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The term surrealism was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire to describe the Jean Cocteau/ Erik Satie/ Pablo Picasso/ Léonide Massine collaboration Parade ( 1917) in the program notes: "From this new alliance, for until now stage sets and costumes on one side and choreography on the other had only a sham bond between them, there has come about, in Parade, a kind of super-realism (sur-réalisme), in which I see the starting point of a series of manifestations of this new spirit (esprit nouveau)."
While related to Dada, from which many of its initial members came, surrealism is significantly broader in scope. As Dada was a negative response to the First World War, surrealism possesses a more positive view that the world can be changed and transformed into a fertile crescent of freedom, love, and poetry.
André Breton's Surrealist ManifestoThe Surrealist Manifesto was written by the French writer Andre Breton and published in 1924. This document defines Surrealism as: "Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express verbally, by means of the written word, or in any ot of 1924Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s Years: 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 See also 1924 in aviation 1924 in film 1924 in literature 1924 in mu and the publication of the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste ("The Surrealist Revolution") marked the beginning of the movement as a public agitation. In the manifesto of 1924 Breton defines surrealism as "pure psychic automatism" with automatism being spontaneous creative production without conscious moral or aesthetic self-censorship. By Breton's admission, however, as well as by the subsequent development of the movement, this was a definition capable of considerable expansion. Breton also wrote the following dictionaryFor other uses of "dictionary", see dictionary (disambiguation). A dictionary is a list of words with their definitions, a list of characters with their glyphs, or a list of words with corresponding words in other languages. Many dictionaries also provide and encyclopediaEncyclopaedia Britannica An encyclopedia (alternatively encyclopaedia is a written compendium of human knowledge. The term comes from the Greek words , enkyklios paideia ("in a circle of instruction"). From , circuit shaped from circuit and , meaning inst definitions:
Breton and Philippe Soupault wrote the first automatic bookAutomatic writing (also known as free writing is the process of writing without thinking, usually with the intent of removing conscious barriers and inhibitions in the writer. Its use began in the Spiritualism movement, but it was later adopted both as a, Les Champs MagnetiquesLes Champs Magnetiques (The Magnetic Fields) is a famous novel by Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault. It is famous because it was the first work created in the field of literary surrealism. It was published in 1920 using the surrealist technique known as, in 1919Events January January 1 Edsel Ford succeeds his father as head of the Ford Motor Company January 5 Spartacist uprising Socialist demonstrations in Berlin turn into attempted communist revolution with Spartacist League in the forefront January 9 Spartacus. Later, automatic drawing was developed by André Masson, and automatic drawing and painting, as well as other automatist methods, such as decalcomania, frottage, fumage, grattage and parsemage became significant parts of surrealist practice. ( Automatism was later adapted to the computer.) Many of the popular artists in Paris throughout the 1920s and 1930s were surrealists, including René Magritte, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, Valentine Hugo , Meret Oppenheim , Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy. Games such as the exquisite corpse also assumed a great importance in surrealism. Although sometimes considered exclusively French, surrealism was in fact international from the beginning, with both the Belgian and Czech group s developing early; the Czech group continues uninterrupted to this day. In fact, some of the most significant surrealist theorists and the most radical of surrealist methods have hailed from countries other than France. For example, the technique of cubomania was invented by Romanian surrealist Gherasim Luca.
In popular culture, particularly in the United States of America, surrealism is probably most often associated with the paintings of Salvador Dalí. Dalí was active in surrealism from 1929 to 1936, and gave the movement what he called the Paranoiac-critical method, which was well received at the time. From the late 1930s on most members of the movement have found Dalí's painting to have had little significance for surrealism, and Dalí to have moved further and further away from the movement. (However, there have been some, such as André Thirion , who have taken a more measured view.)
The 1960s saw a dramatic expansion of surrealism with the founding of The West Coast Surrealist Group as recognized by Andre Breton's personal assistant Jose Pierre and also The Surrealist Movement in the United States, and surrealist groups around the world, including many in areas in which surrealism had not previously existed, such as the Surrealist Group of Pakistan.
While surrealism is typically associated with the arts, it has been said to transcend them; surrealism has had an impact in many other fields. In this sense, surrealism is not specifically the privilege of self-identified "surrealists" or those sanctioned by Breton, rather, it refers to a range of creative acts of revolt and efforts to liberate the imagination. In addition to Surrealist ideas finding their genesis in the ideas of Hegel, Marx and Freud, surrealism being inherently dynamic and claims to be dialectic in its thought, surrealist groups have also drawn on sources as seemingly diverse as Bugs Bunny, comic strips, the obscure poet Samuel Greenberg and the hobo writer and humourist T-Bone Slim . One might say that surrealist strands may be found in movements such as Free Jazz ( Don Cherry, Sun Ra, etc.) and even in the daily lives of people in confrontation with limiting social conditions. Thought of as the effort of humanity to liberate the imagination as an act of insurrection against society, surrealism dates back to, or finds precedents in, the alchemists, possibly Dante, various heretical groups, Hieronymus Bosch, Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, Comte de Lautreamont and Arthur Rimbaud. Some people believe that "Non-western" cultures also provide a continued source of inspiration for surrealist activity because some may strike up a better balance between instrumental reason and the imagination in flight than Western culture.
Some artists, such as H.R. Giger in Europe, who won an Academy Award for his stage set, and who also designed the "creature," in the movie Alien, have been popularly called "surrealists," though Giger is a visionary artist and does not claim to be surrealist. The Society for the Art of Imagination has come in for particularly bitter criticism from the surrealist movement (although this criticism has been characterized by at least one anonymous individual as coming from "the Marxists [sic] surrealist groups, who maintain small contingents worldwide;" he has also pointed out what he considers the hypocrisy of any surrealist criticism of the Society for the Art of Imagination given that Kathleen Fox designed the cover of issue 4 of the bulletin of the Groupe de Paris du Mouvement Surrealiste , S.U.RR... and also participated in the 2003 "Brave Destiny"[1] show at the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, which was criticised by a number of surrealists in a tract entitled " Craven Destiny." However, though some presented "Brave Destiny" as the largest-ever exhibit of surrealist artists, the show was officially billed as exhibiting "Surrealism, Surreal/ Conceptual, Visionary, Fantastic , Symbolism, Magic Realism, the Vienna School , Neuve Invention , Outsider, Naive, the Macabre , Grotesque and Singulier Art ."