III.

Surrealism in Art

In painting and sculpture Surrealism is one of the leading influences on art in the 20th century. It claimed as its ancestors in the fine arts such painters as the Italian Paolo Uccello, the British poet and artist William Blake, and the Frenchman Odilon Redon. In this century it also admired, and included in its exhibitions, works by the Italian Giorgio de Chirico, the Russian Marc Chagall, the Swiss Paul Klee, the French artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, and the Spaniard Pablo Picasso, none of whom was ever a member of the Surrealist group. From 1924 the German Max Ernst, the Frenchman Jean Arp, and the American painter and photographer Man Ray were among its members. They were joined for a short time around 1925 by the Frenchman André Masson and the Spaniard Joan Miró, who remained members for some time but were too individualistic as painters to submit to the strong leadership of André Breton, who exercised final authority over the movement.

Later members of the group included the French-American Yves Tanguy, the Belgian René Magritte, and the Swiss Alberto Giacometti. The Catalan painter Salvador Dalí joined the Surrealist movement in 1930 but was later denounced by most Surrealists because he was held to be more interested in commercializing his art than in Surrealist ideas. Although for a time he was the most talked-about member of the group, his work is so idiosyncratic as to be only partially typical of Surrealism.

Surrealist painting exhibits great variety of content and technique. That of Dalí, for example, consists of a more or less direct and photographic transcription of dreams, deriving its inspiration from the earlier dream-like paintings of de Chirico. Arp's sculptures are large, smooth, abstract forms, and Miró, a formal member of the group for a short time only, employed, as a rule, fantastic shapes, which included deliberate adaptations of children's art and which also had something in common with the designs used by Catalan artists to decorate pottery. The Russian-American painter Pavel Tchelichew, while not a member of the Surrealist group, created Surrealist images in his paintings as well as in his numerous ballet designs.

An American offshoot of the Surrealist movement is the group of artists known as the Magic Realists, under the leadership of the painter Paul Cadmus. The group also includes George Tooker, Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, Philip Evergood, Peter Blume, and Louis Guglielmi. The assemblage sculptor Joseph Cornell began as an acknowledged Surrealist, but later pursued his highly individual art. The Surrealists' attitude towards free creation was a major influence on the beginnings of Abstract Expressionism in New York.