SURREALISM QUOTES II
quotations about surrealism
Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation ... a way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.
OCTAVIO PAZ
Alternating Current
Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all: SURREALISM, Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
ANDRÉ BRETON
First Surrealist Manifesto, 1924
For its adherents, Surrealism was a way of life, a kind of existence that left room for playfulness and creativity. It was about living for the moment, with spontaneity and internal intellectual freedom and a lack of materialism, all of which were completely opposed to the values of the bourgeoisie.
CATHRIN KLINGSÖHR-LEROY
Surrealism
I'm wary of surrealist nightmares that try to have mass appeal. They can't: the form is premised on frustrating our conscious interpretations, forcing us to make up our own minds not only as to whether that uncertainty is worthwhile or pleasurable, but also if those are even fair demands.
K. AUSTIN COLLINS
"David Lynch's Heartbreaking Gift to Laura Palmer", The Ringer, May 17, 2017
Within popular conceptions, surrealism is misunderstood in many different ways, some of which contradict others, but all of these misunderstandings are founded in the fact that they seek to reduce surrealism to a style or a thing in itself rather than being prepared to see it as an activity with broadening horizons.
MICHAEL RICHARDSON
Surrealism and Cinema
I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Manifestoes of Surrealism
The term "surrealism" is used now so often to refer to anything out of the norm that we might underestimate just how shocking the philosophy was in its early stages. The movement followed in the path of Dada, which was a response to the horror and destruction of World War I.
SHERYL NONNENBERG
"Above and beyond realism", Palo Alto Online, January 26, 2017
Surrealism! What is Surrealism? In my opinion, it is above all a reawakening of the poetic idea in art, the reintroduction of the subject but in a very particular sense, that of the strange and illogical.
PAUL DELVAUX
lecture, 1966
One can understand why Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing save from violence. The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Second Manifesto of Surrealism
At this point it must be repeated that surrealism is a vanguard, I might say the most aggressive vanguard. It is, taken as a whole, a declaration of our innermost rights, those pertinent to the depths described by that perhaps intangible phrasal symbol "unconscious," and it is a reality that lies beyond the coordinates of directed thought, a s u r r e a l i t y.
NIKOS STABAKIS
Surrealism in Greece: An Anthology
Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.
SUSAN SONTAG
On Photography
If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
The Theater and Its Double
The real importance of automatism lay in the fact that it led to a different relation between the artist and the creative act. Where the artist had traditionally been seen as someone who invents a personal world, bringing into being something unique to his own 'genius', the surrealists conceived themselves as explorers and researchers rather than 'artist' in the traditional sense and it was discovery rather than invention that became crucial for them.
MICHAEL RICHARDSON
Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World
To be a surrealist ... means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.
RENE MAGRITTE
Time, April 21, 1947
The vice named surrealism is the immoderate and impassioned use of the stupefacient image or rather of the uncontrolled provocation of the image for its own sake and for the element of unpredictable perturbation and of metamorphosis which it introduces into the domain of representation; for each image on each occasion forces you to revise the entire Universe.
LOUIS ARAGON
Paris Peasant
Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between oneself and the rest of creation. To abuse them was immediately to set oneself adrift from true being.
MICHAEL RICHARDSON
Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World
Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end.
HENRY MILLER
The Cosmological Eye
Among those who do not comprehend surrealism are people who look upon the real as verifiable, as something to be checked against past experience or observation. These individuals fail to see that for the surrealist the dimensions of the real cannot be gauged by reference to the familiar. So far as the real appears to have limits, they are foisted upon it by the mental, emotional, and imaginative limitations of spectators accustomed to measure the possible by the already known. For this reason, surrealism and many of its contemporary opponents remained inevitably at loggerheads. The one group insisted on estimating the scope of reality by its possibilities. The other condemned the real to be repetitive of what the past had shown them.
JOHN HERBERT MATTHEWS
The Surrealist Mind
Surrealism is easy; if you've seen an elephant and a giraffe, you can picture an elephant with the legs of a giraffe. The challenge is painting a convincing elephant.
J.W. MCCORMACK
"The New 'Twin Peaks' Reflects America The Way It Is Now", BuzzFeed News, June 4, 2017
It's hard to say exactly what is and isn't surrealistic, because it's not a style.
WILLIAM JEFFETT
"Dali exhibition explores the life and work of Frida Kahlo", Bradenton Herald, December 16, 2016