After the First World War, Tristan Tzara, leader of the Dada movement, felt it was necessary to scandalise society. He used anti-art (ugliness not beauty) to offend the bourgeoisie who belonged to a society that could produce such an abhorrent act of destruction. However, the proposed sufferers were not outraged, instead they believed their new style of rebellious art was antagonistic towards 'old art' and not against them. They readily accepted this new style and anti-art became Art. The Dada movement used techniques developed during Cubism, such as collage and the inclusion of found objects. In 1922, Andre Breton wanted to break away from the Dada movement after reading the ideas of Sigmund Freud. The Dada movement evolved into Surrealism in late 1924.
The Surrealist artists aimed to use their new ideals to modernise art by counter-acting the ordered and restricted way of civilised life. They aimed to achieve this by using detailed illustration to question the evidence gained by the eyes. The Surrealist artists claimed they would liberate man by representing the super-reality of imagination, which contained all their fantasies and dreams, therefore, encouraging a natural freedom of thought and expression. Artists used hypnotism and drugs to gain an insight into the unconscious state to bring forth 'unseen' images, words, and ideas. The concious state could not achieve these images and feelings. Surrealist art made no sense and was disorientating because it used normal everyday images in unreal situations.
The Surrealist movement was concerned with subject matter and the effects brought about by it. The subject matter was often an impossibility of the real visual world, designed to make the reader question what they have or have not seen. As the Surrealist movement evolved, artists celebrated primitive art and art of children and the insane. They believed young children produced purer forms of art than the suppressed and tarnished versions fabricated by developed adults. The Surrealists frequently enjoyed children's games, for example, one would draw a head, torso, or limb, and then fold the paper so that the next artist could not see his addition, and would continue it. The bizarre images resulted in providing artists with inspiration, for example Joan Miro's 'The Harlequin's Carnival'.
The Surrealists separated into two groups, the Automatists and the Veristic Surrealists. Automatists concentrated more on feelings and less on the questioning; they thought 'meaning' was a unnecessary problem. They believed Automatism to be the method by which images of the subconscious would reach the conscious. They saw the confines of traditional art as prejudiced against free expression, and form was an offender of these constraints. Ernst and Miro both represent this kind of Surrealist art.
In 'Shock of the New', Robert Hughes states, Miro's art is a “free lyrical mixture of folk tales, eroticism, sardonic humour, farmhouse scat-talk, and grotesque absurdity”. Simple forms offered Miro (1893-1983) a variety of opportunities. He frequently started his canvases with casual washes and built up from the forms created by rags and sponges.
Miro repeatedly claimed that during his years in Paris, the hunger and staring at cracks in the plaster made him hallucinate, which helped him loosen his imagination and gain ideas for his Surrealist art.
Miro investigated dreams believing they were the original and untainted state of thought, and tried to interpret his childhood to create art, as well as the childhood innocence of untainted imagination and free fantasy all Surrealists sought.
In 1921, Miro painted 'The Farm' (oil on canvas). The painting is a series of abstract images intertwined; the cracks in the farmhouse, the apparatus positioned around it, the contents of the outhouse, the appearance of the plants, animals, and the soil itself. All painted with a sense of urgency and forced recollection. The design and layout of the painting suggests Cubist ideas, for example, the heavy landscape balanced with a desolate sky.
Although Miro's work is abstract, sometimes almost unidentifiable, it always functions to symbolize some part of his existence, for example, Miro manipulated studio objects to create 'Still Life with Old Shoe' in (Jan 24-May 29) 1937. He employed everyday objects and transformed them into abstract ideas, for example, a bottle, an apple with a fork embedded in it (as if committing as act of murderous spite), a broken loaf of bread, and an old shoe. The indefinite forms of objects intensify the senses, making the viewer evaluate and re-evaluate the painting. Miro formulated it to symbolize the lives of peasants surviving the Spanish Civil War.
Max Ernst (1891-1976) was originally a Dada-ist in Germany before moving to France after World War One. Before Ernst taught himself to paint he had studied philosophy and psychiatry, often visiting asylums to witness the power of images created by those judged insane. Like Miro, Ernst's work is often witty, frequently puzzling, but always poignant and memorable. The subject matter is Ernst's art is repeatedly of human concerns, sex, death, and the loss of identity.
In his painting 'Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale' (1924, oil on wood with wood construction), Ernst has reverted to Cubism, in the sense that he shows the painting from various angles at once, as Miro did with 'The Farm'. He used collage and also included a physical construction of a toy gate, whose brusque arrangement leads the viewer to challenge reality. The title scrawled without any grand splendour suggests Ernst's humour, as does the concept of a small nightingale intimidating two 'children'. Although there is actually a third figure in the illustration.
Ernst experimented with frottage – taking rubbings from a variety of sources, for example, floorboards. This technique focused his style of art for the next two decades. He took the images he produced and rearranged them to create illusions of reality. He used these rubbings to stimulate the readers imagination of surfaces and the reality there of. Ernst employed assorted techniques, such as collages with 19th Century magazines and suspending paint over a canvas and drizzling on to it.
'The King Playing with Queen' is a bronze statue cast in 1944; it features a geometric king dominating a chessboard (which also functions as a table) with his vast magnitude. Ernst elongated the king's upper limbs to show his strength and superiority. Ernst moulded the monarch's head into that of a bull's head, complete with horns, to symbolise male fertility and leadership. The king is a competitor as well as a chess piece; he is literally 'playing' with the queen. The queen, herself, is a minor fragment. The insignificant chess pieces on the right appear to be disengaged in whatever 'game' is taking place between the monarchs. This work shows a combination of Surrealism and Cubism, and a knowledge of Freud's theories.
However, the Veristic Surrealists interpreted Automatism to signify allowing the images of the subconscious to emerge uninterrupted so they could be unscrambled. They thought the objects stood as a metaphor for a hidden reality.
They saw traditional art and form as the method to represent the images of the subconscious with truth, that if undocumented, would disintegrate into the unknown. An example of this type of Surrealist artist is Salvador Dali.
Salvador Dali (1904-1989) once said the only difference between himself and a madman was that he was not mad. Dali aimed to re-interpret the ability to see surreal images due to be tired, ill, or on drugs, and question whether that or the 'normal' world was the true reality. His art was often strange and erotic, influenced by dreams and his fear of sex. Throughout his art, he like to use flaccid subject matter, for example, runny Camembert cheese, soft watches, and fried eggs. Dali painted with photographic precision and used radiantly intense colours that made his compositions look alive.
However, Dali challenged forms and the perception of them to question the reading of art, often turning the negative into a positive, for example, hollows become solids. Dali's paintings invite the eye but not the body, as his barren landscapes were pure illusion. He created a visual reality from elements of visions, dreams, memories, and psychological distortions by familiar objects, such as watches, insects, and telephones.
In 'Persistence of Memory' (oil on canvas 1931), Dali uses a number of objects to refer to time, watches, eggs, a dead fish, and a dead olive tree with its branches cut, in comparison with a single living fly and a swarm of ants. In the two rectangles on the left, one of them is supporting the dead tree, which questions logic. Dali encouraged the viewer to interpret his paintings and make sense of his 'nonsense', for example, would the watches still tell the time without been solid?
In 'The Lugubrious Game' (1929), Dali uses explicit images of masturbation. The sculpture on the plinth is turning his head away in disgrace from it's overly enlarged right hand. He also employs imagery of excrement on the shocked man in the foreground. This led to discussions between Dali and Breton (and other Surrealists) over whether excrement was a suitable dream image; Dali argued that a censored dream is no dream at all.
As Miro did in 'Still Life with Old Shoe', Dali also used his art to demonstrate his feelings in response to his native country tearing itself apart during the Spanish Civil War. He renamed 'Soft Construction with Boiled Beans' (1936), which shows a woman horribly dismembering herself, 'Premonition of Civil War'. The phallicism and implied castration, and impotence, mark out his personal male fears, in a Freudian way.
In conclusion, Surrealist art and it's artists are still popular today, this is because in today's modern society, we, the viewer, still question reality and the effects it has on the individual. Art is still used to question life and our interpretation of it, for example with current advertising campaigns, such as Absolute Vodka and WKD.