In 1924 André Breton defined surrealism as pure psychic automatism. In 1861, Gustave Courbet called realism the negation of the ideal. One question runs between them: what is real? Surrealism and realism are rival claims about reality: realism trusts the visible world, surrealism hunts for what hides behind it.
Realism and Surrealism make opposite claims about what is real. Learn how each movement defined reality, and why Surrealism turned to the occult for answers.
What Are Realism and Surrealism, Exactly?
Breton published the First Surrealist Manifesto on 15 October 1924. Its definition is the most quoted sentence of the movement: “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express, verbally, in writing, or in any other manner, the actual functioning of thought.” The same manifesto declares the goal: to resolve dream and reality, “seemingly so contradictory,” into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.
Courbet needed no manifesto. In December 1861, answering young painters who had asked him to open a school, he wrote that realism is the negation of the ideal and that painting “can only consist of the representation of real and existing things.” Where Breton distrusted the world, Courbet trusted it completely. One definition asks us to treat the eye as an instrument. The other asks us to treat it as a suspect.
Where Did the Two Movements Come From?
Those two definitions were not born in quiet studios. They arrived at the end of two catastrophes, and each movement carried scars.
Realism came first, out of the revolution of 1848. The label was pushed by the critic Champfleury, born Jules Husson. Courbet painted The Stone Breakers in 1849, two laborers beside a road, and followed it with A Burial at Ornans (1849-50), a village funeral on a canvas the size of a history painting. The priest reads the office. The women in white bonnets weep. The gravedigger waits at the hole. The Academy read the scale as an insult: this size was reserved for kings, not for the burial of peasants.
The insult became a scandal in 1855. The jury of the Exposition Universelle rejected two of Courbet’s works, including The Artist’s Studio, so he rented a shed across the street, hung forty paintings, and called it the Pavilion of Realism. The refusal turned realism into a public cause. Courbet stayed political: he joined the Paris Commune in 1871, was imprisoned, fined, and exiled to Switzerland, where he died in 1877.
Surrealism answered a different catastrophe, the First World War. Breton had studied medicine and worked with shell-shocked soldiers at the Val-de-Grâce hospital in Paris. The trenches had been dug by reason, by generals and engineers, and the surrealists concluded that reason itself was compromised. In 1922-23 they held “sommeils” (so-MAY), sleep sessions in which the poet Robert Desnos spoke and wrote in trance. The sessions collapsed in accusations of theater. Calling them cheap fraud underestimates what a trance can produce; calling them possession overestimates it. They left the movement its method: the body could think without the mind’s permission. The Manifesto followed that autumn, and the Bureau of Surrealist Research opened at 15 rue de Grenelle, inviting the public to confess their dreams.
What Did Each Movement Claim About Reality?
That history explains why each movement painted what it painted. What follows is the claim each made about the world.
For the realists, the visible world was sufficient. Courbet’s funeral scene had already made the argument: the sacred had moved out of the cathedral and into the street. A laborer’s shoulder carried as much meaning as a saint’s halo. The eye, properly disciplined, was a moral instrument.
The surrealists replied that the eye sees only a surface. The image, for them, was not a record but a discharge, a spark struck between distant realities. Lautréamont had given them the formula in Les Chants de Maldoror (1869): “as beautiful as the chance meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” Breton made that sentence a law: the more distant the realities, the stronger the flash. He named the result “convulsive beauty” in the magazine Minotaure in 1934.
Breton’s Second Manifesto, in 1930, went further. It spoke of “a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, the high and the low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.” This is the sentence that links surrealism to the occult tradition, because the occult has always worked at that same point where opposites hold together. We keep the two manifestos in our library between the alchemical commentaries and the treatises on dreams. Breton would not have minded.
How the Two Movements Actually Put Paint on the Canvas
The claims demanded methods. A reporter does not work like a dowser, and each side had its own discipline.
The realists trained attention. Courbet laid his paint in thick, heavy strokes, lifting the pigment with a palette knife until the surface had a body a viewer could almost weigh. The same documentary appetite filled the novels of the 1850s: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary brought the precision of a clerk to the life of a provincial wife. To paint that way a painter needed a steady hand and a hatred of decoration.
The surrealists trained release. Breton’s instructions for automatic writing were simple: quiet the mind, write as fast as possible, do not edit, do not reread. We follow the same rule in our own study. With Philippe Soupault, Breton had already produced The Magnetic Fields (1920) entirely by automatic writing, and the First Manifesto records the phrase that arrived at the edge of sleep and set him on the path: “There is a man cut in two by the window.” In 1925 the group invented the exquisite corpse, cadavre exquis (ka-DAHV-rex-KWEE): each player folded the sheet, drew a body part out of sight, and passed it on. The first sentence assembled this way read “The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.” No single mind could have planned it.
Salvador Dalí systematized the approach as the paranoiac-critical method in the early 1930s: stare at one image until a second appears inside it, then paint both. He claimed that The Persistence of Memory (1931) came from watching camembert soften in the August sun. Whether true or not, the method worked. For the surrealists the image was not invented. It was found, the way a dowser finds water.
Where Do Magic Realism and Symbolism Fit?
Between those two disciplines, other movements tried to sit in both chairs.
The German critic Franz Roh coined “magic realism” in 1925 for postwar painters who returned to sober, precise representation of everyday scenes, but rendered them with a strange glow. Latin American writers later borrowed the term for novels in which ghosts and rain receive equal calm. The difference from surrealism fits in one sentence: magic realism treats the impossible as ordinary, while surrealism treats the ordinary as impossible.
Both currents descend from a refusal that predates them. Jean Moréas published the Symbolist Manifesto in Le Figaro on 18 September 1886, declaring that the object was not the aim of art but a sign to be deciphered. The symbolists withdrew from Courbet’s world of flesh and stone toward the idea. The surrealists went the other way, down into matter, into the body, into the table of the séance, hunting for the marvelous inside the visible.
The hunt left its own literature. Pierre Mabille published The Mirror of the Marvelous in 1940, a guided tour of occult texts that became a surrealist standard. André Breton wrote Arcane 17 in 1945 on the Gaspé Peninsula of Quebec, casting his companion Elisa as the tarot’s Star, a woman pouring two streams of water, one into the sea and one onto the land. A movement that began in a psychiatric ward ended by reading a card.
What People Get Wrong About the Divide
The neighbors blur the picture further, because much of what people repeat about both movements is wrong.
Surrealism is not randomness. Breton expelled members he judged to have abandoned method. Automatic writing had rules, and the movement defended them like a monastery defends its hours.
Realism is not photographic finish. Courbet’s canvases are heavy and visibly worked; he was attacked for his subject matter, not his brushwork. Photorealism, which copies photographs with patient exactness, is a separate movement born in late-1960s New York and California.
The two are not simple opposites. Breton did not want to abolish reality; he wanted to double it. “Surreality” is the resolution of dream and reality, which means realism survives inside surrealism as one term of the equation.
Nor was surrealism indifferent to the occult. It was anti-clerical, but the hermetic current ran through it from the start. In “The Occultation of Surrealism” (1943), Breton argued that esoteric tradition could renew a movement exhausted by politics. Even René Magritte, who rejected the Freudian fever of his colleagues, approached the question from the other side. His The Treachery of Images (1929) writes “This is not a pipe” beneath a painted pipe, and he insisted the picture hid nothing. The visible is the visible. The mind, he said, is the mystery.
FAQ
Can a painting be both realistic and surreal?
Yes. Most canonical surrealist canvases are. Dalí and Magritte painted with near-academic precision so that the impossible would look undeniable. The technique is realistic; the scene is not.
What did André Breton mean by “pure psychic automatism”?
He meant thought expressing itself without the control of reason, morality, or aesthetics, in writing, drawing, or any other medium. It was the definition of surrealism in the First Manifesto of 1924.
Is realism the same as photorealism?
No. Realism was a mid-19th-century political and philosophical position based on observation. Photorealism is a late-1960s movement that copies photographs, often at enormous scale.
Why were surrealists interested in alchemy and tarot?
Because alchemy is the art of transforming one substance into another, and the surrealists wanted to transform perception itself. Their engagement with esoteric symbolism deepened steadily after 1930.
The dispute between realism and surrealism is not a quarrel between two styles. It is the old question of the library, restated in paint: is the world finished, or is it still revealing itself? Follow the thread through the vertical hub, trace the symbolist lineage that prepared the ground, and continue with our guide to art and occultism.