The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (468 page)

Surrealism
.

Movement in art and literature flourishing in the 1920s and 1930s, characterized by a fascination with the bizarre, the incongruous, and the irrational. It was closely related to
Dada
, its principal source; several artists figured successively in both movements, each of which was conceived as a revolutionary mode of thought and action—a way of life rather than a set of stylistic attitudes. Both were strongly antirationalist and much concerned with creating effects that were disturbing or shocking, but whereas Dada was essentially nihilist, Surrealism was positive in spirit. Surrealism originated in France. Its founder and chief spokesman was the writer André
Breton
, who officially launched the movement with his first
Manifeste du surréalisme
, published in 1924. The central idea of the movement was to release the creative powers of the subconscious mind, or as Breton put it, ‘to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality’. Within this general aim Surrealism embraced a large number of different and not altogether coherent doctrines and techniques, characteristically aimed at breaching the dominance of reason and conscious control by methods designed to release primitive urges and imagery. Breton and other members of the movement drew liberally on Freud's theories concerning the subconscious and its relation to dreams. The way in which Surrealist artists set about exploration of submerged impulses and imagery varied greatly (in spite of Breton's demands there was little doctrinal unity, and defections, expulsions, and personal attacks are a feature of the history of the movement). Some artists, for example
Ernst
and
Masson
, cultivated various spontaneous techniques such as
frottage
in an effort to eliminate conscious control. At the other extreme,
Dali
,
Magritte
, and others painted in a scrupulously detailed manner to give a hallucinatory sense of reality to scenes that make no rational sense.
Paris remained the centre of Surrealism until the Second World War, when the emigration of many European artists to the USA made New York the new hub of its activity. However, it became the most widely disseminated and controversial aesthetic movement of the 1920s and 1930s, spread partly by a series of major international exhibitions. Two of the most important took place in 1936: the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London, and ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Surrealism did not take root in Germany (Ernst, the major German Surrealist, lived mostly in France and the USA), but it flourished vigorously in Belgium—in the work particularly of Magritte, the most inspired of all Surrealist painters, and
Delvaux
, the most long-lived upholder of the tradition. Many artists who were not in sympathy with the political aims of Surrealism (for a time it was associated with the French Communist Party), and who were never formal members of the movement, nevertheless found its ideas stimulating and were influenced by its imagery. In Britain, Henry
Moore
and Paul
Nash
were among the major artists who went through a Surrealist phase. The English Surrealist Group was founded in 1936, but it was social rather than revolutionary in its aims.
Although it broke up as an organized movement during the war and by this time had spent its main force, the spirit of Surrealism lived on. With its stress on the marvellous and the poetic, Surrealism offered an alternative approach to the formalism of
Cubism
and various types of abstract art, and its methods and techniques continued to influence artists in many countries. It was, for example, a fundamental source for
Abstract Expressionism
.

 
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(1903–80).
English painter, graphic artist, and designer. He abandoned an apprenticeship as a railway engineer to study engraving and etching, 1921–6, and up to 1930 worked exclusively as a graphic artist. His etchings of this period are in the
Romantic
and visionary tradition of Samuel
Palmer
. In the early 1930s he began experimenting with oils (following a decline in the market for prints), and by 1935 he had turned mainly to painting. His paintings of the 1930s show a highly subjective response to nature, inspired mainly by visits to Pembrokeshire. He had a vivid gift of visual metaphor and his landscapes are not scenic, but semi-abstract patterns of haunting and monstrous shapes rendered in his distinctively acidic colouring (
Entrance to a Lane
, Tate, London, 1939). During the war years he was employed as an
Official War Artist
to record the effects of bombing, and his work matured as he wrestled with the problems of finding a visual surrogate for the devastation and the destruction of man-made things. Soon after the war he took up religious painting, with a
Crucifixion
(1946) for St Matthew's, Northampton (he received the commission at the dedication of Henry
Moore's
Madonna and Child
in this church), and also portraiture, with
Somerset Maugham
(Tate , 1949). It was in these two fields that he chiefly made his mark in his later career. The Maugham portrait has an almost
caricature
quality (Maugham's friend Sir Gerald
Kelly
said it made him look ‘like an old Chinese madam in a brothel in Shanghai’), and his most famous portrait, that of Winston Churchill (1954), was so hated by the sitter that Lady Churchill destroyed it. Sutherland's most celebrated work, however, has become widely popular—it is the immense tapestry of
Christ in Glory
(completed 1962) in Coventry Cathedral. Sutherland continued to paint landscapes—his first love—often inspired by the French Riviera, where he lived for part of every year from 1947. Apart from paintings and graphic art, his work included ceramics and designing posters and stage costumes and decor. He was one of the most famous British artists of the 20th cent. and received many honours, notably the Order of Merit in 1960.

 
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Swanenburgh , Jacob van
.

See
REMBRANDT
.

 
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(
c.
1500–after 1553).
Netherlandish painter, book illustrator, and designer of stained-glass windows. He came from Groningen, worked in Antwerp and Gouda, and also travelled to Italy early in his career. His works show that he was familiar with those of
Dürer
,
Holbein
,
Scorel
, and other northern artists who were impressed by Italian
Renaissance
art, but in spite of this his style has a certain archaic charm. He had a predilection for showing people wearing high hats, turbans, and other odd headgear.

 
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