What is Surrealist Automatism Art?

Surrealist automatism is a method of art-making.

Regia Marinho
3 min readFeb 20, 2022

The artist suppresses conscious control over the making process, allowing the unconscious mind to have the power over it.

Joan Miró — Harlequin’s Carnival, 1924. Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Who invented automatic drawing?

Automatic drawing was pioneered by the English artist Austin Osman Spare who wrote a chapter, Automatic Drawing as a Means to Art, in his book, The Book of Pleasure (1913).

How does automatism relate to Surrealism?

Automatism was used by the Surrealists to facilitate the direct and uncontrolled outpouring of unconscious thought.

The Surrealists experimented with automatist techniques of writing, drawing, and painting.

In his first Surrealist Manifesto, André Breton provided a dictionary-style definition that made automatism virtually a synonym of Surrealism.

Early 20th-century Dadaists, such as Hans Arp, made some use of this method through chance operations.

Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century.

And The Automatic Message (1933) was one of Breton’s significant theoretical works about automatism.

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Regia Marinho
Regia Marinho

Written by Regia Marinho

I publish tech, art, food, AI, AR, architecture, interior design, fashion, and photography articles. Ideas to inspire the world through art. @regiaart