Surrealism Emily Rinaudo Kristy Wright

The Beginning In 1924, Andre Breton announced the birth of Surrealism. A movement in painting that emphasized the unconscious. Surrealists were interested in presenting a more profound reality revealed by the unconscious mind. They wished to produce images that went beyond mere painting to reach a new level of reality. In their experiments, dreams became important sources of inspiration

Cultural Influences Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.

The most bright representative of this period were Dali, Ernst, Magritte, and Miró.

Dali Born on May 11, 1904, Salvador Dali i Domenech is one of the world’s most recognized surrealist artists. His parents told him he was a reincarnation of his older brother who died before he was born. Dali moved to the student residences at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid. He spent several years studying there and then shortly before his graduation, he was expelled for declaring that no one on the faculty of the school was competent enough to examine him.

Inspirations Being one of the first artists to use holography and taking great inspiration from his Catholic faith and the events of the day, including the bombing at Hiroshima. From this time period, two of Dali’s most famous works, Hallucinogenic Toreador and La Gare de Perpignan were created

Themes/ Artwork The dominant themes in his career revolved around his childhood sexual desires and on the study of the unconscious mind.   Among them is The Specter of Sex Appeal, in which he depicts himself as a child watching a brutalized body of a woman, who is barely able to support herself with the aid of the sticks.  The Great Masturbator. Spider of the Evening.

Man Ray Man Ray was born as Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Philadelphia.Man Ray's career is distinctive above all for the success he achieved in both the United States and Europe. For Man Ray, photography often operated in the gap between art and life.

Influences Dada and Surrealism were important in encouraging his attitude. He worked in styles influenced by Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism. He also successfully navigated the worlds of commercial and fine art, and came to be a sought-after fashion photographer. He is perhaps most remembered for his photographs of the inter-war years.

Rene Magritte Rene Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, in 1898, Little is known about Magritte's early life. He began lessons in drawing in 1910. On 12 March 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre

Influences Popular interest in Magritte's work rose considerably in the 1960s, and his imagery has influenced pop, minimalist and conceptual art. Magritte settled on a dead-pan, illustrative technique, the better to clearly articulate the content of his pictures.

Technique Repetition was an important strategy for Magritte, informing not only his handling of motifs within individual pictures, but also encouraging him to produce multiple copies of some of his greatest works. Magritte's work had a major impact on a number of movements that followed his death, including Pop, Conceptualism, and the painting of the 1980s