Out of Dada's playful revolt came a movement with a program. In 1924 the French poet André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto. Inspired by the psychologist Sigmund Freud's ideas about dreams and the unconscious mind, Breton defined Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism": expressing thought free from reason, taste and morality. The aim was to join dream and reality into a "super-reality," a surréalité.
Surrealist artists worked in two main ways. Some used automatism: drawing or painting without planning, letting the hand move freely, then developing what appeared; Joan Miró and André Masson worked this way. Others painted dream images with sharp, precise realism, so that impossible things look real: Salvador Dalí and René Magritte.
Key idea
Looking closely (in words): The Persistence of Memory
Salvador Dalí (1904 to 1989) painted The Persistence of Memory in 1931; it is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and is still in copyright. Describe. It is small, about 24 by 33 centimeters (9.5 by 13 inches). On a barren shore under a clear sky, three pocket watches hang limp and soft: one draped over a branch of a dead tree, one over the edge of a table, one over a strange, pale, sleeping form on the ground. A fourth watch, closed and orange, is covered with ants. Golden cliffs of the Catalan coast rise in the distance. Analyze. Everything is painted with tiny, smooth brushstrokes and sharp detail, like an old master, so the impossible soft watches look real. Long shadows and empty space give a dreamlike stillness. Interpret. Hard, mechanical time melts in the world of dreams and memory. Dalí said the idea came to him while looking at a soft Camembert cheese melting in the sun.
Common mistake
René Magritte (1898 to 1967), a Belgian, painted puzzles about images and words. In The Treachery of Images (1929, Los Angeles County Museum of Art) a carefully painted pipe floats above the words Ceci n'est pas une pipe, "This is not a pipe." He was right: it is a painting of a pipe, not a pipe. The Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim made Object (1936), a cup, saucer and spoon covered in fur, turning a familiar thing into something unsettling.
Why it works
Worked example: Surrealist or just strange?
- It is odd and funny.
- But it was not made from the Surrealist program of freeing the unconscious or painting dreams.
- Strangeness alone does not make a work part of the movement.
Answer: No: odd, but not Surrealist in the art-history sense.