SURREALISM · Surrealism Art Techniques Surrealism make use of several techniques to create the effect and provide inspiration. ! Collage – assembling different elements to create

SURREALISM A twentieth-century literary, philosophical and artistic movement that explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the poetic and the revolutionary.

Surrealism aimed to revolutionise human experience, rejecting a rational vision of life in favour of one that asserted the value of the unconscious and dreams. The movement’s poets and artists found magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional.

The word ‘surrealist’ (suggesting ‘beyond reality’) was coined by the French avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire in a play written in 1903 and performed in 1917. But it was André Breton, leader of a new grouping of poets and artists in Paris, who, in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), defined surrealism as:

pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any 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.

Many surrealist artists used automatic drawing or writing to unlock ideas and images from their unconscious minds, and others sought to depict dream worlds or hidden psychological tensions.

Attractive to writers, artists, photographers and filmmakers from around the world who shared this aggressive rejection of conventional artistic and moral values, surrealism quickly became an international movement. It exerted enormous impact on the cultural life of many countries in the interwar years and later.

Why Does Surrealism Matter? Surrealism represents a crucible of avant-garde ideas and techniques that contemporary artists are still using today, including the introduction of chance elements into works of art. These methods opened up a new mode of painterly practice pursued by the Abstract Expressionists. The element of chance has also proven integral to performance art, as in the unscripted Happenings of the 1950s, and even to computer art

based on randomization. The Surrealist focus on dreams, psychoanalysis, and fantastic imagery has provided fodder for a number of artists working today, such as Glenn Brown, who has also directly appropriated Dalí’s art in his own painting.

Surrealism’s desire to break free of reason led it to question the most basic foundation of artistic production: the idea that art is the product of a single artist’s creative imagination. As an antidote to this, Breton promoted the cadavre exquis, or “exquisite corpse,” as a technique for collectively creating art, one that is still played as a game widely today. It involves starting a sentence, sketch, or collage, and then giving it to another person to continue—without letting that person see what has already been written, drawn, or placed. The term derived from a simple game of creating collective prose that resulted in the sentence, “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.” Given the method’s embrace of chance and tendency to produce humorous, absurd, or unsettling images, it soon became a viable technique for creating exactly the type of unconscious, collective work that the Surrealists sought. Exquisite Corpse 27 (ca. 2011), a work completed by Ghada Amer, Will Cotton, and Carry Leibowitz, is a contemporary example of the sort of stylistically and thematically disconnected work that can arise from this Surrealist method. The historian and music critic Greil Marcus has gone so far as to characterize Surrealism as one chapter in a series of revolutionary attempts to liberate thought that stretches from the blasphemies of medieval heretics up to the 1960s and beyond. In this light, Surrealism can be understood as the progenitor of the later, Marx-inspired art movement Situationism, 1960s countercultural protests, and even punk: a project of breaking down the rational order that society imposes on individuals.

Surrealism Art Techniques Surrealism make use of several techniques to create the effect and provide inspiration.

§ Collage – assembling different elements to create a whole (e.g. The Hat Makes the Man by Max Ernst)

§ Cubomania – form of collage wherein an image is cut into squares and reassembled randomly. This technique was invented by Romanian Surrealist artist Gherasim Luca.

§ Decalcomania – spreading thick paint on a canvas, and while still wet, covering it with paper or foil. This is removed again, while still wet, and the result of the pattern becomes the base of the finished painting.

§ Eclaboussure – the process of placing paints down and the water or turpentine is splattered. The painting is then soaked entirely, revealing random splats and dots once the media is removed.

§ Frottage – method of using the pencil rubbings over to a texture surface.

§ Fumage – art technique which made use of impressions by smoke of a candle or lamp onto the blank canvas. Also called sfumato.

§ Grattage – the process of scraping paint off the canvas to reveal the imprint placed beneath.

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Sources: https://1stwebdesigner.com/modern-surrealism/ https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-what-is-surrealism http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/surrealism