Surrealism

Those poets, intellectuals, and European artists, many of them Marxists, who in 1924 were attracted to the magazine 'La Revolution Surrealiste' and to Andre Breton, recognized that the time had come to liberate expressive form, to release the world of the subconscious, of dreams and of 'pure psychic automatism'. They were willing to give shape to their nightmares, paranoia, suppressed eroticism, and to the dark side of the mind. The 'surrealism' defined by Breton was 'outside all...
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Those poets, intellectuals, and European artists, many of them Marxists, who in 1924 were attracted to the magazine 'La Revolution Surrealiste' and to Andre Breton, recognized that the time had come to liberate expressive form, to release the world of the subconscious, of dreams and of 'pure psychic automatism'. They were willing to give shape to their nightmares, paranoia, suppressed eroticism, and to the dark side of the mind. The 'surrealism' defined by Breton was 'outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations. 'Humour, extravagance, cruelty and anguish present in disturbing metamorphoses recur in the poetic outpourings of Eluard and Aragon, in the plays of Artaud, or the cine poems of Bunuel and Cocteau, as in the art of Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali, Paul Delavaux, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro, Jean (Hans) Arp, Henry Moore, Man Ray. And while it is easy enough to trace the beginnings of literary surrealism to the death of Dada, it is harder to trace its eclipse: the liberating effects of Surrealism were still enjoyed by the generation of artists following the second world war when action painting and the informal universe offered new horizons to explore. It helped shape the spirit of May 1968, when written large on the walls of Paris and elsewhere was the slogan 'All power to the imagination' echoing the speech made by Andre Breton in autumn 1942 to Yale University: 'Surrealism was born to affirm unlimited faith in the genius of youth'.