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An Interesting Quiz About Surrealism

Deepa Kartha
Quirky, bizarre and dreamlike, the surrealist movement influenced the worlds of art and literature greatly. Here is a quiz that would test your knowledge about surrealism.
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The surrealist movement was started by poet André Breton with the publication of his work, The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.
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Surrealism started in Paris in 1924. The movement went beyond the rational and the conscious and focused on dreams and the unconscious realms of the human mind.
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The Surrealists were deeply influenced by the works of the French psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, especially by his book, 'The Interpretation of Dreams'.
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Dadaism was the precursor for surrealism, where the artists created works that were anti-rational, anti-aesthetic and anti-idealistic. However, while Dadaism focused on the negative, surrealism focused on the positive.
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Automatism (the art of drawing aimlessly), frottage (rubbing graphite on a paper that is placed on a textured surface) and decalcomania (transferring image from one paper to another by applying gouache are all techniques used by surrealists. Modeling was a technique used by cubists.
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While Salvador Dali, Max Enrst and Rene Magritte were popular surrealists, Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch post-impressionist painter.
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René Magritte’s The Future of Statues (L’Avenir des statues) showcases the commercial plaster version of Napoleon’s death mask, which was painted like a deep-blue sky with sunlit clouds on them. It was created in 1937.
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Apart from unexpected and illogical juxtapositions, personal iconography and distorted figures, symbolic images, bizarre assembly of ordinary objects, visual puns, biomorphic shapes, etc. were some other characteristics of surrealism.
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The Exquisite Corpse is a chain game, where a piece of creative work would be passed from one player to another, until the work is completed.
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Alfred Hitchcock took the help of Salvador Dali to create the dream sequence scene in his 1945 movie Spellbound. Although the original scene was for 20 minutes, it was cut to 2 minutes in the final edit of the movie.
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Dali, the most famous Surrealist painter of the times, was popularly known for his iconic moustache and extravagant persona.
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Although Surrealism continues to exist in the field of art and literature, Surrealist as an organized movement is believed to have come to an end in 1966 with the death of Andre Breton.
That's about it! Let us check how knowledgeable are you about the subject of surrealism.