SUR - RE - AL - ISM a style of art and literature developed in the 20th century, stressing the subconscious or non-rational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or the exploitation of chance effects, unexpected juxtapositions, etc.

What does that mean??? 20th Century - in Europe between World Wars I and II. These artists protested against the Dada movement of the Germans (where they produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason) Surrealism is a way to combine conscious and unconscious levels of thought so completely, that dream and fantasy would be joined to the real world in "an absolute reality, a ‘ surreality’

2 Types of Surrealism 1. The Automatists Suppression of consciousness in favor of the subconscious. There was more focused on feelings. These artists felt that images should not be burdened with "meaning." This was the more popular of the two. 2. The Veristic Surrealists They wanted to represent these images as a link between the abstract spiritual realities and the real world. To these artists, the image represented the subconscious This branched into three other groups (Classical, Social, and Visionary).

Salvador Dali Salvador Dali was born as the son of a prestigious notary in the small town of Figuera in Northern Spain. Dali began to study art at the Royal Academy of Art in Madrid. He was expelled twice and never took the final examinations. His opinion was that he was more qualified than those who should have examined him. Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali i Domenech received his first drawing lessons when he was ten years old.

By 1929 Dali had found his personal style that should make him famous - the world of the unconscious that is recalled during our dreams. In 1933 Salvador Dali had his first one-man show in New York. One year later, he visited the U.S. for the first time supported by a loan of US$500 from Pablo Picasso. To evade World War II, Dali chose the U.S.A. as his permanent residence in He received international fame when three of his paintings were shown in the third annual Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928.

The hanging watches is more effective than any other distortion in The Persistence of Memory 1931 undermining our belief in a natural, rule-bound order of things. The imagery reaches into the unconscious, evoking the universal human preoccupation with time and memory. Dali himself is present, in the form of the dormant head. He claimed that the idea for the painting came to him while he was meditating upon the nature of Camembert cheese.

Sleep 1937 Dali saw sleep as a monster supported by crutches. In this fantastic representation of sleep, only the head of the dreamer is seen, against a background of dream- like images. The delicate balancing of the figure indicates that, should a single crutch be removed, the dreamer will awake. This demonstrates the fragility of the state of sleep. Dali's meticulous attention to detail creates an atmosphere of enhanced hyper-reality.

single images that change according to perception, and groups of two or more images that are not alike as subjects but have disturbing visual similarities. But in this canvas Dali has combined the two in a display of illusionism. Swans Reflecting Elephants 1937 The hallucinatory images created by Dali's 'paranoiac critical method’ are of two main kinds:

The swans and tree stumps, reflected in the water, somehow take on the appearance of elephants; yet when the picture is turned upside-down the swans are transformed into elephants and vice versa! The soft, slippery surfaces and writhing forms (even the clouds seem organic) create a distinctly uncomfortable atmosphere, apparently at odds with the presence of the prosaic, palely loitering man.

Grant Wood Grant Wood was a quiet philosopher-artist. Wood was born to Quaker parents on a small farm near Anamosa, Iowa. This experience would be the basis of his iconic images of small-town plain folk. First trained in Minneapolis and Chicago art schools, his early works were outdoor scenes combining bright colours and a loose, impressionistic style. From about 1928 until his death, Wood developed a stylized, hard-edged realism perfectly blended with characterizations of rural life. His representational paintings showed reassuring American subjects tied to long lasting myths about the perfection of agricultural life. Intentionally aimed at a Depression-era audience, Wood's work found in the local scene a means of expressing nationalistic sentiment.

These paintings shows Wood’s stylized, hard-edged realism perfectly blended with his characterizations of rural life. Spring in the Country, 1941 Stone City, Iowa

The people in the painting are representing small town folks, rather than farmers. Papa runs the local bank or lumber yard and the lady is his grown-up daughter. She is very self-righteous like her father. There is a relationship between these people and the Gothic house in the background. Although this was not meant to be satirical, the people who resent this painting are those who feel they resemble this portrayal. American Gothic 1930