Rendezvous of Dreams. Surrealism and German Romanticism

One hundred years ago, the most renowned artistic movement of the twentieth century emerged in Paris: Surrealism. Sparked by a reconsideration of value systems in the aftermath of the First World War, it was a current that would shape the twentieth century like no other. Surrealism displayed a striking »elective affinity« in particular with German Romanticism. The supernatural and irrational, dreams and chance, a feeling of community and encounters with a changing natural world were vital sources of inspiration for German Romanticism and shaped international Surrealism differently a century later. Starting with André Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, fascinating parallels come to light with respect to fundamental questions, attitudes, motifs and even pictorial processes.

Selected Surrealist masterpieces by Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Valentine Hugo, Toyen, André Masson, Paul Klee and many more demonstrate that, alongside poets including Novalis, Achim and Bettine von Arnim, Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist and Karoline von Günderrode, the great Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) and Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810) also played an important role in the search for a revolutionary new art form in the twentieth century.

Surprisingly, even more direct references to German Romanticism emerged in the Resistance and among those surrealists living under occupation and in exile during the Second World War. In a broader sense, comparable basic ideas about the cosmos, nature, dreams, inner visions and community can be discerned in the activities of the Surrealists between 1924 and 1966.

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