Movements in Modern Art, Surrealism - Fiona Bradley

Notes/Quotes

• 'In his second Surrealist manifesto, Breton testifies to the difficulties experienced by his movement, the 'ship which a few of us had constructed with our own hands in order to move against the current' from which some members had jumped or been pushed. He insists on his understanding of Surrealism as a way into a mental world of endless possibility, 'a certain point of the mind which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions'.' (pg. 10/11)
• Surrealist Dream Imagery - Dali's Metamorphosis of Narcissus - ''It is not the unconscious I seek in your pictures but the conscious', Freud said. He made it clear that Surrealist paintings could not be used to psychoanalyse their painters. Instead, the artists were merely using methods and motifs drawn from psychoanalysis to give their pictures a look of the unconscious.' (pg. 32)
• Rene Magritte - Man with a Newspaper 1928. (pg. 38)
• 'The similarity between the figure of Narcissus and the image of the stone hand and egg makes them fuse together into a kind of double image. This was one of Dali's gifts to Surrealism, and was the result of his famous 'paranoiac critical method'. This was essentially a method for the creative misreading of the visual world.' (pg. 39)
• Both Freud and Lacan were interested in the clinical condition of paranoia, a mental illness which causes the sufferer to interpret visual information wrongly - to start 'seeing things'.' (pg. 39)
• 'The eye is a consistent Surrealist icon. It appears and reappears throughout Surrealist imagery, both visual and poetic, as a site of confrontation, conjunction and communication. The eye links inner and outer, subjective and objective.' (pg. 70)
• 'It presides over the opening of Un Chien Andalou, a powerful metaphor for originality, and surreality, of the film's vision.' (pg. 70)
• 'Dali's dream sequence was announced in the film by the dissolving of a real eye into an eye painting on a curtain. Hollywood had passed through to the other side of the Surrealist mirror.' - Alfred Hitchcock's 'Spellbound' (pg. 72)