![[ Home page English Spiritual surealism Fine Art Works Gallery of Spiritualist Canadian Artist Diane Tremblay From fantasy-symbolism to spiritualism-surrealism ]](surrealism_files/diane2.jpg)
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Surrealism defenition: literary and art movement influenced by
Freudianism and dedicated to the expression of imagination as revealed
in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and free of
convention. The movement was founded (1924) in Paris by Andre' Breton ,
with his Manifeste du surre'alisme, but its ancestry is traced to the
French poets Baudelaire , Rimbaud , Apollinaire , and to the Italian
painter, Giorgio de Chirico . Many of its adherents had belonged to the
Dada movement. In literature, surrealism was confined almost
exclusively to France. Surrealist writers were interested in the
associations and implications of words rather than their literal
meanings; their works are thus extraordinarily difficult to read. Among
the leading surrealist writers were Louis Aragon , Paul E'luard ,
Robert Desnos , and Jean Cocteau , the last noted particularly for his
surreal films. In art the movement became dominant in the 1920s and 30s
and was internationally practiced with many and varied forms of
expression. Salvador Dali and Yves Tanguy used dreamlike perception of space and dream-inspired symbols such as melting watches and huge metronomes. Max Ernst and Rene Magritte
constructed fantastic imagery from startling combinations of
incongruous elements of reality painted with photographic attention to
detail. These artists have been labeled as verists because their
paintings involve transformations of the real world. “Absolute”
surrealism depends upon images derived from psychic automatism, the
subconscious, or spontaneous thought. Works by Joan Miro and Andre' Masson are in this vein. The movement survived but was greatly diminished after World War II. Bibliography: See A. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (tr. 1969); L. Lippard, ed., Surrealists on Art (1970); R. Brandon, Surreal Lives (1999); studies by P. Waldberg (1966), W. S. Rubin (1969), S. Alexandrian (1970), H. S. Gershman (1969, repr. 1974), J. H. Matthews (1977), E. B. Henning (1979), A. Balakian (1987), H. Lewis (1988), and M. Nadeau (tr. 1967, repr. 1989). |