Trends and Movement Task

 

This task is give by Professor Megha Trivedi Ma'am (Department of English, MKBU).

Surrealism – The Logic of Dreams and the Power of the Unconscious

🔰 Introduction

Have you ever awoken from a dream where time had no meaning, logic was irrelevant, and yet everything felt deeply true? That’s the world where Surrealism dwells. Born in the ashes of World War I, this radical movement rejected rationality and embraced the absurd, the erotic, the dreamlike, and the deep subconscious mind.

At its core, Surrealism wasn’t merely an artistic movement — it was a revolution of the mind.

🧭 1. Origins and Philosophical Foundations

Surrealism emerged in France in the 1920s, led by André Breton, a poet and former Dadaist. Deeply influenced by Sigmund Freud’s work on dreams and the unconscious, Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.

He defined Surrealism as:

"Psychic automatism in its pure state... dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason."

🔹 Influences:

• Dadaism: A nihilistic, anti-art response to the absurdity of WWI. Surrealism evolved from its rebellious spirit but aimed for something constructive.

• Freudian Psychoanalysis: Especially ideas of repression, dream symbolism, and the id.

• Marxist Philosophy: Many surrealists envisioned mental liberation as a path to societal revolution.

Surrealism attempted to unite dreams and reality into a single, higher reality: the surreal.

🔮 2. Key Features of Surrealism

Surrealist works were designed to disrupt the rational mind and expose the raw subconscious.

• Dream Imagery: Often strange, illogical, but emotionally resonant.

• Juxtaposition: Placing unrelated or contradictory elements side-by-side to shock and provoke.

• Automatic Writing (Automatism): Creating without conscious control to access pure thought.

• Eroticism & Taboo: A rebellion against societal and sexual repression.

• Symbolism: Objects become portals into repressed desires, fears, or archetypes.

Surrealism was a rebellion not just against how we think, but against why we think that way.

🖼️ 3. Surrealism in Visual Art

The visual art of Surrealism plays with perception, asking us to trust what we feel, not what we know.

🔹 Key Artists:

• Salvador Dalí: His The Persistence of Memory (melting clocks) became an icon of warped time and dream logic.

• René Magritte: His works like The Treachery of Images (“This is not a pipe”) questioned the line between image and reality.

• Max Ernst: Invented techniques like frottage and collage to bypass the conscious mind.

• Joan Miró: Employed abstract shapes to evoke dream language and subconscious emotion.

Their art wasn’t just meant to be seen, but decoded — like dreams.

📚 4. Surrealism in Literature

Surrealist writers broke all conventions of plot, grammar, and sense. They wrote in streams, bursts, and dreamlike fragments.

• Automatic Writing: Letting the subconscious guide the pen.

• Hallucinatory Narratives: Time, space, and identity often collapse.

• Eroticism & the Absurd: Symbols of repression, liberation, and contradiction.

🔹 Notable Writers:

• André Breton: His novel Nadja blends autobiography, dreams, and obsession.

• Paul Éluard: His love poems danced between sensuality and the surreal.

• Antonin Artaud: His “Theatre of Cruelty” aimed to shake audiences from passive watching into emotional, even physical, response.

• Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault: Explorers of poetry’s subconscious dimensions.

 5. Surrealism in Theatre and Cinema

Surrealist film sought to bypass logic and strike the unconscious directly.

• Un Chien Andalou (1929): Co-created by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, this film features shocking, disjointed imagery (like an eyeball being sliced) meant to jolt the viewer from rational passivity.

• Surrealist themes also flowed into Theatre of the Absurd, seen in playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, where language breaks down and meaning is elusive.

📖 6. Influence and Lasting Legacy

Surrealism changed how we understand imagination, creativity, and truth.

It inspired:

• Postmodern Literature: With fragmented structure and self-referentiality.

• Magical Realism: Writers like Gabriel García Márquez blur reality and fantasy.

• Psychoanalytic Criticism: Literature as a mirror of inner drives.

• Pop culture, advertising, fashion, even music videos (think of Björk or David Lynch).

Today, Surrealism reminds us: there’s more to life than logic — there’s mystery.

 To sum up Surrealism was, and still is, a revolution of perception. In its dreamscapes and shadowy logic, it urges us to embrace uncertainty, to listen to the unconscious, and to believe that imagination is not an escape — but a deeper way of seeing.

Whether it's Dalí’s dripping clocks or Breton’s poetic wildness, Surrealism whispers a truth we often forget: sometimes, dreams are more real than reality itself.

DADAISM – When Art Went Mad on Purpose

"Dada means nothing. If it had meaning, Dada would not be Dada." – Tristan Tzara

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 1. The Birth of Dada

The Dada movement was born in 1916 in Zürich, Switzerland, at a bohemian nightclub called the Cabaret Voltaire — in the middle of the chaos of World War I. Europe was witnessing unprecedented destruction, and the intellectuals, artists, and poets gathering here saw logic, nationalism, and traditional values as culprits behind the war.

Artists like Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Emmy Hennings, and Richard Huelsenbeck came together to challenge the meaning of art itself. The term Dada was reportedly picked by stabbing a dictionary — a random act reflecting the group's belief in chance over reason.

2. Philosophy of Dada

Dada wasn’t a style — it was a spirit of rebellion. It went beyond anti-war sentiment and entered the realm of anti-art, anti-bourgeois culture, and anti-rationalism. Dadaists believed that the logic and values of the Enlightenment, which had dominated Western civilization, had led to destruction — so nonsense, absurdity, and irrationality became their weapons of resistance.

They aimed to shock, provoke, confuse, and destroy conventional norms. Art was no longer about beauty or skill but about concept, reaction, and disruption.

 Key Features of Dadaism:

• Meaninglessness & Satire: Art with no clear message, often mocking politics or culture.

• Randomness & Chance: Many works were made by letting dice or chance decide the outcome.

• Ready-mades: Everyday objects were presented as art (e.g., a urinal, a bottle rack).

• Absurdity & Irony: Dada celebrated nonsense and ridiculed seriousness.

• Collage & Photomontage: Combining cut-outs from newspapers, magazines, and photographs.

• Multimedia Experimentation: Art included painting, poetry, performance, and sound.

 3. Visual Arts of Dada

Dada visual art was designed to provoke, not please. It embraced shock value:

• 🎨 Marcel Duchamp: The iconic Fountain (1917) — a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” — became the most famous ready-made. Another work, L.H.O.O.Q., was a postcard of the Mona Lisa with a mustache — poking fun at classical art.

• 🖼️ Hannah Höch: A Berlin Dadaist, she used photomontage to criticize gender roles and Weimar politics.

• ✂️ Jean Arp: Let pieces of paper fall randomly and glued them where they landed — a literal act of chance in art.

• ⚙️ Francis Picabia: Created mechanical drawings that mocked industrial logic and modernity.

 4. Dada Literature & Poetry

Dada writers rejected traditional grammar, structure, and coherence. They played with sound, nonsense, and spontaneity.

• 🗣️ Hugo Ball’s Karawane (1916) is a poem of made-up syllables: “jolifanto bambla o falli bambla”. It sounds ritualistic but carries no semantic meaning.

• ✂️ Tristan Tzara wrote instructions to make poetry by randomly selecting newspaper clippings from a bag.

• 🗯️ Dada poetry performances often involved multiple people reading aloud at once, creating a cacophony of noise.

 5. Performance & Theatre

Dada performances were staged at Cabaret Voltaire, where artists wore masks, danced erratically, banged on instruments, and read incoherent poetry.

These events were not meant to entertain but to challenge the audience’s expectations. They mocked the seriousness of war and the absurdity of modern civilization. Some performances were chaotic protests against the very idea of organized performance.

 6. Film & Photography

Dada also influenced early experimental cinema:

• 🎥 Man Ray (USA/France): His rayographs (camera-less photographs) and short films like Le Retour à la Raison used lights, shadows, and random images.

• 📽️ Hans Richter: His silent film Rhythmus 21 (1921) showed abstract, moving shapes.

• 🎞️ Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique (1924) was a non-narrative film with repetitive, surreal images.

These non-linear, plotless films were visual equivalents of Dada poetry and laid the groundwork for surrealist cinema and video art.

 7. Dada’s Political Edge

In Berlin, Dada took a radical, political turn. The artists used satirical photomontages to critique the government, military, and capitalist system:

• 📰 George Grosz: Created grotesque caricatures of corrupt politicians, soldiers, and capitalists.

• 🖼️ John Heartfield: Brilliantly used photomontage as propaganda, often targeting Nazism, years before it fully rose to power.

• Dadaists joined forces with left-wing political movements and participated in revolutionary protests.

Dada thus became a powerful tool for artistic resistance and political dissent.

 8. Legacy of Dada

Though Dada as a movement faded around 1924, its influence exploded across 20th-century and contemporary art:

• 🎨 Surrealism (André Breton’s movement grew out of Dada)

• 🖼️ Pop Art (e.g., Andy Warhol’s soup cans reflect Duchamp’s ready-mades)

• 💡 Conceptual Art (art as an idea — a legacy of Dada)

• 🎭 Performance Art, Happenings, Postmodernism, and Anti-art movements

Duchamp’s Fountain is now one of the most important artworks of the 20th century, not for its appearance, but for its concept — redefining art as context, thought, and provocation.

 to summing up Dada was more than a movement — it was a cultural explosion. It shattered the definition of art and questioned everything the modern world stood for. It refused to make sense because the world no longer made sense.

In an age of war, lies, and control, Dada chose chaos, laughter, nonsense, and bold protest. It gave birth to a new kind of creativity — one that is still shaking the foundations of art today.

✨ In our time of misinformation, algorithms, and digital absurdity — what would a “Dada” movement look like now?

Expressionism – The Art of Inner Anguish

🔰 Introduction

At the dawn of the 20th century, Europe stood at a crossroads. With industrialization booming and the continent marching toward devastating wars, the old romantic ideals of harmony, nature, and order felt distant — even irrelevant. Artists and thinkers began turning away from the external world and instead looked inward, diving deep into the emotional and psychological turmoil of human existence. Thus emerged Expressionism — an art movement that sought not to mirror reality, but to scream from within it.

Expressionism was not just a visual style. It was a philosophy, a state of mind, and a radical cry from the soul in a rapidly dehumanizing world. It captured pain, anxiety, madness, and rebellion, becoming a vessel through which inner anguish was spilled onto canvas, stage, and page.

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🧭 1. Origin and Historical Background

Expressionism primarily took root in Germany around 1905, during a time of profound social and political unrest. Its most active and dynamic period stretched from 1910 to 1925, coinciding with the first World War and its devastating aftermath.

🔹 Reactionary Roots:

Expressionism emerged as a rebellion — a reaction against:

• The cold, mechanical world born of industrialization

• The spiritual alienation of urban life

• The materialism of modern capitalist society

• A growing sense that machines were replacing meaning

The First World War served as a brutal confirmation of this disillusionment. The trauma, the mass deaths, and the loss of human dignity left a scar on the European psyche. In Germany, the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) became the epicenter of a cultural explosion where Expressionist literature, theatre, painting, and cinema thrived.

What unified these diverse forms was a common goal: to express raw emotional truth, no matter how dark, disturbing, or distorted.

 2. Key Characteristics of Expressionism

Expressionist art does not try to describe reality — it tries to feel it. Here's how it does that:

• Subjectivity over Objectivity: Truth lies within the self. Expressionist works focus on emotional truth, not factual accuracy.

• Distortion & Exaggeration: Reality is twisted to mirror psychological states — a screaming face, a broken building, a warped street.

• Dark & Chaotic Themes: Common subjects include fear, madness, death, war, and existential dread.

• Fragmentation: In literature, narratives are often disjointed or hallucinatory, reflecting the fractured modern mind.

• Symbolism: Images like masks, shadows, cities, and grotesque figures recur — each symbolizing inner turmoil or societal decay.

• Anti-Bourgeois Sentiment: A deep criticism of middle-class values, materialism, and societal hypocrisy.

Expressionism, in essence, is an emotional protest against a world that has lost its soul.

 3. Expressionism in Visual Art

In painting, Expressionists discarded realism and chose instead to portray what the heart screams — not what the eye sees.

• Artists used bold, unnatural colors, jagged lines, and chaotic compositions.

• The goal was to disturb, awaken, and confront.

🔹 Major Artists:

• Edvard Munch (Norway): His iconic The Scream (1893) became the face of existential terror.

• Egon Schiele (Austria): Known for emotionally raw, often erotic, distorted human figures.

• Wassily Kandinsky (Russia): One of the pioneers of abstract art, believing color and form could express spiritual vibrations.

• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Founder of Die Brücke ("The Bridge"), a group aiming to bridge past art with the future through emotional immediacy.

These artists laid the foundation for modern abstract and psychological art forms.

 4. Expressionism in Literature

Literature too became a stage for emotional expression. Expressionist writers abandoned traditional narrative and character development. They employed archetypes, stream of consciousness, monologues, and symbolic settings to communicate psychological anguish.

🔹 Notable Writers:

• Franz Kafka: Although more often labeled existentialist, works like The Metamorphosis and The Trial depict surreal alienation and nightmarish absurdity in a deeply Expressionist fashion.

• Georg Kaiser: In plays like From Morn to Midnight, he used nameless characters and fast-paced surreal action to critique consumerism and spiritual emptiness.

• Ernst Toller: His dramas, such as Man and the Masses, blended personal suffering with political rebellion.

• August Strindberg: In A Dream Play, he explored mental fragmentation through shifting time, identity, and hallucinations.

Their aim wasn’t to entertain, but to unsettle — to reveal the truths we hide from ourselves.

5. Expressionism in Theatre and Film

The stage became a mirror of mental breakdown. Sets were angular, dialogues symbolic, and plots dreamlike or nightmarish. Characters often represented ideas or emotional states, not individuals.

🎬 Expressionist Cinema:

Germany’s film industry in the 1920s created a visual language that haunts cinema to this day:

• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920): Directed by Robert Wiene, this film defined Expressionist cinema — twisted sets, angular architecture, and a plot blending madness with authority.

• Nosferatu (1922): F. W. Murnau’s eerie Dracula film uses shadow and silence to generate dread.

• Metropolis (1927): Fritz Lang’s dystopian masterpiece portrays a mechanized future where emotions rebel against cold reason.

These films didn’t just tell stories — they visualized emotions and challenged perception.

 6. Social and Political Context

Expressionism wasn’t escapist. It was deeply political.

• Expressionists raged against capitalism, authoritarianism, and the moral vacuum of modernity.

• Many were left-wing, advocating social reform or even revolution.

• Their work reflected a collective trauma — the spiritual sickness of a world that had seen too much war and too little humanity.

 7. Legacy and Influence

Though suppressed during the Nazi regime as “degenerate art,” Expressionism shaped the future:

• Influenced Modernist literature (T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce)

• Laid the groundwork for Absurdist drama (Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter)

• Anticipated Abstract Expressionism and psychoanalytic criticism

• Inspired Gothic and horror cinema, psychological thrillers, and dystopian science fiction

 To summing up Expressionism was not just an art form — it was a spiritual revolt. It cried out against numbness, apathy, and conformity. Even today, in an era shaped by anxiety, identity struggles, and rapid technological shifts, Expressionism’s message remains powerful: truth lies within — no matter how terrifying it may be.

 

Conclusion

Surrealism, Dadaism, and Expressionism were three groundbreaking art movements that shattered traditional boundaries and redefined the purpose of art in the 20th century. Expressionism delved deep into the emotional and psychological realms, capturing inner turmoil through distorted forms and vivid colors. Dadaism responded to the chaos of World War I by rejecting logic, reason, and conventional aesthetics, instead embracing absurdity, spontaneity, and protest. Surrealism, influenced by both, took rebellion a step further by exploring dreams, the unconscious mind, and irrational juxtapositions to unlock a higher artistic truth. Though different in style and focus, all three movements shared a desire to challenge norms, question reality, and express the complexities of the human experience in a rapidly changing world. Together, they ignited a creative revolution that continues to influence art, literature, film, and thought to this day.

References

1. Hobbs, Robert C. “Early Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism.” Art Journal, vol. 45, no. 4, 1985, pp. 299–302. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/776801. Accessed 12 Apr. 2025.

2. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Expressionism | Definition, Characteristics, Artists, Music, Theater, Film, and Facts.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 Mar. 2025, www.britannica.com/art/Expressionism.

3. --- . “Dada | Definition and History.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 28 Mar. 2025, www.britannica.com/art/Dada.

4. “Surrealism | Definition, Painting, Artists, Artworks, and Facts.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 July 1998, www.britannica.com/art/Surrealism.

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