SURREALISM

sur- (beyond ) + réalisme (realism)

The Unconscious

Revolution (personal and social)

Random Juxtapositions (Collage, “Corps Exquisite” and Automatic Drawing)

Objet Trouve

Andre Breton

“Surrealism, as I envisage it, proclaims loudly enough our absolute nonconformity, that there may be no question of calling it, in the case against the real world, as a witness for the defense.”

Andre Breton, 1924, Manifeste du Surrealisme

The Rendezvous of Friends

Max Ernst, 1922

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Lord Byron (1788-1824) (“Mad, bad and dangerous to know”)

Lord Byron

Theodor Gericault

The Raft of The Medusa 1819

Delacroix

The Death of Sardanapolus 1827

Francisco Goya

The Sleep of reason Produces Monsters

1799

Eugene Delacroix

“I accustomed myself to simple hallucination…”

-Arthur Rimbaud

Karl Marx

Sigmund Freud

“Radical Juxtapostions”

Collage

Objet trouve

Automatic drawing

Exquisite Corpse

"manufactured objects raised to the dignity of works of art through the choice of the artist."

Surrealist Exhibition of Objects, 1936

“ the revolution of objects and the revolution through objects”

Fountain

Marcel Duchamp, 1917

Two Children are Menaced by a Nightingale

Max Ernst, 1924

Murdering Aeroplane

Max Ernst, 1920

“frottage” drawings by Max Ernst, c. 1920s

Une Semaine de Bonte

Max Ernst, 1934

"systematic displacement"

“He who speaks of collage speaks of the irrational.“

Max Ernst

“Corps Exquisite”

“automatic drawing”

by Andre Masson

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought.

Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any

control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

-Andre Breton

The Harlequin’s Carnival

Joan Miro, 1924

“…the pairing of two apparently unpairable realities on a plane apparently unsuitable to them”

-Andre Breton

Walter Benjamin credited Surrealism with having exposed to view "the ruins of the bourgeoisie".

Luncheon in Fur

Meret Oppenheim, 1936

Le Cadeau

Man Ray, 1923

“As beautiful as…

…the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.”

-Lautreamont

Le mervailleuse

“Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful. Anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.”

-Andre Breton, 1924

Mystery and Melancholy of a Street

Giorgio di Chirico, 1914

Giorgio di Chirico

The Persistence of Memory

Salvador Dali, 1934

The Church of the Sagrada Familia

Antoni Gaudi, begun 1883

L’ Amour Fou

“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.”

-Andre Breton

Alberto Giacometti

Woman With Her Throat Cut

Alberto Giacometti

Seated Bather

Pablo Picasso

“Minotauromachie” Pablo Picasso 1937

Erotic-Veiled

Erotique Voilee

Man Ray, 1933

Hans Bellmer

Surrealist Legacies

New York 1940-1970

The Liver is the Cock’s Comb

Arshile Gorky, 1942

Robert Motherwell

Elergy for the Spanish Republic 1953-4

Jackson Pollock

Lavender Mist, 1950

Joseph Cornell

Jasper Johns

Robert Rauschenberg

Claes Oldenburg

1960+

Robert Gober

Louise Bourgeois

Mona Hatoum

Marc Quinn

Sarah Lucas

Jake and Dinos Chapman

Paul McCarthy

Chris Burden (Los Angeles, 1970s)

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.

-Andre Breton (Paris, 1924)

Ai Weiwei

Performance Art

“Hyperreal”

Matthew Barney

Maurizio Catellan

Jeff Koons

Surrealism and Popular Culture

Cinema

Rock music

TV

Spellbound

Alfred Hitchcock, 1945

Surrealism, Advertisement and Package Design

Surrealism and Product Design

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali

Man Ray

Meret Oppenheim

Julia Lohmann

Surrealism and Fashion

Elsa Schiarapelli

Dali-inspired hats, 1936

Guy Bourdin

“Surrealism does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like. There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do; like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts.”

-Andre Breton

“Madness is revolution confined to the self.”

-John Berger