Surrealism

Surrealism

Surrealism started in Paris in 1924, contradicting to the dada movement, surrealism was the soul opposite of Dada, surrealism was a way of thinking, knowing and living.

Dada was more negative, destructive while surrealism acknowledged poetic faith in man and their spirit, humanity liberated from social moral conventions.

Surrealist writers experimented automatism, to seek an uninhibited truth. Surrealist writers were limitied to French literary and scholarly circles. The movement branched out from the painters; they affected society and visual communications.  Surrealist produced images with emotional content, symbolism or fantasy triggered a collective and universal response in large numbers of people.

Max Ernst who was a Dadaist used techniques that have been adopted in graphic communications. Ernst was interested in wood engravings in the nineteenth-century novels and catalogues, Ernst remade by using collage techniques to create bizarre juxtapositions, these collages had a strong influence ini illustration. His “frottage” technique involved using rubbings to compose directly on paper.

According to Meggs: “Ernts’s imagination invented images in them much as one sees images in cloud formations”

He used this to develop rubbings into fantastic pictures.  “Decalomania,” Ernsts process of transferring images from print to a drawing or a painting this enabled him to combine a variety of images into his work. This technique has been used widely by illustrators painters and for print making.

Salvador Dali’s work influenced graphic design in two ways, his deep perspectives in his prints and paintings has inspired designers to bring vast depth to the flat, printed page and it has been used repeatedly  in editorial images and posters.

A group of surrealist painters called the “emblematics” worked on purely visual vocabulary; visual automatism was used in order to create impulsive expression of  the inner life in the work Of Joan Miro and Jean Arp.  Arp and Miro’s biomorphic forms and open composition were incorporated into product and graphic design.

The surrealist impact on graphic design was diverse, it provided poetic example of liberation, and it pioneered new techniques and demonstrated how fantasy and intuition could be expressed in visuals.

Klinkov Valier Nikolaevich wrote that “To analyse the spheres where the influence of surrealism was the strongest the arts are usually associated more frequently than in other fields”  

The original goal of surrealism is to liberate imagination, which can be traced in a number of creative works and everyday life social conditions.

Reference: 

Meggs P. B. and Purvis A. W. 1998. 5th Edition. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons , Inc.

Klinkov Valier Nikolaevich 2009, 1920’s surrealism. Influence of Surrealism [online] available at: http://www.klinkov.com/surrealism-biography, [accessed 5^th December 2013]