Surrealism and trauma
Surrealism is informed by trauma and so am I. So it is natural that I would look to this movement to understand better the context of my own making.
Dorothea Tanning
'La corde sensible'
René Magritte
Meret Oppenheim
'Breton defined Surrealism as a way to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.” He recast it as an artistic enterprise with his 1928 publication Surrealism and Painting. By then, artists such as Jean Arp, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, René Magritte, Joan Miró, and Yves Tanguy had been drawn into his orbit.
Stylistically, Surrealism ranged from the quasi-abstraction of Miró to Magritte’s deadpan realism. Originally centered in Paris, it became global in scope, spilling over to the Americas and Asia. Reacting to the carnage of World War I, the movement attacked rationalism and social decorum, upending longstanding artistic precepts and subverting conventional sexual mores with misogynistic élan. Even so, Surrealism attracted a significant cohort of female artists, among them Meret Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, Claude Cahun, and Leonora Carrington.
The Surrealists reveled in a discontinuity best summarized by a line from the 1868 novel Les Chants de Maldoror, which described a “chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” This idea became Surrealism’s credo, codified by the collaborative genre known as the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). Resembling a game of telephone, but played with drawings, cadavre exquis involved passing a piece of paper around a group of artists. Each would render part of a figure, then hide it by folding the sheet over. Other participants would follow suit, and the result when revealed was predictably disjointed.'
Like Dadaism, Surrealism was an avant-garde movement that explored the psyche and had placed strong emphasis on mental investigation. it is unsurprising that they were a response to profound changes in politics, war, revolution, and technology witnessed in the early 20th Century.
