Presentation by Krassimir Illiev

Surrealism

• A literary and art movement influenced by Freudianism which was dedicated to the expression of imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and free of convention, or, it is also said to be “a style in which fantastical visual imagery from the subconscious mind is used with no intention of making the work logically comprehensible”;

• Surrealism is considered to be founded in 1924 in Paris by André Breton , with his Manifeste du surréalisme, but its ancestry is traced to the French poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire to the Italian painter Georgio de Chirico.

Surrealism

• Surrealism flourished in Europe between World Wars I and II.

• It grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works considered anti-art that deliberately defied reason and was strongly against political society as a whole;

• Surrealism emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression instead. The movement was in fact a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past and had lead to and culminated in the horrors of World War I.

Surrealism

• According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton “Surrealism is 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.“

• Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.

• Surrealist consider the concept of supremacy of mind over

matter to be extremely mistaken and believe that in dialectical materialism, insisting on the supremacy of matter over mind.

Surrealism

• In literature, Surrealism was confined to France exclusively;

• As Surrealist writers were interested in the associations and implications of words rather than their literal meanings, their works are extraordinarily difficult to read. Among the leading surrealist writers were Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, and Jean Cocteau, which is also known for his surreal films.

Surrealism• Directed at first by Poerre Naville and Benjamin Peret, then from issue No. 4 (1924)

by Andre Breton, twelve numbers of La Revolution Surrealiste appeared between December 1924 and December 1929, the year the Second Manifesto, which Breton used for a fierce purification of his group, was written.

• It is interesting to note that Aragon, Breton, Eluard, Peret, and Unik (all of them Surrealism representatives) were members of the communist party since 1926 and were expelled in 1933, the year of the last issue of La Surrealisme au service de la revolution (l.s.a.s.d.l.r.).

• La Revolution Surrealiste practiced intellectual violence on purpose. The first issue published a photograph of Germaine Berton, who had just killed Marius Plateau, a member of the extreme right-wing Action Francaise; the portrait appeared surrounded by photographs of all the members of the group. It also raised the question "Is suicide a solution?" and contained a number of dream reports and ‘automatic’ texts. Suicide was never a solution for a Surrealist. The second issue featured the test of ‘Open the prisons, disband the army!’. The issue also contained open letters such as Breton to Deltiel, and address to the ‘warped pope’.

Surrealism

• A committee for action against the war in Morocco issued a manifesto, the Surrealists immediately associated themselves with it and signed a violently anti-nationalist text published in La Revolution Surrealist. Violence and black humor did not put a stop to the poetic and ethical experimentation: issue no. 9-10 were devoted to ‘automatic writing’ and the last issue posted the question "What hope do you place in love?" The illustrations in this review were deliberately austere in appearance. A majority of surrealists let others speak out while they secretly thought that they would be the vehicles of a real revolution in sensibility.

• That revolution took place through the medium of automatic writing;

especially Eluard’s poems like Capitale de la douleur and novels such as Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris both written in 1926. Breton knew what Surrealism owed to painters and in La Revolution Surrealiste had begun a series of articles on painting which were collected in 1928 at the first edition of his now famous book Le Surrealisme et la peinture.

Georgio De Chirico

The Uncertainty

The Enigma Of The Hour

The Awakening Of Ariadne

La Reve Transforme

Yves Tanguy

Storm

I Came as I Promised

Ernst Max

Le Cormoranes

Fruto de una Larga Experincia

Rene Magritte

Without NamePopular

Panorama

Salvador Dali