Surrealism did, celebrated the instantaneous human act as the well-spring of creativity. The early work of many Abstract Expressionists reveals a tight bond between the more superficial aspects of both movements, and the emergence (at a later date) of aspects of ]ic humor in such artists as ] sheds an even starker light upon the connection. Up until the emergence of ], Surrealism can be seen to have been the single most important influence on the sudden growth in American arts, and even in Pop, some of the humor manifested in Surrealism can be found, often turned to a cultural criticism.


The Second World War overshadowed, for a time, almost all intellectual and artistic production. In 1939 Wolfgang Paalen was the first to leave Paris for the New World as exile. After a long trip through the forests of British Columbia, he settled in Mexico and founded his influential art-magazine ]. In 1940 Yves Tanguy married American Surrealist painter ]. In 1941, Breton went to the United States, where he co-founded the short-lived magazine '']'' with Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and the American artist ]. However, it was the American poet, ], and his magazine '']'' which offered Breton a channel for promoting Surrealism in the United States. The ''View'' special issue on Duchamp was crucial for the public understanding of Surrealism in America. It stressed his connections to Surrealist methods, offered interpretations of his work by Breton, as well as Breton's view that Duchamp represented the bridge between early modern movements, such as ] and ], to Surrealism. Wolfgang Paalen left the group in 1942 due to political/philosophical differences with Breton.
===Surrealism in comedy===
:''Main article: ].''


] ]]
Some branches of comedy (chiefly ], and also ]) are known for being very surreal. Some notable examples include:
Though the war proved disruptive for Surrealism, the works continued. Many Surrealist artists continued to explore their vocabularies, including Magritte. Many members of the Surrealist movement continued to correspond and meet. While Dalí may have been excommunicated by Breton, he neither abandoned his themes from the 1930s, including references to the "persistence of time" in a later painting, nor did he become a depictive pompier. His classic period did not represent so sharp a break with the past as some descriptions of his work might portray, and some, such as ], argued that there were works of his after this period that continued to have some relevance for the movement. When the war reached Ireland with the ] in May 1941, ], who had experimented with surrealist themes in the 1930s, responded with a series of dark works reflecting the shocked state of the people of the city. These were exhibited at the ] after its restoration in 1943, following near destruction in the blitz.<ref name=PatMurphy>{{cite news |title=Ireland's greatest surrealist |author=Patrick Murphy |newspaper=] |date=31 December 1980 }}</ref>
* ]
* '']''
* '']''
* '']''
* ]
* '']''
* '']''
* '']''
* '']''
* '']''
* '']''
* '']''
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* '']''


During the 1940s Surrealism's influence was also felt in England, America and the Netherlands where Gertrude Pape and her husband Theo van Baaren helped to popularize it in their publication The Clean Handkerchief.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Surrealist women : an international anthology|date=1998|publisher=University of Texas Press|others=Rosemont, Penelope. |isbn=978-0-292-77088-1|edition=1st|location=Austin|oclc=37782914|url=https://archive.org/details/surrealistwomeni00rose}}</ref> ] took an interest in ] figures, and in England ], ], ] and ] used or experimented with Surrealist techniques. However, ], one of the first British Surrealists whose work in this genre dated from 1935, remained within the movement, and organized an exhibition of current Surrealist work in 1978 in response to an earlier show which infuriated him because it did not properly represent Surrealism. Maddox's exhibition, titled ''Surrealism Unlimited'', was held in Paris and attracted international attention. He held his last one-man show in 2002, and died three years later. Magritte's work became more realistic in its depiction of actual objects, while maintaining the element of juxtaposition, such as in 1951's ''Personal Values (Les Valeurs Personnelles)''<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.sfmoma.org/MSoMA/newAWScreen.asp?awScreenNum=5139|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20081001014708/http://www.sfmoma.org/MSoMA/newAWScreen.asp?awScreenNum=5139 |url-status=dead|title=SFmoma.org|archivedate=October 1, 2008}}</ref> and 1954's ''Empire of Light (L’Empire des lumières)''.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/2594 |title=Artist – Magritte – Empire of Light – Large |publisher= Guggenheim Collection |date= January 1953|access-date=2009-12-26}}</ref> Magritte continued to produce works which have entered artistic vocabulary, such as ''Castle in the Pyrenees (Le Château des Pyrénées)'',<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://artacademieparis.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/magritte_Castle-in-the-Pyrenees.jpg |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20180510184620/https://artacademieparis.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/magritte_Castle-in-the-Pyrenees.jpg|url-status= dead |website=Artacademieparis|archive-date=May 10, 2018|title = Castle in the Pyrenees|last = Magritte|first = Rene}}</ref> which refers back to ''Voix'' from 1931, in its suspension over a landscape.
== Impact of Surrealism ==
While Surrealism is typically associated with the arts, it has been said to transcend them; Surrealism has had an impact in many other fields. In this sense, Surrealism does not specifically refer only to self-identified "Surrealists", or those sanctioned by Breton, rather, it refers to a range of creative acts of revolt and efforts to liberate imagination.
In addition to Surrealist ideas that are grounded in the ideas of ], ] and ], surrealism is seen by its advocates as being inherently dynamic and as dialectic in its thought. Surrealists have also drawn on sources as seemingly diverse as ], ], ], ], ], ], ], the obscure poet ] and the ] writer and humourist ]. One might say that Surrealist strands may be found in movements such as ] (], ], ] etc.) and even in the daily lives of people in confrontation with limiting social conditions. Thought of as the effort of humanity to liberate imagination as an act of insurrection against society, surrealism finds precedents in the ], possibly ], ], ], ], ] and ].


Other figures from the Surrealist movement were expelled. Several of these artists, like ] (by his own description) "remained close to Surrealism".<ref name="tomkins"/> Frida Kahlo should be mentioned. She had a New York solo exhibition in 1938 with 25 paintings, encouraged by Breton himself.
Surrealists believe that ''non-Western'' cultures also provide a continued source of inspiration for Surrealist activity because some may strike up a better balance between instrumental reason and the imagination in flight than Western culture. Surrealism has had an identifiable impact on radical and revolutionary politics, both directly -- as in some surrealists joining or allying themselves with radical political groups, movements and parties -- and indirectly -- through the way in which surrealists' emphasis on the intimate link between freeing the imagination and the mind and liberation from repressive and archaic social structures. This was especially visible in the ] of the 1960s and 1970s and the French revolt of May 1968, whose slogan "All power to the imagination" arose directly from French surrealist thought and practice.


After the crushing of the ], ] returned to Paris to continue creating his own word that had been transcended the surrealism. The preface to his first exhibition in the Furstenberg Gallery (1957) was written by Breton yet.<ref name="breton">Breton, André. ''Surrealism and Painting'', Icon, 1973</ref>
Some ]s, such as ] in ], who won an ] for his stage set, and who also designed the "creature," in the movie ''],'' have been popularly called "Surrealists," though Giger's art is promoted as surrealist biomorphic art.


Many new artists explicitly took up the Surrealist banner. ] and ] continued to work, for example, with Tanning's ''Rainy Day Canape'' from 1970. Duchamp continued to produce sculpture in secret including an installation with the realistic depiction of a woman viewable only through a peephole.
==Critiques of Surrealism==
Surrealism has been critiqued from several perspectives:


Breton continued to write and espouse the importance of liberating the human mind, as with the publication '']'' in 1952. Breton's return to France after the War, began a new phase of Surrealist activity in Paris, and his critiques of rationalism and dualism found a new audience. Breton insisted that Surrealism was an ongoing revolt against the reduction of humanity to market relationships, religious gestures and misery and to espouse the importance of liberating the human mind.
=== Feminist ===
] have in the past critiqued the surrealist movement, claiming that it is fundamentally a male movement and a male fellowship, despite the occasional few celebrated woman surrealist painters and poets. They believe that it adopts typical male attitudes toward women, such as worshipping them symbolically through stereotypes and sexist norms. Some feminists have argued that in surrealism women are often made to represent higher values and transformed into objects of desire and of mystery.


'''Major exhibitions of the 1940s, '50s and '60s'''
===Freudian===
* 1942 – ''First Papers of Surrealism'' – New York – The Surrealists again called on Duchamp to design an exhibition. This time he wove a 3-dimensional web of string throughout the rooms of the space, in some cases making it almost impossible to see the works.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/interviews/hirschhorn/popup_9.html |first=Marcel|last= Duchamp |publisher=Toutfait.com |access-date=|title = Sixteen Miles of String}}</ref> He made a secret arrangement with an associate's son to bring his friends to the opening of the show, so that when the finely dressed patrons arrived, they found a dozen children in athletic clothes kicking and passing balls and skipping rope. His design for the show's catalog included "found", rather than posed, photographs of the artists.<ref name="tomkins"/>
* 1947 – International Surrealist Exhibition – Galerie Maeght, Paris<ref>International Surrealist Exhibition – Galerie Maeght, Paris« L’espace d'exposition comme matrice signifiante: l'exemple de l'exposition internationale du surréalisme à la galerie Maeght à Paris en 1947 », ''Ligiea'', n°73-74-75-76 : Art et espace. Perception et représentation. Le lieu, le visible et l'espace-temps. le geste, le corps et le regard, sous la direction de Giovanni Lista, Paris, juin 2007, p. 230-242.</ref>
* 1959 – International Surrealist Exhibition – Paris
* 1960 – ''Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters' Domain'' – New York


==Post-Breton Surrealism==
] initiated the psychoanalytic critique of surrealism with his remark that what interested him most about the surrealists was not their unconscious but their conscious. His meaning was that the manifestations of and experiments with psychic automatism highlighted by surrealists as the liberation of the unconscious were highly structured by ego activity, similar to the activities of the dream censorship in dreams, and that therefore it was in principle a mistake to regard surrealist poems and other art works as direct manifestations of the unconscious, when they were indeed highly shaped and processed by the ego. In this view, the surrealists may have been producing great works, but they were products of the conscious, not the unconscious mind, and they deceived themselves with regard to what they were doing with the unconscious. In psychoanalysis proper, the unconscious does not just express itself automatically but can only be uncovered through the analysis of resistance and transference in the psychoanalytic process.


In the 1960s, the artists and writers associated with the ] were closely associated with Surrealism. While ] was critical of and distanced himself from Surrealism, others, such as ], were explicitly using Surrealist techniques and methods. ] in France included a number of Surrealist ideas, and among the slogans the students spray-painted on the walls of the Sorbonne were familiar Surrealist ones. ] would commemorate this in a painting titled ''May 1968.'' There were also groups who associated with both currents and were more attached to Surrealism, such as the ].
===Situationist===


During the 1980s, behind the ], Surrealism again entered into politics with an underground artistic opposition movement known as the ]. The Orange Alternative was created in 1981 by ] (alias 'Major'), a graduate of history and art history at the University of ]. They used Surrealist symbolism and terminology in their large-scale happenings organized in the major Polish cities during the ] regime and painted Surrealist graffiti on spots covering up anti-regime slogans. Major himself was the author of a "Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism". In this manifesto, he stated that the socialist (communist) system had become so Surrealistic that it could be seen as an expression of art itself.
While some individuals and groups on the core and fringes of the ] were surrealists themselves, others were very critical of the movement, or indeed what remained of the movement in the late 50s and 60s. The Situationist International could therefore be seen as a break and continuiation of the Surrealist praxis. The Situationists felt that surrealism had retreated into the salons and galleries and therefore had been absorbed into the bourgeois order. They nevertheless took inspiration from some surrealist theories and methods.


Surrealistic art also remains popular with museum patrons. The ] in New York City held an exhibit, ''Two Private Eyes'', in 1999, and in 2001 ] held an exhibition of Surrealist art that attracted over 170,000 visitors. In 2002 the ] in New York City held a show, ''Desire Unbound'', and the ] in Paris a show called ''La Révolution surréaliste''.
==References==

<references/>
Surrealist groups and literary publications have continued to be active up to the present day, with groups such as the ], the Leeds Surrealist Group, and the Surrealist Group of Stockholm. ] of the Czech-Slovak Surrealists continues to make films and experiment with objects. In Ireland, novelists and poets associated with Surrealism are ], Matthew Geden, ], Afric McGlinchey, Tim Murphy, ], and ].<ref>''Seeds of Gravity: An Anthology of Contemporary Surrealist Poetry from Ireland'', ed. by ], Dublin: SurVision Books, 2020, {{ISBN|978-1-912963-18-8}}.</ref> The Dublin-based
'']'' online magazine "currently the only international magazine devoted exclusively to surrealist poetry."<ref>Tim Murphy, , '']'', 1 April 2019.</ref> Such contemporary avantgardist poets as Sergey Buryukov, Anna Glazova, Tatyana Graus, Dmitry Grigoriev, ], and others representative Surrealism in ].<ref>''message-door: An Anthology of Contemporary Surrealist Poetry from Russia'', ed. and trans. by ], Dublin: SurVision Books, 2020, {{ISBN|978-1-912963-17-1}}.</ref>

==Impact and influences==
While Surrealism is typically associated with the arts, it has impacted many other fields. In this sense, Surrealism does not specifically refer only to self-identified "Surrealists", or those sanctioned by Breton, rather, it refers to a range of creative acts of revolt and efforts to liberate imagination.<ref>Vaneigem, Raoul (Dupuis Jules-François), ''Histoire désinvolte du surréalisme''. Nonville: Paul Vermont, 1977. {{cite book |last=Vaneigem |first=Raoul |translator-first=Donald |translator-last=Nicholson-Smith |title=A Cavalier History of Surrealism |location=Edinburgh |publisher=AK Press |date=1999 |url=https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/raoul-vaneigem-a-cavalier-history-of-surrealism.lt.pdf}}</ref> In addition to Surrealist theory being grounded in the ideas of ], ] and ], to its advocates its inherent dynamic is ]al thought.<ref>Vaneigem, Raoul (Dupuis Jules-François), ''Histoire désinvolte du surréalisme''. Nonville: Paul Vermont, 1977. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith as , Edinburgh: AK Press, 1999. pp. 49–51; 69–73.</ref> Surrealist artists have also cited the ], ], ],<ref name="thecityreview1">{{cite web|url=http://www.thecityreview.com/surreal.html |title=Surrealism:Two Private Eyes|work = thecityreview.com|first=Carter B. |last=Horsley |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110615202647/http://www.thecityreview.com/surreal.html|archive-date = 15 June 2011}}</ref><ref>. Retrieved August 27, 2010.</ref> the ],<ref name="thecityreview1"/> ], ] and ] as influences.<ref>{{Cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EPrI92j80r0C&q=rimbaud+and+surrealism&pg=PA17 | title=Surrealism| isbn=978-0-231-06811-6| year=1990| last1=Chénieux-Gendron| first1=Jacqueline| publisher=Columbia University Press}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |jstor = 2929720|title = Rimbaud-Father of Surrealism?|journal = Yale French Studies|issue = 31|pages = 45–51|last1 = Bays|first1 = Gwendolyn M.|year = 1964|doi = 10.2307/2929720}}</ref>

===May 68===
Surrealists believe that non-Western cultures also provide a continued source of inspiration for Surrealist activity because some may induce a better balance between instrumental reason and imagination in flight than Western culture.<ref>Choucha, Nadia. Surrealism & the Occult: Shamanism, Alchemy and the Birth of an Artistic Movement. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny; Inner Traditions, 1992.</ref><ref>Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. (English translation of Logique du sens. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969.) Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale; edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.</ref> Surrealism has had an identifiable impact on radical and revolutionary politics, both directly — as in some Surrealists joining or allying themselves with radical political groups, movements and parties — and indirectly — through the way in which Surrealists emphasize the intimate link between freeing imagination and the mind, and liberation from repressive and archaic social structures. This was especially visible in the ] of the 1960s and 1970s and the ], whose slogan "All power to the imagination" quoted by ] and ]<ref>Viénet, Rene. ''Enragés and situationists in the occupation movement, France May '68. New York; London: Autonomedia; Rebel Press, 1992, p.21''</ref> from the originally Marxist "''Rêvé''-lutionary" theory and praxis of Breton's French Surrealist group.<ref>Ford, Simon. ''The Situationist International: A User's Guide''. London: Black Dog, 2005, pp. 112–130.</ref>

===Postmodernism and popular culture===
Many significant literary movements in the later half of the 20th century were directly or indirectly influenced by Surrealism. This period is known as the ] era; though there is no widely agreed upon central definition of ], many themes and techniques commonly identified as Postmodern are nearly identical to Surrealism.

First Papers of Surrealism presented the fathers of surrealism in an exhibition that represented the leading monumental step of the avant-gardes towards installation art.<ref>Demos, T. J. "Duchamp's Labyrinth: "First Papers of Surrealism", 1942." October 97 (2001): 91–119. Accessed March 16, 2021. {{doi|10.2307/779088}}.</ref> Many writers from and associated with the ] were influenced greatly by Surrealists. ]<ref>Dana Gioia. ''California poetry: from the Gold Rush to the present''.Heyday Books, 2004.{{ISBN|1-890771-72-4}}, {{ISBN|978-1-890771-72-0}}. pg. 154.</ref> and ]<ref>Franklin Rosemont, Robin D. G. Kelley. ''Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora''. University of Texas Press, 2009. {{ISBN|0-292-71997-3}}, {{ISBN|978-0-292-71997-2}}. og. 219–222.</ref> are often categorized as both Beat and Surrealist writers. Many other Beat writers show significant evidence of Surrealist influence. A few examples include ],<ref>Rosemont, pg. 222–226</ref><ref>Bob Kaufman. ''Cranial Guitar''. Coffee House Press, 1996. {{ISBN|1-56689-038-1}}, {{ISBN|978-1-56689-038-0}}. pg. 28.</ref> ],<ref>Kirby Olson. ''Gregory Corso: doubting Thomist''. SIU Press, 2002. {{ISBN|0-8093-2447-4}}, {{ISBN|978-0-8093-2447-7}}. pg. 75–79.</ref> ],<ref>Allen Ginsberg, Lewis Hyde. ''On the poetry of Allen Ginsberg''. University of Michigan Press, 1984. {{ISBN|0-472-06353-7}}, {{ISBN|978-0-472-06353-6}}. pg. 277–278.</ref> and ].<ref>Dave Meltzer. ''San Francisco beat: talking with the poets''. City Lights Books, 2001. {{ISBN|0-87286-379-4}}, {{ISBN|978-0-87286-379-8}}. pg. 82–83.</ref> Artaud in particular was very influential to many of the Beats, but especially Ginsberg and ].<ref>Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. London: Virgin Publishing Ltd. (2001), paperback, 628 pages, {{ISBN|0-7535-0486-3}}. pg. 12, 239</ref> Ginsberg cites Artaud's "Van Gogh – The Man Suicided by Society" as a direct influence on "]",<ref>Allen Ginsberg. "Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts & Bibliography." Ed. Barry Miles. Harper Perennial, 1995. {{ISBN|0-06-092611-2}}. pg. 184.</ref> along with Apollinaire's "Zone",<ref>Ginsberg, pg. 180</ref> García Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman",<ref>pg. 185.</ref> and Schwitters' "Priimiititiii".<ref>Ginsberg, pg. 182.</ref> The structure of Breton's "Free Union" had a significant influence on Ginsberg's "Kaddish".<ref>Miles, pg. 233.</ref> In Paris, Ginsberg and Corso met their heroes Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Benjamin Péret, and to show their admiration Ginsberg kissed Duchamp's feet and Corso cut off Duchamp's tie.<ref>Miles, pg. 242.</ref>

], a core member of the Beat Generation and a postmodern novelist, developed the ] with former surrealist ]—in which chance is used to dictate the composition of a text from words cut out of other sources—referring to it as the "Surrealist Lark" and recognizing its debt to the techniques of Tristan Tzara.<ref>William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz, Ira Silverberg. ''Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader''.Grove Press, 2000. 080213694X, 9780802136947. pg. 119, 254.</ref>

Postmodern novelist ], who was also influenced by Beat fiction, experimented since the 1960s with the surrealist idea of startling juxtapositions; commenting on the "necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill", he added that "any old combination of details will not do. Spike Jones Jr., whose father's orchestral recordings had a deep and indelible effect on me as a child, said once in an interview, 'One of the things that people don't realize about Dad's kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful.'"<ref name="PynchonSurralism">] (1984) '']'', p.20</ref>

Many other postmodern fiction writers have been directly influenced by Surrealism. ], for example, has translated Surrealist poetry and said the Surrealists were "a real discovery" for him.<ref>Paul Auster. ''Collected prose: autobiographical writings, true stories, critical essays, prefaces and collaborations with artists''. Macmillan, 2005 {{ISBN|0-312-42468-X}}, 9780312424688. pg. 457.</ref> ], when called a Magical Realist, said he saw his work instead "allied to surrealism".<ref>Catherine Cundy. ''Salman Rushdie''. Manchester University Press ND, 1996.{{ISBN|0-7190-4409-X}}, 9780719044090. pg. 98.</ref><ref>Salman Rushdie, Michael Reder. ''Conversations with Salman Rushdie''. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2000. {{ISBN|1-57806-185-7}}, {{ISBN|978-1-57806-185-3}}. pg. 111, 150</ref> ] regarded as a surrealist filmmaker being quoted, "David Lynch has once again risen to the spotlight as a champion of surrealism,"<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://facets.org/blog/exclusive/watch/essays/david-lynch-and-surrealism-deconstruction-of-the-lynchian-label/|title=David Lynch and Surrealism: Deconstruction of the 'Lynchian' Label|date=2017-09-02|website=Facets Features|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-22|archive-date=2020-03-22|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200322230627/http://facets.org/blog/exclusive/watch/essays/david-lynch-and-surrealism-deconstruction-of-the-lynchian-label/|url-status=dead}}</ref> in regard to his show '']''. For the work of other postmodernists, such as ]<ref>]. ''The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks''. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2009. 1604732520, 9781604732528. pg. 73–74.</ref> and ],<ref>Brian Evenson. ''Understanding Robert Coover''. Univ of South Carolina Press, 2003. {{ISBN|1-57003-482-6}}, {{ISBN|978-1-57003-482-4}}. pg. 4</ref> a broad comparison to Surrealism is common.

], a popular technique among novelists of the latter half of the 20th century especially among Latin American writers, has some obvious similarities to Surrealism with its juxtaposition of the normal and the dream-like, as in the work of ].<ref>McMurray, George R. "Gabriel García Márquez." Gabriel García Márquez. Ungar, 1977. Rpt. in ''Contemporary Literary Criticism''. Ed. Jean C. Stine and Bridget Broderick. Vol. 27. Detroit: Gale Research, 1984. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 2 September 2010.</ref> ] was inspired by the revolutionary voice in Surrealist poetry and points to inspiration Breton and Artaud found in Fuentes' homeland, Mexico.<ref>Maarten van Delden. ''Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity''. Vanderbilt University Press, 1999.{{ISBN|0-8265-1345-X}}, 9780826513458. pg. 55, 90.</ref> Though Surrealism was a direct influence on Magic Realism in its early stages, many Magic Realist writers and critics, such as Amaryll Chanady<ref>Maggie Ann Bowers. ''Magic(al) realism''. Routledge, 2004. {{ISBN|0-415-26853-2}}, {{ISBN|978-0-415-26853-0}}. pg. 23–25.</ref> and S. P. Ganguly,<ref>Shannin Schroeder. Rediscovering magical realism in the Americas. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004. {{ISBN|0-275-98049-9}}, {{ISBN|978-0-275-98049-8}}. pg. 7.</ref> while acknowledging the similarities, cite the many differences obscured by the direct comparison of Magic Realism and Surrealism such as an interest in psychology and the artefacts of European culture they claim is not present in Magic Realism. A prominent example of a Magic Realist writer who points to Surrealism as an early influence is ] who also later criticized Surrealism's delineation between real and unreal as not representing the true South American experience.<ref>Navarro, Gabriel. ''Musica y escrita en Alejo Carpentier'' Alicante: Universidad de Alicante. 1999. {{ISBN|84-7908-476-6}}. pg. 62</ref><ref>Emory Elliott, Cathy N. Davidson. ''The Columbia history of the American novel''. Columbia University Press, 1991. {{ISBN|0-231-07360-7}}, {{ISBN|978-0-231-07360-8}}. pg. 524.</ref>

===Surrealist groups===
{{see also|Category:Surrealist groups}}

Surrealist individuals and groups have carried on with Surrealism after the death of André Breton in 1966. The original Paris Surrealist Group was disbanded by member Jean Schuster in 1969, but another Parisian surrealist group was later formed. The current Surrealist Group of Paris has recently published the first issue of their new journal, ''Alcheringa''. The Group of Czech-Slovak Surrealists never disbanded, and continue to publish their journal ''Analogon'', which now spans almost 100 volumes.

===Surrealism and the theatre===
Surrealist theatre and Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty" were inspirational to many within the group of playwrights that the critic Martin Esslin called the "]" (in his 1963 book of the same name). Though not an organized movement, Esslin grouped these playwrights together based on some similarities of theme and technique; Esslin argues that these similarities may be traced to an influence from the Surrealists. ] in particular was fond of Surrealism, claiming at one point that Breton was one of the most important thinkers in history.<ref>Eugène Ionesco. ''Present past, past present: a personal memoir''. Da Capo Press, 1998. {{ISBN|0-306-80835-8}}. pg. 148.</ref><ref>Rosette C. Lamont. Ionesco's imperatives: the politics of culture. University of Michigan Press, 1993. {{ISBN|0-472-10310-5}}. pg. 41–42</ref> ] was also fond of Surrealists, even translating much of the poetry into English.<ref>James Knowlson. ''Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett''. London. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997. {{ISBN|0-7475-3169-2}}., pg. 65</ref><ref>Daniel Albright. ''Beckett and aesthetics''. Cambridge University Press, 2003. {{ISBN|0-521-82908-9}}. pg. 10</ref> Other notable playwrights whom Esslin groups under the term, for example ] and ], were at some point members of the Surrealist group.<ref>{{cite book|last=Esslin|page= 89|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eKOrGfbC624C&pg=PA89|title = The Theatre of the Absurd|date= 6 January 2004|publisher= Knopf Doubleday Publishing|isbn= 9781400075232}}</ref><ref>Justin Wintle. ''Makers of modern culture''. Routledge, 2002. {{ISBN|0-415-26583-5}}. pg. 3</ref><ref>C. D. Innes. ''Avant garde theatre, 1892–1992''.Routledge, 1993. {{ISBN|0-415-06518-6}}. pg. 118.</ref>

Alice Farley is an American-born artist who became active during the 1970s in San Francisco after training in dance at the California Institute of the Arts.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|title=Surrealist Women: An International Anthology|last=Rosemont|first=Penelope|publisher=University of Texas|year=1998|isbn=978-0-292-77088-1|location=Austin, Texas|pages=|url=https://archive.org/details/surrealistwomeni00rose/page/208}}</ref> Farley uses vivid and elaborate costuming that she describes as "the vehicles of transformation capable of making a character's thoughts visible".<ref name=":0" /> Often collaborating with musicians such as ], Farley explores the role of improvisation in dance, bringing in an automatic aspect to the productions.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Farley|first1=Alice|last2=Threadgill|first2=Henry|last3=Field|first3=Thalia|last4=Morrow|first4=Bradford|date=1997|title=Erotec : An Interview with Alice Farley and Henry Threadgill|journal=Conjunctions|issue=28|pages=229–240|issn=0278-2324|jstor=24515633}}</ref> Farley has performed in a number of surrealist collaborations including the ] in Chicago in 1976.<ref name=":0" /><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Susik |first=Abigail |date=2021-12-08 |title='Always for Pleasure': Chicago Surrealism and Fashion, An Interview with Penelope Rosemont |url=https://jsa-asu.org/index.php/JSA/article/view/228 |journal=Journal of Surrealism and the Americas |language=en |volume=12 |issue=1 |pages=78–92 |issn=2326-0459}}</ref>

==Alleged precursors in older art==
Various much older artists are sometimes claimed as precursors of Surrealism. Foremost among these are ],<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-bosch-describe-high-fashion-heavy-metal|title=Why Bosch Is Used to Describe Everything from High Fashion to Heavy Metal|last=Cohen|first=Alina|date=2018-04-24|website=Artsy|access-date=2019-04-23}}</ref> and ], whom Dalí called the "father of Surrealism."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://news.nationalpost.com/afterword/giuseppe-arcimboldo-the-prince-of-produce-portraiture|title=Giuseppe Arcimboldo: The prince of produce portraiture|website=nationalpost}}</ref> Apart from their followers, other artists who may be mentioned in this context include ], for some ] landscapes. Many critics feel these works belong to ] rather than having a significant connection with Surrealism.<ref>"...the tendency to interpret Bosch's imagery in terms of modern Surrealism or Freudian psychology is anachronistic. We forget too often that Bosch never read Freud and that modern psychoanalysis would have been incomprehensible to the medieval mind... Modern psychology may explain the appeal Bosch's pictures have for us, but it cannot explain the meaning they had for Bosch and his contemporaries. Bosch did not intend to evoke the subconscious of the viewer, but to teach him certain moral and spiritual truths, and thus his images generally had a precise and premeditated significance." {{Cite book|title=Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1450–1516 : between heaven and hell|last=Bosing, Walter.|date=2000|publisher=Taschen|isbn=3-8228-5856-0|location=London|oclc=45329900}}</ref>


==See also== ==See also==

* ]
*]
* ]
*]
* ]
*]
* ]
*]
*]
* {{annotated link|Neo-Fauvism}}
* {{annotated link|Organic Surrealism}}
* {{annotated link|Outsider art}}
* {{annotated link|Psychedelic art}}
* {{annotated link|Salón de Mayo}} (Cuba)

==References==
{{Reflist|30em}}

==Bibliography==
; ]
* ''Manifestoes of Surrealism'' containing the first, second and introduction to a possible third manifesto, the novel ''The Soluble Fish'', and political aspects of the Surrealist movement. {{ISBN|0-472-17900-4}} .
* ''What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings of André Breton''. {{ISBN|0-87348-822-9}} .
* ''Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism'' (Gallimard 1952) (Paragon House English rev. ed. 1993). {{ISBN|1-56924-970-9}}.
* ''The Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism'', reprinted in:
** Bonnet, Marguerite, ed. (1988). ''Oeuvres complètes'', 1:328. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.

; Other sources
* Ades, Dawn. ''Surrealism in Latin America: Vivisimo Muerto'', Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2012. {{ISBN|978-1-60606-117-6}}
* Alexandrian, Sarane. ''Surrealist Art'' London: Thames & Hudson, 1970.
* ] 1917, 1991. Program note for ''Parade'', printed in ''Oeuvres en prose complètes'', 2:865–866, Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin, eds. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
* Allmer, Patricia (ed.) ''Intersections – Women Artists/Surrealism/Modernism'', Rethinking Art's Histories series, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016.
* Allmer, Patricia and Donna Roberts (eds) '"Wonderful Things" – Surrealism and Egypt', ''Dada/Surrealism'', University of Iowa, 20:1, 2013.
* Allmer, Patricia (ed.) ''Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism'', London and Manchester: Prestel and Manchester Art Gallery, 2009.
* Allmer, Patricia and Hilde van Gelder (eds.) ''Collective Inventions: Surrealism in Belgium'', Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007.
* Allmer, Patricia and Hilde Van Gelder (eds.) 'The Forgotten Surrealists: Belgian Surrealism Since 1924', ''Image Narrative'', no. 13, 2005.
* Brotchie, Alastair and Gooding, Mel, eds. ''A Book of Surrealist Games'' Berkeley, California: Shambhala, 1995. {{ISBN|1-57062-084-9}}.
* ] ''Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology'' 2001, MIT Press.
* Chadwick, Whitney. ''Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation''. The MIT Press, 1998. {{ISBN|978-0-262-53157-3}}
* Chadwick, Whitney. ''Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement''. 1985, Bulfinch Press. {{ISBN|978-0-8212-1599-9}}
* Durozoi, Gerard, ''History of the Surrealist Movement'' Translated by Alison Anderson University of Chicago Press. 2004. {{ISBN|0-226-17411-5}}.
* Flahutez, Fabrice, ''Nouveau Monde et Nouveau Mythe. Mutations du surréalisme de l'exil américain à l'écart absolu (1941–1965)'', Les presses du réel, Dijon, 2007.
* Flahutez, Fabrice(ed.), Julia Drost (ed.), Anne Helmreich (ed.), Martin Schieder (ed.), ''Networking Surrealism in the United States. Artists, Agents and the Market'', T.1., Paris, DFK, 2019, 400p. ({{ISBN|978-3-947449-50-7}}) (PDF) https://doi.org/10.11588/arthistoricum.485
* Fort, Ilene Susan and Tere Arcq, editors. ''In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States'', Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2012.
* Galtsova, Elena. ''Surrealism and Theatre. On the Theatrical Aesthetics of the French Surrealism'', Moscow, Russian State University for the Humanities, 2012, {{ISBN|978-5-7281-1146-7}}
* {{cite book|author=David Hopkins|title=Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction|year=2004|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-280254-5}}
* Leddy, Annette and Conwell, Donna. ''Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico'', Los Angeles: Getty Publications. 2012. {{ISBN|978-1-60606-118-3}}
* Lewis, Helena. ''Dada Turns Red.'' Edinburgh, Scotland: University of Edinburgh Press, 1990.
* Low Mary, Breá Juan, ''Red Spanish Notebook'', City Light Books, Sans Francisco, 1979, {{ISBN|0-87286-132-5}}
* Melly, George ''Paris and the Surrealists'' Thames & Hudson. 1991.
* Moebius, Stephan. ''Die Zauberlehrlinge. Soziologiegeschichte des Collège de Sociologie. Konstanz: UVK 2006. About the ], its members and sociological impacts.''
* Nadeau, Maurice. ''History of Surrealism''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1989. {{ISBN|0-674-40345-2}}.
* Polizzotti, Mark. ''Why Surrealism Matters''. Yale University Press, 2024. Review: Saler, Michael, , ], February 23, 2024.
* Richard Jean-Tristan. ''Les structures inconscientes du signe pictural/Psychanalyse et surréalisme'' (''Unconscious structures of pictural sign''), L'Harmattan ed., Paris (France), 1999
* Review "Mélusine" in French by Center of surrealism studies directed by Henri Behar since 1979, edited by Editions l'Age d'Homme, Lausanne, Suisse. Download platform www.artelittera.com 14.00
* {{cite book | chapter = Poulenc, Francis | title = The Penguin Opera Guide | author = Sams, Jeremy | editor = Amanda Holden | location = London | publisher = Penguin Books | year = 1997 | orig-year = 1993 | isbn = 978-0-14-051385-1 | url = https://archive.org/details/operaguidepengui00nich}}

; Anthologies
* ''Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry: An Anthology''. Ed. by Tony Kitt. Dublin: SurVision Books, 2023. {{ISBN|978-1-912963-44-7}}.
* ''message-door: An Anthology of Contemporary Surrealist Poetry from Russia''. Ed. and trans. by ]. Dublin: SurVision Books, 2020. {{ISBN|978-1-912963-17-1}}.
* ''Seeds of Gravity: An Anthology of Contemporary Surrealist Poetry from Ireland''. Ed. by ]. Dublin: SurVision Books, 2020. {{ISBN|978-1-912963-18-8}}.


==External links== ==External links==
{{Commons category}}
<!-- ATTENTION! Please do not add links without discussion and consensus on the talk page. Undiscussed links will be removed. -->
{{Wiktionary|surrealism}}
Academic resources/'Classical' Surrealism:
{{Wikiquote}}
*
<!-- ATTENTION! Please do not add links without discussion and consensus on the talk page. Undiscussed links will be removed.-->
*
*
*, A general history of the art movement with 100+ artist bio's and art.
<!--BLACKLISTED LINK *-->
* — an article looking at Surrealism and Surrealists' connections to anarchist, socialist and working class politics
* , "recomposed photographs", in a rather surrealist spirit.
* , an article from Arsenal/ Surrealist Subversion


===André Breton writings===
{{Modernism}}
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100209063222/http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.htm |date=2010-02-09 }}
*


===Overview websites===
{{Westernart}}
* from ].
{{Schools of poetry}}
* {{in lang|fr}}
*
* , BBC Radio 4 discussion with Dawn Adiss, Malcolm Bowie and Darien Leader (''In Our Time'', Nov. 15, 2001)


] ===Surrealism and politics===
* {{cite web|url=http://libcom.org/history/1919-1950-the-politics-of-surrealism |title=1919–1950: The politics of Surrealism |last=Heath |first=Nick |publisher=Libcom.org }}
* {{cite web|url=http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/70spubs/73surreal/arsenalindex.htm |title=Herbert Marcuse and Surrealism |last=Rosemont|first=Franklin|year=1989|work=Arsenal vol. 4 }}
* {{Cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/mar/28/topstories3.artnews |title=How the surrealists sold out |last=Kennedy |first=Maev |date=2007-03-27 |work=] }}


===Surrealist poetry===
{{Link FA|el}}
* {{cite web |url=http://alangullette.com/essays/lit/surreal.htm |title=The Theory and Techniques of Surrealist Poetry |last=Gullette |first=Alan |access-date=2009-05-17 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110718140135/http://alangullette.com/essays/lit/surreal.htm |archive-date=2011-07-18 |url-status=dead }}
* Holcombe, C. J.
*
* {{cite book | last = Jackaman | first = Rob | title = The course of English surrealist poetry since the 1930s | publisher = ] | year = 1989 | location = ] | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=DV9_6DAOSscC | isbn = 978-0-88946-932-7 }}
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100919154241/http://www.benjamin-peret.org/documents/128-aime-cesaire-et-le-surrealisme.html |date=2010-09-19 }} {{in lang|fr}}

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Latest revision as of 06:06, 4 January 2025

International cultural movement (1920s–1950s)
Surrealism
The Treachery of Images, by René Magritte (1929)The Treachery of Images, by René Magritte (1929), featuring the declaration "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (lit. 'This is not a pipe')
Years active1920s–1950s
LocationFrance, Belgium
Major figuresBreton, Carrington, Dalí, Ernst, Fini, Magritte, Oppenheim
Influences
Influenced
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Surrealism
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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. It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, 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. However, the Surrealist movement was not officially established until after October 1924, when the Surrealist Manifesto published by French poet and critic André 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. 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, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.

Founding of the movement

Max Ernst, The Elephant Celebes, 1921

The word surrealism was first coined in March 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire. 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" .

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":

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)

The term was taken up again by Apollinaire, both as subtitle and in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias: Drame surréaliste, which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917.

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."

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. 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, 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, and Yves Tanguy, Dora Maar

Cover of the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, December 1924

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 work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate 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."

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

Yvan Goll, Surréalisme, Manifeste du surréalisme, Volume 1, Number 1, October 1, 1924, cover by Robert Delaunay
Main article: Surrealist Manifesto

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.

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.

Goll and Breton clashed openly, at one point literally fighting, at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, over the rights to the term Surrealism. In the end, Breton won the battle through tactical and numerical superiority. Though the quarrel over the anteriority of Surrealism concluded with the victory of Breton, the history of surrealism from that moment would remain marked by fractures, resignations, and resounding excommunications, with each surrealist having their own view of the issue and goals, and accepting more or less the definitions laid out by André Breton.

Breton's 1924 Surrealist Manifesto defines the purposes of Surrealism. He included citations of the influences on Surrealism, examples of Surrealist works, and discussion of Surrealist automatism. He provided the following definitions:

Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.

Encyclopedia: Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.

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Giacometti's Woman with Her Throat Cut, 1932 (cast 1949), Museum of Modern Art, New York City

The movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games, discussed the theories of Surrealism, and developed a variety of techniques such as automatic drawing. Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage, grattage and decalcomania.

Soon more visual artists became involved, including Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Francis Picabia, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Alberto Giacometti, Valentine Hugo, Méret Oppenheim, Toyen, and Kansuke Yamamoto. Later, after the second World War, Enrico Donati, Vinicius Pradella and Denis Fabbri became involved as well. Though Breton admired Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and courted them to join the movement, they remained peripheral. More writers also joined, including former Dadaist Tristan Tzara, René Char, and Georges Sadoul.

André Masson. Automatic Drawing. 1924. Ink on paper, 23.5 × 20.6 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In 1925 an autonomous Surrealist group formed in Brussels. The group included the musician, poet, and artist E. L. T. Mesens, painter and writer René Magritte, Paul Nougé, Marcel Lecomte, and André Souris. In 1927 they were joined by the writer Louis Scutenaire. They corresponded regularly with the Paris group, and in 1927 both Goemans and Magritte moved to Paris and frequented Breton's circle. The artists, with their roots in Dada and Cubism, the abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky, Expressionism, and Post-Impressionism, also reached to older "bloodlines" or proto-surrealists such as Hieronymus Bosch, and the so-called primitive and naive arts.

André Masson's automatic drawings of 1923 are often used as the point of the acceptance of visual arts and the break from Dada, since they reflect the influence of the idea of the unconscious mind. Another example is Giacometti's 1925 Torso, which marked his movement to simplified forms and inspiration from preclassical sculpture.

However, a striking example of the line used to divide Dada and Surrealism among art experts is the pairing of 1925's Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person (Von minimax dadamax selbst konstruiertes maschinchen) with The Kiss (Le Baiser) from 1927 by Max Ernst. The first is generally held to have a distance, and erotic subtext, whereas the second presents an erotic act openly and directly. In the second the influence of Miró and the drawing style of Picasso is visible with the use of fluid curving and intersecting lines and colour, whereas the first takes a directness that would later be influential in movements such as Pop art.

Giorgio de Chirico, The Red Tower (La Tour Rouge), 1913, Guggenheim Museum

Giorgio de Chirico, and his previous development of metaphysical art, was one of the important joining figures between the philosophical and visual aspects of Surrealism. Between 1911 and 1917, he adopted an unornamented depictional style whose surface would be adopted by others later. The Red Tower (La tour rouge) from 1913 shows the stark colour contrasts and illustrative style later adopted by Surrealist painters. His 1914 The Nostalgia of the Poet (La Nostalgie du poète) has the figure turned away from the viewer, and the juxtaposition of a bust with glasses and a fish as a relief defies conventional explanation. He was also a writer whose novel Hebdomeros presents a series of dreamscapes with an unusual use of punctuation, syntax, and grammar designed to create an atmosphere and frame its images. His images, including set designs for the Ballets Russes, would create a decorative form of Surrealism, and he would be an influence on the two artists who would be even more closely associated with Surrealism in the public mind: Dalí and Magritte. He would, however, leave the Surrealist group in 1928.

In 1924, Miró and Masson applied Surrealism to painting. The first Surrealist exhibition, La Peinture Surrealiste, was held at Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. It displayed works by Masson, Man Ray, Paul Klee, Miró, and others. The show confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts (though it had been initially debated whether this was possible), and techniques from Dada, such as photomontage, were used. The following year, on March 26, 1926, Galerie Surréaliste opened with an exhibition by Man Ray. Breton published Surrealism and Painting in 1928 which summarized the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the 1960s.

Surrealist literature

See also: List of Surrealist poets

The first Surrealist work, according to leader Breton, was Les Chants de Maldoror, and the first work written and published by his group of Surréalistes was Les Champs Magnétiques (May–June 1919). Littérature contained automatist works and accounts of dreams. The magazine and the portfolio both showed their disdain for literal meanings given to objects and focused rather on the undertones; the poetic undercurrents present. Not only did they give emphasis to the poetic undercurrents, but also to the connotations and the overtones which "exist in ambiguous relationships to the visual images."

Because Surrealist writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize their thoughts and the images they present, some people find much of their work difficult to parse. This notion however is a superficial comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton's initial emphasis on automatic writing as the main route toward a higher reality. But—as in Breton's case—much of what is presented as purely automatic is actually edited and very "thought out". Breton himself later admitted that automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and other elements were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of visual artists in the movement forced the issue, since automatic painting required a rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus, such elements as collage were introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling juxtapositions as revealed in Pierre Reverdy's poetry. And—as in Magritte's case (where there is no obvious recourse to either automatic techniques or collage)—the very notion of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation in and of itself. Surrealism was meant to be always in flux—to be more modern than modern—and so it was natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new challenges arose. Artists such as Max Ernst and his surrealist collages demonstrate this shift to a more modern art form that also comments on society.

Surrealists revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, and for the line "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", and Arthur Rimbaud, two late 19th-century writers believed to be the precursors of Surrealism.

Examples of Surrealist literature are Artaud's Le Pèse-Nerfs (1926), Aragon's Irene's Cunt (1927), Péret's Death to the Pigs (1929), Crevel's Mr. Knife Miss Fork (1931), Sadegh Hedayat's the Blind Owl (1937), and Breton's Sur la route de San Romano (1948).

La Révolution surréaliste continued publication into 1929 with most pages densely packed with columns of text, but which also included reproductions of art, among them works by de Chirico, Ernst, Masson, and Man Ray. Other works included books, poems, pamphlets, automatic texts and theoretical tracts.

Surrealist films

Main article: Surrealist cinema

Early films by Surrealists include:

Surrealist photography

Famous Surrealist photographers are the French Dora Maar, the American Man Ray, the French/Hungarian Brassaï, French Claude Cahun and the Dutch Emiel van Moerkerken.

Surrealist theatre

The word surrealist was first used by Apollinaire to describe his 1917 play Les Mamelles de Tirésias ("The Breasts of Tiresias"), which was later adapted into an opera by Francis Poulenc.

Roger Vitrac's The Mysteries of Love (1927) and Victor, or The Children Take Over (1928) are often considered the best examples of Surrealist theatre, despite his expulsion from the movement in 1926. The plays were staged at the Theatre Alfred Jarry, the theatre Vitrac co-founded with Antonin Artaud, another early Surrealist who was expelled from the movement.

Following his collaboration with Vitrac, Artaud would extend Surrealist thought through his theory of the Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud rejected the majority of Western theatre as a perversion of its original intent, which he felt should be a mystical, metaphysical experience. Instead, he envisioned a theatre that would be immediate and direct, linking the unconscious minds of performers and spectators in a sort of ritual event, Artaud created in which emotions, feelings, and the metaphysical were expressed not through language but physically, creating a mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely related to the world of dreams.

The Spanish playwright and director Federico García Lorca, also experimented with surrealism, particularly in his plays The Public (1930), When Five Years Pass (1931), and Play Without a Title (1935). Other surrealist plays include Aragon's Backs to the Wall (1925). Gertrude Stein's opera Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938) has also been described as "American Surrealism", though it is also related to a theatrical form of cubism.

Surrealist music

Main article: Surrealist music

In the 1920s several composers were influenced by Surrealism, or by individuals in the Surrealist movement. Among them were Bohuslav Martinů, André Souris, Erik Satie, Francis Poulenc, and Edgard Varèse, who stated that his work Arcana was drawn from a dream sequence. Souris in particular was associated with the movement: he had a long relationship with Magritte, and worked on Paul Nougé's publication Adieu Marie. Music by composers from across the twentieth century have been associated with surrealist principles, including Pierre Boulez, György Ligeti, Mauricio Kagel, Olivier Messiaen, and Thomas Adès.

Germaine Tailleferre of the French group Les Six wrote several works which could be considered to be inspired by Surrealism, including the 1948 ballet Paris-Magie (scenario by Lise Deharme), the operas La Petite Sirène (book by Philippe Soupault) and Le Maître (book by Eugène Ionesco). Tailleferre also wrote popular songs to texts by Claude Marci, the wife of Henri Jeanson, whose portrait had been painted by Magritte in the 1930s.

Even though Breton by 1946 responded rather negatively to the subject of music with his essay Silence is Golden, later Surrealists, such as Paul Garon, have been interested in—and found parallels to—Surrealism in the improvisation of jazz and the blues. Jazz and blues musicians have occasionally reciprocated this interest. For example, the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition included performances by David "Honeyboy" Edwards.

Surrealism and international politics

Surrealism as a political force developed unevenly around the world: in some places more emphasis was on artistic practices, in other places on political practices, and in other places still, Surrealist praxis looked to supersede both the arts and politics. During the 1930s, the Surrealist idea spread from Europe to North America, South America (founding of the Mandrágora group in Chile in 1938), Central America, the Caribbean, and throughout Asia, as both an artistic idea and as an ideology of political change.

Politically, Surrealism was Trotskyist, communist, or anarchist. The split from Dada has been characterised as a split between anarchists and communists, with the Surrealists as communist. Breton and his comrades supported Leon Trotsky and his International Left Opposition for a while, though there was an openness to anarchism that manifested more fully after World War II. Some Surrealists, such as Benjamin Péret, Mary Low, and Juan Breá, aligned with forms of left communism. When the Dutch surrealist photographer Emiel van Moerkerken came to Breton, he did not want to sign the manifesto because he was not a Trotskyist. For Breton being a communist was not enough. Breton denied Van Moerkerken's pictures for a publication afterwards. This caused a split in surrealism. Others fought for complete liberty from political ideologies, like Wolfgang Paalen, who, after Trotsky's assassination in Mexico, prepared a schism between art and politics through his counter-surrealist art-magazine DYN and so prepared the ground for the abstract expressionists. Dalí supported capitalism and the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco but cannot be said to represent a trend in Surrealism in this respect; in fact, he was considered, by Breton and his associates, to have betrayed and left Surrealism. Benjamin Péret, Mary Low, Juan Breá, and Spanish-native Eugenio Fernández Granell joined the POUM during the Spanish Civil War.

Breton's followers, along with the Communist Party, were working for the "liberation of man". However, Breton's group refused to prioritize the proletarian struggle over radical creation such that their struggles with the Party made the late 1920s a turbulent time for both. Many individuals closely associated with Breton, notably Aragon, left his group to work more closely with the Communists.

Surrealists have often sought to link their efforts with political ideals and activities. In the Declaration of January 27, 1925, for example, members of the Paris-based Bureau of Surrealist Research (including Breton, Aragon and Artaud, as well as some two dozen others) declared their affinity for revolutionary politics. While this was initially a somewhat vague formulation, by the 1930s many Surrealists had strongly identified themselves with communism. The foremost document of this tendency within Surrealism is the Manifesto for a Free Revolutionary Art, published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera, but actually co-authored by Breton and Leon Trotsky.

However, in 1933 the Surrealists' assertion that a "proletarian literature" within a capitalist society was impossible led to their break with the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, and the expulsion of Breton, Éluard and Crevel from the Communist Party.

In 1925, the Paris Surrealist group and the extreme left of the French Communist Party came together to support Abd-el-Krim, leader of the Rif uprising against French colonialism in Morocco. In an open letter to writer and French ambassador to Japan, Paul Claudel, the Paris group announced:

We Surrealists pronounced ourselves in favour of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and defined our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the colour question.

The anticolonial revolutionary and proletarian politics of "Murderous Humanitarianism" (1932) which was drafted mainly by Crevel, signed by Breton, Éluard, Péret, Tanguy, and the Martiniquan Surrealists Pierre Yoyotte and J.M. Monnerot perhaps makes it the original document of what is later called "black Surrealism", although it is the contact between Aimé Césaire and Breton in the 1940s in Martinique that really lead to the communication of what is known as "black Surrealism".

Anticolonial revolutionary writers in the Négritude movement of Martinique, a French colony at the time, took up Surrealism as a revolutionary method – a critique of European culture and a radical subjective. This linked with other Surrealists and was very important for the subsequent development of Surrealism as a revolutionary praxis. The journal Tropiques, featuring the work of Césaire along with Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, Lucie Thésée, Aristide Maugée and others, was first published in 1941.

In 1938 André Breton traveled with his wife, the painter Jacqueline Lamba, to Mexico to meet Trotsky (staying as the guest of Diego Rivera's former wife Guadalupe Marin), and there he met Frida Kahlo and saw her paintings for the first time. Breton declared Kahlo to be an "innate" Surrealist painter.

Internal politics

In 1929 the satellite group associated with the journal Le Grand Jeu, including Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Maurice Henry and the Czech painter Josef Sima, was ostracized. Also in February, Breton asked Surrealists to assess their "degree of moral competence", and theoretical refinements included in the second manifeste du surréalisme excluded anyone reluctant to commit to collective action, a list which included Leiris, Limbour, Morise, Baron, Queneau, Prévert, Desnos, Masson and Boiffard. Excluded members launched a counterattack, sharply criticizing Breton in the pamphlet Un Cadavre, which featured a picture of Breton wearing a crown of thorns. The pamphlet drew upon an earlier act of subversion by likening Breton to Anatole France, whose unquestioned value Breton had challenged in 1924.

The disunion of 1929–30 and the effects of Un Cadavre had very little negative impact upon Surrealism as Breton saw it, since core figures such as Aragon, Crevel, Dalí and Buñuel remained true to the idea of group action, at least for the time being. The success (or the controversy) of Dalí and Buñuel's film L'Age d'Or in December 1930 had a regenerative effect, drawing a number of new recruits, and encouraging countless new artistic works the following year and throughout the 1930s.

Disgruntled surrealists moved to the periodical Documents, edited by Georges Bataille, whose anti-idealist materialism formed a hybrid Surrealism intending to expose the base instincts of humans. To the dismay of many, Documents fizzled out in 1931, just as Surrealism seemed to be gathering more steam.

There were a number of reconciliations after this period of disunion, such as between Breton and Bataille, while Aragon left the group after committing himself to the French Communist Party in 1932. More members were ousted over the years for a variety of infractions, both political and personal, while others left in pursuit of their own style.

By the end of World War II, the surrealist group led by André Breton decided to explicitly embrace anarchism. In 1952 Breton wrote "It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself." Breton was consistent in his support for the francophone Anarchist Federation and he continued to offer his solidarity after the Platformists supporting Fontenis transformed the FA into the Fédération Communiste Libertaire. He was one of the few intellectuals who continued to offer his support to the FCL during the Algerian war when the FCL suffered severe repression and was forced underground. He sheltered Fontenis whilst he was in hiding. He refused to take sides on the splits in the French anarchist movement and both he and Peret expressed solidarity as well with the new Fédération anarchiste set up by the synthesist anarchists and worked in the Antifascist Committees of the 60s alongside the FA.

Golden age

Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in London and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high-water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions. Another English Surrealist group developed in Birmingham, meanwhile, and was distinguished by its opposition to the London surrealists and preferences for surrealism's French heartland. The two groups would reconcile later in the decade.

Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dalí joined the group in 1929 and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.

Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth; stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.

1931 was a year when several Surrealist painters produced works which marked turning points in their stylistic evolution: Magritte's Voice of Space (La Voix des airs) is an example of this process, where three large spheres representing bells hang above a landscape. Another Surrealist landscape from this same year is Yves Tanguy's Promontory Palace (Palais promontoire), with its molten forms and liquid shapes. Liquid shapes became the trademark of Dalí, particularly in his The Persistence of Memory, which features the image of watches that sag as if they were melting.

The characteristics of this style—a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological—came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modern period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality".

Between 1930 and 1933, the Surrealist Group in Paris issued the periodical Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution as the successor of La Révolution surréaliste.

From 1936 through 1938 Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Roberto Matta joined the group. Paalen contributed Fumage and Onslow Ford Coulage as new pictorial automatic techniques.

Long after personal, political and professional tensions fragmented the Surrealist group, Magritte and Dalí continued to define a visual program in the arts. This program reached beyond painting, to encompass photography as well, as can be seen from a Man Ray self-portrait, whose use of assemblage influenced Robert Rauschenberg's collage boxes.

Max Ernst, L'Ange du Foyer ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme (1937), private collection

During the 1930s Peggy Guggenheim, an important American art collector, married Max Ernst and began promoting work by other Surrealists such as Yves Tanguy and the British artist John Tunnard.

Major exhibitions in the 1930s

  • 1936 – London International Surrealist Exhibition is organised in London by the art historian Herbert Read, with an introduction by André Breton.
  • 1936 – Museum of Modern Art in New York shows the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism.
  • 1938 – A new Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme was held at the Beaux-arts Gallery, Paris, with more than 60 artists from different countries, and showed around 300 paintings, objects, collages, photographs and installations. The Surrealists wanted to create an exhibition which in itself would be a creative act and called on Marcel Duchamp, Wolfgang Paalen, Man Ray and others to do so. At the exhibition's entrance Salvador Dalí placed his Rainy Taxi (an old taxi rigged to produce a steady drizzle of water down the inside of the windows, and a shark-headed creature in the driver's seat and a blond mannequin crawling with live snails in the back) greeted the patrons who were in full evening dress. Surrealist Street filled one side of the lobby with mannequins dressed by various Surrealists. Paalen and Duchamp designed the main hall to seem like cave with 1,200 coal bags suspended from the ceiling over a coal brazier with a single light bulb which provided the only lighting, as well as the floor covered with humid leaves and mud. The patrons were given flashlights with which to view the art. On the floor Wolfgang Paalen created a small lake with grasses and the aroma of roasting coffee filled the air. Much to the Surrealists' satisfaction the exhibition scandalized the viewers.

World War II and the Post War period

Yves Tanguy Indefinite Divisibility, 1942, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

World War II created havoc not only for the general population of Europe but especially for the European artists and writers that opposed Fascism and Nazism. Many important artists fled to North America and relative safety in the United States. The art community in New York City in particular was already grappling with Surrealist ideas and several artists like Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell converged closely with the surrealist artists themselves, albeit with some suspicion and reservations. Ideas concerning the unconscious and dream imagery were quickly embraced. By the Second World War, the taste of the American avant-garde in New York swung decisively towards Abstract Expressionism with the support of key taste makers, including Peggy Guggenheim, Leo Steinberg and Clement Greenberg. However, it should not be easily forgotten that Abstract Expressionism itself grew directly out of the meeting of American (particularly New York) artists with European Surrealists self-exiled during World War II. In particular, Gorky and Paalen influenced the development of this American art form, which, as Surrealism did, celebrated the instantaneous human act as the well-spring of creativity. The early work of many Abstract Expressionists reveals a tight bond between the more superficial aspects of both movements, and the emergence (at a later date) of aspects of Dadaistic humor in such artists as Rauschenberg sheds an even starker light upon the connection. Up until the emergence of Pop Art, Surrealism can be seen to have been the single most important influence on the sudden growth in American arts, and even in Pop, some of the humor manifested in Surrealism can be found, often turned to a cultural criticism.

The Second World War overshadowed, for a time, almost all intellectual and artistic production. In 1939 Wolfgang Paalen was the first to leave Paris for the New World as exile. After a long trip through the forests of British Columbia, he settled in Mexico and founded his influential art-magazine Dyn. In 1940 Yves Tanguy married American Surrealist painter Kay Sage. In 1941, Breton went to the United States, where he co-founded the short-lived magazine VVV with Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and the American artist David Hare. However, it was the American poet, Charles Henri Ford, and his magazine View which offered Breton a channel for promoting Surrealism in the United States. The View special issue on Duchamp was crucial for the public understanding of Surrealism in America. It stressed his connections to Surrealist methods, offered interpretations of his work by Breton, as well as Breton's view that Duchamp represented the bridge between early modern movements, such as Futurism and Cubism, to Surrealism. Wolfgang Paalen left the group in 1942 due to political/philosophical differences with Breton.

The Conspirators by Colin Middleton (1942), the Irish Surrealist's response to the Belfast Blitz

Though the war proved disruptive for Surrealism, the works continued. Many Surrealist artists continued to explore their vocabularies, including Magritte. Many members of the Surrealist movement continued to correspond and meet. While Dalí may have been excommunicated by Breton, he neither abandoned his themes from the 1930s, including references to the "persistence of time" in a later painting, nor did he become a depictive pompier. His classic period did not represent so sharp a break with the past as some descriptions of his work might portray, and some, such as André Thirion, argued that there were works of his after this period that continued to have some relevance for the movement. When the war reached Ireland with the Belfast Blitz in May 1941, Colin Middleton, who had experimented with surrealist themes in the 1930s, responded with a series of dark works reflecting the shocked state of the people of the city. These were exhibited at the Belfast Municipal Gallery and Museum after its restoration in 1943, following near destruction in the blitz.

During the 1940s Surrealism's influence was also felt in England, America and the Netherlands where Gertrude Pape and her husband Theo van Baaren helped to popularize it in their publication The Clean Handkerchief. Mark Rothko took an interest in biomorphic figures, and in England Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Paul Nash used or experimented with Surrealist techniques. However, Conroy Maddox, one of the first British Surrealists whose work in this genre dated from 1935, remained within the movement, and organized an exhibition of current Surrealist work in 1978 in response to an earlier show which infuriated him because it did not properly represent Surrealism. Maddox's exhibition, titled Surrealism Unlimited, was held in Paris and attracted international attention. He held his last one-man show in 2002, and died three years later. Magritte's work became more realistic in its depiction of actual objects, while maintaining the element of juxtaposition, such as in 1951's Personal Values (Les Valeurs Personnelles) and 1954's Empire of Light (L’Empire des lumières). Magritte continued to produce works which have entered artistic vocabulary, such as Castle in the Pyrenees (Le Château des Pyrénées), which refers back to Voix from 1931, in its suspension over a landscape.

Other figures from the Surrealist movement were expelled. Several of these artists, like Roberto Matta (by his own description) "remained close to Surrealism". Frida Kahlo should be mentioned. She had a New York solo exhibition in 1938 with 25 paintings, encouraged by Breton himself.

After the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Endre Rozsda returned to Paris to continue creating his own word that had been transcended the surrealism. The preface to his first exhibition in the Furstenberg Gallery (1957) was written by Breton yet.

Many new artists explicitly took up the Surrealist banner. Dorothea Tanning and Louise Bourgeois continued to work, for example, with Tanning's Rainy Day Canape from 1970. Duchamp continued to produce sculpture in secret including an installation with the realistic depiction of a woman viewable only through a peephole.

Breton continued to write and espouse the importance of liberating the human mind, as with the publication The Tower of Light in 1952. Breton's return to France after the War, began a new phase of Surrealist activity in Paris, and his critiques of rationalism and dualism found a new audience. Breton insisted that Surrealism was an ongoing revolt against the reduction of humanity to market relationships, religious gestures and misery and to espouse the importance of liberating the human mind.

Major exhibitions of the 1940s, '50s and '60s

  • 1942 – First Papers of Surrealism – New York – The Surrealists again called on Duchamp to design an exhibition. This time he wove a 3-dimensional web of string throughout the rooms of the space, in some cases making it almost impossible to see the works. He made a secret arrangement with an associate's son to bring his friends to the opening of the show, so that when the finely dressed patrons arrived, they found a dozen children in athletic clothes kicking and passing balls and skipping rope. His design for the show's catalog included "found", rather than posed, photographs of the artists.
  • 1947 – International Surrealist Exhibition – Galerie Maeght, Paris
  • 1959 – International Surrealist Exhibition – Paris
  • 1960 – Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters' Domain – New York

Post-Breton Surrealism

In the 1960s, the artists and writers associated with the Situationist International were closely associated with Surrealism. While Guy Debord was critical of and distanced himself from Surrealism, others, such as Asger Jorn, were explicitly using Surrealist techniques and methods. The events of May 1968 in France included a number of Surrealist ideas, and among the slogans the students spray-painted on the walls of the Sorbonne were familiar Surrealist ones. Joan Miró would commemorate this in a painting titled May 1968. There were also groups who associated with both currents and were more attached to Surrealism, such as the Revolutionary Surrealist Group.

During the 1980s, behind the Iron Curtain, Surrealism again entered into politics with an underground artistic opposition movement known as the Orange Alternative. The Orange Alternative was created in 1981 by Waldemar Fydrych (alias 'Major'), a graduate of history and art history at the University of Wrocław. They used Surrealist symbolism and terminology in their large-scale happenings organized in the major Polish cities during the Jaruzelski regime and painted Surrealist graffiti on spots covering up anti-regime slogans. Major himself was the author of a "Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism". In this manifesto, he stated that the socialist (communist) system had become so Surrealistic that it could be seen as an expression of art itself.

Surrealistic art also remains popular with museum patrons. The Guggenheim Museum in New York City held an exhibit, Two Private Eyes, in 1999, and in 2001 Tate Modern held an exhibition of Surrealist art that attracted over 170,000 visitors. In 2002 the Met in New York City held a show, Desire Unbound, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris a show called La Révolution surréaliste.

Surrealist groups and literary publications have continued to be active up to the present day, with groups such as the Chicago Surrealist Group, the Leeds Surrealist Group, and the Surrealist Group of Stockholm. Jan Švankmajer of the Czech-Slovak Surrealists continues to make films and experiment with objects. In Ireland, novelists and poets associated with Surrealism are Tony Bailie, Matthew Geden, Anatoly Kudryavitsky, Afric McGlinchey, Tim Murphy, Ciaran O'Driscoll, and John W. Sexton. The Dublin-based SurVision online magazine "currently the only international magazine devoted exclusively to surrealist poetry." Such contemporary avantgardist poets as Sergey Buryukov, Anna Glazova, Tatyana Graus, Dmitry Grigoriev, Anatoly Kudryavitsky, and others representative Surrealism in Russian literature.

Impact and influences

While Surrealism is typically associated with the arts, it has impacted many other fields. In this sense, Surrealism does not specifically refer only to self-identified "Surrealists", or those sanctioned by Breton, rather, it refers to a range of creative acts of revolt and efforts to liberate imagination. In addition to Surrealist theory being grounded in the ideas of Hegel, Marx and Freud, to its advocates its inherent dynamic is dialectical thought. Surrealist artists have also cited the alchemists, Dante, Hieronymus Bosch, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, Comte de Lautréamont and Arthur Rimbaud as influences.

May 68

Surrealists believe that non-Western cultures also provide a continued source of inspiration for Surrealist activity because some may induce a better balance between instrumental reason and imagination in flight than Western culture. Surrealism has had an identifiable impact on radical and revolutionary politics, both directly — as in some Surrealists joining or allying themselves with radical political groups, movements and parties — and indirectly — through the way in which Surrealists emphasize the intimate link between freeing imagination and the mind, and liberation from repressive and archaic social structures. This was especially visible in the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and the French revolt of May 1968, whose slogan "All power to the imagination" quoted by The Situationists and Enragés from the originally Marxist "Rêvé-lutionary" theory and praxis of Breton's French Surrealist group.

Postmodernism and popular culture

Many significant literary movements in the later half of the 20th century were directly or indirectly influenced by Surrealism. This period is known as the Postmodern era; though there is no widely agreed upon central definition of Postmodernism, many themes and techniques commonly identified as Postmodern are nearly identical to Surrealism.

First Papers of Surrealism presented the fathers of surrealism in an exhibition that represented the leading monumental step of the avant-gardes towards installation art. Many writers from and associated with the Beat Generation were influenced greatly by Surrealists. Philip Lamantia and Ted Joans are often categorized as both Beat and Surrealist writers. Many other Beat writers show significant evidence of Surrealist influence. A few examples include Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Artaud in particular was very influential to many of the Beats, but especially Ginsberg and Carl Solomon. Ginsberg cites Artaud's "Van Gogh – The Man Suicided by Society" as a direct influence on "Howl", along with Apollinaire's "Zone", García Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman", and Schwitters' "Priimiititiii". The structure of Breton's "Free Union" had a significant influence on Ginsberg's "Kaddish". In Paris, Ginsberg and Corso met their heroes Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Benjamin Péret, and to show their admiration Ginsberg kissed Duchamp's feet and Corso cut off Duchamp's tie.

William S. Burroughs, a core member of the Beat Generation and a postmodern novelist, developed the cut-up technique with former surrealist Brion Gysin—in which chance is used to dictate the composition of a text from words cut out of other sources—referring to it as the "Surrealist Lark" and recognizing its debt to the techniques of Tristan Tzara.

Postmodern novelist Thomas Pynchon, who was also influenced by Beat fiction, experimented since the 1960s with the surrealist idea of startling juxtapositions; commenting on the "necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill", he added that "any old combination of details will not do. Spike Jones Jr., whose father's orchestral recordings had a deep and indelible effect on me as a child, said once in an interview, 'One of the things that people don't realize about Dad's kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful.'"

Many other postmodern fiction writers have been directly influenced by Surrealism. Paul Auster, for example, has translated Surrealist poetry and said the Surrealists were "a real discovery" for him. Salman Rushdie, when called a Magical Realist, said he saw his work instead "allied to surrealism". David Lynch regarded as a surrealist filmmaker being quoted, "David Lynch has once again risen to the spotlight as a champion of surrealism," in regard to his show Twin Peaks. For the work of other postmodernists, such as Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover, a broad comparison to Surrealism is common.

Magic realism, a popular technique among novelists of the latter half of the 20th century especially among Latin American writers, has some obvious similarities to Surrealism with its juxtaposition of the normal and the dream-like, as in the work of Gabriel García Márquez. Carlos Fuentes was inspired by the revolutionary voice in Surrealist poetry and points to inspiration Breton and Artaud found in Fuentes' homeland, Mexico. Though Surrealism was a direct influence on Magic Realism in its early stages, many Magic Realist writers and critics, such as Amaryll Chanady and S. P. Ganguly, while acknowledging the similarities, cite the many differences obscured by the direct comparison of Magic Realism and Surrealism such as an interest in psychology and the artefacts of European culture they claim is not present in Magic Realism. A prominent example of a Magic Realist writer who points to Surrealism as an early influence is Alejo Carpentier who also later criticized Surrealism's delineation between real and unreal as not representing the true South American experience.

Surrealist groups

See also: Category:Surrealist groups

Surrealist individuals and groups have carried on with Surrealism after the death of André Breton in 1966. The original Paris Surrealist Group was disbanded by member Jean Schuster in 1969, but another Parisian surrealist group was later formed. The current Surrealist Group of Paris has recently published the first issue of their new journal, Alcheringa. The Group of Czech-Slovak Surrealists never disbanded, and continue to publish their journal Analogon, which now spans almost 100 volumes.

Surrealism and the theatre

Surrealist theatre and Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty" were inspirational to many within the group of playwrights that the critic Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd" (in his 1963 book of the same name). Though not an organized movement, Esslin grouped these playwrights together based on some similarities of theme and technique; Esslin argues that these similarities may be traced to an influence from the Surrealists. Eugène Ionesco in particular was fond of Surrealism, claiming at one point that Breton was one of the most important thinkers in history. Samuel Beckett was also fond of Surrealists, even translating much of the poetry into English. Other notable playwrights whom Esslin groups under the term, for example Arthur Adamov and Fernando Arrabal, were at some point members of the Surrealist group.

Alice Farley is an American-born artist who became active during the 1970s in San Francisco after training in dance at the California Institute of the Arts. Farley uses vivid and elaborate costuming that she describes as "the vehicles of transformation capable of making a character's thoughts visible". Often collaborating with musicians such as Henry Threadgill, Farley explores the role of improvisation in dance, bringing in an automatic aspect to the productions. Farley has performed in a number of surrealist collaborations including the World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago in 1976.

Alleged precursors in older art

Various much older artists are sometimes claimed as precursors of Surrealism. Foremost among these are Hieronymus Bosch, and Giuseppe Arcimboldo, whom Dalí called the "father of Surrealism." Apart from their followers, other artists who may be mentioned in this context include Joos de Momper, for some anthropomorphic landscapes. Many critics feel these works belong to fantastic art rather than having a significant connection with Surrealism.

See also

References

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  96. Dana Gioia. California poetry: from the Gold Rush to the present.Heyday Books, 2004.ISBN 1-890771-72-4, ISBN 978-1-890771-72-0. pg. 154.
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  113. Salman Rushdie, Michael Reder. Conversations with Salman Rushdie. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2000. ISBN 1-57806-185-7, ISBN 978-1-57806-185-3. pg. 111, 150
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  122. Emory Elliott, Cathy N. Davidson. The Columbia history of the American novel. Columbia University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-231-07360-7, ISBN 978-0-231-07360-8. pg. 524.
  123. Eugène Ionesco. Present past, past present: a personal memoir. Da Capo Press, 1998. ISBN 0-306-80835-8. pg. 148.
  124. Rosette C. Lamont. Ionesco's imperatives: the politics of culture. University of Michigan Press, 1993. ISBN 0-472-10310-5. pg. 41–42
  125. James Knowlson. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997. ISBN 0-7475-3169-2., pg. 65
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  127. Esslin (6 January 2004). The Theatre of the Absurd. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. p. 89. ISBN 9781400075232.
  128. Justin Wintle. Makers of modern culture. Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-415-26583-5. pg. 3
  129. C. D. Innes. Avant garde theatre, 1892–1992.Routledge, 1993. ISBN 0-415-06518-6. pg. 118.
  130. ^ Rosemont, Penelope (1998). Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. Austin, Texas: University of Texas. pp. 208, 292, 356–358, 383, 438, 439. ISBN 978-0-292-77088-1.
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Bibliography

André Breton
  • Manifestoes of Surrealism containing the first, second and introduction to a possible third manifesto, the novel The Soluble Fish, and political aspects of the Surrealist movement. ISBN 0-472-17900-4 .
  • What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings of André Breton. ISBN 0-87348-822-9 .
  • Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism (Gallimard 1952) (Paragon House English rev. ed. 1993). ISBN 1-56924-970-9.
  • The Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism, reprinted in:
    • Bonnet, Marguerite, ed. (1988). Oeuvres complètes, 1:328. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
Other sources
  • Ades, Dawn. Surrealism in Latin America: Vivisimo Muerto, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2012. ISBN 978-1-60606-117-6
  • Alexandrian, Sarane. Surrealist Art London: Thames & Hudson, 1970.
  • Apollinaire, Guillaume 1917, 1991. Program note for Parade, printed in Oeuvres en prose complètes, 2:865–866, Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin, eds. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
  • Allmer, Patricia (ed.) Intersections – Women Artists/Surrealism/Modernism, Rethinking Art's Histories series, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016.
  • Allmer, Patricia and Donna Roberts (eds) '"Wonderful Things" – Surrealism and Egypt', Dada/Surrealism, University of Iowa, 20:1, 2013.
  • Allmer, Patricia (ed.) Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism, London and Manchester: Prestel and Manchester Art Gallery, 2009.
  • Allmer, Patricia and Hilde van Gelder (eds.) Collective Inventions: Surrealism in Belgium, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007.
  • Allmer, Patricia and Hilde Van Gelder (eds.) 'The Forgotten Surrealists: Belgian Surrealism Since 1924', Image Narrative, no. 13, 2005.
  • Brotchie, Alastair and Gooding, Mel, eds. A Book of Surrealist Games Berkeley, California: Shambhala, 1995. ISBN 1-57062-084-9.
  • Caws, Mary Ann Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology 2001, MIT Press.
  • Chadwick, Whitney. Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation. The MIT Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0-262-53157-3
  • Chadwick, Whitney. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. 1985, Bulfinch Press. ISBN 978-0-8212-1599-9
  • Durozoi, Gerard, History of the Surrealist Movement Translated by Alison Anderson University of Chicago Press. 2004. ISBN 0-226-17411-5.
  • Flahutez, Fabrice, Nouveau Monde et Nouveau Mythe. Mutations du surréalisme de l'exil américain à l'écart absolu (1941–1965), Les presses du réel, Dijon, 2007.
  • Flahutez, Fabrice(ed.), Julia Drost (ed.), Anne Helmreich (ed.), Martin Schieder (ed.), Networking Surrealism in the United States. Artists, Agents and the Market, T.1., Paris, DFK, 2019, 400p. (ISBN 978-3-947449-50-7) (PDF) https://doi.org/10.11588/arthistoricum.485
  • Fort, Ilene Susan and Tere Arcq, editors. In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2012.
  • Galtsova, Elena. Surrealism and Theatre. On the Theatrical Aesthetics of the French Surrealism, Moscow, Russian State University for the Humanities, 2012, ISBN 978-5-7281-1146-7
  • David Hopkins (2004). Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280254-5.
  • Leddy, Annette and Conwell, Donna. Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico, Los Angeles: Getty Publications. 2012. ISBN 978-1-60606-118-3
  • Lewis, Helena. Dada Turns Red. Edinburgh, Scotland: University of Edinburgh Press, 1990.
  • Low Mary, Breá Juan, Red Spanish Notebook, City Light Books, Sans Francisco, 1979, ISBN 0-87286-132-5
  • Melly, George Paris and the Surrealists Thames & Hudson. 1991.
  • Moebius, Stephan. Die Zauberlehrlinge. Soziologiegeschichte des Collège de Sociologie. Konstanz: UVK 2006. About the College of Sociology, its members and sociological impacts.
  • Nadeau, Maurice. History of Surrealism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1989. ISBN 0-674-40345-2.
  • Polizzotti, Mark. Why Surrealism Matters. Yale University Press, 2024. Review: Saler, Michael, "'Why Surrealism Matters' Review: Utopia of the Imagination", The Wall Street Journal, February 23, 2024.
  • Richard Jean-Tristan. Les structures inconscientes du signe pictural/Psychanalyse et surréalisme (Unconscious structures of pictural sign), L'Harmattan ed., Paris (France), 1999
  • Review "Mélusine" in French by Center of surrealism studies directed by Henri Behar since 1979, edited by Editions l'Age d'Homme, Lausanne, Suisse. Download platform www.artelittera.com 14.00
  • Sams, Jeremy (1997) . "Poulenc, Francis". In Amanda Holden (ed.). The Penguin Opera Guide. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-051385-1.
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