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Surrealist films
Main article: List of surrealist films

Early films by Surrealists include:

* Entr'acte by René Clair (1924)
* La Coquille et le clergyman by Germaine Dulac, screenplay by Antonin Artaud (1928)
* L'Étoile de mer by Man Ray (1928)
* Un chien andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí (1929)
* L'Âge d'Or by Buñuel and Dalí (1930)
* Le sang d'un poète by Jean Cocteau (1930)

[edit] Music by Surrealists
Main article: Surrealist music

In the 1920s several composers were influenced by Surrealism, or by individuals in the Surrealist movement. Among them were Bohuslav Martinů, André Souris, and Edgard Varèse, who stated that his work Arcana was drawn from a dream sequence.[citation needed] Souris in particular was associated with the movement: he had a long relationship with Magritte, and worked on Paul Nouge's publication Adieu Marie.

Germaine Tailleferre of the French group Les Six wrote several works which could be considered to be inspired by Surrealism[citation needed], including the 1948 Ballet Paris-Magie (scenario by Lise Deharme), the Operas La Petite Sirène (book by Philippe Soupault) and Le Maître (book by Eugène Ionesco).[citation needed] Tailleferre also wrote popular songs to texts by Claude Marci, the wife of Henri Jeanson, whose portrait had been painted by Magritte in the 1930s.

Even though Breton by 1946 responded rather negatively to the subject of music with his essay Silence is Golden, later Surrealists, such as Paul Garon, have been interested in—and found parallels to—Surrealism in the improvisation of jazz and the blues. Jazz and blues musicians have occasionally reciprocated this interest. For example, the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition included performances by "Honeyboy" Edwards.

Writing continues
René Magritte's "This is not a pipe." The Treachery of Images 1928-9

The first Surrealist work, according to leader Breton, was Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Magnétiques) (May–June 1919). Littérature contained automatist works and accounts of dreams. The magazine and the portfolio both showed their disdain for literal meanings given to objects and focused rather on the undertones, the poetic undercurrents present. Not only did they give emphasis to the poetic undercurrents, but also to the connotations and the overtones which "exist in ambiguous relationships to the visual images."

Because Surrealist writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize their thoughts and the images they present, some people find much of their work difficult to parse. This notion however is a superficial comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton's initial emphasis on automatic writing as the main route toward a higher reality. But—as in Breton's case—much of what is presented as purely automatic is actually edited and very "thought out". Breton himself later admitted that automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and other elements were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of visual artists in the movement forced the issue, since automatic painting required a rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus such elements as collage were introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling juxtapositions as revealed in Pierre Reverdy's poetry. And—as in Magritte's case (where there is no obvious recourse to either automatic techniques or collage)—the very notion of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation in and of itself. Surrealism was meant to be always in flux—to be more modern than modern—and so it was natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new challenges arose.

Surrealists revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont and for the line "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella," and Arthur Rimbaud, two late 19th century writers believed to be the precursors of Surrealism.

Examples of Surrealist literature are Crevel's Mr. Knife Miss Fork (1931), Aragon's Irene's Cunt (1927), Breton's Sur la route de San Romano (1948), Péret's Death to the Pigs (1929), and Artaud's Le Pese-Nerfs (1926).

La Révolution surréaliste continued publication into 1929 with most pages densely packed with columns of text, but also included reproductions of art, among them works by de Chirico, Ernst, Masson, and Man Ray. Other works included books, poems, pamphlets, automatic texts and theoretical tracts.

Expansion
André Masson. Automatic Drawing. 1924. Ink on paper, 23.5 x 20.6 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games, discussed the theories of Surrealism, and developed a variety of techniques such as automatic drawing. Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage and decalcomania.

Soon more visual artists joined Surrealism including Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Enrico Donati, Alberto Giacometti, Valentine Hugo, Méret Oppenheim, Toyen, Grégoire Michonze, and Luis Buñuel. Though Breton admired Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and courted them to join the movement, they remained peripheral.[4] More writers also joined, including former Dadaist Tristan Tzara, René Char, and Georges Sadoul.

In 1925 an autonomous Surrealist group formed in Brussels. The group included the musician, poet, and artist E.L.T. Mesens, painter and writer René Magritte, Paul Nougé, Marcel Lecomte, and André Souris. In 1927 they were joined by the writer Louis Scutenaire. They corresponded regularly with the Paris group, and in 1927 both Goemans and Magritte moved to Paris and frequented Breton's circle.[3] The artists, with their roots in Dada and Cubism, the abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky, Expressionism, and Post-Impressionism, also reached to older "bloodlines" such as Hieronymus Bosch, and the so-called primitive and naive arts.

André Masson's automatic drawings of 1923, are often used as the point of the acceptance of visual arts and the break from Dada, since they reflect the influence of the idea of the unconscious mind. Another example is Giacometti's 1925 Torso, which marked his movement to simplified forms and inspiration from preclassical sculpture.

However, a striking example of the line used to divide Dada and Surrealism among art experts is the pairing of 1925's Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person (Von minimax dadamax selbst konstruiertes maschinchen)[5] with The Kiss (Le Baiser)[6] from 1927 by Ernst. The first is generally held to have a distance, and erotic subtext, whereas the second presents an erotic act openly and directly. In the second the influence of Miró and the drawing style of Picasso is visible with the use of fluid curving and intersecting lines and colour, whereas the first takes a directness that would later be influential in movements such as Pop art.
Giorgio de Chirico The Red Tower (La Tour Rouge) (1913).

Giorgio de Chirico, and his previous development of metaphysical art, was one of the important joining figures between the philosophical and visual aspects of Surrealism. Between 1911 and 1917, he adopted an unornamented depictional style whose surface would be adopted by others later. The Red Tower (La tour rouge) from 1913 shows the stark colour contrasts and illustrative style later adopted by Surrealist painters. His 1914 The Nostalgia of the Poet (La Nostalgie du poete)[7] has the figure turned away from the viewer, and the juxtaposition of a bust with glasses and a fish as a relief defies conventional explanation. He was also a writer whose novel Hebdomeros presents a series of dreamscapes with an unusual use of punctuation, syntax, and grammar designed to create an atmosphere and frame around its images. His images, including set designs for the Ballets Russes, would create a decorative form of Surrealism, and he would be an influence on the two artists who would be even more closely associated with Surrealism in the public mind: Dalí and Magritte. He would, however, leave the Surrealist group in 1928.

In 1924, Miro and Masson applied Surrealism to painting, explicitly leading to the La Peinture Surrealiste exhibition of 1925, held at Gallerie Pierre in Paris, and displaying works by Masson, Man Ray, Klee, Miró, and others. The show confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts (though it had been initially debated whether this was possible), and techniques from Dada, such as photomontage, were used. The following year, on March 26, 1926 Galerie Surréaliste opened with an exhibition by Man Ray. Breton published Surrealism and Painting in 1928 which summarized the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the 1960s.

Founding of the movement

World War I scattered the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and in the interim many involved themselves with Dada, believing that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought the terrifying conflict upon the world. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued.

During the war, André Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from shell-shock. He met the young writer Jacques Vaché and felt that Vaché was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry, and came to admire the young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, "In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most."

Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. They began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault delved deeper into automatism and wrote The Magnetic Fields in 1919. They continued writing, gathered more artists and writers into the group, and came to believe that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada attack on prevailing values. In addition to Breton, Aragon, and Soupault, the group expanded to include Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise, Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy.
Cover of the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, December 1924.

As they developed their philosophy they felt that while Dada rejected categories and labels, Surrealism would advocate the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination according to the Hegelian Dialectic. They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse.

Freud's work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. However, they embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness. Later, Salvador Dalí explained it as: "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad."

The group aimed to revolutionize human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects, by freeing people from what they saw as false rationality, and restrictive customs and structures. Breton proclaimed, the true aim of Surrealism is "long live the social revolution, and it alone!" To this goal, at various times Surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism.

In 1924 they declared their philosophy and intentions in the first "Surrealist Manifesto." That same year they established the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and began publishing the journal La Révolution surréaliste.

Giorgio de Chirico
(1888-1978)
- One of the most influential Surrealist artists in history is Giorgio de Chirico. Born in Greece to Italian parents in 1888, de Chirico was the founder of the Metaphysical Art movement.
In 1906, following a stint in Athens and Florence to study art, de Chirico entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany. He returned to Milan, Italy in 1909, but soon after returned to Florence, where he began painting his series of Metaphysical Town Squares. The first in the series was The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, inspired by the feelings de Chirico had when visiting Piazza Santa Croce. de Chirico was also incredibly moved by Turin during a short stop there on his way to Paris in 1911. He met up with his brother Andrea in Paris, and was introduced through his brother to Pierre Laprade, who helped de Chirico get an exhibit at the Salon d’Automne. It was there that he sold his first painting, and was noticed by both Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire introduced de Chirico to art dealer Paul Guillame, and he signed a contract with Guillame for several works.
de Chirico returned to Italy after the outbreak of the First World War, enlisting in the Italian army. He was deemed unfit for combat and was assigned to work at the hospital in Ferrara. In 1918, he transferred to Rome, and began a period of great popularity with his exhibits. He married Russian ballerina Raissa Gurievich in 1924 in Rome, and the couple moved to Paris. The marriage was short lived, and soon after, de Chirico met and married Isabella Pakszwer Far. The couple moved back to Italy, settling in Rome in 1944.
Late in his life, de Chirico returned to a more classic style of painting, and was negatively reviewed by critics. As a result of the negative criticism, de Chirico, who greatly appreciated his classic, more mature style, began to deny the authenticity of some of his early paintings. He also painted his own “forgeries”, and it was during this time that he began declaring these works as forgeries in actual terms.
De Chirico had a strong influence on many of the surrealist movement’s most prominent artists, including Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst and others. He also influenced other artistic endeavors, including those of Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni.
Giorgio de Chirico died on November 20, 1978 in Rome. He was laid to rest at the Monumental Church of St. Francis at Ripa in Rome.

Joan Miro
(1893-1983)
- Referred to as the "most Surrealist of us all" by Andrй Breton, Joan Mirу i Ferrа was born on April 20, 1893 in Barcelona. Resisting being pigeon holed as an artist in a particular style, it is his use of sexual symbols and a great interest in automatism that earned him recognition as a surrealist artist. Some of his work, however, shows inspiration from the Dada movement.
Miro studied at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts, and then moved to Paris in 1923. It was there that he met German surrealist Max Ernst, and together they designed several pieces for Sergei Diaghilev, a Russian art critic. It was this collaboration that produced the surrealist painting technique known as grattage, where paint is scraped off of the canvas with a trowel.
Later in his career, Miro moved away from painting to focus on other mediums, including ceramics and sculpting. Two of the most famous of the hundreds of ceramics pieces he created – The Wall of the Moon and The Wall of the Sun - are on display at the UNESCO Building in Paris. He also created temporary paintings on glass windows for an exhibit in his later years. It was toward the end of his life that he began writing some of his most unusual ideas, including gas sculpting.
Miro was the recipient of several prestigious awards during his lifetime. In 1954, he received the Venice Biennale print making prize for images depicting the Spanish Civil War. In 1958, he received the Guggenheim International Award, and just a few years prior to his death, he was presented with a Gold Medal of Fine Arts by King Juan Carlos of Spain.
Miro married Pilar Juncosa in 1929, and the couple welcomed daughter Dolores in 1931. He died in Mallorca in 1983, bedridden and stricken with heart disease and respiratory problems. He is buried in Montjuic Cemetery in Barcelona.
Much of Miro’s works can be seen at the Joan Miro Foundation Center for Contemporary Art in Barcelona; and there are several pieces at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. A Miro painting today commands a price tag of up to $10 million.