Surrealism

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Surrealism

Surrealism as World War I came to an end; the Dada movement evolved into a new movement called Surrealism. This medium of art created a palette of purity and hope though automatism and use of dreams. The Surrealists strove for simplicity and spontaneity or as some called it, automatism. They wanted to answer the question "how shall I be free?" and to express thought without any tainted preconceptions. They believed automatism "would reveal the true and individual nature of anyone who practiced it, far more completely than could any of his conscious creations.
This free style of expression, first used in literary circles headed by Andre Breton and then by painters like Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali and René Magritte, upheld the Dadaist rejection of traditional forms of art. However, by portraying a field of unconscious thought and thereby, following an uncontaminated reality, the surrealists avoided the horrors of premeditated warfare and political, social and economic lies and injustices. Surrealist theorists found Surrealism to be a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the heights and the depths, cease to be perceived a contradiction. In vain one would seek any other motive for Surrealist activity than determining this point.
Surrealism found a place where contradictory thoughts might not serve as dichotomies. Free of a socially constructed point of view or "raison", a writer or artist travels to a place of thinking that is both irrational and rational at the same time. Through the unconscious or a highly sensitized state of mind, the surrealist brought forth a new manner of seeing and feeling the world as it was understood and negotiated by Western peoples. In its development, Surrealism celebrated the art of children, mad people and primitive art.
The Surrealists believed in the innocent eye. They foun...