Quotes About Surrealism

Really, I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.

Claude Cahun is a fascinating artist - one of the few women to be part of the surrealist movement, she and her partner Suzanne Malherbe took on men's names and made artworks that investigated female identity long before 'The Second Sex' or Cindy Sherman.

Wherever one encounters members of the human race, they always show the traits of a being that is condemned to surrealistic effort. Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats.

Symbolism and surrealism overlap in the way they give primacy to mental reality over objective reality, and this in turn gives rise to a certain kind of space. ("Introduction")

Time even influenced postmodern artists such as Picasso, Braque, and Dalí. Picasso and Braque's cubist style, for instance, depicts people and objects as they exist from all perspectives simultaneously, while Salvador Dalí's Persistence of Memory depicts the malleability and relativity of time.

One night, for example, I picked up Salvador Dalí on Fifty-Seventh Street and took him to the St. Regis Hotel, not that far away. It was really him, moustache pointing straight up—the whole picture-perfect Dalí. I was flabbergasted. I only had him for a few blocks, and I was dying to say something to him, but I was completely tongue-tied. He paid me, tipped me, and a doorman came to sweep him away.

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

We took out our heavy revolvers (all of a sudden there were revolvers in the dream) and joyfully killed the Gods.

The world unfortunately is real and I, unfortunately, am Borges

Painting bodies with the patterns of Kusama's hallucinations obliterated their individual selves and returned them to the infinite universe.

It's easy to see why 'American Horror' is freaking people out. The ultraviolent hallucinations never pause long enough to make sense. In terms of coherence, it makes your average David Lynch movie look like 'Burn Notice.'

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.

I used to go to tea at the St. Regis with Dali. I was standing there and Mr. Dali walked over to me and asked if I would like to have tea with him and Truman Capote. Normally if a person would come up to you in a magazine store and ask you to have tea, you'd run, wouldn't you? But I sort of had a feeling that this was legitimate.

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. p. 919

The activities of these parasites and degenerates gave rise to Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Pointillism, Constructivism, Orphism, Surrealism, Dada, and also Impossibleism, Supersurrealism, Dynamic Double-Dog Realism, Ishkabibbleism, and Mama, which is like Dada only nicer.

Trained slugs race across his jello in eight-cylinder sombreros

Henry, in coat and tie, waded out to where Francis stood, his trousers rolled to the knee, and old-fashioned banker in a surrealist painting.

Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over.

I suppose you'll want to see the aliens now," he said. "Do you want me to sit in a corner and rust, or just fall apart where I'm standing?

Ford," he said, "you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.

A steel door closed and the captain was on his own again. He hummed quietly and mused to himself, lightly fingering his notebook of verses. "Hmmm," he said, "counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor …" He considered this for a moment, and then closed the book with a grim smile. "Death's too good for them," he said.

the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, "really aren't surrealistic, because they're just random, and there's no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images.

Taken one by one, you could certainly say that these leathery specimens were valid works of art. Unlike a gallery of paintings, though, the assembly of human skins created a surrealistic, unsettling atmosphere. Kenzo was staring at the otherworldly torsos in a trance, trying to imagine those desiccated, decorative skins wrapped around living human flesh.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.