Admiration Theatre

Alfred Jarry and surrealism

Jarry was passionately interested in art, and spent many hours visiting exhibitions and the studios of painters. Jarry's career as art critic began almost before he established himself as a writer. The most famous of Jarry's acquaintances and of the painters he admired was Gauguin. He was also associated with Henri Rousseau, the English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, and 'les Nabis', a group banded together by their absolute hostility to all forms of realism and naturalism. Jarry was also himself active as an artist and illustrator, working in a number of different media. Keith Beaumont

It was Jarry's friend, the poet Apollinaire, who coined the negologism 'sur-realisme' to describe the creation of a new reality and ways of looking at nature, which necessarily include man's inner being and all the realities that lie beyond man's immediate gaze. For Apollinaire it is part of the poet's mission to imagine truths that other men are as yet unable to grasp. Charles Schumacher

Jarry was a leader among the emerging groups of artists who would found surrealism and whose work would spread over Europe to influence artists as diverse as the Italian playwright Dario Fo and the Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali.

Surrealists seek the greater liberation of the mind, to enable the mind to leap the barrier set up for it by the antimonies of reason and dreaming, reason and madness, feeling and representation etc., which constitute the major obstacles in Western thought. Andre Breton

In surrealism, the key question ceases to be: how good a painter or poet is the artist under discussion? It becomes instead: how well does this artist make use of his medium to project an inner vision that permits us to experience and explore the world? J.H. Matthews


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Alfred Jarry and surrealism Jarry was passionately interested in art, and spent many hours visiting exhibitions and the studios of painters. Jarry's career as art critic began almost before he established himself as a writer. The most famous of Jarry's acquaintances and of the painters he admired was Gauguin. He was also associated with Henri Rousseau, the English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, and 'les Nabis', a group banded together by their absolute hostility to all forms of realism and naturalism. Jarry was also himself active as an artist and illustrator, working in a number of different media. Keith Beaumont It was Jarry's friend, the poet Apollinaire, who coined the negologism 'sur-realisme' to describe the creation of a new reality and ways of looking at nature, which necessarily include man's inner being and all the realities that lie beyond man's immediate gaze. For Apollinaire it is part of the poet's mission to imagine truths that other men are as yet unable to grasp. Charles Schumacher Jarry was a leader among the emerging groups of artists who would found surrealism and whose work would spread over Europe to influence artists as diverse as the Italian playwright Dario Fo and the Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali. Surrealists seek the greater liberation of the mind, to enable the mind to leap the barrier set up for it by the antimonies of reason and dreaming, reason and madness, feeling and representation etc., which constitute the major obstacles in Western thought. Andre Breton In surrealism, the key question ceases to be: how good a painter or poet is the artist under discussion? It becomes instead: how well does this artist make use of his medium to project an inner vision that permits us to experience and explore the world? J.H. Matthews
Company No 4221389		© Admiration 2005