Posted by Penny Tristram
Surrealism is perhaps the 20th Century’s best-known art movement, having achieved popular status via its most famous proponent, Salvador Dali.The movement, at least in the visual arts, is all about unexpected and unrelated pairings, and visual surprises, that often create a dream-like feeling, to amusing or unsettling result.Along with Dali, a few of early-20th-century surrealism’s best know practitioners are Joan Miro, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Frida Kahlo.
Roots in Dadaism
Surrealism emerged from another art movement, Dada, which sprung up in Europe during WW1. Dada was a hugely radical movement – it was all about challenging established norms in both art and life. Dadaists, like modernist writers, had seen the wholesale mismanagement and mass carnage inflicted in the name of Queen and Country as part of WW1, and realized they could no longer trust the government, the establishment, even God and their parents, and therefore chose to challenge old fashioned visual media (like oil paintings of the countryside) that represented established norms. Dadaism, despite being a lesser-known movement compared to surrealism, possessed an influence that has extended all the way into modern visual culture, influencing the punk look especially. Hana Hoch’s piece, shown below, is a classic example of Dadaist art.
The writer, and Dadaist, Andre Breton founded the surrealist movement in 1924. He and other surrealists believed that established society had weighed down people’s unconscious minds, meaning that they could not express themselves freely. Creating surrealist art was a way of unlocking the voice of the subconscious. They did this through methods like automatic drawing, where the artist simply draws without thinking or planning, and the hand is allowed to move randomly over the paper. The images that result are supposedly the expression of subconscious or unconscious thoughts. As a result of the emphasis on the subconscious, surrealist paintings often contain dream-like symbols and images.
Surrealist Painting Today.
Although surrealism’s heyday was during the early 20th Century, it’s had a profound influence on visual art, design, film, and photography, extending to the present day. In the world of painting, pop-surrealism, or lowbrow art, is a movement centered around Los Angeles that arose in the 1970s and is currently highly popular. Hans Rudolf Giger is also considered a contemporary surrealist, and paintings inspired by Giger’s and Dali’s works in particular are popular sellers in traditional and online galleries around the world.