Surrealism

An attempt to paint dreams and the unconscious with eyes wide open. Melting clocks, boulders floating in the sky. None of it explains itself logically, yet it feels strangely familiar — the movement dove straight into the deep layers of the human mind, using paint as the vehicle. The name has a quiet history behind it. The word “surrealism” was coined by the poet Apollinaire in 1917; he died the following year. Seven years later, in 1924, when Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto, he picked up the dead poet's word and carried it forward — not an insult, not a name they gave themselves, but one handed down to them. The method Breton set out in the manifesto was “automatic writing”: let the hand move before the mind decides, and let whatever the mind is doing come straight through. Counting its reach into advertising and film, this may be the style that traveled furthest of any in the twentieth century. They were people who turned even the making of an exhibition into a work. The Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme ran at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris from 17 January to 24 February 1938. Duchamp, given the design of the rooms, hung twelve hundred coal sacks from the ceiling. On the opening night the lighting failed, and visitors were handed flashlights and left to hunt for the pictures in the dark. Less looking at paintings than going to look for them. One last note, from Japan. Here the name was shortened to shūru and became an everyday word — but the meaning shifted. The original sur- means above: a further reality lying beyond this one. In Japan the word entered art writing in the 1970s, and from the late 1990s it spread with the sense of absurd, nonsensical. This map has said many times that names are given by a later age. Here is one more pattern to add: a name can change meaning at the far end of the sea it crossed.