quotations about surrealism
The simplest act of surrealism is to fire randomly into a crowd.
ANDRE BRETON
attributed, "China Mieville's counterfactual novel is a chilling, surreal caprice", The Spectator, February 25, 2017
Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.
SUSAN SONTAG
On Photography
The surrealists are "archaeological" in their intent to make contact with a pervasive force of the past and reform it in their own image.
SASHA COLBY
Stratified Modernism: The Poetics of Excavation from Gautier to Olson
I categorically refused to consider the Surrealists as just another literary and artistic group. I believed they were capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the "practical, rational world." I was going to become the Nietzsche of the irrational. I, the obsessed rationalist, was the only one who knew what I wanted: I was not going to submit to irrationality for its own sake, to the narcissist and passive irrationality others practiced. I would do completely the opposite. I would fight for the 'conquest of the irrational'.
SALVADOR DALI
Diary of a Genius
Art is magic. So say the surrealists. But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic. To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction. Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.
HANS HOFFMAN
"Search for the Real in the Visual Arts"
The objective of Surrealism is to make use of the dream, which will open the way to the Great Mystery of Life in the cause of his own art.
NATHALIA BRODSKAÏA
Surrealism
Surrealism is embedded in the everyday, in the daily experience.
KATHARINE CONLEY
Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life