Surrealism - Between Home and Exile
Written by Sophie Marx
From a distance, the canvas spurted with chaos, carefully curated through large brushstrokes of colour, centred above darkness. The closer I stepped to the painting, the more its composition and distinct shapes became visible to the eye: A small body—I imagine it to be the body of a baby or small child—falling into the abyss of colour, faces melting into the background and a river carving its way through a landscape of mountains.
The sorrow and torment illustrated through the brushwork conveys the Palestinian artist’s Reem Natsheh’s vision of her home. After the latest military aggression against the Palestinians broke out in October 2023 in genocidal extend, the artist, like countless others, found herself displaced, robbed of the stable home she knew before. Taking on the new identity of refugee, she began to exist between the nostalgia for her home country and her future in exile, leading her to reflect on the concept of identity in the painting Visual Narrative Between Home and Exile.
Her room, serving as inspiration, became the backdrop for her ambivalent vision. She rendered it in surrealistic terms, revealing its representation of being an infinite space transcending physical walls. Formulated in André Breton’s 1924 manifesto, Manifeste du Surréalisme, Surrealism rejected conformity and placed emphasis on the human subconscious and dreams in particular. As a movement and philosophy it is still in development today and as visible in Natsheh’s Visual Narrative Between Home and Exile, the circumstances driving her to paint in surreal terms are connected to the similar circumstances Surrealism was established in—artists torn between war and dreams.
Working as an assistant at a neuropsychiatric centre in Saint-Dizier in 1916, Breton became fascinated with Freud’s methods of interpreting dreams of people with psychotic disorders to heal them of their condition. Breton hoped to gain access to the human subconscious by channeling psychoanalytic methods into art, particularly poetry, through automatic writing and painting in order to reproduce the wondrous images haunting our minds as we sleep.
Freud’s theories, which greatly influenced Surrealism were shaped by the First World War and the newly recognised phenomenon of shell shock. The unprecedented horrors that industrial warfare caused were blamed by surrealists on the rational ways of political and societal thinking.
Realism (a theory claiming to explain the reality of international relations) and its accompanying ‘cult of the offensive’ in the early twentieth century emphasized material power, particularly military and economic strength, to ensure the survival of a state. It is based on the belief that today’s allies can become tomorrow’s enemies, as human nature, which is reflected in state behaviour, is argued to be fundamentally greedy, power-hungry and selfish.
The idea of preventative wars, a factor in the outbreak of the First World War, is founded in the notion that being in a permanent state of preparedness: expecting war, striking first, and being on the offensive rather than risk being attacked. This mindset aimed to ensure state autonomy but instead, often led to miscommunication between governments. The theory of preferably fighting now than later to weaken the enemy explains how Germany and France ended up being the war’s main adversaries over an issue that originated between the Balkans and Russia resulting in an estimate of over 250,000 soldiers suffering from shell-shock by the end of the war, according to the Doughboy Foundation.
Realising the power trauma has on the subconscious and how it manifests in dreams, Freud pursued this field as his specialty in the context of increased mental health struggles following the war. In dreams, the mind is free from rationality, and the same desire to be unfettered by reason was echoed by Surrealists as they processed the horrors around them and defied the political norms underlying them. The reoccurring image of disfigured and violated bodies in surrealist paintings were, according to art historian Katy Hessel, in part influenced by the return of missing-limbed veterans from the front lines.
In their opposition to the violence, the Surrealist pantheon embraced wonder, the absurd, and the nonsensical, indulging in passion capable of triggering madness. They investigated the trajectory of dreams and how they can relate to and restructure our reality. Grazing the line of the grotesque, the disfigurement and distortion of bodies and images in a way forces the onlooker to face suppressed, complex emotions boiling up. Merging the seen with the unseen, one is transported into a transient state of the in-between, enabling raw access to an emotional reality.
Aligned with Goethe’s description in Faust II, the movement looked at the world, believing that everything can metamorphose into anything in an instant—an idea that constitutes the arguably deepest poetic myth in Surrealism. Trees morphing into the shape of the female body- or is it the reverse?- as painted by Rita Kerr-Newman-Larsen; Dora Maar’s creations of a hand replacing a crab as the host of a shell on a black-and-white beach or a man bending with the street; human and animal forms merging into one as imagined by Suzanne Van Damme.
Like today, the 1930s (in which Surrealism further developed) witnessed a spurt in fascism across Europe, a political environment that had an undeniable influence on Surrealism and its artists. In the face of violence and hatred, escaping the ugly reality and, more importantly, finding an outlet to deal with what was occurring gave way for the movement to grow internationally.
Turning away from the status quo of rationality and instead investigating emotions, the interior life and, in Bernard Roger’s words, the “science of Love, founded on the analogy whereby all reigns and levels of existence communicate.” It formed the stepping stone for the coexistence of knowledge and intuition, science and poetry.
With political patterns are repeating themselves and, with them, an urge for escapism and detachment, as well as an attempt to gain not only an understanding of ourselves but emotional stability through psychology. Like Surrealists of the twentieth century, we often find ourselves grasping on to single fragments of reality, changing them, defacing them, removing ourselves from them until they become bearable to exist alongside us. A similar process Natsheh used in processing her new identity through her painting—between home and exile, war and peace, reality and dreams.
