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April 17, 2013
Whilst reviewing the “Drawing Surrealism” exhibition in the New York Book Review of Books Sanford Schwartz observes that:
Surrealism has entered the language as a synonym for almost anything that seems odd, uncanny, or freaky. For some, the very word connotes a profane, or carnivalesque, lifting of the lid on hidden, even repressed, thoughts and feelings. But initially this art was romantic and revolutionary in its goals. A little like Dada, which was more a spirit in the air than a movement, and probably put as much energy into cabaret performances and the issuing of statements as the making of artworks, Surrealism was about the need for radically new approaches to writing, art, and experience itself.
Surrealism, which was underway in the early 1920s in Paris, came out of the same disgust with the attitudes that resulted in the1914-1918 war. sought to find, foster, and celebrate precisely the impulses that traditional or generally accepted thinking seemingly said had no place at the table.
Schwartz adds that surrealism remained a functioning movement of sorts until perhaps the early 1960s. It's last real impact on art probably came in the 1940s, when a number of American artists then finding their voices, including Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, were stimulated by Surrealism’s belief that the unconscious was a reservoir of energies waiting to be tapped.
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