Poet Guillaume Apollinaire first used the term “surrealist” in 1917 to describe Jean Cocteau’s ballet Parade, and the word appeared in his own play Les Mamelles de Tirésias. André Breton, who later founded the Surrealist movement, adopted the term for the Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), and his definition is translated as “pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express…the real process of thought. It is the dictation of thought, free from any control by the reason and of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.” The word surreal became a part of everyday language in subsequent decades and entered the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1967. The dictionary defines it as “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream.”
Who first used the word Surrealism?
What was Surrealism and its goal?
Surrealism was a movement in visual art and literature that flourished in Europe between World Wars I and II. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics previously and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Surrealists endeavoured to bypass social conventions and education to explore the subconscious through a number of techniques, including automatic drawing, a spontaneous uncensored recording of chaotic images that “erupt” into the consciousness of the artist; and exquisite corpse, whereby an artist draws a part of the human body (a head, for example), folds the paper, and passes it to the next artist, who adds the next part (a torso, perhaps), and so on, until a collective composition is complete.
