Surrealism was born in Paris in the early 1920s, as an extension of Dada. André Breton published its manifesto in 1924 and defined it as a way of expressing thought freed from the control of reason. Inspired by Freud, poets and painters explored dreams, desire and the unconscious.
Two approaches coexisted. Automatism gave free rein to spontaneous gesture and chance, through techniques such as grattage and decalcomania. Other artists, by contrast, adopted a meticulous technique to paint impossible scenes made of displaced obj... Voir plus >
Surrealism was born in Paris in the early 1920s, as an extension of Dada. André Breton published its manifesto in 1924 and defined it as a way of expressing thought freed from the control of reason. Inspired by Freud, poets and painters explored dreams, desire and the unconscious.
Two approaches coexisted. Automatism gave free rein to spontaneous gesture and chance, through techniques such as grattage and decalcomania. Other artists, by contrast, adopted a meticulous technique to paint impossible scenes made of displaced objects and unexpected juxtapositions.
They recognised forerunners in Giorgio de Chirico, in the imagination of Symbolism and in the dreamlike jungles of Henri Rousseau.
In 1931 Salvador Dalí painted the melting watches of ‘The Persistence of Memory’, René Magritte paired a pipe with the inscription ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’, Max Ernst invented frottage and Joan Miró filled his canvases with signs and organic forms. Paul Klee took part in the first exhibition of Surrealist painting in 1925 without joining the group, and Frida Kahlo, whom Breton linked to the movement, rejected the label, saying that she painted her own reality.
Having become international in the 1930s, Surrealism crossed the Atlantic during the war with the exile of Breton, Ernst and Masson. Their taste for automatism influenced the New York painters and paved the way for a form of abstract art based on gesture.
Voir moins