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How did Surrealist landscapes combine natural scenery with fantasy and myth?
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Landscape painting
River Landscape in the Late Afternoon, oil on canvas by Adriaen van de Velde, 1663; in a private collection.
Surrealist landscape painting combined natural scenery with fantasy and myth by delving into the subconscious to create strange, dreamlike tableaux. Rather than depicting reality, Surrealists sought to reunite the conscious and unconscious realms, often placing recognizable, realistically painted images within ambiguous or paradoxical frameworks that defied rational sense.12
These landscapes frequently featured unexpected juxtapositions between the natural and the imagined world. Artists employed various approaches to achieve this:1
- Detailed Irrationality: Painters like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte rendered minutely detailed, alien worlds that resembled compelling dreams. Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory is a quintessential example of this style.21
- Biomorphic Abstraction: Other artists, such as Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy, used suggestive, indefinite, or sculpturesque forms set against barren, infinite horizons to evoke psychic responses.2
- Myth and Occult Imagery: Artists like Leonora Carrington incorporated themes of sorcery, alchemy, and metamorphosis into their work, further blending the natural world with the realm of myth.2
By bypassing social conventions and rationalism, these artists transformed the traditional landscape into a medium for personal psychic investigation and revelation.2