's
Woman with Her Throat Cut, 1932 (cast 1949),
Museum of Modern Art, New York City The movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games, discussed the theories of Surrealism, and developed a variety of
techniques such as
automatic drawing. Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as
frottage,
grattage and
decalcomania. Soon more visual artists became involved, including
Giorgio de Chirico,
Max Ernst,
Joan Miró,
Francis Picabia,
Yves Tanguy,
Salvador Dalí,
Luis Buñuel,
Alberto Giacometti,
Valentine Hugo,
Méret Oppenheim,
Toyen, and
Kansuke Yamamoto. Later, after the
second World War,
Enrico Donati, Vinicius Pradella and Denis Fabbri became involved as well. Though Breton admired
Pablo Picasso and
Marcel Duchamp and courted them to join the movement, they remained peripheral. More writers also joined, including former Dadaist
Tristan Tzara,
René Char, and
Georges Sadoul. . Automatic Drawing. 1924. Ink on paper, 23.5 × 20.6 cm.
Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1925 an autonomous Surrealist group formed in Brussels. The group included the musician, poet, and artist
E. L. T. Mesens, painter and writer
René Magritte,
Paul Nougé,
Marcel Lecomte, and
André Souris. In 1927 they were joined by the writer
Louis Scutenaire. They corresponded regularly with the Paris group, and in 1927 both Goemans and Magritte moved to Paris and frequented Breton's circle. has the figure turned away from the viewer, and the juxtaposition of a bust with glasses and a fish as a relief defies conventional explanation. He was also a writer whose novel
Hebdomeros presents a series of dreamscapes with an unusual use of punctuation, syntax, and grammar designed to create an atmosphere and frame its images. His images, including set designs for the
Ballets Russes, would create a decorative form of Surrealism, and he would be an influence on the two artists who would be even more closely associated with Surrealism in the public mind: Dalí and Magritte. He would, however, leave the Surrealist group in 1928. In 1924, Miró and Masson applied Surrealism to painting. The first Surrealist exhibition,
La Peinture Surrealiste, was held at Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. It displayed works by Masson,
Man Ray,
Paul Klee, Miró, and others. The show confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts (though it had been initially debated whether this was possible), and techniques from Dada, such as
photomontage, were used. The following year, on March 26, 1926, Galerie Surréaliste opened with an exhibition by Man Ray. Breton published
Surrealism and Painting in 1928 which summarized the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the 1960s.
Surrealist literature The first Surrealist work, according to leader Breton, was
Les Chants de Maldoror, and the first work written and published by his group of
Surréalistes was
Les Champs Magnétiques (May–June 1919).
Littérature contained automatist works and accounts of dreams. The magazine and the portfolio both showed their disdain for literal meanings given to objects and focused rather on the undertones; the poetic undercurrents present. Not only did they give emphasis to the poetic undercurrents, but also to the connotations and the overtones which "exist in ambiguous relationships to the visual images." Because Surrealist writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize their thoughts and the images they present, some people find much of their work difficult to parse. This notion however is a superficial comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton's initial emphasis on automatic writing as the main route toward a higher reality. But—as in Breton's case—much of what is presented as purely automatic is actually edited and very "thought out". Breton himself later admitted that automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and other elements were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of visual artists in the movement forced the issue, since automatic painting required a rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus, such elements as collage were introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling juxtapositions as revealed in
Pierre Reverdy's poetry. And—as in Magritte's case (where there is no obvious recourse to either automatic techniques or collage)—the very notion of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation in and of itself. Surrealism was meant to be always in flux—to be more modern than modern—and so it was natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new challenges arose. Artists such as Max Ernst and his surrealist collages demonstrate this shift to a more modern art form that also comments on society. Surrealists revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym
Comte de Lautréamont, and for the line "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", and
Arthur Rimbaud, two late 19th-century writers believed to be the precursors of Surrealism. Examples of Surrealist literature are Artaud's
Le Pèse-Nerfs (1926), Aragon's ''
Irene's Cunt'' (1927), Péret's
Death to the Pigs (1929), Crevel's
Mr. Knife Miss Fork (1931),
Sadegh Hedayat's
The Blind Owl (1937), and Breton's
Sur la route de San Romano (1948).
La Révolution surréaliste continued publication into 1929 with most pages densely packed with columns of text, but which also included reproductions of art, among them works by de Chirico, Ernst, Masson, and Man Ray. Other works included books, poems, pamphlets, automatic texts and theoretical tracts.
Surrealist films Early films by Surrealists include: • ''
Entr'acte'' by
René Clair (1924) •
The Seashell and the Clergyman ('''') by
Germaine Dulac, scenario by Antonin Artaud (1928) • ''
L'Étoile de mer'' by
Man Ray (1928) •
Un Chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí (1929) • ''
L'Âge d'Or'' by Buñuel and Dalí (1930) •
The Blood of a Poet ('''') by Jean Cocteau (1930) •
Destino by
Walt Disney and
Salvador Dalí (later completed by
Walt Disney Animation Studios) (2003)
Surrealist photography Famous Surrealist photographers are the French
Dora Maar, the American
Man Ray, the French/Hungarian
Brassaï, French
Claude Cahun and the Dutch
Emiel van Moerkerken. In Japan (see
Surrealism in Japan), the 1937 exhibition
Kaigai Chōgenjitsushugi Sakuhin Ten (
Exhibition of Overseas Surrealist Works)—described as Japan’s first Surrealism “international” exhibition—consisted largely of photographs, many of them reproductions of Surrealist paintings and objects. Surrealist photography also influenced avant-garde circles there; for example, the Japanese poet and photographer
Kansuke Yamamoto participated in the
Nagoya Photo Avant-Garde.
Surrealist theatre The word
surrealist was first used by Apollinaire to describe his 1917 play
Les Mamelles de Tirésias ("The Breasts of Tiresias"), which was later
adapted into an opera by
Francis Poulenc.
Roger Vitrac's
The Mysteries of Love (1927) and
Victor, or The Children Take Over (1928) are often considered the best examples of Surrealist theatre, despite his expulsion from the movement in 1926. The plays were staged at the
Theatre Alfred Jarry, the theatre Vitrac co-founded with
Antonin Artaud, another early Surrealist who was expelled from the movement. Following his collaboration with Vitrac, Artaud would extend Surrealist thought through his theory of the
Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud rejected the majority of Western theatre as a perversion of its original intent, which he felt should be a mystical, metaphysical experience. Instead, he envisioned a theatre that would be immediate and direct, linking the unconscious minds of performers and spectators in a sort of ritual event, Artaud created in which emotions, feelings, and the metaphysical were expressed not through language but physically, creating a mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely related to the world of dreams. The Spanish playwright and director
Federico García Lorca, also experimented with surrealism, particularly in his plays
The Public (1930),
When Five Years Pass (1931), and
Play Without a Title (1935). Other surrealist plays include Aragon's
Backs to the Wall (1925).
Gertrude Stein's opera
Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938) has also been described as "American Surrealism", though it is also related to a theatrical form of
cubism.
Surrealist music In the 1920s several composers were influenced by Surrealism, or by individuals in the Surrealist movement. Among them were
Bohuslav Martinů,
André Souris,
Erik Satie,
Francis Poulenc, and
Edgard Varèse, who stated that his work
Arcana was drawn from a dream sequence. Souris in particular was associated with the movement: he had a long relationship with Magritte, and worked on
Paul Nougé's publication
Adieu Marie. Music by composers from across the twentieth century have been associated with surrealist principles, including
Pierre Boulez,
György Ligeti,
Mauricio Kagel,
Olivier Messiaen, and
Thomas Adès.
Germaine Tailleferre of the French group
Les Six wrote several works which could be considered to be inspired by Surrealism, including the 1948 ballet
Paris-Magie (scenario by
Lise Deharme), the operas
La Petite Sirène (book by Philippe Soupault) and
Le Maître (book by Eugène Ionesco). Tailleferre also wrote popular songs to texts by Claude Marci, the wife of Henri Jeanson, whose portrait had been painted by Magritte in the 1930s. Even though Breton by 1946 responded rather negatively to the subject of music with his essay
Silence is Golden, later Surrealists, such as
Paul Garon, have been interested in—and found parallels to—Surrealism in the improvisation of
jazz and the
blues. Jazz and blues musicians have occasionally reciprocated this interest. For example, the
1976 World Surrealist Exhibition included performances by
David "Honeyboy" Edwards. ==Surrealism and international politics==