Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects, and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself. The roots of surrealism lie behind the ethos of romanticism and dada during the 19th century. Dada was a movement in which artists stated their disgust with the war and with life in general. These artists showed that European culture had lost meaning to them by creating pieces of “anti-art” or “nonart.”Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” These artist tried to access their unconscious mind through automatism. In art, automatism refers to creating art without conscious thought, accessing material from the unconscious mind as part of the creative process. Artist did things such as transcribing dreams, automatic drawing exercises or even rapid fire questioner all to unleash the unconscious mind and minimize the influence of the conscious mind. Surrealism was powerfully influenced by Sigmund Freud-a neurologist. Freud legitimized the importance of dreams and the unconscious as valid revelations of human emotion and desires; his exposure of the complex and repressed inner worlds of sexuality, desire, and violence provided a theoretical basis for much of Surrealism.Karl Marx was also an inspiration, It was hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution.