Surrealism and Pop Art remain some of the most popular and loved art movements of the 20th century, well-known even by those who are not deeply interested in the history of art. The aestheticized weirdness of Surrealist art gave birth to countless images and ideas that settled in mass culture. Despite the lack of the magical fleur of Surrealist dreams, Pop Art was, in some ways, the direct heir to the revered movement. Read on to learn more about the connection between the two styles and their conceptual structures.
Pop Art and Surrealism: Mundane Objects Gaining New Meanings
The world was recovering after a devastating war, modernity was gaining speed, and all art seemed meaningless, pretentious, and dated. In this environment, a group of young radicals decides to shatter the existing order and address the hidden agendas behind the normative way of life. This sequence of events and preconditions could describe many moments in the history of art. Particularly, they could relate to the emergence of two different movements within three decades: Surrealism and Pop Art. Similar artistic objectives and historical circumstances resulted in the aesthetics so different yet so conceptually alike.
Strictly speaking, the foundations for both movements were laid decades, if not centuries, before their ideologies came into existence. The opposition of reality and fantasy in art has been an eternal driving force for theories, styles, and concepts. Still, the most important step was taken by the 19th-century Realists, led by Gustave Courbet. Instead of pretentious portraits and idyllic imaginary landscapes, Courbet painted the raw reality of peasants, workers, and beggars. This was the reality no one wanted to see, but the one desperately needed to be recorded. Half a century after Courbet’s death, through urbanization, reality transformed into a mixture of human and non-human, manual and mechanical activities, real and ephemeral benefits and threats. The development of psychiatry revealed the depths of the human psyche and its possible delusions. The world was never uniform, but modernity had demonstrated how different it seemed from the insides of one’s mind.
In the years following World War I, Western artists desperately looked for new identities and ways out of the current crisis. The Surrealists emerged from the remains of pre-war spiritual explorations, blended with Freud’s psychoanalysis and a deep desire for escapism. The key concept for Surrealism was the so-called inner desire that motivated every human activity while remaining concealed from an individual. Surrealists believed that through trance, dreams, and thought experiments, it was possible to reveal this desire, hidden by the superficial societal conditions and norms. By bringing out free associations with objects and states, they aimed to untangle the complexity of one’s mind.
To locate this inner desire, Surrealists, just like Dadaists just a few years before them, reimagined the status of everyday objects. Similarly, they tried to grant them a surprising new dimension—sometimes disturbing, erotic, or straight-up repulsive. Thus, cups and saucers grew fur, lobsters turned into telephones, and smoking pipes became not what they seemed. Combined and misplaced, mass-produced objects obtained magical qualities and turned into something more than simply a sum of ill-fitting parts. Pop artists developed the idea further: for them, a commodity became a valuable artistic object within itself. A can of soup, a sandwich, or a comic book strip were important enough to become not merely symbolic figures in one’s artwork but the center of it.
Both movements shared a fascination with everyday mass-produced objects and consumer culture. Commodity fetishism, or the construction of extra meanings and values of products and services, became the basis of their symbolic language. If Surrealism went on to explore the deeply concealed undertones of this consumerist landscape, Pop Art enthusiastically plunged into it and brought it to the point of maximal absurdity. Pop Art’s superficiality was its strongest side: instead of suggesting meanings to its viewers, it left them alone with the experience, as disappointing or fulfilling as it could be in one’s mind. Some saw an ecstatic glorification of capitalism there, while others saw a bitter protest of the left-wing intellectuals. Another key difference was that Pop Artists took a step back from using readymades or found objects and chose to craft their copies of real things using traditional artistic means.
Artist Superstar: Dali vs. Warhol
With a twist of curious coincidence, both art movements became directly associated with single male figures over the years, standing apart from the rest of their fellow artists. These figures overshadowed others and wrote their own playbooks that sometimes contradicted the ideas of their less celebrated colleagues. Despite substantial criticism from their contemporaries, Dali’s version of Surrealism and Warhol’s idea of Pop Art became synonymous with entire movements.
Salvador Dali redesigned the Surrealist brand from a rebellious quasi-anarchic movement into a cult centered around the artist’s identity. While Andre Breton and others spoke about dismantling the hierarchies of the world before them, Dali longed to climb on top of the same power structure. Notoriously, he claimed to be the only real Surrealist and had plans to found a violent and racist religion with himself as its patriarch. He also commodified his art beyond any measure, appearing in TV commercials and designing perfume bottles, ads for stockings, and candy packages.
Andy Warhol’s Pop explorations similarly fell out of line with the works of other famous artists of his era. Artists like Claes Oldenburg and Jasper Johns have always maintained a sense of irreality in their works. No matter how bright and promising Oldenburg’s giant installations looked, they never tried to appear realistic. They were deliberately fake and unnerving, too bright, too glossy, and too crude to be what they seemed.
Warhol’s imitations, however, deceive the audience completely. Warhol’s cardboard boxes mimic the readymade works by Marcel Duchamp but remain products of artistic creation, indistinguishable from those they were inspired by. At the same time, Warhol applied the concept of serial mass production to his works in the same manner it worked for the actual products. Hundreds of silkscreen prints, dozens of soup cans, and cereal boxes ruin the fleur of artistic exclusivity. Some art historians regard Warhol’s series as an expression of anxiety caused by the hysterical consumption and total commodification.
Surrealism, Pop Art and the Art of Selling Things
As we already mentioned, both Surrealism and Pop Art revolved around commodity culture and its evaluation. Surrealism was the first art movement that blended with consumer culture almost to the point of non-distinction. Dora Maar shot campaigns for fashion magazines, Remedios Varo illustrated medicine ads, and Man Ray’s image of Lee Miller’s red-painted lips became the principal character of Helena Rubinstein’s lipstick campaign.
Elsa Schiaparelli, the famous couturier who revolutionized women’s fashion, still retains her questionable status when it comes to the Surrealist movement and its affiliations. Some critics see her merely as a promoter of the Surrealist aesthetic through her collaborations with Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, and other artists of the movement. Others, however, insist that Schiaparelli was an equally important Surrealist artist working in the domain of costume. Another of Schiaparelli’s collaborators, the famous Meret Oppenheim, designed jewelry and gloves, creating wearable Surrealist objects that could be produced on a scale larger than traditional works of art. Surrealist furniture and design similarly offered to bring a touch of mystery and fantasy into everyday life.
Surrealism was one of the most influential and widespread art movements, yet its influence on the American art scene is hard to overestimate. With the beginning of World War II in Europe, many French, Spanish, and German Surrealists like Breton, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy fled to the US and settled there, arranging exhibitions and events. Soon, Surrealism seeped deep through the canvas of the American artistic scene. From a countercultural idea, it turned into the most fashionable collectible and the most exciting party theme. From a group of weird creatives, Surrealist artists turned into celebrities, endorsed by famous collectors and patrons.
Under this influence, it would be strange if Pop Art, the movement exploiting the consumer aesthetic, did not soon immerse itself in the advertising business. Apart from imitating ads and products, artists soon started to appear in TV commercials and printed posters. Thus, Keith Haring signed a contract with a watch brand, and Andy Warhol appeared on TV promoting sandwiches and cars.
