SURREALISM

1. 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 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. Giorgio de Chirico 1888 - 1978 • - 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. Song of Love, 1914 Oil on canvas, 73 x 59.1 cm

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

8. SURREALISM • Techniques/Strategies • - Automatic drawing • By freeing artists from the normal association of pictorial ideas, they sought to create according to the irrational dictates of the subconscious mind and vision. • - Decalcomania • Method where watercolour paints were pressed between two sheets of paper. • Frottage • Textural rubbings, method used extensively by Max Ernst. • - Coulage • Pouring instead of brushing paints on canvas. • - Exquisite corpse (Concealed drawing)

9. SURREALISM 2 branches Super-Realism (Surrealism) Organic 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

10. Realistic Representation Rene Magritte

11. 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

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

13. Essential Questions Overarching 1) What is reality? 2) How can artworks be a reflection of life? Topical 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?

14. 5W1H

15. RENE MAGRITTE 1898 -- 1967 WHO • 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) *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.

16. 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. The Difficult Crossing 1926, Oil on canvas, 80 x 65 cm

17. Keywords/phrases • Surrealism • Paradox/ Juxtaposition • Absurd relationships • Ambiguous/ Mysterious • Tap on the subconscious

19. Key Dates 1898: 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.

20. Key Dates 1927: 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 lighter colours, while maintaining the Surrealist character of the imagery. 1956: Made a number of brief and often comical Surrealist films. 1967: Died of cancer

21. When The social and historical context which affects the artist and his works

22. When 1870s: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 Movement Dadaists 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.

23. Where Belgium France

24. 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

25. 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 writingspontaneously 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.

26. Which Surrealism

27. Which 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.

28. What Subject matter Themes Exposing psychological truth Images of subconscious/paradoxes

29. 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

30. The Large Family, 1963 Rene Magritte Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm

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

32. 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

33. 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, 1933 Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm

34. The Human Condition,1935 Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm

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

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

37. The son of man, 1964 Oil on canvas.

38. What Themes Exposing 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.

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

40. 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.

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

42. 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. Voice of Space (La Voix des airs) by Rene Magritte, 1931, Oil on canvas, 72.7 x 54.2 cm

43. 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.

44. The Listening Room, 1952 by René Magritte Oil on canvas, 45 x 54.7 cm

45. 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.

46. Personal Values by René Magritte, 1952 Oil on canvas, 80.01 cm x 100.01 cm

47. 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. Empire of Light by René Magritte, 1953-54, Oil on canvas, 195.4 x 131.2 cm *veristic: almost real, truth

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

49. “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 Carte Blanche, 1965 Oil on canvas.

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