In New York's Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, patrons can walk past Salvador Dali's famous tiny painting, "The Persistence of Memory." This work, which is arguably the most iconic piece of surrealist art work, depicts a clock melting on top of a tree branch. Nearby, a swarm of ants gather on top of a stopwatch, presumably gnashing it to pieces. In this simple, beautiful image, Dali toys with the notion of the subconscious made real. The dreamlike images, ironic juxtapositions, and inchoate scenes depicted in surrealist art invite viewers to explore their own subconscious for meaning. The surrealist school formed in the late 1910s and early 1920s in the wake of what was supposed to the "War to End All Wars." The movement, which was sometimes associated with the burgeoning socialist and communist movements evolving in Europe and Russia, was more provocative than rebellious. According to some art historians, it represented the recognition that the modern world had become too complex to be rationally comprehended. The surrealist artists and contemporary writers of the Lost Generation developed a truly new way of thinking about civilization. Ever since the late 1600s, when Sir Isaac Newton codified the mathematical science of calculus and developed his fundamental laws of physics, the Western intellectual tradition has favored something called "scientific rationality." This point of view suggests that, given enough research and persistence, people can theoretically figure out anything. Surrealism emphatically denied the conclusions of this so-called Newtonian Reductionism. |
