Surrealism

Sparked in Paris around the year 1924 was the idea that prioritized dreaming and the unconscious mind over everyday physical matter, now known as Surrealism.

(The Persistence of Memory [Dali, 1931] at the side)

Branching off from the Dada movement’s anti-artwork, the Surrealism movement contains humorous and poetic artworks to express wanting to gain political, social, and personal freedom.

It was also an alternative to the Cubist movement, which was formalistic, and started modern painting with a traditional emphasis on content

In the published The Surrealist Manifesto from 1924, Andre Breton, a poet and critic as well as the spokesman for the movement, heavily drew theories from Sigmund Freud’s concept about the subconscious mind, and gave his own version of Surrealism as “a means of reuniting conscious with 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.” (Breton, 1924, Britannica, 2023)

During the 1920s, there would be meetings in which people apart of the movement would play drawing games, discuss theories, and develop new techniques like automatic drawing, where the hand freely illustrates on paper

For the poetry world, surrealism used its juxtaposition of words that were unusual not because they were logical, but because they were psychological

But for the painting world, it was not only majorly influenced by Dada, but it also included disturbing images from early painters Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya 

(Tondal's Vision [Bosch, unknown] at the top and Witches Sabbath [Goya 1798] at the bottom)

The practice of the art really encourages methodological research and experimentation, really using it as a means to get into personal investigations and revelations