What is Surrealism?

The First World War, which started in Europe in 1914 and spread to the whole world, was a very important turning point in which the destinies of countries changed. It triggered great changes in political, social and economic fields. On the humanitarian scale, it caused great destruction. After the "Great War" that lasted until 1918, humanity, which started to build a new world with the breakthroughs made in the fields of industry, technology and science, began to clearly feel the emptiness and hunger that it was exposed to spiritually.

People who fell into depression and searched for new meanings began to create new literary and artistic movements that would feed their souls. Humanity sought to heal their souls and psychology and to repair the spiritual collapse caused by the war with currents such as futurism, dadaism and cubism.

French André Bréton, the founder of the surrealism movement, was a writer trained in medicine and psychiatry. He first got together with the literati of the period, Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, and published a magazine and laid the foundations of the surrealism movement. In 1920, they collaborated with Tristan Tzar, the founder of the dadaism movement, which has an understanding of art against logic. After a while, he left the dadaists and published the first manifesto of the surrealism movement in 1924 with a different stance from them. French literary figures René Crevel, Benjamin Péret, Robert Desnos, Georges Sadoul, Paul Éluard and Antonin Artaud became the first members of this new movement.

Surrealism; It is an art movement that allows the subconscious and the spirit to reveal themselves, without being subject to the interference of mind and thought and without being bound by any rules, values or traditions, through writing, poetry, verbal or other different expression methods such as painting and architecture. It is a kind of psychic automatism.

The word surrealism is derived from the combination of the French words “super” and “réel”.

In his first manifesto, Breton, the father of the Surrealism movement, presented a new writing technique that he found based on the work of Sigmund Freud in the field of psychoanalysis. This technique, called "automatic writing", was invented so that the subconscious can bring itself to the surface by deactivating the conscious.

In this writing technique, the writer takes the paper and pen in his hand and closes his thoughts, what he has learned so far, his judgments and consciousness as much as possible. So he pulls himself out of the way. That is, he puts his consciousness into a passive state. He quickly writes everything that comes to the tip of his pen without thinking. He writes without thinking, without editing, and without stopping. He completes his article by avoiding the control of the mind, completely away from worries and thoughts such as what I wrote, what kind of sentence did I make, did I follow the spelling rules. It never uses punctuation marks. Because all kinds of thoughts and the desire to obey the rules will activate the consciousness and prevent the subconscious from revealing itself.

The result is a surreal work.

The articles written with this technique are not subject to criticism of logic, accepted traditions in society, aesthetic or moral evaluations. The first book that Breton wrote using this technique was "Magnetic Meadows".

In Breton's "second surrealism manifesto" published in 1929, he criticized his current friends who advocated the necessity of being involved in political actions, and argued that artistic creativity should be original and free from ideologies.

With the outbreak of the second world war, many artists went to New York from Europe, so the surrealism movement migrated to America. Although the opinion that the organized surrealism movement in Europe ended as of the second world war is common, it is still possible to see its continuing influence in areas such as fashion, decoration, cinema, architecture, illustration, photography, advertising and marketing.

In the surrealism movement;

It is the most basic writing technique to write with free association as much as possible by disabling the consciousness as much as possible.

Artists were influenced by Freud's psychoanalytic work.

The unknown aspects of human existence have been tried to be revealed. According to this current, reality is much deeper than what the human senses can perceive.

Reason is opposed, it is argued that the subconscious mind actually dominates the conscious.

It is aimed to reflect the complex and mysterious world of the subconscious to life and art.

The real reality was questioned, and methods such as dreams, hypnotism, and drunkenness were used to reach the undiscovered parts of reality.

Punctuation marks are not used in literature. Surrealism is against all rules.

Surrealists are against other literary movements and all traditional art rules. They make fun of these rules.

According to the Surrealism movement, the artist is not a "creator". It is just an automatic tool that reaches your own self and reflects the realities there.

According to the Surrealism movement, art is not a method of showing one's skills, but a game played by adults.