The Surrealism movement is an ideological movement that arose in the field of art and literature from the 1920s to the 1960s. The core idea is to liberate the subconscious mind, challenge the hegemony of reason, and try to explore the “absolute reality” in illusion and irrational thinking through art and literature. The predecessor of Surrealism was Dada, but it abandoned the nihilism contained in Dada, and turned to systematically explore the subconscious. In 1924, French poet Andre Breton published the Manifesto of Surrealism, officially announcing the birth of Surrealism. Deeply inspired by Freud, Breton believes that the subconscious mind is the source of artistic creation, and irrational thinking contains the truth beyond reality. The surrealists represented by it try to create “surrealite”, that is, a higher level of reality, by solving the opposites (such as dream and reality, rationality and madness). The revolution of art and literature is inseparable from the social revolution. In his Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton defined surrealism as a pure mental unconscious activity in which people express the real operation of thought in oral, written or other forms, with the goal of breaking the shackles of reason and morality and realizing individual and collective freedom by liberating the subconscious mind. Under the influence of this thought, many new creative methods have emerged, such as artists directly describing dream images, or creating random beauty through collage, rubbing and other techniques (such as Salvador Dali’s “The Eternity of Memory“). In the field of literature, it is shown that creators abandon the control of logic. Leave your hand free to write or paint with the flow of your subconscious mind (e.g., Breton and Philippe Soupault in Les Champs Magnetiques).
Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory. 1931
References：
Breton, André. 1969. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). n.d. “Salvador Dalí: The Persistence of Memory (1931).” Accessed June 25, 2023. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79018.
Breton, André, and Philippe Soupault. 1985. The Magnetic Fields. Translated by David Gascoyne. London: Atlas Press.
