Surrealism (1924-1960) in the Western Visual Arts

 

SURREALISM (1924-1960) IN THE WESTERN VISUAL ARTS

The term “surrealism” was originally coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in a March 1917 letter to Paul Dermée, Belgian writer, poet, and literary critic. Born to a Polish-Lithuanian mother, Apollinaire emigrated as a teenager to France, where he made his mark as a poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic.

André Breton, French poet and critic, was among the original leaders of the Surrealist movement. He published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.

Breton conceived of Surrealism as a reaction against the European “rationalism” that culminated in the devastating conflict of World War I. Breton’s exposition of Surrealism was “anti-rational” and political.

Heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud, especially his theory of the “subconscious,” Breton said that poetry should draw on unconscious inspiration and promoted automatic writing. His aesthetic of unconscious inspiration affected every branch of the arts but was especially powerful in painting.

Although the close of the Surrealist movement has been dated to the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, its influence continues. 

*** 

“Mystery and Melancholy of a Street” (1914) by Giorgio de Chirico is a classic work of Surrealism’s immediate precursor, de Chirico and Carlo Carrà’s Pittura Metafisica (1911-1920). De Chirico creates a haunting dreamscape with his characteristic contrivances—visually extreme perspectives; urban settings empty of human presence or very nearly so; items either singly or together arranged, situated outside everyday context; desert environs lit unnaturally in subdued, often creamy hues. Jutting leftward is the shadow of a hidden figure, as a lone, wispy flag undulates in the distance and in the foreground an empty horse trailer sits in the shadow of the flanking structure. The figure playing with a hoop is no child in the cheerful company of friends but rather a ghostly silhouette.

 

Encyclopedia Britannica’s take on Pittura Metafisica:

“Metaphysical painting, style of painting that flourished mainly between 1911 and 1920 in the works of the Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. These painters used representational but incongruous imagery to produce disquieting effects on the viewer. Their work strongly influenced the Surrealists in the 1920s.

“…Metaphysical painting originated with de Chirico. In Munich, Germany, where he spent his formative years, de Chirico was attracted to 19th-century German Romantic painting and to the works of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. The latter’s search for hidden meanings beyond surface appearances and his descriptions of empty squares surrounded by arcaded buildings in the Italian city of Turin made a particularly deep impression on de Chirico.

“…The Metaphysical school proved short-lived; it came to an end about 1920 because of dissension between de Chirico and Carrà over who had founded the group. After 1919 de Chirico produced weaker images, lacking the mysterious power of his earlier work, and his painting style eventually sank into an eccentric Classicism.”

See: https://www.britannica.com/art/Metaphysical-painting

—The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, “Metaphysical Painting”

If you examine de Chirico’s career over the decades, it’s apparent that after setting forth his original vision, he didn’t develop much beyond it, sinking into what the Britannica article has described as “an eccentric Classicism.”

To best appreciate de Chirico, I would say we have to view his entire oeuvre in one go and without regard to the passage of his long lifetime—he lived until 90. Doubtlessly, he successfully propounded an original and influential vision, and he is rightly hailed as one of the progenitors of Surrealism.

https://oddsandendsgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2020/06/de-chirico-metafisico.html

Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) by Giorgio de Chirico

Max Ernst (1891-1976) was an unusually creative, highly versatile artist. His output was dreamlike in characteristically Surrealist style yet distinguishable for its nightmarish content—intense and at least for its time uniquely bizarre—frequently consisting of weirdly textured phantasmagoria intermixed with dark, disturbing motifs, purportedly Freudian.

He served as a German soldier in the First World War. Shellshocked, in a manner of speaking, by the horror and devastation, the effects of wartime trauma colored his entire work.

In 1919 he joined the Dada movement until its natural death in 1924. He transitioned into becoming one of the principal founding members of Surrealism.

Ernst pioneered several innovative techniques in the visual arts—frottage, using rubbing from a textured surface; grattage, scratching the surface of a painting; and decalcomania, pressing against a wet painting the surface of an object and then pulling it away.

His was a Bohemian and at various times drifter lifestyle, although he was more settled later in life. Granted U.S. citizenship in 1948, he became a citizen of France in 1958, where he lived until his death. He married four times. His only son was born to his first wife in 1920.

“The Angel of Hearth and Home” (1937) features an angel as a quasi-demonic figure with a birdlike head, garmented in garishly freakish plumage.

Ernst was frightened by birds. His condition appears to have originated in his unspoken adverse childhood experiences. Birds he envisioned in his work as fearsome and threatening otherworldly creatures.

The retitling of the painting to “The Triumph of Surrealism” by Ernst in 1938 is a political statement. Always sophisticated and often ironic, he at this point imagined fascism losing to the “anti-rational” forces of Surrealism and the like.

 

The Angel of Hearth and Home (1937) by Max Ernst, retitled in 1938 The Triumph of Surrealism 

 

Joan Miró (1893-1983) is a Catalan artist whose lifetime work was grounded in the Surrealist philosophy of automatism. Automatism draws on the influence of the unconscious in creating art so that conscious activity is to some extent suppressed. His oeuvre, which began in figurative representation and concluded in pure abstraction, is intriguing, playful, happy, and childlike.

Miró was an avowed Surrealist who signed the manifesto of 1924. He was respected by the movement for his automatism-inspired art. André Breton, the leading spokesman for Surrealism at the time, said that Miró was “the most Surrealist of us all.”

“Harlequin’s Carnival” (1925) illustrates Miró’s transition from the figurative to the abstract. The harlequin, a street-theatre character, inspires the entire look and feel of the piece, which is delightfully colored and engagingly patterned. Not entirely two-dimensional, the picture is executed with a background variably tinted and textured, thereby adding visual depth. What look to be animal-like figures combine and mingle with shapes and curls.

Miró's quirky motifs broadcast throughout the course of the 1996 Barcelona Summer Olympics augmented his fame, turning it global.

Antoni Gaudi, the architect of La Sagrada Familia, put Barcelona on the map; Miro did the same for Catalonia.

Harlequin's Carnival (1925) by Joan Miró

“The Persistence of Memory” (1931) has risen to become one of the most recognizable works of Western visual art, in cultural influence and prestige belonging to a select group of masterpieces that include, among a limited number, da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” Michelangelo’s “David,” Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” and Rodin’s “The Thinker.” “Persistence” is widely acknowledged today as the most prominent ambassador of Surrealism.

The most curious actors in “Persistence” are the two melting clocks to the left of what looks like the inside of an oyster fabulously graced with eyelashes or whiskers of some sort. Draped atop the oyster swoons a third liquefying clock. In Dali’s own words, the three mucilaginous timepieces are inspired by his own postprandial encounter with Camembert cheese. The unearthly desert landscape recurs throughout his paintings.

The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dali

It would appear at this point that Surrealists are all men, but that is hardly the case. René Magritte (1898-1967) is among the most popular Surrealist painters. The daylight character of his paintings accounts for his broad appeal—eerie, certainly, but not gloomy or morbid. His signature motif was the startling juxtaposition—often humorous or tongue-in-cheek—of the everyday and familiar, and the fantastical. Master of his medium, he was highly proficient in oil, winningly so. Magritte is suitably described as a realist, or more correctly, a magical realist, in painting. He created a world in which the real and the fantastical coexisted as if they had always belonged together, according to the state of affairs set in place from the beginning.

“Golconda” (1953) shows near identical men—they are not all the same, take a close look—clad in overcoat and bowler hat raining down in orderly fashion from the blue Belgian sky to land in a setting concomitantly urban and urbane.

The title perplexes. Golconda is a city in the state of Telangana, India, near Hyderabad, that from the mid-14th century until the end of the 17th was the capital of the diamond industry in the region. Two kingdoms successively ruled from the city, which now thrives as a tourist destination. Magritte’s friend Louis Scutenaire, Belgian poet and Surrealist, suggested the title, which in English means “mine of wealth.” Magritte in selecting “Golconda” is probably being mysteriously and inexplicably ironical.

Golconda (1953) by René Magritte

M. C. (Maurits Cornelis) Escher is a popular artist who produced finely crafted woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, often inspired by mathematics. Although Escher was not a mathematician, his work is widely known among scientists and mathematicians.

Escher’s graphic art dealt with impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations.

His impossible perspectives of interconnected stairs and ramps populated by walking figures—images which make up his most celebrated work—are Surrealist in their fantastical, dream-like quality. His other output intimates this quality.

Although Escher did not associate himself with Surrealism, we are disinclined to separate him entirely from the defining attributes of the movement.

https://oddsandendsgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2025/12/four-figurative-sculptures.html

 

Relativity (1953) by M. C. Escher

“Woman with Her Throat Cut” (1932, cast 1949) by Alberto Giacometti is a masterpiece of figurative sculpture executed in the style of Surrealism and dates to the rise of the movement in the 1930s.

Abstraction is apparent in the stylized geometric transformation of the viscera in “Woman with Her Throat Cut.” Abstraction was well underway during the heyday of Surrealism in the 1930s. We are able to distinguish in the artist’s lurid brainchild the larynx joined to the esophagus with its cartilaginous rings, the rib cage pulled somewhat apart, a resection of the small intestine, the lower part of the stomach sliced open, and almost disconnected, the lobe of what is the liver, possibly. The entire piece is splayed and looks like the victim of a homicide. It is not a literal representation but rather metaphorical.

https://oddsandendsgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2025/12/four-figurative-sculptures.html

Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932, cast 1949) by Alberto Giacometti

It would appear at this point that Surrealists are all men, but that is hardly the case. Men do tend to dominate art history, less so, however, following the transformations wrought by the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, which encompassed political, social, and cultural, besides economic changes.

Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst’s fourth wife—they married in 1946—was a kindred spirit. Tanning was also dark and foreboding in her output.

“Eine Kleine Nachmusik” (1943) arranges in perspective a giant sunflower with two weird children loitering in a dimly lit hotel corridor, one of them, her locks bafflingly trailing upward—the composition is dreamlike, more accurately, nightmarish.

The title of the painting refers to the chamber ensemble piece of Mozart, a bright and energetic, happy invention, in ironic contrast with the painting.

The starring role of the two female children is a feminine touch. Art is a projection of individual psyche.

Whoever checked into Tanning’s hotel probably wouldn’t be able to sleep the night for fear that the sunflower would devour them.

We are surprised to learn that the couple didn’t live in the Batcave.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943) by Dorothea Tanning