Discourse – Surrealism

Automatic Drawing, 1924. Andre Masson

Surrealism developed at the close of World War One. The movements leader, Andre Breton had been a practising Dadaist throughout the war. Surrealist key principles encouraged complete freedom of thought by tapping into subconsciousness; recording ideas and dreams through automatism and games. The purpose of Surrealist games such as cut up and exquiste corpse was to remove any form of conscious control from creative works.

Dali, Picasso and Marcel Ducamp were amongst the artists who practised automatic drawing. Many paintings began by the use of this method, once a form became visible within the image it was developed. As discussed in my post Surrealist Typography I think that it is arguable that the process can be entirely automatic – having experimented with this technique myself I feel that there does need to be some intervention in order for the image to be visually interesting. Pioneer of automatic drawing Andre Masson admitted that he often incorporated both states of consciousness in his work.

Surrealism’s influence is evident in the work of artist Brian Schorn, who I have mentioned in earlier discourse post Émigré. Like Breton, Schorn holds the same fascination for body parts; both have a history within medicine.

References

http://www.gosurreal.com/history.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism

http://tashcarter.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/surrealist-typography/

http://tashcarter.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/discourse-emigre/

Image taken from

http://www.all-art.org/art_20th_century/masson2.html