The History and Impact of Surrealism as It Celebrates Its Centennial

Proto-Surrealism

While we think of Surrealism as a 20th-century phenomenon, its roots in art reach much farther back. For much of European art history, depictions of heaven and hell were a constant theme, and in this respect, portrayals of otherworldly planes intersecting our own were an accepted fact of pictorial organization.

Medieval and Renaissance Art

All such art was arguably surreal in this sense, but there were instances of what could be called proto-Surrealism, particularly in the work of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516), a Dutch/Netherlandish painter whose phantasmagoric compositions are among the most canonical in Western art. Paintings like The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1510) were much admired by the Surrealists for their bizarre scenery and chaotic juxtaposition of disparate images.

The fanciful portraits of the Italian Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–93) were also proto-Surrealist, combining still life and trompe l’oeil to cobble imaginary sitters out of objects related to them (a librarian made of books, a cook fashioned out of victuals, and so on).

Romanticism

Surrealism could be considered a backlash to large historical forces—the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution—that developed in Europe between the 17^th and 19^th centuries. The former held that religion and faith must relinquish themselves to the power of reason, effectively severing a connection between the physical and metaphysical that Surrealism would later try to repair.

Surrealism rejected Enlightenment beliefs, but it wasn’t the first movement to do so. In the early 19^th century, Romanticism swept across the Continent, its proponents arguing that relying on reason alone shortchanged individual agency by ignoring sensation, both good and bad. Among the artists within its ranks were three—William Blake, Henry Fuseli, and Francisco Goya—whose work could be considered proto-Surrealistic.

A poet as well as an artist, Blake (1757–1827) conjured ecstatic visions of figures set against stars and planetary orbs, radiating coronas of cosmic light that metaphorically burst the straitjacket of logic. Blake critiqued reason in hand-colored engravings like Newton (1795), which depicts the eponymous titan of science seated naked on a rock, bending over a scroll with compass in hand, so fixated on his calculations that he’s blind to everything else.

Fuseli (1741–1825) was a Swiss artist whose crepuscular masterpiece, The Nightmare (1781), plumbed the erotic depths of dreams a century before Freud. It pictures a woman in a diaphanous gown lying prostrate on a bed as a satanic incubus sits on her chest. On the left, a blind horse pokes its head through a curtain. The sexual overtones of The Nightmare are as disturbing as they are unmistakable; the same overtones suffuse Fuseli’s other works, including studies of women whose tinge of fetishistic obsession presaged the same within Surrealism.

One of the iconic names in Western art, Goya (1746–1828) channeled the benighted conditions of late 18^th– and early 19^th-century Spain as it lay in the smothering grip of the Catholic Church. In 1799 he published The Caprices, a folio of aquatints depicting Spain’s crippling backwardness as a series of stark tableaux populated by hideous dwarfs, cadaverous hags, witches, and other abominations. The signature image of the collection shows a man, head down on a table, beset by scores of bats, cats, and owls. Its caption, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” speaks to the limits of the Enlightenment project to reform behavior.

Symbolism

In the late 19th century, another group of artists likewise anticipated Surrealism. Calling themselves Symbolists, they explored aspects of the human condition as dreamlike allegories.

Odilon Redon (1840–1916) is probably the most widely recognized Symbolist thanks to his “noirs,” a series of lithographs and charcoals begun in the 1880s. Among the most extraordinary was The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (1882). Much of Redon’s work was inspired by writers like Edgar Allan Poe, to whom this rendering of an eyeball ascending the sky was dedicated.

The work of Gustave Moreau (1826–98) was equally hallucinatory, suffusing scenes from Greek mythology and the Bible with a lysergic air of exoticism. His most famous canvas, The Apparition (1874–76), transforms the New Testament tale of John the Baptist’s head being delivered on a platter to Salome into a deliriously decadent apparition of his severed pate floating in front of the barely clothed recipient.

Post-Impressionism

While Symbolism functioned as a unique chapter in art, it was also the result of the Post-Impressionist context in which it developed. Marquee names of the period—Paul Gaugin, Edvard Munch, and Vincent van Gogh—crossed over into Symbolism.

This was especially true of Gaugin, whose Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake (1889) leavened a meditation on good versus evil with a generous dollop of self-regard, and Munch, whose combination of Symbolism and Expressionism resulted in that veritable logo for angst, The Scream (1893). Van Gogh, meanwhile, psychologically supercharged his landscapes and genre scenes, employing frenetic brushwork as a kind of borderline automatism.

James Ensor

A contemporary of the artists above, James Ensor (1860–1949) also foreshadowed Surrealism. Ensor spent much of his life in Ostend, a resort on the Flanders coast. His family ran a gift emporium there catering to tourists, and it was especially busy during the city’s annual carnival, when the shop sold masks to revelers. These items featured prominently in Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels (1889), which transplants the Gospel tale of Jesus’s triumphal arrival into Jerusalem to the Belgian capital of Ensor’s day. Jesus is seen in a parade led by a boisterous crowd wearing grotesque masks. Even more uncanny were paintings like Skeletons Warming Themselves (1889), of a group of costumed skeletons gathered around a stove.

Giorgio de Chirico

While Freud provided the theoretical foundation for Surrealism, Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) supplied its visual template, arguably exercising an even greater influence than Freud on the Surrealists. His work predated Dada by several years, with paintings like The Enigma of the Oracle going as far back as 1910. He dubbed his approach pittura metafisica (metaphysical art).

A typical de Chirico composition centered on a desolate Italian piazza bounded by colonnades, towers, and other elements of classical architecture, though factories appeared occasionally in the background. His scenes were for the most part devoid of people, populated instead by an odd assortment of objects that included Greco-Roman statuary, mannequins, and cryptic geometrical solids. He used sharp contrasts between light and dark, and long, menacing shadows loomed throughout. His sharply titling perspective led the eye into a kind of spatial purgatory, a trope adopted later by Tanguy, Dalí, and others.

De Chirico’s work was enthusiastically embraced by Breton, who credited it with “preserving for eternity the memory of the true modern mythology.” However, Breton’s view of de Chirico cooled considerably after 1928, by which time the latter had abandoned metaphysical art, turning instead to an odd, and often clunky, blend of classical and baroque motifs.

De Chirico’s most famous paintings spoke to the anxieties of the Industrial Age by evoking a curdled nostalgia for the certainties of antiquity. To this extent, they always expressed the artist’s skepticism toward modernity, a gimlet view that would blossom in his later retardataire style. Still, metaphysical art was ambiguous enough to earn an essential spot within the avant-garde.