Sur - re - al - ism (n.) -(often l.c.) a style of art and literature
developed principally in the 20th century, stressing the subconscious or nonrational
significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or the exploitation of chance effects,
unexpected juxtapositions, etc.
Surrealism was developed by the 20th-century literary and artistic
movement. The surrealist movement of visual art and literature, flourished in Europe
between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada
movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately
defied reason; but Surrealism emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression.
The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction
wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the
past and had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman
of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published "The Surrealist
Manifesto" in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious
realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be
joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality." Drawing
heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the
wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this
normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters
alike. This movement continues to flourish at all ends of the earth. Continued thought
processes and investigations into the mind produce today some of the best art ever
seen.
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