Surrealist Movement Research Articles

‘Archetypal Load of Tension’: Idiosyncratic Idioms of Surrealism Created by Aleksander Krzywobłocki and Margit Reich-Sielska in the 1930s in Lviv

This article examines the artistic contributions of two members of the ‘artes’ group, active in Lviv (Lwów during the interwar period) from 1929 to 1935: Aleksander Krzywobłocki (1901–1979) and Margit Reich-Sielska (1900–1980). Situated within the ‘artes’ milieu, which emerged as the most cohesive community among phenomena with a surrealist profile in the history of Polish art, their creative endeavors have faded from the collective memory of subsequent generations of art historians and critics, both within and beyond Poland. With the aim of elucidating the distinctive characteristics of Krzywobłocki and Sielska’s artistic attitudes, deeply rooted in the cultural landscape of interwar Galicia, this study explores their work as both manifestations of the avant-garde milieu in Lviv and contributions to the transnational surrealist movement. This examination takes a relational approach, considering their artistic output within a framework of trans-local and trans-regional connections. Drawing upon the works of various surrealists active in different European centers, I juxtapose the artistic approaches of Krzywobłocki and Sielska with other practitioners of the movement to highlight both convergences and differences in their expressions. By situating their artistic profiles within the broader modalities of surrealism as a polycentric movement and within the unique cultural context of Lviv—a city marked by its multiethnic, multicultural, and multiconfessional character—I argue that their imaginings should be classified as idiosyncratic idioms of surrealism. This hybrid expression, which developed on the peripheries of European artistic hubs, is primarily distinguished by an ‘archetypal load of tension’—a continual quest for archetypal content that has been lost in the modern world.

Aberrant Shakespeare: Ron Athey’s Excesses, Bataille’s Solar Anus, Becomings-Macbeth

l In this article we argue that Ron Athey’s performance Solar Anus is an aberrant adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in which the parodic world of abundant excess that the witches catalyze is redemptively captured and transformed through the playful, androgynous, and excessive performance of Athey, who fulfills the witches’ prophecy and continues to live on sovereignly as both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Athey is a Los Angeles-based performance artist who practices what is sometimes called “extreme performance,” exploring the limits of aesthetics and the capabilities of the human body to express both beauty and pain. His work Solar Anus draws on the works of Georges Bataille, especially his short essay-poem, Solar Anus, as well as Paul Molinier, a queer French painter and visual artist who worked on the fringes of the surrealist movement. We work through the combined sociopolitical theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology of transversal poetics and engage especially with the theories and explorations of aesthetics and sovereignty by Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in order to explore the ways in which Athey is capable of realizing the witches’ prophecy of sovereignty without being destroyed by the parodic world that they create and inhabit. Alongside the concepts of sovereignty, we examine how Bataille’s ideas of parody, sacrifice, and excess offer new ways of understanding the world of Macbeth and how excess and sovereignty both function within its porous borders.

“Poetic Insubordination”

Abstract The Surrealist movement in Paris has kept alive, since the early 1970s, the red and black flame of rebellion, the antiauthoritarian dream of radical freedom, the poetical insubordination to the powers that be, and the obstinate desire to reenchant the world. Unfortunately, most academic or mainstream accounts of surrealism take it for granted that the group dissolved itself in 1969. It is quite strange that this attitude persisted despite the very visible presence of the surrealist movement in Paris after 1970. Historians have been trying to decree the end of surrealism for years. For most of them, surrealism was nothing else than one of the innumerous artistic vanguards, such as Cubism or Futurism.

Rebels with Shackles: The Role and Representation of Claude Cahun in Surrealism Movement

The significant change of women role in surrealism movement has been noticed by many researchers. They argue that the female role is no longer considered as femme-enfant, muse or spouses and lovers (bodies of desires, and as irrational and inferior creatures), their roles have instead become multi-faceted. Claude Cahun displays the complex and multiple roles of a woman as a surreal artist. She has multiple identities (a transgender, hyper-femininity, an androgyne and a lesbian). Meanwhile, her role is not confined by gender contexts, but she goes further, and she realizes and challenges the shackles of the broader social contexts, like the oppression of minority groups, homophobia and political upheaval. By focusing on Cahun, this essay has analyzed three questions, including what restrictions these male counterparts placed on women in the surrealist group, how Cahun’s artwork rebels against the male-dominated surrealist movement, and how her work challenges broader social conventions on the role and representation of women. The essay thus contributes to understanding the significant value of the role and representation of women in surrealism. Meanwhile, they are of great significance in understanding the value and contribution of women to society, as the subjective and individual equal to men.

르네 마그리트 작품의 제목 연구

The purpose of this study is to examine the aesthetics René Magritte seeks to realize through his titles by analyzing the titles of his works in detail at the grammatical and functional levels and revealing their characteristics. As a result of consideration based on vocabulary and frequency analysis of the titles of his works, the following characteristics were discovered. 1) Morphological and syntactic characteristics: His title is not much different from other surrealist titles in that its lexical frequency is similar to that of modern French, it uses both function words and content words equally, it frequently uses idioms, and it is not long and simple. However, it is distinguished from the latter titles in that it is frequently repeated. 2) Semantic characteristics: His title prefers vocabulary related to the ‘external world’ and its ‘sense’ instead of vocabulary related to the priority values of the Surrealist movement. 3) Functional characteristics: His title is similar to other surrealist titles in that it is difficult to find emotive, conative, and metalingual functions in it, and the poetic function is strengthened while the referential function is weakened. However, it differs from the latter titles in that it realizes the aesthetics of subversion that overturns realistic perception through poetic function.

O percurso do Abjecionismo no discurso crítico de Mário Cesariny

Abjectionism has been one of the most debated strands related to the course of the Surrealist movement in Portugal. This text proposes a synthetic perspective of the main aspects evoked by this concept and presents an overview of some representative stages of Mário Cesariny’s critical thinking, in which the poet proposes different interpretations of Abjectionism. In Cesariny, Abjectionism was initially seen as a significant component of the plural Surrealist manifestation in Portugal, progressively coming to be seen, on the one hand, as an expression of a conjuncture shared by authors from different literary and artistic currents, on the other hand as a path unrelated to Surrealism and abusively appropriated by Luiz Pacheco.

Fragmentary writing in J.V. Foix’s surrealist criticism and poetry

This article addresses a little-known episode in the surrealist movement: the adventurous (if not hindered) integration of surrealism into Iberian literature and art, particularly J.V. Foix’s intervention through critical (in La Publicitat ) and poetical writing ( Gertrudis , 1927, and KRTU , 1932), and his collaboration with Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró. Foix accomplished the dynamic process of transforming and reconfiguring the meaning and function of surrealist aesthetics in Catalonia in a complex network and context. Reading Foix not only as a philological issue, but also against an international background, and from the fragmentary writing perspective, will enrich traditional approaches and provide an insight into Catalan surrealism.

Paul Delvaux: The Study of Nine Paintings by Non-Invasive Methods

Paul Delvaux (1897–1994) was a Belgian Surrealist painter known for his dreamlike and enigmatic compositions. His works often featured nude or semi-nude women and deserted urban landscapes, evoking a sense of mystery and intrigue. Delvaux’s meticulous attention to detail and masterful use of light and shadow added depth and realism to his surrealistic style, making him one of the leading figures of the Belgian Surrealist movement. Although writings about Paul Delvaux’s work are not lacking, the literature mainly deals with the stylistic and iconographic aspects of his work. Taking an interest in painting materials and the painter’s technique allows us to understand his personality and to apprehend his work in a different way. In order to collect such information, the early painted production of Delvaux was studied in situ with imaging methods (high-resolution photography, infrared reflectography and X-ray radiography) and non-invasive analytical techniques (MA-XRF and Raman spectroscopy). The results obtained for nine oil paintings produced from 1928 to 1958 are discussed in terms of the support, the preparatory layer, the preparatory drawing, the changes in composition and reuse of paintings, the pictorial layer and the dripping phenomenon.

“Talk About Complications!”: Surrealism’s Trouble with Women

Abstract: This article approaches the ‘problem’ of woman in Surrealism indirectly by way of a consideration of same-sex desire and sexual difference. For all its celebration of ‘woman’, the surrealist movement initially struggled to accommodate the experience of the feminine, which functioned primarily as a figure of difference. Indeed, the heightened affirmation of sexual difference served a dual function: it not only helped negotiate the threat of same-sex desire within the homosocial context of the surrealist group, but it also reinforced the insistent imagining of the female body as a series of fetishistic part-objects. This would have important implications on the status of women artists and writers, serving to marginalize female agency and experience. The implications of this hypothesis are explored through an analysis of the treatment of desire in the work of Max Ernst and Claude Cahun.

Y si quieres saber de mi pasado y La casa azul: Imaginación y sensibilidad surrealista en Chavela Vargas

This article analyzes the construction, representation, and meaning of the personal relationship between painter Frida Kahlo and singer Chavela Vargas in the graphic novel La casa azul (Alba 2014) by the Catalan artist Tyto Alba. I explore how Alba re-creates and interprets the relationship between these two prominent popular culture figures based on Chavela’s memoirs Y si quieres saber de mi pasado (Vargas 2002) and Frida Kahlo’s Diario. Autorretrato íntimo (Kahlo 1995). In this analysis, I found particularly relevant the role played by dreams, daydreams, and imagination—all pillars of the surrealist movement to which Alba pays homage in La casa azul—as tools in the construction of the story and, more importantly, in the creation of Chavela’s subjectivity. Ultimately, I argue that Tyto Alba construes Frida as a metaphorical mirror in which Chavela sees herself and constructs her own personal identity.

“… that which wishes to articulate itself in you”

Abstract Jewish anarchist mysticism weaves elusively through the worlds of art, politics, and religion, informing all three with the concept of do’ikayt, or “hereness.” This essay will bring together threads of the Jewish roots of the Dada and Surrealist movements as they burst into queerness with the work of Claude Cahun, William S. Burroughs, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and examine in particular the cut-up method as employed by those artists across media before examining an application of the same method to a pantheist Jewish transness through the mystical practice of gender confirmation surgery to arrive at a theory of bodily hereness. Using the writer’s own experimentation with gender and cut-up poetry to seek a nonlinear harmony with the Spinozan immanent Hashem-as-living-universe, this writing explores the rejection of not only the gender binary, but also the binary inherent in representational art to replace both with the somatic experience of fragments of the universe ricocheting off each other and being transformed by the interaction.

Will Atkin, Surrealist Sorcery: Objects, Theories and Practices of Magic in the Surrealist Movement

Will Atkin, Surrealist Sorcery: Objects, Theories and Practices of Magic in the Surrealist Movement

Surrealismo Português e Surrealismo Internacional a partir da correspondência de Mário Cesariny com Sérgio Lima, Laurens Vancrevel e Frida Vancrevel

From the end of the 1960s onwards, Mário Cesariny established a prolific dialogue with the international surrealist movement, with repercussions on the way in which the Portuguese Surrealism came to be considered. In this paper, I propose a perspective on Cesariny's critical intervention in a moment of transition in the panorama of the international surrealist movement, represented, on the one hand, by a certain decentralization in relation to the Parisian paradigm and, on the other hand, by the pluralization of surrealist groups. Cesariny's correspondence with the Brazilian Sergio Lima and with the Dutch Laurens and Frida Vancrevel are taken as a starting point, articulated with his critical and anthological activity. These epistolography contains the fundamental aspects of Cesariny's criticism of the limitations of the narrative disseminated internationally regarding the Portuguese case and its integration in the context of a critical review of Surrealism.

“World Literature” between Transcultural Poetics and Colonial Politics: Yang Chichang, Le Moulin, and Surrealism in Taiwan

This article investigates the artistic and political significance of the Le Moulin poetry society (Fengche shishe) to both Taiwan literature and world literature. Founded in 1933 in occupied Taiwan, the group consisted of Taiwanese and Japanese poets united by their aim to adopt the surrealist poetics that circulated from France via Japan. Although revisionist efforts have been made in the past two decades to integrate Le Moulin into Taiwan’s literary history, existing scholarship has largely adopted postcolonial and Sinophone frameworks. Huang Yali’s 2016 documentary, however, propounds the possibility of considering Le Moulin as world literature in Kuei-fen Chiu’s dual definition — participating in the formation of a world community of cross-cultural exchanges and opening up new literary worlds through aesthetic experimentation. This article expands Chiu’s model by contending that the Le Moulin poets’ subjugation by colonial politics and their controversial articulations of so-called “colonized mentality” were integral parts of their participation in and identification with world literature. This investigation of their political awareness and efforts to participate in the surrealist movement reveals how they unceasingly crusaded for the survival of a “world of literature” against external forces that sought to eliminate literature’s expressive potential in response to its time. Although their unilateral transculturation of French surrealism does not fit with David Damrosch’s model of translation and global circulation, Le Moulin’s contribution to the continuation and maintenance of surrealism and avant-garde poetry prompts us to reconsider and recognize the merits of works of world literature that have so far been marginalized.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Portrait of an artist at work: exploring Max Ernst’s surrealist techniques

Max Ernst was one of the most influential artists associated with both the Dada and Surrealist movements. However, until now, only few scientific studies have been devoted to his works. This paper presents the results of a multi-analytical investigation on six oil paintings, made between 1927 and 1942, belonging to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York). Through a combined art historical and scientific approach, this study aims at understanding Ernst’s painting techniques, including frottage, grattage, dripping, and decalcomania, the used materials, and the state of conservation of the artworks. Non-invasive in situ investigations were performed by means of Vis–NIR multi-spectral imaging, X-ray fluorescence, external reflection FTIR and Raman spectroscopy. Imaging analysis revealed important information about Ernst’s painting methods while the other techniques provided useful information about the ground layer, the painting materials and the presence of alteration products. Ernst’s palette discloses great freedom in his use of materials and evolution during the time. This investigation demonstrates that an integrated, non-invasive, diagnostic approach provides a thorough analysis of materials and execution techniques of Ernst’ masterworks allowing an in-depth knowledge of his highly skilled work.

Surrealism and Power in Contemporary Tunisian Art: Sculpture by AÏcha Filali and Houda Ghorbel

Surrealism and Power in Contemporary Tunisian Art:Sculpture by AÏcha Filali and Houda Ghorbel Anne Marie E. Butler (bio) INTRODUCTION Contemporary Tunisian surrealist artworks expose and subvert the interplay of productive and suppressive strategies of Tunisian political regimes that originated under the first president of the republic, HABIB BOURGUIBA (1956–1987), solidified under ZINE EL-ABIDINE BEN ALI (1987–2011), and which continue to permeate the post-2011 era.1 While these three larger eras of the modern Tunisian state are distinct, the state's multiple, interwoven parts constitute a deep entrenchment of authority that suffuses each. Aïcha Filali's Hierarchy (2000) (see fig. 1) and Houda Ghorbel's Pensées Canalisées (Channeled Thoughts, 2016) (see fig. 2) each critique state power by pointing out the realities of the Tunisian state's operations. In Hierarchy, three ceramic heads, one mounted above the next, indicate how individual bodies set in power [End Page 499] relationships remain beholden to the state apparatus. Meanwhile, Ghorbel juxtaposes ceramic heads with PVC bodies in parallel to the opposing demands of the Tunisian state and Tunisian social norms on citizens. She indicates that even post-uprising, issues of state authoritarianism still affect Tunisians' autonomy. Her assessment corresponds with a body of scholarship on political repression and dissidence in modern Tunisia, including texts by Mohamed Chamekh, Laryssa Chomiak, Abir Kréfa, and Mohamed-Salah Omri.2 Filali evaluates the Ben Ali era and Ghorbel the post-uprising moment, indicating that state power cannot be addressed merely through shifts in political power. These Tunisian artists use surrealism through the deployment of the uncanny, illogical bodily configurations, and biomorphic shapes. Such iterations disrupt the boundaries between reality and dream, conscious and subconscious. Yet, it would be a mistake to think of surrealism as wholly concerned with fantasy. Although it often suggests the merger of fantasy and reality, surrealism in fact challenges established reality. Some questioning along this line is found in Tunisian art pioneer Hatim El Mekki's approach to artmaking, which Jean Goujon describes as ceaselessly questioning the world through images.3 Tunisia can be seen as one such exploitative society where surrealism can help to expose the "pseudo-real" of the state. With its origins typically ascribed to twentieth-century Europe, surrealism may seem an incongruous choice for artists working in contemporary Tunisia. Surrealism, however, was a global ideological movement that equally prized poetry, literature, and visual culture. The Egyptian surrealist group Art and Liberty (1938 to the late 1940s), the Paris-based Arab Surrealist Movement in Exile (founded in the 1970s), and the Chicago Surrealist Group (founded in 1966) are examples of the movement's global scale. In 1939, Kamel Telmisany, a member of Art and Liberty, expressed: "[surrealism] is a movement whose most distinctive feature is the internationalism of its thought and means. Its character is not local or nationalist in any way."4 Women North African surrealist artists such as Egyptian Inji Efflatoun, another member of the Art and Liberty group, and Algerian Baya Mahieddine also provide a backdrop for the surrealist aspects of [End Page 500] Filali's and Ghorbel's works.5 Contemporary artists who subscribe to surrealism's tenets continue to transgress geographies and eras, including through a new surrealist magazine, The Room (Al Ghurfa), which features contemporary surrealist art and poetry from the Arab world and Mediterranean.6 Tunisian artists working in surrealism are not part of a contemporary or sustained surrealist movement, yet a history of surrealism exists in Tunisia. The movement is discussed in the Tunisian context in poetry and literature, for example.7 In visual art, El Mekki, Abdelaziz Gorgi, and Jellal Ben Abdallah, members of the École de Tunis (1936–1956) under the French protectorate, each exhibit surrealist styles in their painting.8 French surrealism touched Tunisia directly through French surrealist poet and (later exiled) member of André Breton's group Philippe Soupault, who directed Radio Tunis from 1937 to 1940. Importantly, a group of intellectuals operating in Tunis during the interwar period, Taht Essour (Under the Ramparts), comprised what may have been the only organized group to align itself with surrealist ideals. At its core, surrealism as an ideology and an ontology...

Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood by David Hopkins

Reviewed by: Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood by David Hopkins Abigail Susik Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood. David Hopkins. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021. Pp. 352. $50.00 (hardcover). The 59th Venice Biennale, which opened in April 2022, announced that its title, The Milk of Dreams, was taken from a notebook of children's stories and drawings called Leche del sueño made in Mexico by the surrealist Leonora Carrington. "Carrington's stories describe a world set free, brimming with possibilities," said Biennale curator Cecilia Alemani, referring to the metamorphosed characters that Carrington created during the second half of the 1950s, such as the boy "Headless John," who has wings in place of ears and a head that detaches and gleefully flies away.1 However, Biennale organizers also clarified that they selected Carrington's notebook, made as a gift for her own children, because it is an "allegory of a century that imposed intolerable pressure on the individual" (da Silva, "Venice Biennale"). If the Venice Biennale's embrace of surrealism (via Carrington) as somehow emblematic of both the past and present can be seen as an indication of surrealism's growing cultural currency in the years leading up to its centenary in 2024, then a new and expansively erudite study by art historian David Hopkins can help us get to the bottom of what exactly such cultural ascendancy for surrealism means. Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood insightfully confronts [End Page 677] surrealism's insistent pairing of the promise of youth and childhood with the various struggles and compromises that besiege adulthood, just as surrealism itself predicated the transformative power of the marvelous upon the need to overcome the limitations of modern life. The photograph on the cover of Dark Toys evokes something of the fraught nature of surrealism's investment in childhood that Hopkins unflinchingly addresses in his account. In a snapshot taken in Paris in 1938, Max Ernst faces us, thrusting one leg over an enormous antique rocking horse belonging to his lover, Leonora Carrington, who owned it as a child. This was the same rocking horse that found its way into paintings such as Carrington's Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse), also from this period. Just a year later, Ernst and Carrington would be torn apart by the outbreak of World War II, and following a series of horrific traumas, Carrington eventually settled in Mexico, where she would create the children's notebook, Leche del sueño, some fifteen years later. Yet, these examples from Carrington's life and oeuvre tell just part of the story of surrealism's fixation on the kinds of childish things that often bespeak profound loss or troubling memories. Dark Toys, on the contrary, unleashes an armada of compelling queries related to this subject. Hopkins doesn't shy away from the mixed emotions of melancholy, joy, inhibition, and desire that besiege the surrealist attraction to childhood and its baubles, nor from the complex individual and collective histories that underpin the movement's valorization of the juvenile. In seven chapters investigating an abundant array of subjects related to surrealism and childhood in Europe, Britain, and the United States, Hopkins adroitly establishes the historical and theoretical foundations for surrealism's obsession, and reveals its parameters in the works of surrealist or surrealist-adjacent artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Bellmer, Joseph Cornell, and Helen Levitt, as well as a number of countercultural and what he calls "late surrealist" manifestations in Pop and contemporary art since the 1960s (239). The final three chapters and a concluding coda break away from the history of the surrealist movement to assess post-1945 extensions of themes that preoccupy Hopkins throughout the book, such as nostalgia, historicity, miniaturization, collecting, and traumas of violence or abuse, in the work of artists Eduardo Paolozzi, Louise Bourgeois, Martin Sharp, Claes Oldenburg, Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Helen Chadwick, Mike Kelley, Susan Hiller, Wendy McMurdo, and others. Given that Dark Toys consists of a series of surrealist case studies spanning from the 1920s to the mid–1940s, followed by a comparative exploration of the explicit...

BIRTH OF A SURREAL IMAGE IN ATTRIBUTIVE CONSTRUCTIONS

Introduction. The article focuses on the problems of the surreal images in the poetry of David Gascoigne – one of the leaders of surrealist movement in Great Britain.Surrealist image remains a complex phenomenon with weird, fantastic, dream-like qualities. To create surreality, it must conform to rigid criteria of juxtaposing distant realities.Purpose of this paper is to define the types of semantic connections between the elements in the adjective/participle-noun constructions in Gascoigne’s poetry and to analyze the linguistic mechanisms of creating a surreal image.Methods. The research was carried out by means of the methods of structural, semantic and contextual analysis.Results. Despite the fact that British surrealism was less automatic than the French original, the poems of David Gascoyne show the avant-garde tendency to the liberation of the language from the established norms and freeing the poems of narrative contexts. Reading surrealist poetry involves constant and systematic decoding of strange, sometimes absurd, often violent images.The paper looks at various types of adjective-noun constructions in Gascoigne’s poetic collection created both in accordance with the system of the language and by its violation, and analyses the ways of rendering the unconscious and creating the surreality.Conclusions. Analyses of adjective/participle-noun combinations shows the mechanisms of image creation the poet uses in his works – expressions with literal meaning in inappropriate, metaphorical, hallucinatory contexts where they acquire new semantic shades of meaning, and combinations of lexemes that belong to incompatible semantic groups. The most complicated surrealist images are born of the interlocking of several tropes or are the product of the poet’s appeal to dream-like states and his contacts with the artists. The links of meaning in these wordcombinations are hard to find, which doesn’t lead to the destruction of the image but inspires readers’ spontaneous associations.

Painting and Poetry in the Theoretical Writings and Ecfrastic Poetry of the Surrealist Ūrḫān Muyassar

This contribution aims to explore the relation between painting and poetry in the thought and in the poetic production of the Syrian poet Ūrḫān Muyassar. The first part of the study offers an overview of the relationship between painting and poetry, with particular reference to the reflections both within the Arab-Islamic culture and within the surrealist movement. In the second part, the focus shifts to Muyassar. After a brief introduction on the poet, the analysis first takes into consideration his theoretical contribution on the relationship between painting and poetry, then the poetic one, through three examples of ekphrastic poems.