Journey into Dream and the Night

On the history and principles of Surrealism.

To New and Uncharted Lands

The shaking of the Newtonian worldview had repercussions in late 19th-century art; disillusioned by Positivist natural sciences and the primacy of reason, the Symbolists were searching the inner world for a new foundation for their worldview. Artists interested in occultism and spiritualism investigated the human mind: fears and fantasies, delusions and dreams. While these “investigations” grew out from the legacy of Romanticism, they were also influenced by the medicine of the time. One of these influences was the lectures of Jean-Martin Charcot held in the 1880s at la Salpêtrière, the psychiatric hospital of Paris. Charcot was interested in art, and his lectures included demonstrations where he induced hysterical fits in his young patients. Making use of suggestion and hypnosis, these performances were theatrical, exaggerated and endowed with visual expressiveness.

Charcot’s lectures were invaluable for Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, but they also inspired many artists, including Guy de Maupassant, whose works include poetic, yet realistic depictions of hysteria and the magnetic powers of the unconscious. Charcot’s lectures were important also for those who had fought in World War I – for young men for whom the demonstrations had become reality and who, having lost so many utopias, saw art as the sole life-transforming power. One of this group of young men was André Breton, a student of medicine born in 1896 who worked in military hospitals – including a neuro-psychiatric ward headed by Raoul Leroy, a former assistant of Charcot’s. Another famous member of the group was Breton’s Dadaist-Surrealistic “hero”, the war-wounded Jacques Vaché, the personification of the man rebelling against society and its values, a poet for whom delusions and hallucinations were the only foundation of life. Vaché died of opium poisoning in 1919, but Breton, adulating the poetics of Vaché’s delusional texts, became the leader of the Surrealists.

Change Life – Change the World

The early years of Surrealism, from 1919 to 1925, are characterised as the intuitive stage of Surrealism, when the writers and poets who had gathered round the journal Littérature distanced themselves from Dadaism that had so eloquently spoken to them during the War. Fed up with the loud provocation and lack of programmatic approach in Dada, the young artists saw in Surrealism an opportunity for resolving the cardinal problems of life. In the first phase, painters also joined in the core that had gathered round Breton. The group’s first exhibition was held in Paris in 1925. It included work by Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, André Masson and Pablo Picasso, as well as Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, much admired by the Surrealists. The group grew later on and its composition changed for reasons both internal and external, but above all because its emphasis on the freedom of the individual made Surrealism a much broader movement than the traditional artistic genres. Its ideas touched upon the entire spectrum of life and man’s relationship to reality. The Surrealists wanted to dissolve the boundary between art and life, claiming that the primary function of art was to investigate humanity and reveal the mystery of life. Calling into question the social conventions of bourgeois society, the Surrealists discovered in art a field where they could express themselves without fear.

The principles of Surrealism were presented by Breton in the Surrealist Manifesto published in 1924. However, he had applied automatic writing – unconscious dictation liberated from the yoke of language and reason, and thereby also of logic and causality – already in the early 1920s in his book Les champs magnétiques (Magnetic Fields). The Manifesto, too, demonstrates Breton’s desire to return to the roots of poetic imagination and his belief in the creativity of unconscious mental processes, belief in “the higher reality of certain hitherto neglected forms of association, in the omnipotence of the dream”, a belief in chance and intuition.

The first phase of Surrealism was characterised by searching: explorations into the unknown self. Surrealists studied psychoanalysis and tried it in practice, seeking the total liberation of the inner powers of man, the dissolution of all forms of external and internal control. They sought the borderline state between sleep and wakefulness, action that spontaneously and randomly combines different realities, images and symbols, and which also creates something new, alters life. They were interested in everything that departed from the preconceived order of events, everything where the random and the surprising could confuse and open up a link to the absurd in life. And they believed that the new, absolute reality, surreality, was part of reality and was enabled in the merging of sleep and wakefulness as the two slide into each other.

The second phase of Surrealism began in 1926. It was linked with the war in the former French colony of Morocco, a war on which the Surrealists, too, had to take a stand. It also strengthened the Surrealists’ consciousness of the position of the individual as a part of different power structures. Changing of life would seem to require the changing of social structures first. The movement became politicised; some Surrealists joined the Communist Party and, following the exhortation of Marx to change the world, substituted social utopias for their personal ones. Breton did not give up the basic ideas of Surrealism, however, refusing to abandon the issues of dream, desire, mad love, convulsive beauty, the wonderful, human language and its liberation. But he did give up the attempt to unite art and politics.

It is estimated that the second phase of Surrealism continued to the mid 1930s, when the core of the Surrealists led by Breton had detached itself from the Marxist front. Political tensions notwithstanding, the 1930s was an artistically active and expansive time, and the international exhibition of Surrealism held in Paris towards the end of the decade did, in fact, already augur the second phase of the movement. However, the development was cut off by World War II breaking out in 1939.

The Surrealists, who returned to Paris from exile in the USA, organised two more international shows (1947 and 1959-60), but the movement founded by Breton was no longer able to renew itself. The official history of the movement continues to 1969, but in practice it was buried with André Breton in 1966.

Ulla Vihanta
Director of the Central Art Achive