Surrealism was born in the aftermath of the First World War, when the whole of Europe was suffering from the trauma of the war, economic depression, and people's unhappiness, and a strong sense of misanthropy and pessimism pervaded the society. Artists began to deny everything, to escape from the cruel reality, and to pursue the non-existent dream. Also influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, they like to put together unrelated things without any logical and rational constraints. Striving to unify dreams with reality, they explore the intention of life and death, presenting horror, mystery and absurdity.
Salvador Dalí
He was born on May 11, 1904, in the city of Figueras, Catalonia, in northeastern Spain, and died on January 23, 1989. A Spanish surrealist painter and printmaker, he is known as the "master of contemporary art magic".
His strange, dreamlike images not only inspire the imagination and induce illusions, but also attract the visual attention of the viewer with their extraordinary power, and are known for exploring the imagery of the subconscious.
Dalí's paintings often collect dreamlike representations, some of which are directly titled "Dreams". But what distinguishes his "dreams" from those of other Surrealist painters is that Dalí created a sense of reality, and also implied certain connotations that he was particularly fond of.
Looking at Dali's paintings, you might suspect that this is the result of his addiction to psychotropic drugs. However, Dali himself had made a statement about this, saying the above quote. So, where did he get his inspiration from? Dalí had his own tricks to keep him creative. One of them involved plates and spoons. Dalí would sit in his chair and hold the spoon over the plate to take a nap. When he fell asleep and the spoon fell on the plate, the sound was enough to wake Dalí up, and he would hastily record the surreal images he dreamed up in time.
Other times, Dalí would remain upside down until he was about to pass out, which kept him in a semi-conscious state. Dalí's most famous approach is called the "Paranoiac-Critical Method". This involves trying to create a "self-induced paranoid state". This helped him to draw an irrational relationship between two unconnected objects and to describe the picture in his subconscious.
He uses the dream world as a ground to accurately depict the irrational world, and to express the panic, desire and uncertainty in his mind.
Max Ernst
Max Ernst (1891-1976) was a French painter and sculptor of German descent. Known as the "Da Vinci of Surrealism," Ernst was a leading figure in both the Dada movement and Surrealist art. His works have amazed the world with their rich and boundless imagination, their sense of the absurdity of the world, and the dreamy, poetic atmosphere drawn from Germanic Romanticism and the art of make-believe. This tireless inventor constantly renewed his expressive techniques: using collage, rubbing, topography and scratching, he devoted himself to creating a varied, colorful world of make-believe. He is known as a disruptive and innovative artist.
Ernst lived through two world wars. During World War I, he served four full years in the army, an experience he describes as "Ernst died once between August 1914 and the end of 1918. He was at the front line, experiencing the destruction of civilization and humanity. After retiring from the army, Ernst and his friends founded the Colondada group in order to challenge and dismantle, in the name of art, what he felt was the repressive side of European culture, especially Christian dogma, traditional morality and the aesthetic codes of Western classical art. This "challenge" continued from Ernst's "Dada" to the "Surrealism" he devoted himself to after arriving in Paris, and then to his later promotion of Abstract Expressionism.
Ernst creates new techniques of painting with the intention of arriving at a future that he can reach as far as possible through a new language. In his eyes, painting is never just a work on paper, dusty, it contains the process of how to form, how to think, how to present illusions and fictions on a solid. Ernst's life has been through the most chaotic, desperate and life-giving era of modern human civilization. He has remained vigorous and combative. "Creation, discovery, revelation." Whenever and wherever Ernst painted, he painted what no one had ever tried to paint.
Joan Miró
Joan Miró (1893-1983) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, potter, printmaker, and representative of surrealism. He is one of the masters of surrealist painting in the 20th century, along with Picasso and Dali. His art represents an alternative style to Surrealism. The themes of his Surrealist works are derived from memories and dreams, i.e. organic Surrealism, but also with grotesque and humorous features, including distorted forms and eccentric geometric structures. Miro believed that eroticism was the most natural, natural and emotional phenomenon, the driving force of life. He was fascinated by femininity, and it is fair to say that he spent his life exploring women and their lives. On December 25, 1983, Miró suffered a heart attack and said goodbye to his beloved wife, Bira, and daughter, Dorona, forever.
The excellence of Miró's art does not lie in his portraits or in the structure of his paintings, but in the fanciful humor of his work - that is one of the elements. Another excellence is that Miró's imaginary world is very vivid. His organic objects and beasts, even his inanimate ones, have a passionate vitality that makes them feel more real to us than what we see every day.
Miró was a very prolific painter, with a consistent and varied style. So much so that it would be difficult to trace it in general terms. Miro's early works were influenced by Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso, as well as the Fauvists, and were either characterized by extremely refined movements of color and line or by a Cubist style. In the mid-1920s, Miro explored some very difficult aspects of his new world, from the complexity of Harlequin's Carnival to the charming simplicity of works like Dog Barking at the Moon and Man Throwing a Bird a Stone. 1928 saw Miro visit the Netherlands, where he was influenced by a handful of Dutch masters. Thereafter Miró produced a series of paintings ranging from real to fantastically deformed examples, titled Dutch Interiors.
Rene Magritte
Rene Magritte (1898-1967) was one of Belgium's fanciful surrealist painters. Magritte was a painter who won by "thinking". He liked to play with mystery and words, trying to show "forbidden images", drawing from reality and maintaining a very special relationship with it. Although Magritte denies that his work is symbolic, his subjects are indeed involved and have a poetic sense of contradiction, silence and mystery. And his choice of realistic approach makes this poetic transcendence of reality even more mystified, and the ambivalence intensified. Indeed, as he says, "it shows a subversive effect".
His early surrealist works often juxtapose unrelated things in strange ways, reminiscent of Chirico's experiments a decade or so ago.
Later he devoted himself to exploring the relationship between the contained and the contained in things themselves, linking different things together in some kind of fantastic transition, such as the change from feet to shoes. He also used famous paintings to experiment with variations, replacing the figure in the Portrait of Madame Recamier by the French classicist David with a coffin.
Magritte believed that there is no "reality" seen in the world, only "reality" felt, and that the "reality" of painting is originally an illusion of the human eye, and that the artist is only illustrating it. This grotesque theory only proves that he is a supernatural artist. This is really a theory that makes people feel quite grotesque.
Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was born in 1887 in Blainville, near Rouen. Duchamp's father was a notary and had six children. Four of them were famous artists: Jacques Villon, a painter, Duchamp-Villon, a sculptor, and Suzanne Duchamp and Marcel Duchamp, also painters.
Marcel Duchamp first worked as a librarian in St. Genevieve, a means of earning a living that greatly narrowed his world of freedom. "Sitting upright, considering what he wished to do, he presented or advised those very polite inquirers with high spirits." Duchamp often made sketches for the Post de France in his early years. Between 1908 and 1910, Duchamp also made a few chatty drawings in the "manner" of the Impressionist masters. "The aim was to understand how they drew these pictures.
Duchamp made many sensational works in his life, too many to mention here. For example, "The Naked Woman Descending the Stairs", "The Bride", "The Big Glass" (also known as "The Bride is even stripped naked by the bachelors"), etc., which had a great influence on later paintings. From the point of view of conceptual art, the first one is, of course, the infamous porcelain urinal, "Fountain".
In 1915 he bought a shovel for shoveling snow and wrote on it "before the arm was broken", and in 1920 he made "The Rotating Trim". He saw all of these as works of art. In his later interviews, he said that these ready-made works were never chosen on the basis of aesthetic principles, and sometimes they were even deliberately made to contradict existing aesthetic principles and standards. They are based on visual "nothingness", without any aesthetic interest in elegance or vulgarity.
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