Surrealism and Magritte’s Poetic Strategies

Surrealism is something which is surprising, unexpected or fantastical elements juxtaposed to form a dream-like scene. It was a cultural movement started by Andre Breton in the 1920s.

The realisation that “reality” is not a given constant and that “reality” cannot exist outside of “perception” or the mind. It is also influenced by writings of Sigmund Freud and the idea of our subconscious (Automatism), privileging the subconscious mind or instincts of the artist.

The ideas of surrealism had a far-reaching influence and allowed artists to use more intuition and the element of chance in their work. For instance, artists such as William de Kooning, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore and Picasso. Eventually, surrealist ideas became subsumed under the ideas of Modernism and Abstraction – the idea that it is the artist’s internal vision and personal genius that determines a piece of art.

What intrigued me was the works of Rene Magritte which questioned the reliability of the senses in perceiving reality. Hence I found out about some of his poetic strategies which include: Juxtaposition, Dislocation, Hybridization, Metamorphosis, Effective Affinities, Play of Opposites, Fossilization, Animism, Doubling, Paintings within Paintings, Scale, Simultanism, Copying, Words and Things and Unexplained Narratives.

As you can see from the featured image Golconda (1953), it has used the strategy of Doubling which depicts a scene of nearly identical men dressed in dark overcoats and bowler hats, who seem to be drops of heavy rain. It can be a funny analogy of “it’s raining cat and dogs”?