Surrealism

Surrealism, an art form developed mainly in the 20^th century, was created from an already well practiced form of Dadaism, or, anti-art. It was created as a form of connecting the dream, imaginary world with the real, everyday world. “Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in ‘an absolute reality, a surreality’” ( surrealist.com).

Surrealism began as a written religious movement with a leader similar to a pope that had the power to “excommunicate” members from the ranks of surrealists. The poet Andre Breton became the leader of the surrealistic groups. One of his first tasks was defining the indefinable, putting the boundaries on surrealism. In his “Manifeste du surrealism” he says “[Surrealism is] Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought” (Harden).

Surrealism did not begin to be recognized as an actual art form until after the invention of “Frottage”. Frottage, or taking paper situated on wood and rubbing it with dark lead, produced random designs from which artists imagined, visualized, and created art pieces which could be widely interpreted. Other methods of creating random, mentally stimulating art included grattage, a method of scraping watercolors from one page to another creating water-like themes, and fumage, a technique using smoke from a candle to create random patterns on paper (Harden).

Surrealistic artists include Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, and, more recently, M.C. Escher