surrealist art

As I've mentioned in my research before, the base of Surrealist themes, fantasies, and body figures were founded by what happened during World War I. I'm taking this time to delve into the chemical weapons used in the war and the plastic surgery/attempts at covering up the wounds.

World War I was the first war in which gas was used as a weapon. The French army was the first to employ gas, as they used 26 mm grenades filled with tear gas in August 1914. The Germans first employed the use of gas in a large-scale. They fired 18,000 artillery shells containing tear gas on the 31st of January 1915. The Germans created another first when they employed chlorine as a weapon in enemy trenches. They used it to inflict damage to the eyes, nose, throat, and lungs with high concentrations of it used to asphyxiate the enemy to death. It killed 140 English officers alone.

The most frequently used and most effective gas of World War I was mustard gas. The Germans introduced this gas by putting it into artillery shells. Mustard gas was not a killing agent but was used to disable the enemy and pollute the battlefield. Mustard gas victims had blistered skin, their eyes became sore, and they began to vomit. It caused internal and external bleeding as well as damage in the bronchial tubes, stripping off the mucous membrane. The blisters were mustard-coloured, eyes became blind and their skin became sticky and stuck together. Here is a photo of the effects of mustard gas.

*Disturbing image

There was a large increase in soldiers returning home with mutilated and disfigured faces. That was obviously due to all of the new, chemical weapons used in warfare. But this is exactly what influenced the Surrealist Artists to base their figures and paintings on. A World War I soldier was the first person to undergo plastic surgery. In my opinion, I believe that the surgical and reformation of deformed facial features in the war had a direct influence on the deconstructing then reconstructing of figures on many surrealist paintings. Here is just one example of just that:

Surrealist figurations were dominated by death. Surrealist artists looked into the concept of death so deeply; they were moved by the horrid representation of the human body - the extremely violated parts of the body. These figures were not only a result of World War I, but they were used to assault rationality and idealism. Missing, dislocated, and disproportionate body parts were used to call attention to the body as something that wasn't completely put together.

Surrealists tried their best to stray away from the human body's biological make-up and resisted the constraints of classification. There was something about the figures that separated humans from other species while destroying the inherent biological features that place humans above all other creatures. The figures are borderline human - their fleshy, molluscan bodies suggest that they belong in the lower class of the animal kingdom but somehow, they retain their appearance of being human. I personally think that is one of the key features of Surrealism and it is shown in this painting here:

Jindrich Styrsky Squid Man (Clovek-sepie) 1934 Oil on Canvas, 39 1/8 x 28 3/4"

Although this looks nothing like a human being, you can still tell that it is a human being. The name of the painting suggests that and the flesh-like colours also suggest the fact that it could be human. Nothing else about the figure looks human but it is in fact human. 

Surrealist figures embody the anonymous, powerless breed of men that emerged out of modern warfare. They capture an antiheroic, impotent state of being as they foreground sexuality and aggression. Surrealists enjoyed highly eroticizing figures with grotesque phallic imagery and seductively rotting flesh. "By confounding facial features with sexual/excretory organs, Surrealist figurations upset high and low determinations about the body." I think that the Surrealists wanted to represent that no matter how you view the human body, it is always the human body and will be sexualized because of the way we view bodies. Phallic objects are also seen is Styrsky's painting. The penis-like "squid tentacle" suggests a form of sexuality although it may not intend to. It does this because of the way human bodies are viewed and received.

Due to Surrealism's goal to transform life by promoting a broader perception of reality, they turned to real life disorders and strange occurrences. 

The Surrealist fantasies were psycho-biographical expositions and sociopolitical realities that resulted from the war. Walter Benjamin, a German literary critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist, observed that Surrealism was "concerned literally with experiences, not with theories and still less with phantasms. And these experiences are by no means limited to dreams, hours of hashish eating, or opium smoking... [Surrealist] creativity resides in a profane illumination, a materialist, anthropological inspiration."

Surrealists represented the human body by showing extreme cases of anatomical disfiguration, mutilation, and deformation. These human injuries were often seen as evidence of the irrational and the macabre but the Surrealists considered this to be something unreal and beyond reality. A large population of the physically maimed and casualties of World War I seem to have birthed popular Surrealist figures.

4,266,000 troops were wounded in World War I. Many of the wounded soldiers harboured many disabilities including: permanent disability, blindness, crippled, limbless. Others with minor injuries wore bandages, braces, artificial devices, and carried crutches. Those who had faced extreme damage to their face lived on with markings of radically reconstructed facial features.

*WARNING - Disturbing images ahead

The weapons that were developed for the war created the injuries that the great soldiers had to recover from. The new artillery created to save the countries tore men apart, completely mangling and destroying their bodies. The extreme forms of machinery such as machine guns or air raids caused shell shock, hysterical disorders, paralysis, and post-traumatic stress disorder on the majority of the soldiers who went to war. 

The majority of the Surrealists knew about the horrors of war from their own army experiences. Those who did not know learned from the war and the myths from the first-hand accounts of friends and relatives or from books and films about the war.

Surrealists were not interested in replicating or documenting the horrors of war at all. Their figures do not mirror actual war mutilations as we would think them to. They represented the anatomical deformations and the fallout of modern warfare and modern life.

Salvador Dali The Persistence of Memory (La Persistance de la memoire) 1931 Oil on canvas, 9 1/2 x 13"

Perhaps Dali's most famous painting describes exactly the deformation of modern warfare and modern life. The figures are melting; the dematerialization and devoid of a structural frame suggests that they are barely holding on for life although they are but inanimate objects. These are the exact elements that recalls the horrifying conditions of World War I.

Most people suggest that this painting could represent the trenches as described by historian Eric Leed, "The men in the trenches lived with the rats that grew fat from eating the corpses of men and animals. The smell of the dead pervaded the front lines, penetrating even the deepest living quarters. The war literature is full of surprising encounters with corpses, complaints of being unable to prevent dirt, mud, and vermin from invading the most personal spaces."

Surrealism essentially sprouted out of poet André Breton's ideas. The whole movement was led by Breton. The Surrealists wanted to overthrow the oppressive rules of modern society by demolishing all forms of rational thought. Although they didn't believe in reality principles, they believed that the subconscious mind was the "superior reality". 

Breton defines Surrealism as "Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern" I believe that this definition means that Surrealism is a product of the mind that happens without any thought. It slightly contradicts itself as the definition states that Surrealism expresses the functioning of thought. Surrealism is controlled by the thought in the absence of any control by logic. Surrealism does not care about aesthetics or morals, and it is expressed without any thought or reason.

I believe that Breton's First Surrealist Manifesto (Le Manifeste du Surrealisme 1924) tried to argue that logic and rationalism controls too much of society. He states that Surrealists are ultimately nonconformists.  He makes it clear that Surrealism can be applied to any circumstance of life and is not restricted to the arts. Dream as a reservoir of Surrealist inspiration is extremely important to Breton.

Breton's humour and tone during the whole manifesto suggests that he is still influenced by Dadaism. This could be why he emphasizes the need of anti-aestheticism so much as the Dada movement was so against aesthetics because it limited art in terms of power. He states that the artist gives up conscious control of the art-work when he or she concentrates too much on aesthetic composition. Beauty is something that comes out of unexpected of abstract subjects.

There are two directions to Surrealism: the automatist element and "poesie-peinture"

Automatist element: The unplanned compositions (although that did not matter to Magritte, Ernst, and Dali who composed their "otherwordly" compositions)

Poesie-Peinture: A poetic, visionary form of painting

The automatist element only lasted during the 1920s because outbreak artists began to compose and recreate the beauty of surrealism. The dream strategies that came out of these artists is what dominated the 1930s of Surrealist paintings.

The surrealist interest in the unconscious actually led to the skewed view that the movement disclaimed all relationship to everyday reality. Breton declared that the motivating force behind Surrealism was to conjoin the opposites, entailing a recuperation of ignored or forgotten realms.

I'm going to dive into the interesting history behind surrealism today. I took out a couple of library books in order to do this.

Surrealism seems to have originated from World War I because in the aftermath of the war, the overall concern of human nature and the future of civilization reached a high level of intensity. Western thinking was basically shifted as a whole because of the sudden realization that violence is a dominant human trait and that the human will causes destruction to a whole new scale.

Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and anthropologists such as Marcel Mauss and Lucien Levy-Bruhl began debating about human nature and civilization through their own writings. Surrealism was born through the upheavals and was deeply rooted in the confusion that resulted from them.

Surrealists attacked traditional ways of seeing and thinking. An editorial in the third issue of La Revolution surrealiste stated, "Ideas, logic, order, Truth (with a capital T), Reason - we consign everything to the nothingness of death. Watch out for your logics, gentleman, watch out, you don't know how far our hatred of logic can take us."

Max Ernst The Barbarians - 1937. Oil on Cardboard Part of a series of paintings that he completed after 1935, Max Ernst portrays the horrors and traumatization he faced while serving in the first world war.

The Surrealists saw this as not a world of pessimism but saw this as a benefit by reclaiming the suppressed reality of human expression. They confronted contradiction, difference, disjunction, multiplicity, rupture, and  incongruity. They refused to idealize and awakened a sensitivity to the arbitrary and the unusual. They brought attention to oppositions and at the same time, broke the barriers that separate and distinguish them, therefore upsetting the we/they mentality that World War I promoted.

The Surrealists celebrated the coupling of irreconcilable realities.

Salvador Dali's Morphology of Skull of Sigmund Freud, 1938, an illustration for Dali's autobiography titled "The Secret Life of Salvador Dali"

Sigmund Freud was an important influence in Dali's life. Salvador read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, which affected his artistic style. He consciously applied Freud's theories and ideas about dreams and the unconscious to his daily life. The more Freud's ideas influenced Dali, the more his paintings became shocking and taboo. The group that Dali was a member of in Paris were all very influenced by Freud. They considered him their patron saint. 

Dali met his idol in 1938. He brought a painting, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, hoping to impress Freud. During their visit, Dali created a few portrait sketches of Freud. Freud summarized their meeting "Until now I have been inclined to regard the surrealists, who have apparently adopted me as their patron saint, as complete fools. The young Spaniard, with his candid, fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, has changed my estimate. It would indeed be interesting to investigate analytically how he came to create his paintings"

The film tells the story of Chronos, the personification of time and the inability to realize his desire to love for a mortal. The scenes blend a series of surreal paintings of Dali with dancing and metamorphosis. The target production began in 1945, 58 years before its completion and was a collaboration between Walt Disney and the Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí. Salvador Dali and Walt Disney Destiny was produced by Dali and John Hench for 8 months between 1945 and 1946. Dali, at the time, Hench described as a "ghostly figure" who knew better than Dali or the secrets of the Disney film. For some time, the project remained a secret. The work of painter Salvador Dali was to prepare a six-minute sequence combining animation with live dancers and special effects for a movie in the same format of "Fantasia." Dali in the studio working on The Disney characters are fighting against time, the giant sundial that emerges from the great stone face of Jupiter and that determines the fate of all human novels. Dalí and Hench were creating a new animation technique, the cinematic equivalent of "paranoid critique" of Dali. Method inspired by the work of Freud on the subconscious and the inclusion of hidden and double images. 

Dalí said: "Entertainment highlights the art, its possibilities are endless." The plot of the film was described by. Dalí as "A magical display of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time." 

Walt Disney said it was "A simple story about a young girl in search of true love."

I found this beautiful short film as I was looking for interviews of Dali on youtube. I'm a sucker for well animated shorts and this one has some gorgeous rendering.

Everything about this film is Dali-esque; the entire story is made by Dali himself. Although this short may have been altered in order to fit into Disney standards of children's animated feature films, it still fits into the orders of surrealism. Surrealism tends to bend reality principles and this short does just what surrealism intends. I especially enjoy how the figure of the main woman changes and the involvement of love easily slips through her fingers.