The Greekness of Modern Greek Surrealism

Abstract

Surrealism as a full-blown artistic movement, or, as many of its exponents preferred to see it, a full-blown way of life, was very much a French product. The line of descent from larry's Ubu (1896), via the self-conscious modernism of Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, to the Dadaist activities of 1916 represents the continuation of that semi-official anti-culture which had existed throughout nineteenth-century France. With the destruction of the officially sanctioned culture of Nationalism and Catholic conformism in the debacle of the First World War, there was a sudden vacuum in French intellectual circles which the anti-culture was quite ready to fill. In the words of an early member of she movement, Roger Vailland: ‘Surrealism was not a literary school. It was above all a common ground and meeting-place for young petit-bourgeois intellectuals particularly aware of the futility of every activity expected of them by their background and their era’.