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Surrealism is meant for me because I am a pretty realistic person but don't like all I see. (Gertrude Abercrombie)
Surrealism sought to maintain its autonomy and the right to continue its own particular investigations into ways of changing consciousness, the role of the unconscious within the social body, and the current state of language both visual and verbal. (Dawn Ades)
The vice named surrealism is the immoderate and impassioned use of the stupefacient image or rather of the uncontrolled provocation of the image for its own sake and for the element of unpredictable perturbation and of metamorphosis which it introduces into the domain of representation; for each image on each occasion forces you to revise the entire Universe. (Louis Aragon)
Surrealism... in its broader sense... represents a spiritual crisis that stems from the ideological developments of the nineteenth century, and has succeeded in producing a technique of writing and painting that conveys a materio-mystical vision of the universe. (Anna Balakian)
Surrealism is born of a consciousness of the derisory condition allotted to the individual and his thought, and a refusal to accommodate oneself to it. (Jean-Louis Bedouin)
My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary. (Gyula Halasz, Brassai)
The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood. (Andre Breton)
One can understand why Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing save from violence. (Andre Breton)
Surrealism is embedded in the everyday, in the daily experience. (Katharine Conley)
Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision. (Salvador Dali)
Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums. (Salvador Dali)
Surrealism! What is Surrealism? In my opinion, it is above all a reawakening of the poetic idea in art, the reintroduction of the subject but in a very particular sense, that of the strange and illogical. (Paul Delvaux)
Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life. (Brad Holland)
My idea of a perfect surrealist painting is one in which every detail is perfectly realistic, yet filled with a surrealistic, dreamlike mood. And the viewer himself can't understand why that mood exists, because there are no dripping watches or grotesque shapes as reference points. That is what I'm after: that mood which is apart from everyday life, the type of mood that one experiences at very special moments. (Ian Hornak)
Three men riding on a bicycle which has only one wheel, I guess that's surrealism. (Dong Kingman)
I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I've always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized 'realistic' story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its 'realist' style. (Stanley Kubrick)
The arctic is so surreal - the landscape of the ice is like no other on the planet. (Diane Langlois)
Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality. (John Lennon)
To be a surrealist... means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been. (Rene Magritte)
Surrealism was a perception of reality over which reason was denied the opportunity to exercise confining restrictions. (John Herbert Matthews)
Surrealism to me has always been the 'stuff of dreams.' These are the things we see when we close our eyes and drift off to other places. (Michael Meissner)
Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end. (Henry Miller)
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. (Anais Nin)
Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings. (Octavio Paz)
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois. (Susan Sontag)
Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares. (Susan Sontag)
Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip. (Susan Sontag)
The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination. (Wallace Stevens)
Refusing to idealize, the Surrealists awakened a sensitivity to the arbitrary and the unusual. (Sidra Stich)
-on Salvador Dali...
It is not only the deceptive calm of the surroundings that is troubling but the clarity of the unreal and fraudulent character of that which is seen. (Sidra Stich)
- in conversation with Carlo McCormick...
People talk about Surrealism as an art movement, like Abstract Expressionism or Impressionism. Surrealism is a philosophical movement. (Dorothea Tanning)
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