Surrealists were a group of painters and artists that drew a large amount of inspiration from the potent impact of dreams. In the beginning, before this artistic movement was fully embraced, many civilized people questioned the value of these works of art. Though considered some of the more recent ground-breaking artwork yet to date by drawing on the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Jung, the Surrealist movement has not lost any of its prior effect on many a budding artist today, and influence from this art can be found in many of the works produced by the fresh artists of today.
Surrealism started as an outgrowth of another movement in the art world between the first and second World Wars. The movement was later called Dada, and was most popular before the occurrence of WWI; many works of “anti-art” were produced as a reaction to the growing restrictions of the social world around at the time. Where Dada’s artwork was produced to deliberately defy the boundaries of reasonable interpretation, Surrealism expressed a more positive goal of combining a sense of the fantastic with a realistic eye and creating a bold vision that took the idea of the surreal to the next level.
It is when reviewing the more creative and remarkable artists of this era, that one can come to realize the appeal and effect that the dreamy state of being has had on the art as a whole, and a person can come to grasp a more personal aspect to these unique interpretations of some of the issues that affect us today. Art is constantly being redefined from within, and it is solely upon the artist’s shoulders to weigh out the experience onto a canvas. It has been said that art imitates life and vice versa, but with Surrealism, the tables are certainly turned around when seen for oneself.
Artists and free-thinking individuals such as; Andre Breton who wrote the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, to famed artist Pablo Picasso whose Surrealistic success was achieved during his period of Cubism. Some of those artists who are now renowned as predecessors to the Surrealist movement began as affiliates of the Dadaism that was strongest during 1919 and the early 1920s, and some of those artists even took Surrealism to greater heights than before. Such as Marcel Duchamp who took to defying the boundaries in stride with his previous experience in the Dada movement.
Though some pieces can seem happenstance from a distance, the powerful intent of the artist to convey a new meaning through mixing up and recombining various creative influences, and even at times making new threads of thought from old ideas or objects is the goal of the artist. To defy the boundary that one has to each own their reality in life, and to put on a new sense of perspective, shaping the rest of a lifetime to come. Some of the more famed paintings are hard to find inexpensively, but buying prints can be the easiest solution to that problem.
There is still a great deal of work created today that draws heavily from the impact that Surrealist thought has made on art in general, and especially on how art can be defined on a truly individual front. Most world-renowned artists have already passed on, but their examples stand as firm points from which to gain an understanding of what Surrealism is, whether defined through a critical mind or as a sampling of how broad the area of art can be. Surrealism is an artistic expression of that state of mind that lies unexplained at the gateway of the subconscious.
