(serē´elĬzem) , 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
André
Breton , with his Manifeste du surréalisme,
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
Éluard , 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
Dalí and Yves
Tanguy used dreamlike perception of space and
dream-inspired symbols such as melting watches and huge
metronomes. Max
Ernst and René
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
Miró and André
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). |
Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth
Edition, Copyright (c) 2005. from
http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/s1/surreali.asp
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