A carnival in 1924, and a biomorphic line

Joan Miró, this reading writes, lived from 1893 to 1983. Early on he stood under Fauvist and Cubist influence, then entered surrealism. He symbolised subjects and motifs, and by bringing them back, again and again, as signs and symbols in the work, reconstructed his unconscious as a concrete reality. Biomorphic abstraction introduces the irregular forms living things have, in a fluid, curving composition. Automatic technique, following chance, lets a shape be drawn freely, and produces work close to abstraction. The image of a thing is expressed in its simplest form, so that only the clearest characteristic is conveyed. The Carnival of Harlequin, which they date to 1924, is the canvas they single out: fallen into hunger through poverty, Miró transferred the hallucinations of that time fantastically onto the picture.

Ernst, a persistence of memory, and a pipe that is not a pipe

Beside him they set Max Ernst, 1891 to 1976, who used collage so that represented objects would seem illogically placed side by side, and who led an irrational mental world forward. They quote a line they give as an accidental meeting, on an absurd plane, of two realities that have nothing to do with each other — an illogical encounter in an odd place, a thing pulled out of everyday image, accompanied by a poetic purification. The techniques they list are collage, from scraps of book illustration, advertising and photographs; frottage, rubbing a pencil over paper laid on grained wood or cloth; grattage, scraping paint from a canvas with a sharp tool; and decalcomania, pressing two surfaces together so that paint on one is transferred to the other, for a chance effect. A work they title as Jumping into the Water is dated 1919.

Salvador Dalí, 1904 to 1989, they write, read Freud’s psychoanalysis early on, and studied from the classics a realistic technique and Cubist composition. After 1929 he took an active part in surrealism. The paranoiac-critical method is, in this telling, an active, voluntary way of giving pictorial form to a delirious world ruled by a concrete illogicality, beyond a passive surfacing of the unconscious. They date The Persistence of Memory to 1931, and quote Breton: Dalí’s art was among the most hallucinatory things one had seen, and with his appearance the window of consciousness opened wide. From a diary of a genius, they add Dalí’s own reply, that surrealism was himself. René Magritte, 1898 to 1967, made familiar everyday objects strange through dépaysement — moving a thing from its ordinary setting into a foreign one, stripping its practical character, and staging a bizarre meeting of objects. “Familiar strangeness,” they write, is here a means of consciousness, of logical and philosophical reflection, rather than of the unconscious. This Is Not a Pipe is dated 1929. Those titles and years stay as named in this reading.

An object in 1924, and two names beside it

In a 1924 essay, they write, Breton defined the object as a tool that mediates and reconciles two competing realities, an inner reality and an outer one. In a 1934 lecture titled, as they render it, “What is surrealism?”, he declared the investigation of the object one of surrealism’s sharpest studies. As in a Hegelian unity of opposites, perception of a physical object and the imagination of a dream-like image collide and, at the same time, join. Surrealism raised the object to a position equal with sculpture, and modern sculpture was redefined on the basis of the object. Representative artists, they name, are Marcel Duchamp, with Fountain and Bicycle Wheel, and Man Ray, with a work they title Gift. Among the books they list at the end are Jin Jung-kwon’s Western art history in its modernism volume, a History of Art for Young People by H. W. Janson and A. F. Janson, a Western art history for the young by Park Gap-yeong, and a volume they attribute to Nelly Brunellenal. Those identifications stay as given in this reading. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. This reading, a student art report on Joan Miró and the surrealists they set beside him, with Harlequin’s Carnival in 1924 and the other dated titles left as named in this reading.

Last updated: 15 November 2026