How does romanticism pave the way for surrealism?
I’ll give it a shot. Romanticism emphasised the personal and subjective experience. In other words, the artist expressed how HE (or she) viewed an experience, idea, or feeling without trying to be objective. In Romanticism, the inner voice is what mattered. Keats wrote about his own feelings about the nightingale, not what he believed nightingales represented on a universal plane. Same goes for Van Gogh and Mussorgsky. Surrealism is sort of that principle taken even further: dream images, symbols that have personal meaning to the author only, but may be just as meaningful in a different way to the viewer/reader/listener. Or they could be totally meaningless as well. Baudelaire’s and Dali’s dream images came out of the deepest level of their subconsciousness. It may be meaningful and exciting to you and me, but statements don’t get much more personal and intimate than that.
