surréalisme

Guillaume Apollinaire first used surréaliste in 1917 to describe a new kind of writing that transcended literal reality. André Breton, a young poet and psychiatrist who had worked in military hospitals treating shell-shocked soldiers during World War I, took up the term for his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism. The war had made conventional reality seem not just unsatisfactory but obscene — the rational world had produced the trenches. Surrealism proposed a more genuine reality beneath the surface.

Breton drew on Sigmund Freud's theories of the unconscious: the idea that beneath rational thought lay a deeper layer of desire, dream, and suppressed experience that was more truly the self. Surrealist techniques — automatic writing, exquisite corpse games, dream recording — were attempts to bypass the rational censor and access this deeper material. Salvador Dalí's melting clocks, René Magritte's bowler-hatted men with apples for faces, Max Ernst's rubbings and collages: all were attempts to make the unconscious visible.

The word réalisme had its own history: coined in French criticism in the 1850s to describe the painting of Gustave Courbet and the writing of Flaubert — art that showed the world as it actually was, without idealization. Surréalisme was a response to realism's assumption that the visible world was the real world. The sur- (above, beyond) proposed a layer of reality that realism could not reach.

Surrealism survived World War II as an artistic and cultural force longer than almost any avant-garde movement. Its influence on advertising, cinema (Luis Buñuel), literature (Borges, García Márquez), and fashion (Elsa Schiaparelli) spread the movement's logic far beyond Paris. The dream-image, the unexpected juxtaposition, the object in an impossible context: these are now reflexes of modern visual culture.