Surrealism in the context of Communism

Henrik Johan Ibsen (/ˈɪbsən/; Norwegian: [ˈhɛ̀nrɪk ˈɪ̀psn̩]; 20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a Norwegian playwright. He is considered one of the world's pre-eminent writers of the 19th century and is often referred to as "the father of modern drama." He pioneered theatrical realism but also wrote lyrical epic works. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and When We Dead Awaken. Ibsen is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. Store norske leksikon describes him as "the center of the Norwegian literary canon."

Ibsen was born into the merchant elite of the port town of Skien and had strong family ties to the Paus family and other families who had held power and wealth in Telemark since the mid-1500s. He established himself as a theater director in Norway during the 1850s and gained international recognition as a playwright with the plays Brand and Peer Gynt in the 1860s. From 1864, he lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, primarily in Rome, Dresden, and Munich, making only brief visits to Norway, before moving to Christiania (Oslo) in 1891. Most of Ibsen's plays are set in Norway, often in bourgeois environments and places reminiscent of Skien, and he frequently drew inspiration from family members. Ibsen's early verse play Peer Gynt has strong surreal elements. After Peer Gynt Ibsen abandoned verse and wrote in realistic prose. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind the façades, revealing much that was disquieting to a number of his contemporaries. He had a critical eye and conducted a free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. Critics frequently rate The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm as Ibsen's best works; the playwright himself regarded Emperor and Galilean as his masterpiece.

Johan August Strindberg (/ˈstrɪn(d)bɜːrɡ/; Swedish: [ˈǒːɡɵst ˈstrɪ̂nːdbærj] ; 22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout his life, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and historical plays to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright.

The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, when he was thirty-two, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play – responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established Théâtre Libre (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.

Western esotericism and the arts surveys documented intersections between Western esotericism—notably Hermeticism, Christian Kabbalah, Alchemy, and Astrology—and the visual arts, literature, and the performing arts from the late Middle Ages to the present. Scholarship highlights recurring vectors: Renaissance and early modern image–text programmes (emblems, alchemical series, Kabbalistic diagrams) that formalised "operative images"; encyclopedic displays and diagrams in early modern erudition; nineteenth-century Spirit photography and related "psychic" image technologies; fin de siècle milieux linking occult orders with salon culture; early twentieth-century abstraction tied to Theosophy/Anthroposophy; ritual poetics on stage and in experimental film; and later artist-authored Tarot and neo-alchemical process art.

Aby Warburg's reading of the Palazzo Schifanoia frescoes in Ferrara established a foundational model for interpreting astrological programs in Renaissance art, while Barbara Obrist documented the late-medieval shift toward serial illustration and diagrammatic representation in alchemical manuscripts. Early modern encyclopedic projects—epitomized by Athanasius Kircher—wove hieroglyphs, cosmology, and spectacular display into ambitious image-systems that influenced the period's visual culture. In parallel, historians of science and craft have emphasized how chymistry's "wider worlds" intersected with literature, theatre, and the visual arts. Classic studies have traced how esoteric metaphysics and "spiritual" aesthetics contributed to early abstraction (e.g., Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint), while recent scholarship reassesses the role of Spiritualism/Spiritism within abstract art and Surrealism's image-making and poetics.

Peer Gynt (/pɪər ˈɡɪnt/, Norwegian: [peːr ˈjʏnt, - ˈɡʏnt]) is a five-act play in verse written in 1867 by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. It is one of Ibsen's best known and most widely performed plays.

Peer Gynt chronicles the journey of its titular character from the Norwegian mountains to the North African desert and back. According to Klaus Van Den Berg, "its origins are Romantic, but the play also anticipates the fragmentations of emerging modernism" and the "cinematic script blends poetry with social satire and realistic scenes with surreal ones." Peer Gynt has also been described as the story of a life based on procrastination and avoidance.

Paul Klee (German: [paʊ̯l ˈkleː]; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism.

Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively. His lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance.

Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depression and Mexican muralists. The term was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates. Key figures in the New York School, which was the center of this movement, included such artists as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Norman Lewis, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Theodoros Stamos, and Lee Krasner among others.

The movement was not limited to painting but included influential collagists and sculptors, such as David Smith, Louise Nevelson, and others. Abstract expressionism was notably influenced by the spontaneous and subconscious creation methods of Surrealist artists like André Masson and Max Ernst. Artists associated with the movement combined the emotional intensity of German Expressionism with the radical visual vocabularies of European avant-garde schools like Futurism, the Bauhaus, and Synthetic Cubism.

The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s and 1960s in New York City. They often drew inspiration from surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde art movements, in particular action painting, abstract expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, experimental music, and the interaction of friends in the New York City art world's vanguard circle.

Psychedelia usually refers to a style or aesthetic that is resembled in the psychedelic subculture of the 1960s and the psychedelic experience produced by certain psychoactive substances. This includes psychedelic art, psychedelic music and style of dress during that era. This was primarily generated by people who used psychedelic drugs such as LSD, mescaline (found in peyote) and psilocybin (found in magic mushrooms) and also non-users who were participants and aficionados of this subculture. Psychedelic art and music typically recreate or reflect the experience of altered consciousness. Psychedelic art uses highly distorted, surreal visuals, bright colors and full spectrums and animation (including cartoons) to evoke, convey, or enhance the psychedelic experience.

Psychedelic music uses distorted electric guitar, Indian music elements such as the sitar and tabla, electronic effects, sound effects and reverb, and elaborate studio effects, such as playing tapes backwards or panning the music from one side to another.

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈfɾiða ˈkalo]; 6 July 1907 – 13 July 1954) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain. Her 1940 self-portrait titled The Dream (The Bed) holds the record for the most expensive work by a female artist ever auctioned at $54.7 million.

Born to a German father and a mestiza mother (of Purépecha descent), Kahlo spent most of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán – now publicly accessible as the Frida Kahlo Museum. Although she was disabled by polio as a child, Kahlo had been a promising student headed for medical school until being injured in a bus accident at the age of 18, which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems. During her recovery, she returned to her childhood interest in art with the idea of becoming an artist.

In the arts and literature, the term avant-garde (from French meaning 'advance guard' or 'vanguard') identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and surrealism were ahead of their times.

As a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists promote progressive and radical politics and advocate for societal reform with and through works of art. In the essay "The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist" (1825), Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues's political usage of vanguard identified the moral obligation of artists to "serve as [the] avant-garde" of the people, because "the power of the arts is, indeed, the most immediate and fastest way" to realise social, political, and economic reforms.

André Robert Breton (/brəˈtɔːn/; French: [ɑ̃dʁe ʁɔbɛʁ bʁətɔ̃]; 19 February 1896 – 28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet, known as a principal theorist and co-founder of surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism".

Along with his role as leader of the surrealist movement he is the author of celebrated books such as Nadja and L'Amour fou. Those activities, combined with his critical and theoretical work on writing and the plastic arts, made André Breton a major figure in 20th-century French art and literature.

The Theatre of Cruelty (French: Théâtre de la Cruauté, also Théâtre cruel) is a form of theatre conceptualised by Antonin Artaud. Artaud, who was briefly a member of the surrealist movement, outlined his theories in a series of essays and letters, which were collected as The Theatre and Its Double. The Theatre of Cruelty can be seen as a break from traditional Western theatre and a means by which artists assault the senses of the audience. Artaud's works have been highly influential on artists including Jean Genet, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, and Romeo Castellucci.

Surrealist cinema is a modernist approach to film theory, criticism, and production, with origins in Paris, France in the 1920s. The Surrealist movement used shocking, irrational, or absurd imagery and Freudian dream symbolism to challenge the traditional function of art to represent reality. Related to Dada cinema, Surrealist cinema is characterized by juxtapositions, the rejection of dramatic psychology, and a frequent use of shocking imagery. Philippe Soupault and André Breton’s 1920 book collaboration Les Champs magnétiques is often considered to be the first Surrealist work, but it was only once Breton had completed his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 that ‘Surrealism drafted itself an official birth certificate.’

Surrealist films of the 1920s include René Clair's Entr'acte (1924), Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1924), Jean Renoir's La Fille de l'Eau (1924), Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (1926), Jean Epstein's Fall of the House of Usher (1928) (with Luis Buñuel assisting), Watson and Webber's Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Germaine Dulac's The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) (from a screenplay by Antonin Artaud). Other films include Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Âge D'Or (1930), both by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí; Buñuel went on to direct many more films, never denying his surrealist roots. Ingmar Bergman said "Buñuel nearly always made Buñuel films".

Surrealist music is music which uses unexpected juxtapositions and other surrealist techniques. Discussing Theodor W. Adorno, Max Paddison defines surrealist music as that which "juxtaposes its historically devalued fragments in a montage-like manner which enables them to yield up new meanings within a new aesthetic unity", though Lloyd Whitesell says this is Paddison's gloss of the term. Anne LeBaron cites automatism, including improvisation, and collage as the primary techniques of musical surrealism. According to Whitesell, Paddison quotes Adorno's 1930 essay "Reaktion und Fortschritt" as saying "Insofar as surrealist composing makes use of devalued means, it uses these as devalued means, and wins its form from the 'scandal' produced when the dead suddenly spring up among the living."

Surreal humour (also called surreal comedy, absurdist humour, or absurdist comedy) is a form of humour predicated on deliberate violations of causal reasoning, thus producing events and behaviours that are obviously illogical. Portrayals of surreal humour tend to involve bizarre juxtapositions, incongruity, non-sequiturs, irrational or absurd situations, and expressions of nonsense.

Surreal humour grew out of surrealism, a cultural movement developed in the 20th century by French and Belgian artists, who depicted unnerving and illogical scenes while developing techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. The movement itself was foreshadowed by English writers in the 19th century, most notably Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. The humour in surreal comedy arises from a subversion of audience expectations, emphasising the ridiculousness and unlikeliness of a situation, so that amusement is founded on an unpredictability that is separate from a logical analysis of the situation.

The Surrealist Manifesto refers to several publications by Yvan Goll and André Breton, leaders of rival surrealist groups. Goll and Breton both published manifestos in October 1924 titled Manifeste du surréalisme. Breton wrote a second manifesto in 1929, which was published the following year, and in 1942, a reflection or a commentary on the potential for a third manifesto, exploring how the Surrealist movement might adapt to changing times.