The Spread of Surrealism
Surrealism - the artistic movement that explores the unconscious mind, invoking the power of dreams and chance - had a tremendous output in central Europe that has been largely overlooked, particularly in photography. Artists in Czechoslovakia and Poland furthered surrealist ideas extensively as they pursued documentary themes, staged performances for the camera, and made subversive, hallucinatory self-portraits.
Surrealism, with its open explorations of private fantasy, offered an alternative to the public, instructional mission of so much art and culture in the region. At the same time, in 1930s Czechoslovakia, surrealist photography received remarkable visibility in everyday life. In photomontage book covers for the Czech edition of a French thriller series called Fantômas, for example, Jindřich Štyrský portrayed a surreal confrontation between seductive beauty and unexpected violence.
