“A really naked spirit cannot assume that the world is thoroughly intelligible. There may be surds, there may be hard facts, there may be dark abysses before which intelligence must be silent, for fear of going mad.”  -  George Santayana

Symbolism, Dada, and Surrealism are three important cultural movements of the 19th and 20th century whose impact and influence are still felt today and can be seen in contemporary films, popular culture, fine art, comics , music, literature and even comedy. Chronologically the first of these movements was Symbolism which emerged in the second half of the 19th century as an offshoot of the Romantic movement, but in a sense all three movements are descended from, and contain within them, some of the spirit of Romanticism. 

The Romantic movement which began in the late 18th and continued on through to the early 19th century was largely a reaction to the scientific revolution commonly referred to as ‘The Enlightenment’ and to the technological and industrialised society that it spawned. Many poets, artists and writers reacted to what they saw as an excessive focus on a rationalist and mechanised view of reality that in their view ultimately diminished the human spirit and threatened the natural world. The Romantics sought to reconnect with instinct and imagination and with nature. We can see this embodied in the work of poets such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley and also painters such as Caspar David Friedrich and in the work of William Blake, who went on to strongly influence the symbolist movement.

By the 1850s the Romantic movement was starting to wane and Symbolism was beginning to emerge, primarily out of the gothic component of Romanticism. Initially Symbolism was a literary movement, but its influence also quickly spread to the visual arts. Much like Romanticism Symbolism was a reaction to the rationalism and excessive materialism that dominated Western European culture. It sought to escape the grim reality of industrialisation by expressing dreams, spirituality and imagination. The symbolists explored the deeper, darker and more primal themes such as love, death, sexual awakening, madness, myths, the occult , the spiritual and the supernatural.

In 1857 the French poet Charles Baudelaire published the influential collection of poems La Fleur du Mal [The Flowers of Evil] and became an important early figure in the movement. Baudelaire embraced raw subjective experience, in contrast to the narrative approach taken by many previous poets, his poetry revels in feeling and sensation, attempting a kind of derangement of the senses, as well as powerful and sometimes shocking symbolic images. He was also fascinated by the combination of beauty and decay; in his view the modern world is so absurd and grotesque that if you are going to try and make beauty out of it you have to incorporate something of its grotesque nature . Baudelaire believed that to create beautiful works of art based on the aesthetics founded in classicism was no longer authentic, as they can tell us nothing about our modern lives. New forms and approaches were needed to express the complexity of the modern world.

The poet Mallarmé, a contemporary of Baudelaire, also developed the symbolist ethos by making the point that, in his view, reality was better expressed through poetry because it parallels it rather than replicates it.

“To name an object is to suppress three quarters of the enjoyment to be found in the poem….. “ 

He continues - 

“Suggestion…. that is the dream”. 

Mallarmé believed that creating a symbolic metaphor can be more beautiful and have more meaning because it triggers emotional experiences in the viewer rather than trying to directly replicate reality. He felt it was important not to depict a thing, but instead to depict the effect of a thing. Symbolists rejected the realism prevalent at the time, preferring to re-embrace the basic, raw sense of human feeling that had been stripped away by the modern world of industrialisation and materialism. It was a celebration and reassertion of emotion, feelings and internal experiences. Symbolist poets also placed value on the irrational - they wanted to evoke irrational inner emotions and symbols and to try and paint landscapes with words. The symbolists were not afraid to explore the full scope of human nature, the good and the bad, including our more savage and brutal impulses such as lust, violence and corruption, accepting they are also part of what make us human.

As the movement spread into the visual arts one of the most important early symbolist painters was Gustav Moreau. Moreau did not fit in with the traditional art establishment where he was labelled eccentric, but instead dreamt of creating an epic art that was not academic. By going against the classical traditions of his training and also embracing the art of other cultures, Moreau in his depiction of mythical and biblical themes created his own unique and exotic style. Moreau also influenced Odilon Redon, another fascinating and eccentric painter whose work explores dreams and visions, often of an absurd and demented nature. In his work we see strange hovering cubes with a single eyeball floating over moonlike landscapes, eggs with eyes peering over an egg cup, and in ‘Cactus man’ he depicts a bizarre head growing out of a plant pot. Redon’s visionary work with its dreamlike quality would go on to greatly influence the Surrealists. 

Printmaker Alfred Kubin’s work also depicts many bizarre, and often nightmarish scenes, as surreal creatures with elongated legs and arms crawl through peculiar dreamscapes. Both Kubin and Redon’s influence can clearly be seen today in the work of film directors such as Tim Burton and Guillermo del Toro. At the more controversial end there is also the illustrator, painter and printmaker Felicien Rops, whose work often features grotesque caricatures, supernatural imagery, and scenes of strange, erotic, pagan rituals. In Felicien Rops’ work we also see some crossover with ‘the Decadent movement’, a parallel movement that placed an emphasis on the forbidden, the erotic and the perverse.

Other important artists associated with Symbolism include Jean Delville, Arnold Bocklin, Carlos Shwabe, James Ensor, Max Klinger and Gustav Klimt, most known for his epic painting ‘The Kiss’. There is also Edvard Munch, who in his innovative painting ‘The Scream’ begins to depict, and place a newfound emphasis on intense internal psychological states, as well as articulating a 'fin de siècle’ or end of the century weariness. Later on Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter, whose non-realist work draws heavily on dreams and is full of striking symbolic images, is also often associated with the movement. Symbolism is also particularly important as a pioneering movement because it laid the groundwork for later movements such as Expressionism, Surrealism, and abstraction.

In 1914 with the advent of war everything changed. The Dada art movement launched in 1916 was a reaction to the mass slaughter and insanity of the First World War. Much like the Romantics & the Symbolists before them, the Dadaists rejected the artistic and intellectual conventions of the time as well as the modern world’s preoccupation with so-called rationalism and progress. Dada artists attacked the nationalist and capitalist values that had led to the climactic tragedy of the First World War. The level of slaughter, killing and propaganda of the war had been made possible by advancements in technology, mass communication and transportation. In the view of the Dadaists a society that viewed unchecked technological advancement as improvement and progress was absurd. The Dadaists embraced absurdity in their work to mirror what they saw as the absurdity of the society around them, rejecting the societal values of progress defined by scientific and technological advancement and what they saw as the brutality and philistinism of so-called science and reason. Dada was against any kind of aesthetic. It was anti-rational and also anti-idealistic. The artist Marcel Duchamp’s infamous work “Fountain” which is a urinal placed in an art gallery, was an attack on conventional artistic notions of so called ‘high art’ and in doing so impacted many later movements such as conceptual art, performance art and post-modernism. It was essentially a two fingers up to the establishment in general, and in this sense Dada can be seen as a sort of forerunner to the ‘Punk’ ethos in its desire to shock and attack the conventions of the time.

Many artists associated with Dada went on to join the Surrealist movement that followed. The term Surrealism was first coined by the poet Apollinaire in 1917, but it was the writer André Breton who decided to try and create something more definable out of Dada’s absurdity and nonsense and Surrealism was officially defined in 1924 in Breton’s ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’. 

The Surrealists were concerned with the bizarre, irrational and hallucinatory. They rejected logic and reason and were influenced by Freud’s theories of the unconscious mind and its instinctual drives. Like Freud the Surrealists wanted to explore dreams and the unconscious in order to reveal and unlock its secrets. André Breton developed the theory of automatism - automatic drawing exercises designed to unleash the unconscious. He explained it as follows:

‘Psychic automatism in its pure state, dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.’  

Breton believed that suppressing unconscious instinctive drives led to unbalanced people and as a result to an unbalanced society. He believed that liberating the unconscious would have revolutionary consequences. It would free the individual from the tyranny of the mundane and the everyday by breaking the boundaries between dreams and waking life.

The Surrealists drew inspiration from other cultures,. They were also anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist, largely left wing, anti-bourgeois and drawn to communism, socialism and anarchism. Along with Breton other key figures associated with the movement are Max Ernst, Man Ray , Salvador Dali, Antonin Artaud,  [who was later expelled from the movement], Rene Magritte, Remedios Varos, and film makers Luis Bunuel and later Louis Malle. Surrealism also arrived in Britain with artists such as Leonora Carrington, Edward Burra, and Eileen Agar.

With the advent of World War II many of the Surrealists fled to the United States. Breton stuck to his left-wing political agenda and continued to be socialist and anti-profit, but it was Salvador Dali, perhaps the least political of the Surrealists, who embraced American capitalism, becoming an artistic star and beginning the process of marketing Surrealism to the American public and wider world. 

Whether you have studied Surrealism or not you have probably unwittingly been exposed to it, so deeply has its visual imagery infused our culture. The impact of Surrealism can be seen in modern advertising, in political satire, the design of album covers, in comedy, from Spike Milligan to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Monty Python, The British Alternative Comedy movement of the 80s, right up to more contemporary comedy such as The Mighty Boosh. You can see its influence on filmmakers such as Fellini, Hitchcock, Alejandro Jodorowsky,  David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Guilermo del Toro, Tim Burton and also the films of writer/director Charlie Kaufman such as ‘Being John Malkovitch’. It can also be seen in the work of musicians such as Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Syd Barrett, Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman. The word surreal has become so much part of our culture, it is frequently used to describe anything considered bizarre or odd.

So why do Symbolism, Dada and Surrealism still matter? 

Western European culture still has a deep antipathy to non-rational states of mind. In certain corners of society there is still a deep fear of emotion, intuition and instinct, that is to some extent the legacy of the Enlightenment project. The problem with this view is that as human beings, we are not entirely rational; creativity, imagination and innovation all stem from what are often non-logical mental states. The physicist and philosopher of science Roger Penrose believes that human consciousness transcends formal logic. Penrose’s view is that when it comes to creative insights, the brain does not discover solutions in logical steps, we do not move from one stepping stone of realisation to another in a sequential process. We may move from step one, to step two, then suddenly miss out a couple of steps, and end up at step five to reach a solution. It is not clear how the brain achieves this. Penrose is at odds with many in the scientific community in his view that human consciousness does not function algorithmically like a machine and therefore cannot be fully replicated by complex computers. 

To deny the non-rational, nonlinear aspects of our mental processes and to elevate the purely rational above all other mental states is a flawed position. The roots of this world view can be found partly in the rationalist philosopher Descartes’ mechanistic view of reality which was later expanded upon by Issac Newton in what is now defined as the ‘Newtonian mechanistic model’ and also by the Empiricist philosopher John Locke. It was Descartes who concluded that the mind and body are separate, and that the body is a machine, this is often referred to as the ‘mind-body split’ or ‘Cartesian dualism’. While it may have been necessary at a particular point in history to view the world in mechanistic terms in order to attempt to study it objectively and develop the scientific method, our culture has been mired by a profound split between ‘the objective' and ‘the subjective’ ever since. 

Both Cartesian dualism and the Newtonian mechanistic model of the universe that defined Enlightenment thinking have been superseded by the theories of quantum physics and contemporary neuroscience, and as a result are now considered out of date. The mind and body are in fact a complex and integrated system, and the universe, according to modern physics with its references to quarks, black holes and chaos theory is far too complex, paradoxical and bizarre to be explained in simple mechanistic terms. However these ideas have cast a long shadow and are so deep rooted that they continue to have an influence on many aspects of our culture even today. For example Western medicine still takes a completely non-holistic approach to the individual; Illnesses are split into dualistic categories of either ‘physical’ or ‘psychological’ and the body is still viewed largely in mechanical terms, negating the effect of the mind and emotions on health. 

The legacy of the enlightenment and what the psychohistorian Nick Duffel has defined as ‘The Rational Man Project’ also created a style of education that historically has often been used as a form of social control. In Britain the independent or ‘public school system’, still regarded worldwide as the gold standard model for educational excellence, frequently epitomises the worst excesses of the rationalist approach with its suppression of emotion, enforced discipline and conformity, and the curbing of individuality. The truly objective, scientific and rational man takes pride in his ability to suppress his emotions. The rationalist project elevates the traditional, masculine, rational mind and looks down on everything associated with the feminine, such as intuition, sensitivity, tenderness and emotion. The traditional Western education system makes it clear that such emotions ought not to be encouraged as they are seen as a form of weakness or vulnerability. 

Charles Dickens perfectly captured the kind of dry soulless ideology, that holds anything individualistic or imaginative in contempt in the opening to his novel ‘Hard Times’ when the character of Mr Gradgrind says the following-

“Now what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts, nothing else will ever be of any service to them!”

Albert Einstein expressed similar sentiment when he said-

‘It’s a miracle that curiosity survives formal education’

The impact of this kind of deadening restrictive ideology that grew out of the 19th century is essentially everything the Symbolists, Dadaists and Surrealists were reacting against and trying to resist. 

Dada and Surrealism were not just artistic movements, they were also political. They understood it is much easier for powerful elites to control people and turn them into conforming worker drones or willing soldiers to send to war if they are encouraged to be disconnected from their emotions and their inner selves. The powerful have historically had a vested interest in such an ideology because once people start thinking for themselves, educating themselves and trying to express themselves, they begin to question things, leading to the risk of a destabilisation of the existing power structures, the establishment, and the status quo.

Many surrealists were drawn to the work of Karl Marx and in my view Marx’s writing, despite its flaws, still has relevance primarily because it remains one of the great critiques of modern industrial capitalist society. Marx’s theory of 'The Alienation of Labour’ stems from the Romantic tradition and was a response to the exploitation and poor working conditions that resulted from the industrial revolution. 

The core definition of modern alienation is a society where community is broken down and atomised, where people have become estranged from the natural world and work at the command of others often doing mindless jobs. As a result their work and lives become empty and meaningless. If they create for themselves, their work then means something to them as individuals; the self employed worker is often happier than the corporate employee who feels like a cog in a vast machine. The artists in these movements were reacting directly to modern alienation. They stand for those who feel like outsiders, who do not wish to conform to the status quo, or the rigid and prescriptive nature of normal bourgeois society, or who feel they are being brainwashed and manipulated by a corporatised monoculture. They are important to anyone who believes in liberal and pluralistic values, freedom of thought and openness to experience. The upside of The Enlightenment project were the beneficial components of modern science and modern medicine. But on the dark side, you have the arrogance of white male, European, paternalistic culture, leading to imperialism, industrialised warfare, and the exploitation of other cultures and the environment. 

The philosopher Nietzsche felt it was important to embrace the chaotic and instinctive as a source of inspiration. He articulated this when he said:

‘One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.’  

Nietzsche’s solution to the modern dilemma was a reuniting of the subjective and the objective, a healing of the Cartesian mind body split, seeking a balance between the rational and irrational aspects of ourselves in order to become more fully human. 

Nietzsche’s point is a valid one, there are times when we all need a release, to lose the rigidity of our conscious selves, to gain freedom from the shackles of the everyday, the routine, the rational and the mundane, to embrace the madness and wildness within all of us - to liberate our minds from a culture that is so often rife with empty consumerism, vacuity and narcissism, a culture increasingly obsessed with surfaces and progressively removed from any sense of deeper meaning.

Writer and illustrator Mervyn Peake,  best known for his ‘Gormenghast Trilogy’ hinted at this need to engage with imagination and inspiration when he said -

‘Each day I live in a glass room, unless I break it with the thrusting of my senses, and pass through the splintered walls to the great landscape.’

There are without a doubt many things that are best examined through the light of clear, objective, rational thinking, but there are also certain forms of understanding that are more ambiguous and intangible, that go beyond words, beyond reason and description and are perhaps best dealt with in metaphoric terms and best dealt with by art, not science and reason.

The Symbolists, Dadaists and Surrealists remain relevant because they deal in metaphor. Metaphor is the language of dreams, it is the language of the unconscious and the imagination and is the seat of all human creativity. For this reason it will always be of profound importance to us as a species. To my mind, Symbolism, Dada and Surrealism still matter because to try to suppress emotion, intuition and imagination, is not rational, it is a form of madness in itself.