A Brief History of Surrealist Art: From the Bible and Ancient Egypt to Salvador Dalí’s Dream Worlds
The term surrealism — or rather, surréalisme — originates from the French words for “beyond reality.” That’s a zone, we may assume, reachable by only daring, and possibly unhinged, artistic minds. But in fact, even the most down-to-earth among us go beyond reality on a nightly basis. We do so in our dreams, where the accepted mechanics of space and time, life and death, and cause and effect do not apply. Or rather, they’re replaced by another set of rules entirely, which feels perfectly consistent and convincing to us in the moment. Such “dream logic” may frustrate the friends and family we attempt to regale with tales of our night visions, but as the surrealists found, it could also be put to the service of enduring art.
In the Hochelaga video above, that channel’s creator Tommie Trelawny provides a long history of surrealism in a short running time. Tracing that movement’s roots, he goes all the way back to the ancient culture of the Australian Aboriginals, for whom the concept of the “dreamtime” still plays an important role — and has inspired “possibly the oldest unbroken artistic tradition in the world.”
In other places and other eras of antiquity, dreams were also considered “a bridge for the spirit world and the physical one.” For the Egyptians, “these nighttime voyages were a chance to see reality more clearly,” as evidenced by resut, their word for “dream,” which also means “awakening.” Unsurprisingly for regular Hochelaga viewers, Trelawny also finds dreams in the Bible, “a book full of visions of the divine and glimpses into the cosmic unknown.”
In every period between antiquity and now, art — including the work of Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Durer, and Edvard Munch, as well as Japanese woodblock prints — has attempted to capture the sort of experiences and imagery encountered only in dreams, and indeed nightmares. But it was only in the wake of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, first published in 1899, that surrealism could take shape, inspired by the question, “If the mind can reveal itself through dreams, what if it could reveal itself through art?” Après Freud came the unconsciousness-inspired paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, and of course Salvador Dalí. Yet none of them could have foreseen the truly surrealistic déluge that artificial intelligence has brought us. If AI reveals to us something of how we think, its hallucinations reveal to us even more about how we dream.
Related Content:
An Introduction to Surrealism: The Big Aesthetic Ideas Presented in Three Videos
What Makes Salvador Dalí’s Iconic Surrealist Painting The Persistence of Memory a Great Work of Art
David Lynch Presents the History of Surrealist Film (1987)
The Fantastic Women Of Surrealism: An Introduction
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.