Some surrealists, including Ernst, Yves Tanguy from France, and Roberto Matta from Chile, used a combination of techniques to suggest a dream state or to produce an abstract vocabulary of forms. They are therefore difficult to pigeonhole in a single category. In Matta�s The Unknowing (1951, Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, Austria) for example, the artist has created a three-dimensional space and objects that look solid. The objects, however, are so ambiguous that viewers can view them in any number of ways and impose their own interpretations on the painting.
V Surrealist Literature
Although surrealism has had its most lasting impact in visual art, it began as a literary movement. According to Andr� Breton, the first surrealist work was Les champs magn�tiques (1920; The Magnetic Fields, 1985), a collection of automatist writings that he produced in collaboration with French writer Philippe Soupault. Other important surrealist writers include Frenchmen Louis Aragon, Jean Cocteau (who also made surrealist films), and Paul �luard. Some surrealist writers produced accounts of dreams and, like surrealist painters, turned to automatism to access the unconscious. In automatist writing the surrealists allowed their thoughts to flow freely onto the page without attempting to edit or organize them. The resulting stream of words was often difficult to follow. Like surrealist painters, these writers later modified the pure automatism of their early efforts by editing, often with a deliberate emphasis on symbolic imagery.
The surrealist writers revived interest in two 19th-century French poets whose work seemed to anticipate that of the surrealists: Arthur Rimbaud and Isidore Ducasse, whose pen name was Le Comte de Lautr�amont. Breton adopted Lautr�amont�s phrase �beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella,� as an example of the shocking, incongruous beauty that the surrealists hoped to reveal.
VI Influence of Surrealism
Surrealism ranks among the most important and influential European art movements of the first half of the 20th century. Many surrealists, including Breton, Masson, Ernst, and Matta, spent time in the United States during World War II (1939-1945). Their presence proved pivotal to the artistic development of the American abstract expressionist painters, particularly to the work of Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. Surrealism also had a lasting influence on the art of Latin America (see Latin American Painting), in the works of artists such as Frida Kahlo of Mexico and Wifredo Lam of Cuba.
