Surrealism

Surrealism, movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism’s emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I.

According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published “The Surrealist Manifesto” in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.

Roberto Matta

Being With (Être Avec)

Matta's enormous mural-size canvas Being With (Être Avec) was painted in 1946 while he was living in New York. Spanning a length of fifteen feet, the composition is a complex labyrinth of architectural structures seen from various perspectives and primitive humanoid figures contorted unnaturally and exploding with sexual exhibitionism. Such imagery certainly drew from his earlier familiarity with architectural design and Surrealist irrationality. Although physically removed from the horrors of the war, Matta's painting clearly expresses his distress at the state of the world. His Surrealist work of the late 1930s to mid-'40s looked within, depicting "psychological morphologies" that invented visual equivalents for various states of personal consciousness. On the other hand, his paintings and drawings of the mid- to late 1940s, such as Being With (Être Avec), which he called "social morphologies," attempted to address the broader societal crisis that the artist felt he was part of (or "being with"). This shift in outlook, and the introduction of figurative and narrative elements into his paintings (no matter how fantastic they appear), eventually led to Matta's alienation from the Surrealist group.

References:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/575336/Surrealism

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2003.270