{"id":1031,"date":"2024-03-04T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-03-04T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bethanhemus.art\/?p=1031"},"modified":"2025-09-24T12:43:05","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T12:43:05","slug":"surrealism-and-trauma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bethanhemus.art\/?p=1031","title":{"rendered":"Surrealism and trauma"},"content":{"rendered":"
Surrealism is informed by trauma and so am I. So it is natural that I would look to this movement to understand better the context of my own making.<\/span><\/div>\n

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‘Nue couch\u00e9e’<\/span><\/div>\n

Dorothea Tanning<\/span><\/div>\n

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‘La corde sensible’<\/span><\/div>\n
Ren\u00e9 Magritte <\/span><\/div>\n

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‘Object’<\/span><\/div>\n

Meret Oppenheim<\/span><\/div>\n

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‘Breton defined Surrealism as a way to \u201cresolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.\u201d He recast it as an artistic enterprise with his 1928 publication Surrealism and Painting. By then, artists such as Jean Arp, Salvador Dal\u00ed, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Ren\u00e9 Magritte, Joan Mir\u00f3, and Yves Tanguy had been drawn into his orbit.<\/span><\/div>\n

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Stylistically, Surrealism ranged from the quasi-abstraction of Mir\u00f3 to Magritte\u2019s deadpan realism. Originally centered in Paris, it became global in scope, spilling over to the Americas and Asia. Reacting to the carnage of World War I, the movement attacked rationalism and social decorum, upending longstanding artistic precepts and subverting conventional sexual mores with misogynistic \u00e9lan. Even so, Surrealism attracted a significant cohort of female artists, among them Meret Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, Claude Cahun, and Leonora Carrington.<\/span><\/div>\n

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The Surrealists reveled in a discontinuity best summarized by a line from the 1868 novel Les Chants de Maldoror, which described a \u201cchance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.\u201d This idea became Surrealism\u2019s credo, codified by the collaborative genre known as the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). Resembling a game of telephone, but played with drawings, cadavre exquis involved passing a piece of paper around a group of artists. Each would render part of a figure, then hide it by folding the sheet over. Other participants would follow suit, and the result when revealed was predictably disjointed.’<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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SOURCE<\/span>: Article on the enduring impact of Surrealism<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/div>\n

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Like Dadaism, Surrealism was an avant-garde movement that explored the psyche and had placed strong emphasis on mental investigation. it is unsurprising that they were a response to profound changes in politics, war, revolution, and technology witnessed in the early 20th Century.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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Surrealism is informed by trauma and so am I. So it is natural that I would look to this movement to understand better the context of my own making. ‘Nue couch\u00e9e’ Dorothea Tanning ‘La corde sensible’ Ren\u00e9 Magritte  ‘Object’ Meret Oppenheim ‘Breton defined Surrealism as a way to \u201cresolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1032,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bethanhemus.art\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bethanhemus.art\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bethanhemus.art\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bethanhemus.art\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bethanhemus.art\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1031"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bethanhemus.art\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1033,"href":"https:\/\/bethanhemus.art\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031\/revisions\/1033"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bethanhemus.art\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bethanhemus.art\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bethanhemus.art\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bethanhemus.art\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}