Rene magritte and other artists - surrealism

Surrealism and symbolism  - Is it connected?

Time - Lines - http://www.surrealismart.org/history/branches-surrealism.html 

As much as I can tell these two movement have indeed similarities.  The Surrealist artist's are said to have been inspired by the rules of Symbolism and the spontaneous abstract style of Max Ernst.


The first style of the surrealist artist were more known as illusionists and wanted to create realistic representations of a sleep state; in their work. The artist's like Dali and Ernst incorporated elements of nature, animals and even human figures.


The artists bypass reason and rationality by accessing their unconscious mind. In practice, these techniques became known as automatism or automatic writing, which allowed artists to forget conscious thought and embrace chance when creating art.

Salvador Dali

automatism by André Masson

Max Ernst - worked around 1909- 1976.... A soldier in World War I, Ernst emerged deeply traumatized and highly critical of western culture. many artist have taken inspiration from Ernst (Pollock -abstract expressionism) and the artist also told the ideas and inspiration of  Sigmund Freuds dream theories  ....... discovering the possibilities of autonomism and dreams;  his artistic investigations were aided by hypnosis and hallucinogenics. For me all these artists and theories play a massive part in the time of all ism's.

'Men Shall Know Nothing of This' 1923

Above the moment of calm reminds me of the work by Anselm Kiefer. While done later on in the 1939, another one of Ernst many styles.

photo-montage

Magritte was a painting philosopher

Magritte spent many years working as a commercial artist, producing advertising and book designs, and this most likely shaped his fine art.

Words and images - la trahison des images, illustrates this setting words against representations, he accompanies a picture of a pipe with the word this is not a pipe!

This was to throw our thoughts up and aback by a true fact that indeed it is not a pipe it is a painting of a pipe, but our response could argue against the imagery and the fact it is a pipe..... however, what Magritte is signifying is the distinction between, which part of the pipe makes it a pipe.... is it the pipe in General, the mouthpiece, the object of such a thing in a gentleman's pocket, a class of an object? In English is it a pipe but in maybe in Italian the image will be matched with a different word... ..... a child maybe won't have seen a pipe but can read the word.... what does this do to their knowledge of they world?

Words are arbitrary, unreliable things, yet we tend to put more trust in them than in images even though we agree that images can approximate to visual facts...



    

 

I think Magritte's style is very obvious in the style of colour palette and flatness, and imagery. But the thought and theories are not so clear.  I feel the artist comes across as blunt in these works.

The men in bowler hats that often appear in Magritte's pictures can be interpreted as self-portraits. Portrayals of the artist's wife, Georgette, are also common in his work, as are glimpses of the couple's modest Brussels apartment. Although this might suggest autobiographical content in Magritte's pictures, it more likely points to the commonplace sources of his inspiration. It is as if he believed that we need not look far for the mysterious, since it lurks everywhere in the most conventional of lives. Nothing as queer as folk....

magritte and wife

I do think that many different qualities have gone into these ism's and I think each one could be characterised into lots of styles. It's really down to the time period and conventions in the artist time and life at that moment. Maybe this is just what happens when creative minds get together and influence each other to create big better works.