Surrealism
that explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational,
"Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an
inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect
our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life.
-G.de Chirico
"The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand
my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no
meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex,
coherent, and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of
logical intuition.“
-Salvador Dali
Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either
verbally, in writing, or by the 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.
-Andre Breton
A twentieth-century literary, philosophical and artistic movement
the poetic and the revolutionary. The movement is partially in
reaction to the horrors of world war I.
Surrealism literally means “above and beyond reality”
Surrealism grew put of the dada movement, which aimed to
revolutionise human experience, rejecting a rational vision of life.
The movement’s poets and artists found magic and strange beauty
in the unexpected, the disregarded and the unconventional.
Initially, the surrealists wanted to discover a new reality by mixing
dreams with imagination to create strange and unusual works of
art that allowed individual artists to express new emotions that
would make us think.
Characteristic
- Dreams and subconcious
- Impossible scale
- Reversal of natural laws
- Double image
Two types of Surrealist

The first type of surrealists created artworks that were dine

automatically, without thought and were meant to show the
workings of the subconscious mind. This idea was adopted
by many surrealists such as Joan Miro and Andre Masson,
who painted whatever came into their heads, tried to
achieve this in their work through abstraction and without
reference to objects, people, place or things.

The second type, which included artists such as Salvador Dali

and Rene Magritte, they used very familiar everyday objects
painted in a formal, realistic style and juxtapositions them in
unexpected places that were impossible, the way thing may
occur in dream.
Salvador Dalí was born on May
11, 1904, in Figueres, Spain.
From an early age Dalí was
encouraged to practice his art,
and he would eventually go on
to study at an academy in
Madrid. In the 1920s, he went
to Paris and began interacting
with artists such
as Picasso, Magritte and Miro,
which led to Dalí's first Surrealist
phase. He is perhaps best
known for his 1931 painting The
Persistence of Memory, showing
melting clocks in a landscape
setting. The rise of fascist leader
Francisco Franco in Spain led to
the artist's expulsion from the
Surrealist movement, but that
didn't stop him from painting.
Mae West's Face which May be Used as a Surrealist Apartment, 1934-1935 Venus de Milo with Drawers, 1936
Inventions of the
Monsters, 1937
The persistence of memory, 1931
Swans reflecting
elephant
Clouds, pipes, bowler hats, and
green apples: these remain some
of the most immediately
recognizable icons of René
Magritte, the Belgian painter and
well-known surrealist. He
produced a body of work that
rendered such commonplace
things strange, slotting them into
unfamiliar or uncanny scenes, or
deliberately mislabeling them in
order to “make the most
everyday objects shriek
1
aloud.” With his pictorial and
linguistic puzzles, Magritte made
the familiar disturbing and
strange, posing questions about
the nature of representation and
reality.
The son of man, 1946 The portrait, 1935
The lovers, 1928
The false mirror,1929
Golconda (1953)