Surrealism
The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is the only museum in the Netherlands to own a large collection of Surrealist work, the basis of which was laid in the 1960s with works by Hieronymus Bosch. With his bizarre images he is considered to be the precursor of Surrealism.
The term Surealism dates from 1917 and derives from the French writer Guillaume Apollinaire. He thought up this word when describing soemthing that goes beyond reality. In 1924 the poet and art critic André Breton published the first Surrealist manifesto. He described Surrealism in this documents as "though expressed without any control from reason, and independent of all moral and aesthetic considerations". He thought the world should be freed from rationalism, logic and bourgeois culture and based his theory on Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. As an assistant in a psychiatric hospital during the Firs World War he had become acquainted with Freud's theory explaining the way dreams acted as a means of uncovering people's supressed urges, and liberating the tortured mind.
To free the subconscious, the Surrealists thought up the methode of 'écriture automatique' (automatic writing). In a trance, sometimes induced by drugs or hypnosis, painters and writers allowed their brushes or pens to go their own way, not controlled by any type of rational considerations or impediments. Thus they cleared away the cobwebs of academic techniques and conventions and created surprising images and associations. All of this changed in the early 1930s when artists like Salvador Dalí and Magritte once again concentrated on a traditional painting techniques. The illusionary nature of their work allowed them to suggest a reality which could not actually exist, but was possible in dreams and in the realms of imagination.
SELECTION
