Editing Surrealism (section)

==Golden age==
<!-- Commented out: [[File:The Persistence of Memory.jpg|thumb|[[Salvador Dalí]], ''[[The Persistence of Memory]]'' (1931), [[Museum of Modern Art]], [[Manhattan]]]] -->
Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A [[British Surrealist Group|Surrealist group developed in London]] and, according to Breton, their 1936 [[London International Surrealist Exhibition]] was a high-water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions. Another English Surrealist group developed [[Birmingham Surrealists|in Birmingham]], meanwhile, and was distinguished by its opposition to the London surrealists and preferences for surrealism's French heartland. The two groups would reconcile later in the decade.

Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dalí joined the group in 1929 and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.

Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth; stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.

1931 was a year when several Surrealist painters produced works which marked turning points in their stylistic evolution: Magritte's ''Voice of Space (La Voix des airs)''<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/2593?tmpl=component&print=1 |title=Surrealism – Magritte – Voice of Space |publisher=Guggenheim Collection |access-date=2009-12-26 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150319041151/http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/2593?tmpl=component&print=1 |archive-date=2015-03-19 }}</ref> is an example of this process, where three large spheres representing bells hang above a landscape. Another Surrealist landscape from this same year is Yves Tanguy's ''[[:File:Premontory Palace.jpg|Promontory Palace (Palais promontoire)]]'', with its molten forms and liquid shapes. Liquid shapes became the trademark of Dalí, particularly in his ''[[The Persistence of Memory]]'', which features the image of watches that sag as if they were melting.

The characteristics of this style—a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological—came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the [[modernism|modern]] period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality".

Between 1930 and 1933, the Surrealist Group in Paris issued the periodical ''[[Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution]]'' as the successor of ''La Révolution surréaliste''.

From 1936 through 1938 [[Wolfgang Paalen]], [[Gordon Onslow Ford]], and [[Roberto Matta]] joined the group. Paalen contributed [[Fumage]] and Onslow Ford [[Coulage]] as new pictorial automatic techniques.

Long after personal, political and professional tensions fragmented the Surrealist group, Magritte and Dalí continued to define a visual program in the arts. This program reached beyond painting, to encompass photography as well, as can be seen from a Man Ray self-portrait, whose use of assemblage influenced [[Robert Rauschenberg]]'s collage boxes.
[[File:L'Ange du Foyeur.jpg|thumb|left|[[Max Ernst]], ''L'Ange du Foyer ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme'' (1937), private collection]]
During the 1930s [[Peggy Guggenheim]], an important American art collector, married Max Ernst and began promoting work by other Surrealists such as Yves Tanguy and the British artist [[John Tunnard]].

'''Major exhibitions in the 1930s'''
* 1936 – ''[[London International Surrealist Exhibition]]'' is organised in London by the art historian [[Herbert Read]], with an introduction by André Breton.
* 1936 – [[Museum of Modern Art]] in New York shows the exhibition ''[[Fantastic Art]], Dada and Surrealism''.
* 1938 – A new ''[[Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme]]'' was held at the Beaux-arts Gallery, Paris, with more than 60 artists from different countries, and showed around 300 paintings, objects, collages, photographs and installations. The Surrealists wanted to create an exhibition which in itself would be a creative act and called on Marcel Duchamp, Wolfgang Paalen, Man Ray and others to do so. At the exhibition's entrance Salvador Dalí placed his [[Rainy Taxi]] (an old taxi rigged to produce a steady drizzle of water down the inside of the windows, and a shark-headed creature in the driver's seat and a blond mannequin crawling with live snails in the back) greeted the patrons who were in full evening dress. ''Surrealist Street'' filled one side of the lobby with mannequins dressed by various Surrealists. Paalen and Duchamp designed the main hall to seem like cave with 1,200 coal bags suspended from the ceiling over a coal brazier with a single light bulb which provided the only lighting, as well as the floor covered with humid leaves and mud.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/interviews/hirschhorn/popup_8.html |first=Marcel|last= Duchamp |publisher=Toutfait.com |access-date=|title= Twelve Hundred Coal Bags Suspended from the Ceiling over a Stove}}</ref> The patrons were given flashlights with which to view the art. On the floor Wolfgang Paalen created a small lake with grasses and the aroma of roasting coffee filled the air. Much to the Surrealists' satisfaction the exhibition scandalized the viewers.<ref name="tomkins"/>

===World War II and the Post War period===
[[File:Indefinite Divisibility.jpg|thumb|[[Yves Tanguy]] ''Indefinite Divisibility'', 1942, [[Albright Knox Art Gallery]], Buffalo, New York]]
World War II created havoc not only for the general population of Europe but especially for the European artists and writers that opposed Fascism and Nazism. Many important artists fled to North America and relative safety in the United States. The art community in [[Culture of New York City|New York City]] in particular was already grappling with Surrealist ideas and several artists like [[Arshile Gorky]], [[Jackson Pollock]], and [[Robert Motherwell]] converged closely with the surrealist artists themselves, albeit with some suspicion and reservations. Ideas concerning the unconscious and dream imagery were quickly embraced. By the Second World War, the taste of the American [[avant-garde]] in New York swung decisively towards [[Abstract Expressionism]] with the support of key taste makers, including [[Peggy Guggenheim]], [[Leo Steinberg]] and [[Clement Greenberg]]. However, it should not be easily forgotten that Abstract Expressionism itself grew directly out of the meeting of American (particularly New York) artists with European Surrealists self-exiled during World War II. In particular, Gorky and Paalen influenced the development of this American art form, which, as Surrealism did, celebrated the instantaneous human act as the well-spring of creativity. The early work of many Abstract Expressionists reveals a tight bond between the more superficial aspects of both movements, and the emergence (at a later date) of aspects of [[Dadaist]]ic humor in such artists as [[Rauschenberg]] sheds an even starker light upon the connection. Up until the emergence of [[Pop Art]], Surrealism can be seen to have been the single most important influence on the sudden growth in American arts, and even in Pop, some of the humor manifested in Surrealism can be found, often turned to a cultural criticism.

The Second World War overshadowed, for a time, almost all intellectual and artistic production. In 1939 Wolfgang Paalen was the first to leave Paris for the New World as exile. After a long trip through the forests of British Columbia, he settled in Mexico and founded his influential art-magazine [[DYN (journal)|Dyn]]. In 1940 Yves Tanguy married American Surrealist painter [[Kay Sage]]. In 1941, Breton went to the United States, where he co-founded the short-lived magazine ''[[VVV (magazine)|VVV]]'' with Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and the American artist [[David Hare (artist)|David Hare]]. However, it was the American poet, [[Charles Henri Ford]], and his magazine ''[[View (magazine)|View]]'' which offered Breton a channel for promoting Surrealism in the United States. The ''View'' special issue on Duchamp was crucial for the public understanding of Surrealism in America. It stressed his connections to Surrealist methods, offered interpretations of his work by Breton, as well as Breton's view that Duchamp represented the bridge between early modern movements, such as [[Futurism (art)|Futurism]] and [[Cubism]], to Surrealism. Wolfgang Paalen left the group in 1942 due to political/philosophical differences with Breton.

[[File:The_Conspirators_by_Colin_Middleton_1942lr.jpg |thumb |upright=1.2|left|''The Conspirators'' by Colin Middleton (1942), the Irish Surrealist's response to the [[Belfast Blitz]] ]]
Though the war proved disruptive for Surrealism, the works continued. Many Surrealist artists continued to explore their vocabularies, including Magritte. Many members of the Surrealist movement continued to correspond and meet. While Dalí may have been excommunicated by Breton, he neither abandoned his themes from the 1930s, including references to the "persistence of time" in a later painting, nor did he become a depictive pompier. His classic period did not represent so sharp a break with the past as some descriptions of his work might portray, and some, such as [[André Thirion]], argued that there were works of his after this period that continued to have some relevance for the movement. When the war reached Ireland with the [[Belfast Blitz]] in May 1941, [[Colin Middleton]], who had experimented with surrealist themes in the 1930s, responded with a series of dark works reflecting the shocked state of the people of the city. These were exhibited at the [[Ulster Museum|Belfast Municipal Gallery and Museum]] after its restoration in 1943, following near destruction in the blitz.<ref name=PatMurphy>{{cite news |title=Ireland's greatest surrealist |author=Patrick Murphy |newspaper=[[The Irish Times]] |date=31 December 1980 }}</ref>

During the 1940s Surrealism's influence was also felt in England, America and the Netherlands where Gertrude Pape and her husband Theo van Baaren helped to popularize it in their publication The Clean Handkerchief.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Surrealist women : an international anthology|date=1998|publisher=University of Texas Press|others=Rosemont, Penelope. |isbn=978-0-292-77088-1|edition=1st|location=Austin|oclc=37782914|url=https://archive.org/details/surrealistwomeni00rose}}</ref> [[Mark Rothko]] took an interest in [[biomorphism|biomorphic]] figures, and in England [[Henry Moore]], [[Lucian Freud]], [[Francis Bacon (artist)|Francis Bacon]] and [[Paul Nash (artist)|Paul Nash]] used or experimented with Surrealist techniques. However, [[Conroy Maddox]], one of the first British Surrealists whose work in this genre dated from 1935, remained within the movement, and organized an exhibition of current Surrealist work in 1978 in response to an earlier show which infuriated him because it did not properly represent Surrealism. Maddox's exhibition, titled ''Surrealism Unlimited'', was held in Paris and attracted international attention. He held his last one-man show in 2002, and died three years later.  Magritte's work became more realistic in its depiction of actual objects, while maintaining the element of juxtaposition, such as in 1951's ''Personal Values (Les Valeurs Personnelles)''<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.sfmoma.org/MSoMA/newAWScreen.asp?awScreenNum=5139|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20081001014708/http://www.sfmoma.org/MSoMA/newAWScreen.asp?awScreenNum=5139 |url-status=dead|title=SFmoma.org|archivedate=October 1, 2008}}</ref> and 1954's ''Empire of Light  (L’Empire des lumières)''.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/2594 |title=Artist – Magritte – Empire of Light – Large |publisher= Guggenheim Collection |date= January 1953|access-date=2009-12-26}}</ref> Magritte continued to produce works which have entered artistic vocabulary, such as ''Castle in the Pyrenees (Le Château des Pyrénées)'',<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://artacademieparis.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/magritte_Castle-in-the-Pyrenees.jpg |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20180510184620/https://artacademieparis.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/magritte_Castle-in-the-Pyrenees.jpg|url-status= dead |website=Artacademieparis|archive-date=May 10, 2018|title = Castle in the Pyrenees|last = Magritte|first = Rene}}</ref> which refers back to ''Voix'' from 1931, in its suspension over a landscape.

Other figures from the Surrealist movement were expelled. Several of these artists, like [[Roberto Matta]] (by his own description) "remained close to Surrealism".<ref name="tomkins"/> Frida Kahlo should be mentioned. She had a New York solo exhibition in 1938 with 25 paintings, encouraged by Breton himself.

After the crushing of the [[Hungarian Revolution of 1956]], [[Endre Rozsda]] returned to Paris to continue creating his own word that had been transcended the surrealism. The preface to his first exhibition in the Furstenberg Gallery (1957) was written by Breton yet.<ref name="breton">Breton, André. ''Surrealism and Painting'', Icon, 1973</ref>

Many new artists explicitly took up the Surrealist banner. [[Dorothea Tanning]] and [[Louise Bourgeois]] continued to work, for example, with Tanning's ''Rainy Day Canape'' from 1970. Duchamp continued to produce sculpture in secret, including his installation depicting a woman realistically, viewed through a peephole: [[Étant_donnés]].

Breton continued to write and espouse the importance of liberating the human mind, as with the publication ''[[The Tower of Light]]'' in 1952. Breton's return to France after the War, began a new phase of Surrealist activity in Paris, and his critiques of rationalism and dualism found a new audience. Breton insisted that Surrealism was an ongoing revolt against the reduction of humanity to market relationships, religious gestures and misery and to espouse the importance of liberating the human mind.

'''Major exhibitions of the 1940s, '50s and '60s'''
* 1942 – ''First Papers of Surrealism'' – New York – The Surrealists again called on Duchamp to design an exhibition. This time he wove a 3-dimensional web of string throughout the rooms of the space, in some cases making it almost impossible to see the works.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/interviews/hirschhorn/popup_9.html |first=Marcel|last= Duchamp |publisher=Toutfait.com |access-date=|title = Sixteen Miles of String}}</ref> He made a secret arrangement with an associate's son to bring his friends to the opening of the show, so that when the finely dressed patrons arrived, they found a dozen children in athletic clothes kicking and passing balls and skipping rope. His design for the show's catalog included "found", rather than posed, photographs of the artists.<ref name="tomkins"/>
* 1947 – International Surrealist Exhibition – Galerie Maeght, Paris<ref>International Surrealist Exhibition – Galerie Maeght, Paris« L’espace d'exposition comme matrice signifiante: l'exemple de l'exposition internationale du surréalisme à la galerie Maeght à Paris en 1947 », ''Ligiea'', n°73-74-75-76 : Art et espace. Perception et représentation. Le lieu, le visible et l'espace-temps. le geste, le corps et le regard, sous la direction de Giovanni Lista, Paris, juin 2007, p. 230–242.</ref>
* 1959 – International Surrealist Exhibition – Paris
* 1960 – ''Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters' Domain'' – New York