Between the World Wars, a disturbing new spirit surfaced in the world of art and letters: a call to liberate the imagination and explore the tangled world of the unconscious. In their struggle to understand the new century's dangerous trends towards... [more]
Between the World Wars, a disturbing new spirit surfaced in the world of art and letters: a call to liberate the imagination and explore the tangled world of the unconscious. In their struggle to understand the new century's dangerous trends towards centralized power and glorified materialism, the Surrealists infused new Freudian findings with the Symbolist poetry of suggestion in order to unearth that most elusive of objects: the human soul. Surrealists dabbled with automatic writing, dream symbolism, and free association, blending them in unexpected, often random combinations.
Like their painting cohorts Salvador Dali, and Max Ernst, Surrealists writers Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, and Jean Cocteau allowed their subconscious mind, hallucinations, and sexual desires to dictate the assortment of images, symbols, and impressions they freely juxtaposed, in hopes of collapsing the boundaries of the rational. Taking Dada's revolutionary fervor one step further, their works expressed the unspoken impulses that both exalt and destroy life. Toying with the limits of the real and the known, the startling impact of Surrealism teased disturbing, eccentric, and absurd imagery from artists as diverse in medium and era as Paul Klee, Dylan Thomas, and Bob Dylan.
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