The Development of the Surrealist Movement

Duchamp Surrealist artists was also the key figure of Dadaism, a short-lived art movement that began in 1916 and ended in 1922. Dadaism originated as a reaction against the absurdity of war, established bourgeois rationality and morality. The movement was responding declaring itself against art, turning to absurd and primitive, nonsense combination of random words (in literature). However, in course of such struggle Dadaism created art itself with it's major centres in Zurich, Paris, Berlin, Cologne and New York City.

Dadaism explored the ideas of the context of an object. Duchamp created some of the most debated issues in Dadaism. These days the artist's ready-mades are regarded as high art, despite of the fact that his goal was not to turn the everyday into art and his purpose was to create a reaction of indifference in the viewer. The movement of Dadaism with it's interest in psychoanalysis and experiments in juxtaposition, Dadaism provided the basis for Surrealism in the early 1920s.

One more contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements was Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky), an American artist that spent most of his career in Paris, France. First of all, Ray was known as an avant-garde photographer, but he considered himself a painter above all. Man Ray Surrealism painter was named one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century (ARTnews magazine, 1999).

Influenced by Dadaists, a new art movement – Surrealism – emerged from a literary movement at the end of World War I. Both movements focused on the practice of automatic writing which allowed the author to be free from any purposeful thought and explore the subconscious. Thus, words didn't mean anything, but rather symbolized the activities of the unconscious mind. The basic principles of the surrealist movement were outlined by Breton, the leader of the movement in his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.

There were two types of Surrealism: Illusionistic Surrealism and Automatist Surrealism. The first one, Illusionistic Surrealism, includes the works of art composed of irrational content, absurd juxtapositions and metamorphoses of dreams into a higher illusionary state (Dali, Tanguy and Magritte). The second type, Automatist Surrealism, directly derived from automatic writing.

These days there are the followers of the surrealist movement, the artists that use and develop the techniques of the Surrealism movement developed at the beginning of the 20th century. If you are interested in this art look no further and visit the gallery of works created by Ukrainian painter V.Klinkov.