U can read what wikipedia says about surrealism and dada movement the anti-art
Surrealism is a movement stating that the liberation of our mind, and subsequently the liberation of the individual self and society, can be achieved by exercising the imaginative faculties of the "unconscious mind" to the attainment of a dream-like state different from, or ultimately ‘truer’ than, everyday reality.
Surrealists believe that this more truthful reality can bring about personal, cultural, and social revolution, and a life of freedom, poetry, and uninhibited sexuality. André Breton said that such a revealed truth would be beatific, or in his own words, "beauty will be convulsive or not at all."
here come another defenition
Surrealism is an invented word—"sur" means beyond or farther than, so "surreal" means to go beyond real. It was named this because surrealist art derives much of its meaning from the theories of Dr. Sigmund Freud and the unconscious.
Surrealism grew out of the Dada movement and flourished in Europe between World War I and World War II. Surrealism employed many of the techniques of Dada but emphasized the positive rather than the negative. Surrealism tried to meld the conscious and the unconscious, the world of dreams and fantasy along with reality so that the line between these ideas was completely blurred. Many artists of this time felt the unconscious was where the true center of art lay, and that artists could tap into this genius by bending and softening the lines between what one's eyes see and the dreamworld. Much of Surrealistic art portrays alternate realities; some created by accident, some using the unconventional realities of blind feeling and impulse. Some of the art of this time is quite cruel and violent as well as very beautiful. The artists, like the Dada artists before them, wanted to shock their viewers with the unexpected and make people think in new ways. Some well-known artists of this period were Andre Masson, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí.
If i keep posting about the history of surrealism it will be too boaring. so lets close this session. In the comming postings i'll give links and pictures of surreal art and sculptures.
I start with Desmond Morris one of my favorite zoologist, anthroploist rather naturalist - surrealist.
Entry to a Landscape (England, 1947)
Desmond Morris considers this painting, the representation of his entry into the surrealist word, his most formative work."Then, in 1947, I completed a strange picture called Entry to a Landscape, which showed a narrow glimpse of a biomorphic world seen through a cleft in a dark rock-face. It was as though I had offered myself a route of access to a secret, inner personal world. In my mind's eye, I slipped through this crack in the rocks and there I was, suddenly surrounded by a whole array of bizarre inhabitants, all busy courting, fighting, breeding and moving about in front of my eyes. I no longer had to search for them, they were everywhere, making their own demands of me and establishing their own rules. With each new canvas they grew beneath my brush, as though I had become merely their observer rather than their creator. I watched them fondly as they developed and multiplied from canvas to canvas, in my early biomorphic paintings."
from The Secret Surrealist, The Paintings of Desmond Morris, Phaidon Oxford 1987.
