Just as there were two directions in Dada (art in everything vs the anti-art direction), there were also two directions (at least) to Surrealism. The automatist element led to the seemingly unplanned compositions of artists such as Joan Miró and André Masson, while the dream element led to the more composed but "otherwordly" compositions of René Magritte, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dali. All, however, were committed to what is called "poesie-peinture" -- a poetic, visionary form of painting. It is also important to note that commitment to these two directions in art varied among the same artists over time, such that automatist strategies dominated most Surreal art of the 1920s while illusionistic, dream strategies dominated in the 1930s.
|De Chirico: The Seer, 1915||De Chirico: The Enigma of a Day, 1914|
|De Chirico: The Enigma of the Hour, 1911|
In 1936, the Museum of Modern Art
featured an exhibition, "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism," which included
17 works by de Chirico. De Chirico undoubtedly had a strong influence
on Edward Hopper, perhaps on Milton Avery as well. Another connection we
might make to the influence of de Chirico is the work of American artists
who are variously known as American surrealists, magical realists, and
social realists (O. Guglielmi, Peter Blume, Kay Sage, and Walter Quirt
being some of the artists in this category -- see examples under "American
surrealism"). Despite the surrealists' attempt to claim de Chirico
as one of their own, the reality is that we find his influence to be more
marked and apparent in American art than in surrealist, with the exception
of Dali's art.
|Edward Hopper: Nighthawks, 1942 (o/c, 33x60")||Milton Avery: Seated Girl with Dog, 1944 (44x32")|
Biomorphism: the forms suggest a relationship to biological or organic forms found in nature but they do not look like a realistic or naturalistic imitation of anything we might see in the real world
Automatism: techniques which
suggest that the artwork has bypassed conscious or rational thought; that
the forms and images were generated by the subconscious without the artist's
control. Note that an important word in this definition is "suggest."
|Miro: The Birth of the World, 1925, 8'3x6'7||Miro: The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers, 1941|
|Max Ernst: The Attirement of the Bride, 1940||Leonore Fini: The Ends of the Earth, 1949|
Ernst and Fini, along with Dali and one or two other surrealists, were more likely to use an illusionistic style of painting with some hints of biomorphism, as opposed to the more abstract, automatist style used by Miro or Matta. Masson used both styles.
We should also note that surrealist
work can be found in almost any medium, from photography to the surrealist
|Man Ray: The Primacy of Matter over Thought, 1929 (gelatin silver print)||Meret Oppenheim: Object (Fur-Lined Breakfast), 1936|
|Masson: Battle of the Fishes, 1926||Masson: Gradiva, 1939|
|Dali: The Birth of Liquid Desires, 1931-2||Magritte: The False Mirror, 1928|
On one level, the results of surrealist art and literature were an ordering and systematization of the chaotic inventiveness of Dada. On another level, Surrealism as a method signified an art or the creation of art through a process that corresponded rather closely to the state of dreaming. The states of dreaming and reality would then be resolved in an absolute reality, or a state beyond reality, “surrealité.” The exploration of this uncensored state was the key point; art was the by-product in a sense. But in another sense, art was the means of exploration and expression. This notion of art as the means of exploration, and the corresponding de-emphasis on the product, is a very modern position to take although at the same time, it is a position which evokes the spirituality and magic of much ancient art.
By the 1930s, the surrealist movement
was divided between those who wanted to merge with communism and forsake
art, and those leaning toward art for art's sake. Breton tried to
steer a middle path, sympathizing with communism but believing art served
a purpose as a means of expression. In his second manifesto, Breton
stressed the goal of liberating the individual (discovering his inner nature)
while he deplored the use of automatism and dreams if they end only in
art. It should not be surprising, then, that Dali illusionistic,
dream style epitomized surrealism in the early 1930s. Like Masson,
his earlier style had been more firmly rooted in automatism and the use
of non-traditional materials, but also like Masson, his style changed by
the 30s to the more visually familiar academic style with its hallucinatory
|Dali: Bather (Female Nude), 1928 (oil and pebbles on laminated panel)||Dali: Autumnal Cannibalism, 1936 (oil/canvas)|
|Giacometti: The Cage, 1930-1||Giacometti:
The Palace at 4 a.m., 1932
wood, glass, wire and string
Mannequin? spinal cord? reptilian bird?
The Invisible Object, 1934 (bronze: 1935)
The Invisible Object (Hands Holding
the Void), 1934: the ultimate representation of the unobtainable desire?
Or is this the work in which Giacometti both memorializes and decries the
relationship with his father, an artist who encouraged him and recognized
his gifts but did not approve of the abstract styles favored by Giacometti
and a parent who died a year before this work was made? Is the work
a sublimated expression of Giacometti’s fantasies of violence, in particular,
patricidal fantasies, intermingled with the guilt he undoubtedly felt after
his father’s death?
|The Chariot (1950)||Tall Figure, 1947|
One critic has recently suggested that after a period of not working very much and destroying most of what he made, a period which coincided with WW II, and after his exposure to the truth of what had happened during the war, what the “Final Solution” had meant and how many people had lost their lives, Giacometti began to devote his work to the production of the human figure. One of the interesting contradictions in his figural work, a contradiction which does seem to support the idea that his work is an attempt to resolve the psychological conflict he experienced in himself with respect to fantasies of violence and the recognition of what violence in real life achieves, is the difference between looking at his figures from a direct position in front of them and looking at them from a profile position. This dual vision conveys the helpless fragility of humankind as well as the inner strength which resides in the flesh. Giacometti’s own comments neither contradict nor completely confirm this hypothesis. He speaks of the impossibility of trying to model a figure or draw a head, and says that it will never be more than a pale reflection of what he sees. He describes this as both a failure and a success and perhaps an obsession in that he keeps trying and keeps asking how you honestly make something. He concludes that he doesn’t know if he continues to work in order to make something or if he works in order to know why he cannot make what he would like to make. Perhaps that’s the reason why his figures always appear to be far away from us, no matter how close we may get to them–and that’s the quality which Sartre found so existential in Giacometti’s sculpture. It’s also the quality which sets his work apart from the abstract expressionist goal of creating a work of art which subsumes or absorbs the spectator.
|Peter Blume: The Eternal City, 1934-7||Guglielmi: Mental Geography, 1938 (black-and-white photo of original painting)|
|Dorothea Tanning: Rainy-Day Canape, 1970||Tanning: Murmurs, 1976|