Essay On Surrealism

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Define 'Surrealism' in your own words Surrealism was a literary and art movement from the 1920s that developed from the Dada movement. Surrealism, defined by André Breton, the founder of the movement, as ‘Pure psychic automatism.’ Psychic meaning in the mind and automatism meaning actions that one is unaware of, means that psychic automatism means thoughts that one is unware of, or subconscious thoughts. Surrealist artists try to display a world that is above, beyond and more realistic than reality. The logic is that anything inside one’s head is more realistic than anything one see’s in real life and artists use realistic painting techniques to make one believe what they see in the artwork is real. This means that surrealism heavily relies upon dreams, nightmares and other…show more content…
The medium of the artwork is oil on canvas and the dimensions are 50cm by 59cm. Not only is this work a surrealist piece but it is also cubist. In this composition the castle is taking up most of the canvas, while the sun is at the very top and slightly to the right. In this panting Klee has used a very colourful, colour pallet for the castle and has used a dark orangey-red to paint the sun in the dark maroon sky. He has used 3 elements of art; line, shape and colour. He has also used lots of contrasting colours such as green and red or blue and orange as well as emphasis. When I first saw this artwork I had mixed feelings and impressions about it. The first things my eyes were drawn to was the colourful, joyful and exciting castle before being drawn to the sun with a clever use of emphasis from Klee with a use of the element of line by making the sun the only curved line in the artwork. The dark red sun and sky give and angry, violent feeling, which makes me think that this might be representing a happy, innocent city that is going to be swallowed by some horrible fate, like a raging

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