The mysterious flowing clocks of Salvodor Dali, the romantic seascapes of Yves Tanguy, the saints and demons of Max Ernst, the air of the universe of Rene Magritte - they are so different, and yet their commonality is obvious - surrealism in painting.
Surrealism, as a style of painting, in which these and other masters of the surrealist direction worked, was born after the end of the First World War - at a turning point for all art. The shock that the world experienced when it first encountered a huge senseless war machine of destruction seemed to have launched the hidden mechanisms of the human psyche: especially among creative and talented individuals.
There is nothing more real than fiction
Surrealism is the highest point of realism. It is at this peak that the line disappears between reality and its reverse side - unreality: sleep, fiction, fantasy. Therefore, the forms and images present in the canvases of surrealist artists may be subtly familiar to everyone who looks at them. Every person on earth, to one degree or another, met the heroes of the images of these paintings - in their beautiful or terrible dreams, in their dreams.
For artists of this direction, the subconscious side of their own work was extremely important. Needless to say, they lived and worked at the same time as Sigmund Freud, and his works on the unconscious found the most lively response in their minds. It is clear that it is impossible to create while in an unconscious state. Certainly, some of the surrealist artists have abused various psychotropic substances, however, as a rule, not in the moments of creativity.
So what triggered their creative impulse? Perhaps there is only one answer to this question: constant, continuous creative and intellectual communication that existed in the twenties in Europe and especially in Paris at that time. All extremely self-centered, they also needed each other. After all, the subconscious should always, like a vampire, have nourishment in reality. In reality, which was created by like-minded writers, poets, artists and philosophers.
Mediators
Capturing, holding, capturing a moment of sleep, a fleeting moment of hidden fears and exhausting, painful desires - these are aspirations, artistic super-task and themes of creativity of artists of the surrealist direction. They, as guides between reality and the otherworldly, become intermediaries between unspoken thoughts that are in the air, and those to whom these thoughts are intended.
Chirico Giorgio, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Magritte Rene, Salvodor Dali, Frida Kahlo, Paul Delvaux, Dorothy Tanning - painting of the twentieth century is unthinkable without the paintings of these masters. Each of them is unique and inimitable. By the way, this is the difference between surrealist painting and other styles - there can be no unity in it, it is simply forbidden. Only individuality, even rather pronounced individualism, brought to the point of hypertrophy. Perhaps this is why Surrealism barely outlived its main artists in the ensuing era of standardization.
But even in the twenty-first century there are artists who paint in this style. One of the brightest is Michael Parkes, an American living and writing in Switzerland.
