The end of the surrealism movement was so political, so artistically pure.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
As far as the style, I was fascinated by surrealism.
Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.
Surrealism - in particular with Salvador Dali - was all about ego. It was all about extreme individualism.
Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.
The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
Dali was the great painter then and surrealism was a way of life.
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
Surrealism was necessary - essential, even - in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early '60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable.