Surrealism in Photography, a Blog by Béatrice Touchette

Hi and welcome to my Blog! My name is Beatrice and I am interested in many subjects including art and culture.  For my first post, I would like to introduce you to a short essay I read on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website and give you my opinion on it.

   

Otto Umbehr, Mystery of the Street , 1928 

Brief summary of the essay 

Surrealism is an art movement in which imagination takes precedence to reason.  The movement was originally propelled by André Breton's first   Manifesto of surrealism  in 1924. Artists used their unconscious to reach the world of dream.  This process gave rise to themes like intoxication, madness, and sexual ecstasy. Thus, as a medium, photography was perfect to create provocative, psychic, and repulsive works.  To create this ambiguity between dream and reality, photographs used double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization to distort the pictures in the darkroom. Through the years, the movement widened its horizons by taking out of context ordinary pictures and giving them a new connotation. Anthropological photographs, movie stills, medical and police photographs got their way into the surrealist movement. 



    

    

René Magritte,  Edward James in front of "On the Threshold of Liberty" , 1937


    Hans Bellmer,  The Doll, 1934 

My point of view

I think surrealism, beyond the aesthetically pleasing aspect of it, was very representative of society at the time. When you think about it, around 1924, people just went through a war that was pushed by rationalism. Artists reacted and wanted people to look at the destruction and horrors that rationalism has done. I think the historical context in which an art piece was produced enrich our appreciation. We can better understand a society at a given time than we could in a factual history lesson. Knowing how people felt and thought about the world provides an insight into life as it was. Furthermore, I find it fascinating how taking out of context a trivial picture makes it surreal. It opens an interesting discussion about art. What is art? What makes someone an artist? Also, this method of using pictures taken by non-artists to make art is still relevant today, particularly with social media. When it becomes public, the picture is the property of all.

                                                        

How did the painter René Magritte use the camera?


Comments

  1. Claudie Ouellet19 September 2022 at 08:01

    Hello, my name's Claudie and I'll be commenting on you blog!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Claudie Ouellet22 September 2022 at 17:00

    René Magritte would use the camera to create photographic replicas of his real-life paintings. The discourse of this source is informative.
    I think it's incredible how they were able to make art in such spontaneous ways. This type of art was probably a huge help in understanding the unconscious and the ways it functioned. I think it's very interesting how Beatrice mentions how it was representative of people during that time. It's true that it was a very strange period and that things were weird and new. I think surrealism is one of the coolest art styles, just because it's so out of the ordinary. Surrealism gives you the ability to change any usual thing into a childhood vision. This was a very interesting article, and it opened my eyes to a subject I'm not usually that drawn to.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Liel's music blog30 September 2022 at 10:45

      Good comment. Careful to add a quote from the original source.

      Delete

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