Concept in Definition ABC
Miscellanea / / July 04, 2021
By Cecilia Bembibre, in Dec. 2009
Considered one of the most representative artistic styles of the 20th century, surrealism emerged in the 1920s as part of the advancement of the artistic avant-gardes that sought to represent ideals different from the academicists, breaking the laws of painting traditional and therefore managing to attract the attention of the viewer directly. In the case of surrealism, we can point out the presence of non-realistic and in many cases not even figurative images, which were intended to follow the designs of the feelings more than reason.
As his name says, surrealism as Vanguard Artistic was characterized by representing what was observed in reality in an unreal, absurd or fantastic way. In many cases, surrealist paintings are not the product of reality but of dreams and non-rational ideas that the artist had in his mind at the time of making the work. The works do not have a linearity graph, the spaces are usually broken, the proportions of the figures they are not real and the colors are often reversed.
The socio-political context of the time is undoubtedly related to the development of this artistic avant-garde since it was inserted in a historical period of generalized crisis caused by the war and by the different economic complications and social. This reality of hopelessness, fear and disorder had one of its clearest representatives in surrealism as these artists show a different, altered and in many cases chaotic reality.
However, surrealism was not simply a group of artists who sought to represent reality differently. Thanks to the work of the Frenchman André Breton, the movement expanded to much of Europe and did so especially on a philosophical and theoretical level, establishing what they themselves called "the Revolution Surrealist "or the total absence of thought logical and rational.
Among the most important artists of surrealism, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Man Ray, Joan Miró, Paul Klee, and many others whose works are unmatched in their unique, challenging, and profoundly poetic.
Themes in Surrealism