Language has been given man that he may make surrealist use of it. [Anonymous]
Surrealism is a mental automatism whereby we express by speaking , by writing etc.., the real working of the thought. But there is no control of the reason and without morale preoccupations. Gertrude Stein, in her work Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and other early writings, gives more importance to the moral side of the work than to the physical side of it. She draws up circonstances and situations that has no link with reason. Everything she said is first based on a certain reflection, or even on a reflected certainty. She talks about it as if she was just telling a story verbally, without knowing at the time she speaks what is going to be the morale of the topic. We didn't find that point of view before.
André Breton, a leader of the surrealism, was explicit in his assertion that surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.
Surrealism is often characterized only by its use of unusual, sometimes startling juxtapositions, by which it sought to trancend logic and habitual thinking to reveal deeper levels of meaning and unconscious associations. As the surrealism craves for the transcendence of the habitual thinking, Gertrude Stein craves for it too. She puts everything again in question and let the feeling remains, that everything is not at his right place in the world. Thus it was instrumental in promoting Freudian and Jungian conceptions of the unconscious mind.
As a matter of fact, Arthur Rimbaud was the precursor of the surrealism, notably with his poem The Drunken Boat :
La tempête a béni mes éveils maritimes.
The storm made bliss of my sea-borne awakenings
Plus léger qu'un bouchon j'ai dansé sur les flots
Lighter than a cork, I danced on the waves
Qu'on appelle rouleurs éternels de victimes,
Which men call eternal rollers of victims,
Dix nuits, sans regretter l'oeil niais des falots !
For ten nights, without once missing, the foolish eye of the harbor lights !
Feminists criticized the surrealistic movement because It was a really masculine movement in spite of the fact that women were present in a few paintings. They were represented as an object of desire and mystery.
Gertrude Stein, nevertheless, although she is a feminist, copes with both movements.
The Dada movement is a cultural movement ; it was an anti nationalist, provocative movement. The movement concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.
For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests.
Parnassianism refers to its distinction as the home of poetry, literature and learning. It is a poetic movement which had to point up the restraint, the reject of a social and political engagement of the author.
Main theory : Art for art ; art is useless , the aim is the beauty.
Precursors : Théophile Gautier, De Banville.
Surrealist paintings : Beyond painting
Therefore, the surrealism is opened to other forms of movements, and not only to painting. For example, it exists a few surrealist films.
Everything leads us to believe that there is a certain state of mind from which
life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable
and the incommunicable, height and depth are no longer perceived as contradictory.
[André Breton], Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929)
