Surrealism What is it?

A little history… The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I. Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. Dada artists wanted to show their rejection of this reality through their art work. According to its proponents, Dada was not art, it was "anti-art." For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany Hannah Höch (1889-1978)

Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities of World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. Andre Breton was the founding leader – he wanted to people to know that it was a revolutionary movement. Surrealists explored the direct expression of the unconscious unobscured by rational thought. The_Persistence_of_Memory Salvador Dalí. (Spanish, 1904-1989)

Definition… As Surrealists developed their philosophy they felt that while Dada rejected categories and labels, Surrealism would advocate the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination

Surrealism was influenced by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theories, but the movement was also very much a reaction against the "reason" that had led Europe into the devastations of World War I.

According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality.

Sam Flores

Vladimir Kalinin

Sammy Charnine

Sammy Charnine

Pop Surrealism: Also known as Lowbrow art. An underground visual art movement that arose in the Los Angeles, California, area in the late 1970s. Origins in the underground comix world, punk music, hot-rod street culture, and other subcultures. Lowbrow art often has a sense of humor - sometimes the humor is gleeful, sometimes impish, and sometimes it's a sarcastic comment. Johannah O’ Donnell

It’s not just for painters… Surrealism has made its way into photography!

Much is possible with the help of digital editing programs!

This hyper-real surreal look is very trendy right now, especially in advertising!

More examples…

Surrealism requirements (yes, one element can count for 2 requirements):   A cohesive composition that moves across the page, and tells a story

One example of exaggerated size/proportion

3 different images of yourself expressing 3 different emotions

One example of breaking the laws of physics/matter (gravity, melting, Time, fire, etc)

One example of blending one object into another

One example of object replacement (butterflies instead of windmill blades, for example)