Origins and Histories

Abstract

Surrealism as a concept, as a programme, as a movement, as a practice, as a set of people, as a collection of techniques, and as a moment in art history causes all sorts of difficulties. Firstly, it is a translated word from the French ‘surréalisme’. Though in English it popularly appears as a synonym for unreal or incredible, in fact the ‘sur’ preposition in French is generally used to signify on, on top of, at the point of, or above. So ‘surrealism’ in English might best be thought of as super-realism or hyper-realism or heightened realism, perhaps, or even real realism. Yet this sense of the term is then directly at odds with the everyday usage. The word ‘Surréalisme’ was coined in 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire in the new preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias, written in 1903), performed on Sunday 24 June in the tiny Salle Maubel in Montmartre, Paris. Nowadays the word itself is generally applied to a movement in art history from the interwar period (1917–1940), and there have been numerous surrealist groups and artworks appearing in the years since then. Surrealism can either be regarded as dwindling in force as a result of the Second World War, or alternatively as being highly influential through the art of the 1950s and particularly the psychedelic and pop art of the 1960s and later. Its end can be dated to the death of André Breton in 1966 and the European uprisings in 1968, or to the death of Salvador Dalí and the fall of the Berlin Wall, both in 1989. Or it can be regarded as having been transformed into later art movements such as Situationism in the 1960s, or the Eastern European Orange Alternative in the 1980s, or in fact as having never ended at all.