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Surrealism, born in Paris in 1924, was defined by its founder, Andre Breton, as "pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing or by other means, the real process of thought. It is thought's dictation, all exercise of reason and every aesthetic or moral preoccupation being absent." It is apparent that surrealism is less a style than it is a program and a method. Its program is a serious search for the material of art in the subconscious mind, in dreams and hallucinations, in the irrational and atavistic layers of being. Its method is the most spontaneous possible transference of the images uncovered to canvas without consideration of form or design (automatism). Surrealism is an artistic parallel to Freud's researches, though on an intuitive rather than analytical level.

Surrealism did not reach America until the early 1930's, and its orthodox followers on this side of the Atlantic have never been numerous. Nevertheless, its influence here has been pervasive, not only on the painters of fantasy discussed in this chapter, but also on many realists and expressionists, who have made use of its irrational juxtapositions, and on the founders of our abstract-expressionist movement, who adopted its theory of automatism. Surrealism has, in short, been an important fructifying force in our mid-century art without ever becoming a very widespread movement in itself.

In Paris, the expatriate American Man Ray was an early adherent to surrealism, while in this country, Joseph Cornell and Federico Castellón were among its first followers. Castellón's The Dark Figure, done in 1938, is an orthodox example of the "realist" phase of the movement, already exploited by Salvador Dali (who arrived in America the same year). Despite its dismemberments and its gruesome distortions of shape, proportion, and texture, Castellón's picture deals with recognizable things and figures, painted with the utmost faithfulness--a method which heightens the sense of vivid hallucination. Its irrationality need hardly be pointed out; it is of the same order that the Comte de Lautreamont (patron saint of the surrealists) had in mind when he wrote "beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table."

The movement gained impetus with the outbreak of World War II, which brought a number of European surrealists to America for asylum: Yves Tanguy, Kurt Seligmann, and Matta in 1939, Max Ernst in 1941. Of these, the first two made their homes here since, and contributed their very different and personal interpretations of surrealism to American art. Seligmann's painting is rooted in an extraordinary fusion of present and past, the spontaneous fantasy of the moment enriched by his memories of fantastic elements in earlier art, particularly the baroque. Of The Balcony, I he wrote: "The impulse to this painting was given when visitors gathered on the terrace of my studio in Sugar Loaf. Seen from below, the upper part of their bodies appeared as silhouettes against the sky, reminding me of the various 'balcony scenes' of the masters of the past, of certain statues on churches in Italy, especially of San Michele in Lucca." Like baroque sculpture, his compositions have a theatrical quality although the grand gesture seems often tempered by irony. The fantasy is that of a superb prestidigitator rather than of an obsessed mind.

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