Surrealist paintings
In the 1920s, the Parisian art scene was dominated by Surrealism. Events such as the Cœur à Barbe evening in 1923, and artistic experiments such as automatic writing (devised by Philippe Soupault and André Breton in 1919) and the Sommeils hypnotiques (developed by René Crevel, André Breton, Robert Desnos and Benjamin Péret in 1922) were instrumental in the advent of Surrealism. The movement was born in the midst of the Dadaist group's differences. The artists, who broke away from the Dada movement, officially formed the Surrealist group in 1924. In October 1924, André Breton published the First Manifesto of Surrealism, and in December of the same year the magazine La Révolution surréaliste was published, with Benjamin Péret, Pierre Naville and André Breton as its first editors. The processes of Surrealism and its protagonists (such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and the Marquis de Sade) show that the movement was deeply rooted in literature. Nevertheless, Surrealist ideas and practices gradually spread to other areas of artistic creation, such as cinema and photography. Surrealism was opposed to the rationalism of artistic movements such as Suprematism, Constructivism and Neoplasticism, which at the same time were spreading widely in Germany and more generally in the countries of Central Europe. Surrealist artists based their work on empirical concepts of the imaginary, dream and onirism, and aimed to abolish the boundaries between the conscious and the unconscious, dream and reality. The surrealist adventure continued for over forty years.
For a dreamlike setting, hang Victor Brauner's La Mode on your walls. To please all lovers of surrealist painting, you can offer Marc Chagall's Au-dessus de la Ville, 1924.
Although Surrealist artists formed close-knit groups that sometimes challenged each other's egos, each painter nevertheless retained a recognisable style. In "La mode", for example, Brauner Victor developed a pictorial language whose flat colours differed from the more organic approach of Max Ernst in "Après moi le sommeil". His works are excellent gift ideas for art lovers.
