Do You Know What’s Really Surreal?

…and do you know your Veristic Surrealism from your Automatist or Organic? A brief introduction to the first major movement in Postmodern art.

Surrealism grew directly out of the ideas and attitudes of Dada. The earlier movement had formed in 1916 and many artists associated with Dada went on to become major figures within the Surrealist movement, including Max Ernst, Man Ray, Jean Arp, Francis Picabia…

The main features of Dada that fed into Surrealism were:

• the re-assigning of new meaning to everyday objects,
• a disregard for accepted aesthetic,
• the rejection of rationalism,
• the use of confrontation,
• shock tactics and humour.

The Surrealists also thought of themselves as revolutionary, and later went on to demand that art be ‘magical’ and should transcend both religion and politics, thus echoing views first popularised by Der Blaue Reiter.

The main features of Surrealism that differentiated it from Dada were a conscious intellectualism, a fascination with Marxism, Freudian psychology, Occult philosophies and with cutting-edge physics. The Surrealists were also driven by the desire to make our private realities public… and to make art that was more than it seemed, art that in some way could question and ultimately transcend ‘reality’.