SURREALISM WHEN: 1924 to 1945 WHAT: As defined by the leader, Andre Breton: pure psychic automatism by which is intended to express…the true function of.

SURREALISMWHEN: 1924 to 1945

WHAT:As defined by the leader, Andre Breton:“pure psychic automatism by which is intended to express…the true function of thought…Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association… in the *omnipotence of the dream.”

AIM:To use art as a means of revealing the hidden world of the unconscious.

*omnipotence: The possession of complete, unlimited, or universal power and authority

Surrealism:

- Officially *inaugurated in 1924 by French critic & poet, Andre Breton (1896 -- 1966) with the publication of his 1st Surrealist Manifesto.

- An appeal for the freeing of the imaginative life from arbitrary limitations imposed upon it by reason & social order.

- For Breton, the imaginative life embraced the total psychic experience of the unconscious as revealed by Freud. He felt that such could be achieved by techniques of automatic writing.

- Became an international art movement in the 1930s.

* inaugurated: a formal ceremony to open or mark the beginning of something

Definition of Surrealism according to Breton:

‘SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which we propose to express, verbally, in writing,

or by any other means, the real process of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of any

control exercised by reason and outside any aesthetic or moral *preoccupations.’

Dream vs reality

*preoccupations: constant thought about or persistent interest in something

Intention of the Surrealists:

- To discover & explore the world of psychic experience as revealed by psychoanalytic research, especially that of Freud.

- To bring together into a single composition aspects of outer & inner ‘reality’, in much the same way that seemingly unrelated fragments of life combine in the vivid world of dreams.

- Projection in visible form of this new conception required new techniques of pictorial construction.

- A new interest in subject matter, where what is portrayed may not be logically symbolic/ meaningful is the most important contribution of Surrealists to modern painting.

Influences on Surrealism:

- Hallucinatory writings of 19th century poets, stemming from Symbolist fascination with the occult.

- Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis.His research into the significance of dreams & power of the unconscious mind. Stressed the value of memories and experiences buried in the unconscious, and the importance of dreams and free association as ways of reaching them.

- Ideas of the Dadaists where they acknowledged the supremacy of irrational association and imaginative insight. An anti-art movement that privileged ‘nonsense’.

- Metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.

Song of Love, 1914

Oil on canvas, 73 x 59.1 cm

- Italian painter

- Produced his first ‘enigma’ pictures in 1910. Known for paintings of figures dreaming in deserted city squares where mood of intense and mysterious melancholy prevailed.

Founded Metaphysical Painting that aims to:

Present an alternative reality that could communicate with the ‘unconscious’ by dislocating objects from the real world and presenting them in incongruous/absurd relationships that seemed to defy logic.

Giorgio de Chirico1888 - 1978

Disquieting Muses, 1918Oil on canvas, 97.16 cm x 66 cm

Presence of intense, vibrant colours and hallucinatory forms set in a weird and silent landscape.

Nostalgia of the Infinite, 1913

Oil on canvas, 135.2 cm x 64.8 cm

Techniques/Strategies

- Automatic drawingBy freeing artists from the normal association of pictorial ideas, they sought to create according to the irrational dictates of the subconscious mind and vision.

- DecalcomaniaMethod where watercolour paints were pressed between two sheets of paper.

-FrottageTextural rubbings, method used extensively by Max Ernst.

- CoulagePouring instead of brushing paints on canvas.

- Exquisite corpse (Concealed drawing)

SURREALISM

2 branches

Organic SurrealismSuper-Realism(Surrealism)

* Pursued Automatism -- dictation of thought without control of the mind (free association)

* Invented unorthodox spontaneous techniques as a means to eliminate conscious control and to express the workings of the unconscious mind.

* Results: Close to abstraction, although some degree of imagery is normally present.

* Representatives:- Joan Miro, Andre Masson & Matta

* Interest in dreams.

* Present in meticulous detail, recognizable scenes and objects, that are taken out of natural context, distorted and combined in fantastic ways.

* Results: Figurative, precise delineation of bizarre, dislocated imagery.

* Representatives:- Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Rene Magritte

SURREALISM

Realistic Representation

Rene Magritte

To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have

seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.

~ Rene Magritte

Enduring Understanding

Students will understand ……why artists use realistic representations as a means to express their ideas and concepts.

Overarching 1) What is reality?2) How can artworks be a reflection of life?

Topical1) What is the subconscious?

2) How might our everyday lives influence the subconscious?

3) What is a paradox?

4) How does a paradox in a painting lead us to think about reality?

Essential Questions

5W1H

HowPaintings

WhyExpose psychological truth

WhatEveryday objects in unusual contextsSymbolic person/s related to his past

WhichSurrealism

WhereBelgium/France

When1898 - 1967

Rene Magritte

RENE MAGRITTE1898 -- 1967

• Belgian painter, one of the leading Surrealists.

• Blunt, matter-of-fact quality of his technique emphasised the *hallucinatory nature of his imagery, which relied on *incongruous juxtapositions of various kinds.

• Certain imageries like the figure in bowler hat, faces wrapped in cloth etc were often repeated in his paintings.

Early Influences:

• Began as a commercial artist designing wall paper and fashion ads, was able to use his mastery of realism to defy logic in his Surrealist work.

1925: Influenced by de Chirico & Max Ernst.

1926: Painted his first Surrealist works (E.g. The Menaced Assassin)

WHO

*hallucinatory: relating to or involving the belief that something is being seen, heard when it is not there *incongruous: unsuitable, strange, or out of place in a particular setting or context.

The Difficult Crossing1926, Oil on canvas, 80 x 65 cm

One of Magritte’s earlier paintings where Chirico’s influence can be seen. Interior of a room presenting a strange setting: billowing curtain hang from middle of room, planks of wood leaning against the walls.

Storm in the background could be either a painting or a real scene outside the window -- a confusion of the boundaries between inner and outer space typical of Magritte’s future works.

Bird in the grasp of the plaster hand, the table leg changing into a human leg and column with an eye are examples of strange juxtapositions which will see more refinement in his subsequent works.

Keywords/phrases

• Surrealism

• Paradox/ Juxtaposition

• Absurd relationships

• Ambiguous/ Mysterious

• Tap on the subconscious

Key Dates1898: Born in Belgium

1912: Death of his mother (committed suicide by drowning)

1916 – 18: Studied in Royal Academy of Arts in Brussels & became wallpaper designer and commercial artist

1919: Became interested in Futurism

1922: Marries Georgette Berger. Wife was a model in many of his paintings

1926: First Surrealist works. Magritte played an important role in the foundation of the primarily literary Belgian Surrealist group.

mid-1920s: Magritte created standardised human types, favouring especially the man in the bowler hat.

Key Dates1927: Went to live in France for 3 years and participated

in the French Surrealists activities. Did his first one-man show which marked his emergence as a Surrealist artist.

1943: Making use of a parody of Impressionism with lightercolours, while maintaining the Surrealist character of the imagery.

1956: Made a number of brief and often comical Surrealist films.

1967: Died of cancer

When

• The social and historical context which affects the artist and his

works

When1870s: Industrialisation of France beginning of technology such as electricity and airplanes.

1914: World War I World War I scattered the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and while away from Paris many involved themselves in the Dada movement.

1917: Dada MovementDadaists believed that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought the terrifying conflict upon the world

1939: World War I- Created havoc and disrupted almost all intellectual and artistic production- Many important artists fled to North America, and relative safety in the United States.

Where

• Belgium

• France

Where

Belgium (Hainaut)• He was born in the province of Hainaut• The grayness in Hainaut is prominent in

Magritte’s paintings which also contributes to their air of mystery– Hainaut was nicknamed Black Country due

to the pollution from heavy industries that constantly covered the area in black soot

Where

France• Breton joined in the Dada activities and also started

the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault.

• They began experimenting with automatic writing spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts and published the "automatic" writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in Littérature.

• 1924: The first Surrealist Manifesto was established.• 1927: Magritte moved to Paris.

Which

• Surrealism

Surrealism• 1917: The word ‘surrealist’ first appeared. Originally

started by poets and writers in France.

• noun, pure psychic automatism, intended to express the true function of thought. Absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations (Waldberg, Surrealism, 1997).

• Free flow of associations: Alluding to the imaginary, to dreams, to the unconscious and to chance.

Which

What

Subject matter

Themes• Exposing psychological truth

• Images of subconscious/paradoxes

What

Rene Magritte’s Subject Matters• Ordinary mundane objects

– apple, cloud/sky, bird, etc.• Bowler-hatted figures

– alter-egos for his middle-class persona– symbolic of the everyday gentleman in Europe

in the early 1900s

The Large Family, 1963 Rene MagritteOil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm

Golconde by René Magritte, 1953Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm

What• Picture in a Picture

– A painting of reality on an easel/window placed strategically in front of a scene/real world

– Blur the boundary between painting and reality – A pun on Renaissance paintings which are

supposedly ‘windows’ opening on to reality• Veiled/averted faces

– Depict the detachment between people and the world or among people themselves

The Human Condition, 1933

Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm

Magritte had this to say of his 1933 work:

“In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape.”

The Human Condition,1935

Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm

The Lovers by René Magritte, 1928. Oil on canvas, 54 x 73.4 cm

The Lovers by René Magritte, 1928. Oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm

The son of man, 1964Oil on canvas.

ThemesExposing psychological truth Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance.

To create a compelling images that was beyond ordinary formal organisation, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.

What

The False Mirror by René Magritte 1928. Oil on canvas, 54 x 80.9 cm

What

Images of subconscious/paradoxes

• Magritte’s work often shows a *juxtaposition of ordinary/mundane objects in an unusual context - giving new meanings to familiar things.

Rendering objects in establishing a connection between the conscious and the subconscious world.

Paradox: The representational use of objects as something other than what they seem, is illustrated in his painting, The Treachery of Images.

*juxtaposition: means placing things side-by-side. In art this usually is done with the intention of bringing out a specific quality or creating an effect, particularly when two contrasting or opposing elements are used. The viewer's attention is drawn to the similarities or differences between the elements.

The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) by René Magritte, 1928-29Oil on canvas, 63.5 cm x 93.98 cmLos Angeles County Museum of Art

Voice of Space (La Voix des airs) by Rene Magritte, 1931,

Oil on canvas, 72.7 x 54.2 cm

Influenced by Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte sought to strip objects of their usual functions and meanings in order to convey an irrationally compelling image. In Voice of Space (of which three other oil versions exist), the bells float in the air; elsewhere they occupy human bodies or replace blossoms on bushes. By distorting the scale, weight, and use of an ordinary object and inserting it into a variety of unaccustomed contexts, Magritte confers on that object a fetishistic intensity. He has written of the jingle bell, a motif that recurs often in his work: “I caused the iron bells hanging from the necks of our admirable horses to sprout like dangerous plants at the edge of an abyss.”

The disturbing impact of the bells presented in an unfamiliar setting is intensified by the cool academic precision with which they and their environment are painted. The dainty slice of landscape could be the backdrop of an early Renaissance painting, while the bells themselves, in their rotund and glowing monumentality, impart a mysterious resonance.

What

• Magritte's work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. It does not "satisfy emotionally. ”When Magritte once was asked about this image, he replied that of course it was not a pipe, just try to fill it with tobacco.

The Listening Room, 1952 by René MagritteOil on canvas, 45 x 54.7 cm

What

• Magritte used the same approach in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an internal caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. In these "Ceci n'est pas" works, Magritte points out that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself.

Personal Values by René Magritte, 1952

Oil on canvas, 80.01 cm x 100.01 cm

Empire of Light by

René Magritte,

1953-54, Oil on canvas,

195.4 x 131.2 cm

In Empire of Light, a dark, nocturnal street scene is set against a pastel-blue, light-

drenched sky spotted with fluffy cumulus clouds. With no fantastic element other than

the single paradoxical combination of day and night, René Magritte upsets a

fundamental organizing premise of life. Sunlight, ordinarily the source of clarity, here

causes the confusion and unease traditionally associated with darkness. The

luminosity of the sky becomes unsettling, making the empty darkness below even

more impenetrable than it would seem in a normal context. The bizarre subject is

treated in an impersonal, precise style, typical of *veristic Surrealist painting and

preferred by Magritte since the mid-1920s.

*veristic: almost real, truth

Empire of Light II, by René Magritte, 1950Oil on canvas, 78.8 cm x 91.1 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Carte Blanche, 1965Oil on canvas.

“Visible things can be invisible. If somebody rides a horse through a wood, at first one sees them and then not, yet no one knows that they are there. In Carte Blanche, the rider is hiding the trees, and the trees are hiding her. However, the powers of thought grasp both the visible and the invisible - and I make use of the painting to render visible thoughts.”

- Rene Magritte

The Door to Freedom by René Magritte, 1936Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm

Why

• Artist Intention/Philosophy

• Influences

His philosophy• “Art is not the thing it depicts, but merely its image”

His Intention To abolish our perception of the familiar To subvert our habits To make us question the nature of accepted reality Painting was not meant to express ideas or emotion but should question the

visible world

• To confront the tension between the mere representation of objects and art making a statement independent of any object

• Magritte defined the meaning of Surrealism: The term surrealism gives rise to confusion, and the term Realism is not suitable for the direct apprehension of reality. Surrealism is the direct knowledge of reality: reality is absolute, and unrelated to the various ways of interpreting it.

Why

Why

Influences

Theory of dreams• Dreams act as the guardian of sleep• Protect sleeper from reacting to external and

internal stimuli• Hence dreams are disguised with symbols• Stressed importance of memories buried in

the unconscious and dreams

Why

Influences- André Breton• Refer to the Manifesto of Surrealism

How

Techniques/Medium

How

• Realistic representation– Oil on canvas

• Veristic– to depict meticulously a world analogous to

the dream world – to create a connection between abstract

and real material forms – transform objects from the real world in

their paintings

How

Techniques• De-contextualize ordinary objects to take on

different roles• Merge two objects together in transformation• Scale of objects are dramatically enlarged or

reduced• Create incongruence through bizarre images • Replacing parts of objects with other

unrelated objects

How?- Render mundane subject-matter in startlingly imaginative juxtapositions, dislocating space, time and the viewer's mental balance.

- Painted in a scrupulously precise technique where subject matters are rendered realistically. Yet despite the use of realism, he presented viewers with problems of paradox, questioning the nature of our perception.

Time Transfixed, 1939Oil on canvas, 146 x 97 cm

How- Magritte believed that a viewer could be released from the banality of her perceived reality by viewing that reality in a disrupted context.

- His works evoke a sense of mystery without providing any plausible resolution.

- The works resist superficial interpretation and in one’s failed attempt to ‘master the work’ (solve the mystery/know the ‘unknowable’), one is taken out of his/her comfort zone and feels displaced.

The Red Model, 1934Oil on canvas, 183 x 136 cm

Intentions of his works:- Magritte undertook an analysis of reality but unlike the other Surrealist artists of his time, he was not interested in exploring the unconscious. Rather, he aimed to achieve the ‘uncanny’ through revealing strangeness in the familiar.

- Analysis of pictorial language, the relationship between various juxtaposed man-made and natural objects, and also between words and images.

Empire of LightEmpire of Light, 1953-1954, , 1953-1954, Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas, 195.4 x 131.2 cmPeggy Guggenheim CollectionPeggy Guggenheim Collection

Treason of images (This is not a pipe), 1929

On a oil painting, wrote in large letters “this is not a pipe”, which, of course, it isn’t. It is a picture of a pipe, but as a picture, an image, its reality is different from a pipe’s.

The False Mirror, 1928

The world we know is perceived through our eyes and the sense of

sight is one often deemed most important. The title, however,

suggests that the physical appearance of things could be an

illusion, presenting a false perception of reality.

The Human Condition1934, Oil on canvas

100 x 81 cm

What are some ideas Magritte wanted to present in this painting?

- Painting within a painting- Questioning the external reality, is the painting before us, any more real than what is outside the window which is also a mere image?

Personal values, 1952

• Supposedly an interior of a room

with furnishings but with clouds in the

background, again suggesting ambiguity.

• Reflection reveals a window out of which seems to be a plain

coloured wall.•

• Common objects, e.g. comb, brush and

glass, are enlarged beyond their normal

scale.

References

• Bolton, L. ( 2003) Artists in Profile- Surrealism. Heinemann: UK.

• Preview Guide for Parents and Teachers to Childsplay’s Production of ‘This is Not a Pipe Dream’, by Barry Kornhauser

• Putting God in a Frame: The Art of Rene Magritte as Religious Encounter

• Paquet, Marcel (2006) Magritte. Taschen: US

• Eyecon Art http://www.eyeconart.net/history/surrealism.htm

• Guggenheim Museum - http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/piece/?search=René%20Magritte&page=1&f=People&cr=1

• http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/interactive_features/53