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The Cold War began in 1947 and ended in 1989. The Cold War was an ongoing political rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies that developed after World War II.

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Research your assigned category. Include a link to your source and a picture.

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Karl Marx ideas of philosophy were no longer locked away but instead revealed to the world. His ideas were finally being used and exposed to socialist.

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Following the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945 near the close of World War II, the uneasy wartime alliance between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other began to unravel. By 1948 the Soviets had installed left-wing governments in the countries of eastern Europe that had been liberated by the Red Army.

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The Spanish Civil War was one of the bloodiest wars in Europe during the 20th century. It was caused by the failure of Spanish democracy and how Spanish parties and groups did not want to conform to democratic norms, which is equality between political parties, more power to the people, etc. The two opposing parties were called the Spanish Republicans and they were formed by the Spanish government together with unions, communists, anarchists (people against hierarchy), workers, and peasants (lower class or the "poorer" people) and the Nationalists, the rebel part of the army, the bourgeoisie (upper-middle class), the landlords (property owners), and the upper classes.

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Fascism is a far-right ideology which is typically based on militaristic nationalism. Fascists typically had a great amount of disdain for democracy and political and social liberalism. Fascists also sought to oppose and "deal" with Marxists in a stronger form than prior. There is also usually a strong belief in class systems and social elitism. On a political compass fascism is fairly hard to characterize, but is typically placed on the authoritarian right.

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SURREALISM: AN ART MOVEMENT OF THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY
By , contemporary figurative artist and early 19th & 20th Century Print Collector

"Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?" This quote by Leonardo Da Vinci shows he recognized the power of dreams back in the late 15th century.

Artist Victoria Chick discusses Surrealism, an art movement of the early 20th century, on

But it was not until 1924 that dreams became the centerpiece of an art movement whose written goals were compiled in the Surrealist Manifesto. Andre Breton, author of the Manifesto, had been associated with the Dada Movement (about 1915 - 1925 ) but became disillusioned with that group, feeling it did not address expressing the creative unconscious, what art historian Marilyn Stokstad clarified as a higher form of reality, the Sur-reality.

Surrealism was a European movement propelled, at first, by literature but played out in visual art, theater, and film, as well as literary works. It was the outgrowth of many influences including the writings of Freud, the shock effect of nihilist Dada artists, early 20th century philosophy, and the political effects of Communism and Anarchism.

Automatism was a technique used by all three arts as a form of free association of ideas, words, and images. Planning was rejected. Ironically, the basic rules of design and composition were still followed, if subconsciously. Dreams and fantasies were revered as source material, sometimes breaking out as images of bondage or aggression. Mostly, the visual images were compositions of unrelated objects or isolated places painted in a hard-edge, precise style. The sharp clarity of dream images combined with often absurd juxtaposition of the images, was viewed by the Surrealists as liberation of mind and, with it, greater creativity. They were influenced by the French poet, Pierre Reverdy, who wrote in 1918, "The more the relationship between the juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be - the greater its emotional power and poetic reality." In regard to the idea of liberation in the early 20th century, Surrealists were attracted by anarchy, wanting to change reality, and conventional social attitudes and restrictions of their time. Their work was less intentionally designed to offend the viewer than the art produced by their Dada predecessors. In fact, much of Surrealist art was seen by the public as amusing. If the content was hard to understand, at least there was an appreciation of the skill required to render images so meticulously.

The precision of surrealist painters was in keeping with the idea of dream clarity. Georgio de Chirico, Francis Picabia, Joan Miro, Max Ernst, and Yve Tanguy were early painters working in the context of Surrealism. A few of these painted organic shapes, but most painted images of realistic or exaggerated natural objects. Salvador Dali, probably the best known Surrealist, was not well accepted by his Surrealist contemporaries. They resented his capitalist tendencies as evidenced by his successful self-promotion, and resulting sales. Paul Delvaux was a mid-century Surrealist using art history references as part of his dreamlike settings.

Surrealism has continued as a way of seeing in contemporary times with fewer political overtones. It has influenced the development of fantasy art.

Victoria Chick is the founder of the Cow Trail Art Studio in southwest New Mexico. She received a B.A. in Art from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and awarded an M.F.A. in Painting from Kent State University in Ohio. Visit her website at www.ArtistVictoriaChick.com

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Surrealism: An Art Movement of the Early 20th Century

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SURREALISM: AN ART MOVEMENT OF THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY By , contemporary figurative artist and early 19th & 20th Century Print Collector "Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?" This quote by Leonardo Da Vinci shows he recognized the power of dreams back in the late 15th century.

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The Cold War reached its peak in 1948–53. In this period the Soviets unsuccessfully blockaded the Western-held sectors of West Berlin. The United States and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO unified military command to resist the Soviet presence in Europe. The Soviets exploded their first atomic warhead, which ended the American monopoly on the atomic bomb.

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This investigation assesses the significance of surrealist artists' responses to the Spanish Civil War and how the experiences of the horrific event were documented visually. In order to evaluate such significance, this investigation examines the impact the events the war had on surrealist art in Spain, through the use of primary recounts of the war's impact on art and visual art history, mostly focusing on works by Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso who became world renowned for their contribution.

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The Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, as did the revolution within surrealist art. It was an event that did not just affect people locally, but on an international scale. Although, European art in general was impacted by the war, this investigation will not examine the effect the war had on continental surrealism, thus will only focus on Spanish artists and their work. As the leading artists in this movement were the Spanish born artists Picasso and Dali, they will be the central focus.

Two of the sources used in this essay will assess are Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War by Robin Adèle Greenley and The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí by Salvador Dalí will be evaluated for their origins, purposes, values and limitations.

This investigation does not assess the difference in ideologies (Republicanism versus Nationalism) tearing apart Spain, nor does it assess other surrealist art movements in literature, philosophy, film, architecture or music.

Background on the Spanish Civil War

The summer of 1936 marked the beginning of a landmark event within modern European history: the Spanish Civil War, inviting with it a three-year tumultuous period of terror, destruction and persecution, shattering the nation. Its deep rooting ideological confrontations resulted in the intense commitment of all its participants and the loss of over half a million Spanish lives acted as a stimulus to the various international surrealist movements of the time, inspiring artists of all cultures. The creative energy focused on portraying political ideologies and illusions, the social idealisms and the military take on modern warfare, documenting the hopes and despair of the participants in this Kafkaesque war.

The fall of the crumbling Spanish Monarchy and the dissatisfying Second Republic, and the electoral success of the leftist Popular Front, a rebellion against the newly elected government erupted. The Falange or the Nationalists, lead by General Franco, conducted a nationwide revolt, alongside General Mola. They managed to seize the key cities in Northern Spain, including Madrid. The Catalan and Basque country, both known for their persistent separatist movement, anarchism and socialism, unsurprisingly sided and remained loyal to the Republic. This politically polarized Spain, dividing the country into the Nationalist and Republicans.

Mostly socialists, separatists, artists and intellectuals sided with Republicans. Franco wanted to follow Mussolini's example and establish a secular conservative regime and was supported mostly by the conservatives, the military, the royalists and the Clergy. Even though the Church and the Falange experienced some friction, they continued to remain in their 'marriage of convince' because the Republic was seen as antidisestablishmentarian and lethally temporal. The Nationalists rose against the electoral Popular Front government and finally over threw it.

The interferences from external powers such as Germany and the Soviet Union dragged out the war and worsened the conflict. Horrific events which paralyzed the country, such as the annihilation of the Basque country by the German Luftwaffe's Blitzkrieg, served as inspiration which sparked the notion of a world exhibition in France, in 1937. The section dedicated to Spain was known was the Pavilion. Many artists, such as Dali, Picasso and Renau were asked to participate; each created a response to the many atrocities which occurred in the past year of the war. It was the first exhibition of its kind, prompting propaganda from countries such as Spain.

Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War

Surrealism, with no exact definition due to its ambiguous nature, is known for 'imaginative eccentricity' and became a major movement in the late 1920s and throughout 1930s Europe; mostly in places like Germany and Spain. The twisted yet fantastic reality which surrealism creates is seen as an escape from the actual reality. Surrealist artist art is considered to be closely connected with Freudian psychological analysis, claiming that such warped art is an insight into a deeper psyche.

The surrealist works of the Andalusian painters Dalí and Picasso (amongst others) became signatures of the satirical content of the war, acting as world informants of the paralyzing happenings within the country. Although both artists had very different notions of surrealism, both artists depict the war in a grotesque, incomprehensible, violent and audacious manner which reflected the Civil War in all its accuracy. It can be concluded that the war distorted many perspectives of reality. Traditional elements of surrealism stemmed from the Dadaism movement and were subjected to metamorphosis by many artists who incorporated components from cubism, impressionism, 'Enlightenment' and post impressionism as well as various other movements. In its 'purest form', surrealism had little or no affect on the civil war, in fact, prior to the war, it was much more submissive and discerning. However, the introduction of war perverted the movement in Spain most notably by Dalí's Autumn Cannibalism (1936) (fig. 2) and Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War (July, 1936) (fig. 1) and Picasso's Guernika (1937) (fig. 3). Such works were considered a mutation and mockery of works of artists from previous movements like El Greco whose work was considered contemporary for his time.

The Spanish surrealist art culture became a symbol of the Spanish Civil War as well as its leftist orientation and the Republic. This demonstrated the highly interlinked nature of political and cultural developments in 1930s Spain. Architects, like Alphonse Laurencic, drew inspiration from the twisted works of Dali, Kandinsky and Klee among others to invent a form of 'psychotechnic' torture found in the mind-bending prison-cells and torture chambers of Barcelona and elsewhere, built in 1938. Jose Millicua suggested that through the use of the psychological properties of colors and geometric abstraction found in these works, Laurencic created a hell that would physically distort and mentally disturb the victim connecting the growing art culture with the growing militaristic government.

Section C

Evaluation of Sources

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Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War was written by Robin Adèle Greenley, a respected art historian, currently Latin American Studies professor at the Connecticut University. The book, published in 2006 by Yale University Press, New Haven, is a critical interpretation of Surrealist art works by five artists, including, Dali and Picasso. The purpose of Greenley's work is an 'attempt to unravel the correspondence between aesthetics and politics during the Spanish Civil War' and focuses on surrealist aspects of the war, how they differed and were affected by the intense struggle plaguing the country. The value of the book is that there is a clear study of the correlation between the art and the events which took place. It is a secondary source, designed mainly for the purpose of educating. Greenley intimately analyzes how 'artistic practice offers unique insight into the cataclysmic debacle of war.' The limitation of the book from a historical perspective are the existence of some 'peculiarities in relation to its subject' because she examines the surrealist artists and their work immaculately, but fails to draw strong parallels between the political situation of the time and the drastic change of the movement. Her work, although useful, is mostly suited for contemporary aesthetics and critical theory.

The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí was written by Salvador Dali (published in 1942 in its original French, then in 2000, translated into English by Haakon M. Chevalier). The purpose of this source is a memoire, allowing an inside scope to Dali's life. The source's value is that it is a direct account from the leading artist of the Surrealist movement, providing the historian with a unique and personal insight as how the war impacted him and his work. Dali is considered one of the few misunderstood artists of his time and here the idea that 'his genius saves him from chaos' allows us to understand him more. The book allows a deeper understanding of the awesome painter. It is a primary source and therefore is subjected to personal prejudice. Taking into account that the source is a personal memoire, Dali has grandiose his life and placed a very positive theme to everything he did with is ingenious use of words. This highlights the limitations of the source. However, he acknowledges some of this over-the-top heroism on his part in the central chapters of his prose as 'false memories'. The memoir written only three years after the war, and passions were still running high in Spain while many people were trying to exonerate themselves from the general violence and anarchy.

Section D

Analysis

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Both the civil war and the surrealist art movement are closely connected and referred to by Greenley, as the public's awakening of politics and pictures in the politically polarized Spain. It is an accurate description of the relationship between the cultural and political aspects of the war, pointing out how closely connected the two were, although they are often treated as two separate issues within the 1930s.

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Common Themes in Surrealist Art

Spain's political polarization was that of artistic polarization too. The Spanish artistic culture were more than just a visual voice of the war's terrors; they took a more proactive role within the war, thus recording and commenting on the accounts of the petrifying events from a firsthand perspective. The perversion of the surrealist art movement was done in a manner that possibly was perfectly collaborated between all artists. There is no evidence that suggests this, however. The idea of the body as a political metaphor for the country, the people, the artist, for the audience to relate to was simply a trend that caught on. The lewd art united the people, it was not only those who were suffering on Spanish soils, but those who had suffered from the previous war and the various other struggles that were happening concurrently or had passed recently. The surrealistic art 'evolved and functioned' in ways that 'one can relate his stylistic consistencies to his wild political swings' Both Greenley and Dalí agree that that surrealism is the portrayal 'horrific metaphor for the physical annihilation of life.'

Prevalent abstract portrayal in surrealist works

Fundamental components which make up work such as that of Dalí and Picasso were considered contemporary, even for surrealism and, to some extent, were frowned upon and considered the 'assassination of painting'. These innovative elements found in surrealism seemed to pervert the movement making reality more abhorrent and unnatural, but at the same time it acted as an escape from the living nightmares of their reality allowing life to have a more satirical texture to it. Things such as disembodied humans, genitals, death, destruction, furniture and foods even references to religion and Catholicism became the norm in surrealist works represented the supple irony of the artists' lives as well as that of the people; they were painting from their perspective of a war that created a reality for the world that was so obscene, it could not be captured any other way

Spain's political polarization was that of artistic polarization too. The Spanish artistic culture were more than just a visual voice of the war's terrors; they took a more proactive role within the war, thus recording and commenting on the accounts of the petrifying events from a firsthand perspective. The perversion of the surrealist art movement was done in a manner that possibly was perfectly collaborated between all artists. There is no evidence that suggests this, however. The idea of the body as a political metaphor for the country, the people, the artist, for the audience to relate to was simply a trend that caught on. The lewd art united the people, it was not only those who were suffering on Spanish soils, but those who had suffered from the previous war and the various other struggles that were happening concurrently or had passed recently. The surrealistic art 'evolved and functioned' in ways that 'one can relate his stylistic consistencies to his wild political swings' Both Greenley and Dalí agree that that surrealism is the portrayal 'horrific metaphor for the physical annihilation of life.'

Use of media

Elements of Spanish Surrealism became mostly to do with fascism in a farcical, perverse form of display, causing a 'ruin of surrealism'. This was mostly Dali's movement, joined with other surrealists like Rene Magritte and Max Ernst. Dali, in particular, served as the main revolutionary artist to this complex way of painting. The constant elements of his works were things he found some sort of fascination in as a child such as food, death, the idea of sexuality, the human anatomy, insects, a crutch, and various other strange items which he later turned into a satirical, metaphorical component for his work.

The idea of the body as a political metaphor became a fast trend throughout Surrealists work. The body came to represent many concepts of the happenings within their lives. It was a metaphor for the artist's body, a body wounded by war and its ritualized combat, personal strife of civilians and artists, of politicized or sexualized body, an indicator of unconscious desires as well as body mechanisms acting as a transgression of avant-garde within the social context. It was created in a fashion as a universal component; anyone and everyone could relate to the art effortlessly.

Picasso's Guernika (1937) utilized these aspects to create an unconscious conception of war, where the strong prey on the weak as a response to the Pavilion,capturing the violence and the disruptive nature of the confusion of private sexuality. It was a symbol of Guernica's struggle and suffering after its violation by the German Blitzkrieg attack.

Dali's Autumn Cannibalism (1936) also took into consideration these components, as well as his signature elements to represent the Kafkaesque idea of the war with a more ironic twist than Picasso's art. Dali's work making mockery of bourgeoisie and the subtle grotesque manner in which this war is carried out, an element of sadomasochistic aggression between the two faceless, closely entwined figures that have an almost parasitic feel to them, turning a seemingly amorous kiss into a fatal, inescapable trap; underlining the murderous violence depicted.

Artists' social and political issues in their work

A majority of the art responses to the war were surrealist, proving an obvious correlation between the two events. The war had an overwhelming impact of the surrealist art movement inspiring artists such as Dalí and Picasso throughout Spain.

Section E

Conclusion

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It is evident the Spanish Civil War had an impact on the surrealist visual art movement and altered, significantly, the ways in which the movement was captured. The fundamental elements and secondary components that such works were composed of obtained many satirical and metaphorical characteristics which were impacted very much by the war.

Previously, the image of the body as a perverse form of political metaphor was not thought of and therefore rarely appeared in surrealist paintings for the mutation of the body was seen as sacrilegious, and in doing so, the already worrying contemporary art became aesthetically tormenting The perverse maturity of the images from artists such as Dalí and Picasso have been used as ideal examples of this epic movement which altered not only the way people saw their reality but the global ideal of art and art history.

The Spanish Civil War did impact surrealist visual art in Spain by forcing the elements of the work not only more uniform among the artists but changed them to represent something more than the war in their minds.

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Impact of Spanish Civil War on Surrealism Art

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This investigation assesses the significance of surrealist artists' responses to the Spanish Civil War and how the experiences of the horrific event were documented visually.

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Article: How the Surrealist Movement Shaped the Course of Art History

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Article: How the Surrealist Movement Shaped the Course of Art History

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During the 1936 International Surrealist Exposition, held in London, guest speaker Salvador Dalí addressed his audience costumed head-to-toe in an old-fashioned scuba suit, with two dogs on leashes in one hand and a billiard cue in the other. Mid-lecture, constrained by the scuba mask, the Spanish artist began to suffocate and flailed his arms for help. The audience, unfazed, assumed his gesticulations were all part of the performance. As art legend has it, the Surrealist poet David Gascoyne eventually rescued Dalí, who upon recovery remarked, "I just wanted to show that I was plunging deeply into the human mind." Dalí then finished his speech-and his accompanying slides, to no one's surprise, were all presented upside down.

This anecdote underscores the most absurdist, even clownish, elements of the Surrealist movement, epitomized by Dalí-who was considered something of a joke figure by the early 20th-century art establishment. But the art movement was actually far more diverse than is widely known, spanning various disciplines, styles, and geographies from 1924 until its end in 1966.

What Is Surrealism?

Founded by the poet André Breton in Paris in 1924, Surrealism was an artistic and literary movement. It proposed that the Enlightenment-the influential 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement that championed reason and individualism-had suppressed the superior qualities of the irrational, unconscious mind. Surrealism's goal was to liberate thought, language, and human experience from the oppressive boundaries of rationalism.

Breton had studied medicine and psychiatry and was well-versed in the psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud. He was particularly interested in the idea that the unconscious mind-which produced dreams-was the source of artistic creativity. A devoted Marxist, Breton also intended Surrealism to be a revolutionary movement capable of unleashing the minds of the masses from the rational order of society. But how could they achieve this liberation of the human mind?

Automatism, a practice that is akin to free association or a stream of consciousness, gave the Surrealists the means to produce unconscious artwork. Surrealist artist André Masson's mixed-media canvas Battle of Fishes (1926) is an early example of automatic painting. To begin, Masson took gesso-a tacky substance typically used to prime supports for painting-and let it freely fall across the surface of his canvas. He then threw sand over it, letting the grains stick to the adhesive at random, and doodled and painted around the resulting forms. Artists employing automatic methods embraced the element of chance, often to surprising results. Masson's end product features two prehistoric fish, jaws dripping with blood, fighting it out in the primordial ooze: an unconscious demonstration of the inherent violence of nature.

Not every Surrealist chose to create such abstract works, however. Many Surrealists recognized that the representation of a thing's actual appearance in the physical world might more effectively conjure associations for the viewer wherein a deeper, unconscious reality revealed itself. Artists like Dalí and the Belgian painter René Magritte created hyper-realistic, dreamlike visions that are windows into a strange world beyond waking life. Magritte's La Clairvoyance (1936), for instance, in which an artist paints a bird in flight while he looks at an egg sitting atop a table, suggests a dreamscape or a hallucinatory state.

The Icons of Surrealism

Though Surrealism is indeed most associated with such flamboyant and irreverent figures as Dalí, Breton recruited a wide group of artists and intellectuals already active in Paris to write for and exhibit under his banner.

Building on the anti-rational tradition of Dada, Surrealism counted among its members such major Dada figures as Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp. By 1924, this group was augmented by other artists and literary figures, including the writers Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, Georges Bataille, and Antonin Artaud; the painters Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy; the sculptors Alberto Giacometti and Meret Oppenheim; and the filmmakers René Clair, Jean Cocteau, and Luis Buñuel.

But Breton was notoriously fickle about who he admitted to the movement, and he had a habit of excommunicating members who he felt no longer shared his particular view of Surrealism. Desnos and Masson, for example, were tossed out of the group via Breton's "Second Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1930 for their unwillingness to support his political aims. Bataille, whose Surrealist viewpoint differed considerably from Breton's, went on to form his own influential splinter group, the College of Sociology, which published journals and held exhibitions throughout the 1930s.

Surrealism in the Americas

As an interwar movement beginning in Paris in the 1920s, Surrealism responded to a post-World War I period that saw the slow reconstruction of major French cities, the height of the French colonial empire abroad, and the rise of fascism across Europe.

By 1937, however, most of the major figures in Surrealism had been forced to leave Europe to escape Nazi persecution. Max Ernst's Europe After the Rain II(1940-42) reflects this fraught moment with a post-apocalyptic vision created at the height of World War II. A partially abstract work formed by "decalcomania"-a technique that entailed painting on glass, then pressing that painted glass to the canvas to allow chance elements to remain- Europe After the Rain suggests bombed-out buildings, the corpses of humans and animals, and eroded geological formations in the aftermath of a great cataclysm.

The emigration of Surrealists to various sites of refuge during World War II did, however, spread the movement's influence across the Atlantic, where it would take firm root in the Americas. As Surrealism gained traction in the 1930s and '40s, it brought automatic practices and an interest in psychology and mythology to a new generation of artists. Jackson Pollock's Surrealist-inspired Guardians of the Secret (1943) exists somewhere between his earlier Social Realist works and the later drip paintings that would make him famous: it includes a recumbent jackal, two totemic forms, and a frieze of calligraphic pseudo-script.

In Latin America, Surrealism found its voice in the work of artists like Frida Kahlo, whose highly personal artistic style paralleled aspects of Surrealism without owing it any specific intellectual debt. In Arbol de la Esperanza (1946), which translates to "tree of hope," Kahlo doesn't depict an actual tree, but rather a dual self-portrait set in an unfamiliar landscape, a tableau that suggests both the 1925 bus accident that rendered her infertile, and the possibility of renewal. While its depiction of fantastic subject matter is reminiscent of works byMagritte or Dalí, Kahlo's painting celebrates the everyday artistry of traditional Mexican ex voto painting.

The psychological and mythological underpinnings of Surrealism also enabled non-European artists-like Wifredo Lam, a painter of Afro-Cuban and Chinese descent who studied in Madrid and Paris in the 1920s and '30s-to delve into the native traditions of their own countries. Lam's Les Noces (1947) intricately weaves the Cubist-Surrealist forms of artists like Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró into a representation of the Afro-Cuban ritual Santería.

Why Does Surrealism Matter?

Surrealism represents a crucible of avant-garde ideas and techniques that contemporary artists are still using today, including the introduction of chance elements into works of art. These methods opened up a new mode of painterly practice pursued by the Abstract Expressionists. The element of chance has also proven integral to performance art, as in the unscripted Happenings of the 1950s, and even to computer art based on randomization. The Surrealist focus on dreams, psychoanalysis, and fantastic imagery has provided fodder for a number of artists working today, such as Glenn Brown, who has also directly appropriated Dalí's art in his own painting.

Surrealism's desire to break free of reason led it to question the most basic foundation of artistic production: the idea that art is the product of a single artist's creative imagination. As an antidote to this, Breton promoted the cadavre exquis, or " exquisite corpse," as a technique for collectively creating art, one that is still played as a game widely today. It involves starting a sentence, sketch, or collage, and then giving it to another person to continue-without letting that person see what has already been written, drawn, or placed. The term derived from a simple game of creating collective prose that resulted in the sentence, "The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine."

Given the method's embrace of chance and tendency to produce humorous, absurd, or unsettling images, it soon became a viable technique for creating exactly the type of unconscious, collective work that the Surrealists sought. Exquisite Corpse 27 (ca. 2011), a work completed by Ghada Amer, Will Cotton, and Carry Leibowitz, is a contemporary example of the sort of stylistically and thematically disconnected work that can arise from this Surrealist method.

The historian and music critic Greil Marcus has gone so far as to characterize Surrealism as one chapter in a series of revolutionary attempts to liberate thought that stretches from the blasphemies of medieval heretics up to the 1960s and beyond. In this light, Surrealism can be understood as the progenitor of the later, Marx-inspired art movement Situationism, 1960s countercultural protests, and even punk: a project of breaking down the rational order that society imposes on individuals.

Header image: Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2016. Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.
Photographs of Joan Miró and Max Ernst via Wikimedia Commons.

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The art movement was actually far more diverse than is widely known, spanning various disciplines, styles, and geographies from 1924 until its end in 1966.

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Political Poetry in the Wake of the Second Spanish Republic deals with the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, a relationship that has often concerned writers and critics, particularly when we speak of world poets such as the ones included in the present study, who have taken political commitment beyond subject matter, towards a process of transformation of the literary language. The names need little introduction: Rafael Alberti (1902-99), prominent twentieth-century Spanish modernist; Pablo Neruda (1904-73), Chilean poet and Nobel Prize Laureate; and Nicolás Guillén (1902-89), foremost Afro-Cuban poet. The questions arising in the case of poets whose world recognition is evident are significant because literary value itself and the universality of their work are subject to cross-examination. We have asked and continue to ask: Could their poetry change our world view? Could their poems move us towards social action? Is poetic language that unambiguously expresses political views nothing more than propaganda? Will their poetry written under the sign of political commitment survive the test of time? "It is common conception," claims Grant D. Moss in the prologue of his study, "that if a poet inserts politics in his poetry then the poems have degraded. For some, however, politics must be included or poetry has no value" (vii). Moss attempts to move away from the sterile binary model and to approach the delicate connection between politics and poetics from an angle that allows the coexistence of both parts. Why Alberti, Neruda, and Guillén? Moss argues that the experience of the three during the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) was decisive. It led to a life-long affiliation to the Communist Party and to political poetry writing that lasted two decades after the fall of the Second Republic: "The premise of this book was that the Republic benefited the work of each so that instead of producing simple political propaganda on the one hand or 'poetry for poetry's sake' on the other, their politics and their poetics formed a bond, one that would allow both to avoid degradation" (138).

Moss organizes his analysis around individual poets. A first chapter necessarily traces the evolution of the intellectuals' political commitment in Europe and primarily in Spain from 1848 to 1939. There is much needed information in this section: divisions in the Spanish left between Marxists and anarchists; the development of journalism as a platform for social criticism; the negotiation of the intellectuals' place in society at the turn of the century as "part of an ascending [End Page 284] petit bourgeoisie rejected by the oligarchy" and "accepted as cutting-edge producers of liberal culture of Spain and Latin America" (6); the internationalization of the world of letters in Spain after 1900 (6-7); Spain and Latin American Modernism; Spain and the Comintern in 1920 (11); the slow shift from aesthetic commitment to a commitment of poetry and politics during the 1930s (12); the Second Republic or the Republic of Intellectuals (14); Las misiones pedagógicas and Lorca's La Barraca (16); Neruda's Caballo verde para la poesía and Alberti and León's journal Octubre (18); socialist realism; First Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in France, 1935 (20); Alianza de Escritores Antifascistas, 1936 (23); the international arena of the Spanish Civil War (22-24); politics and aesthetics after 1939 (25).

Next chapters follow a similar structure. They include a short biography up to the moment of the Second Republic and a brief review of criticism relevant to the problem of politics and poetry. These sections are followed by a discussion of poetry books published between 1931 and 1959. Chapter 2, "Rafael Alberti: Between Aesthetics and Politics," offers succint analyses of excerpts from El poeta en la calle, De un momento a otro, Vida bilingüe de...

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Political Poetry in the Wake of the Second Spanish Republic deals with the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, a relationship that has often concerned writers and critics, particularly when we speak of world poets such as the ones included in the present study, who have taken political commitment beyond subject matter, towards a process of transformation of the literary language.

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Pablo Neruda was a loyal communist and supporter of Stalin.  Pablo served a term as a senator for the Chilean Communist party. He admired the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, because of their role in defeating Nazi Germany and partly because of an idealist interpretation of Marxist doctrine. Pablo often wrote poems about communism, and he read those poems to thousands of people.

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How was Neruda related to the Spanish Civil War?

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How was Neruda related to the Spanish Civil War?

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Neruda in 1937 moved to Paris to help settle Spanish Republicans supporting the loyalist side of the Civil War. Toward the end of the, Neruda helped citizens to Chile from the corrupted leadership of Franco

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Today is that day, the day that carried
a desperate light that since has died.
Don't let the squatters know:
let's keep it all between us,
day, between your bell
and my secret.

Today is dead winter in the forgotten land
that comes to visit me, with a cross on the map
and a volcano in the snow, to return to me,
to return again the water
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
Today when the sun began with its shafts
to tell the story, so clear, so old,
the slanting rain fell like a sword,
the rain my hard heart welcomes.

You, my love, still asleep in August,
my queen, my woman, my vastness, my geography
kiss of mud, the carbon-coated zither,
you, vestment of my persistent song,
today you are reborn again and with the sky's
black water confuse me and compel me:
I must renew my bones in your kingdom,
I must still uncloud my earthly duties.

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Today is that day, the day that carried a desperate light that since has died. Don't let the squatters know: let's keep it all between us, day, between your bell and my secret.

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Surrealism officially began with Dadaist writer André Breton’s 1924 Surrealist manifesto, but the movement formed as early as 1917, inspired by the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, who captured street locations with a hallucinatory quality.

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Pablo Neruda was a radical communist who hated fascism. He admired Jospeh Stalin's effort in fighting fascist Germany in ww2. As a self identified communist Neruda directly opposed the ideologies off fascism, and as such used his political power to fight fascism in Chile before eventually being exiled from Chile.

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Fascism in Chile. (National socialist movement of Chile)

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Fascism in Chile. (National socialist movement of Chile)

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The National Socialist Movement began in 1930 by General Diaz Valderrama and Jorge Gonzalez von Marées. The party followed similar ideas to the Nazism movement in Germany. The movement gained financial support from the German population in Chile. It began to dissolve around 1938.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Movement_of_Chile

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Neruda was surprised when the war broke out, but the signs of civil war had been building for some time. The assassination of Garcia Lorca, a close friend, stunned him. As a result of this death, he wrote Spain in Our Hearts, a collection of poetry written to show support for the Republican side of the conflict.
- He was a key figure in the resistance, organizing and inspiring the rebel Republican army with his poetry, as well as helping to bring 2,000 Spanish Civil War refugees to Chile. With this, he wrote about their hardships in his poem, El Fuego cruel. (Cruel Fire)

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Communism was based and grounded off of marxism and is believed to have began in 1848. It began because of the proletariat social class, these were the urban factory workers forced into hazardous and cruel conditions because of the industrial revolution. They blamed capitalism for their suffering and so communism began.

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Communism is a form of economy in which all property is publicly shared. People are paid accordingly to their work and the work they are assigned/given. There are little to no social liberties in this ideology. Neruda believed in communism and supported it. He was a communist for the rest of his life and was exiled for his beliefs.

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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pablo-Neruda

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Pablo Neruda, original name Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, (born July 12, 1904, Parral, Chile-died September 23, 1973, Santiago), Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He was perhaps the most important Latin American poet of the 20th century.

Early life and love poetry

Neruda was the son of José del Carmen Reyes, a railway worker, and Rosa Basoalto. His mother died within a month of Neruda's birth, and two years later the family moved to Temuco, a small town farther south in Chile, where his father remarried. Neruda was a precocious boy who began to write poetry at age 10. His father tried to discourage him from writing and never cared for his poems, which was probably why the young poet began to publish under the pseudonym Pablo Neruda, which he was legally to adopt in 1946. He entered the Temuco Boys' School in 1910 and finished his secondary schooling there in 1920. Tall, shy, and lonely, Neruda read voraciously and was encouraged by the principal of the Temuco Girls' School, Gabriela Mistral, a gifted poet who would herself later become a Nobel laureate.

Neruda first published his poems in the local newspapers and later in magazines published in the Chilean capital, Santiago. In 1921 he moved to Santiago to continue his studies and become a French teacher. There he experienced loneliness and hunger and took up a bohemian lifestyle. His first book of poems, Crepusculario, was published in 1923. The poems, subtle and elegant, were in the tradition of Symbolist poetry, or rather its Hispanic version, Modernismo. His second book, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924; Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), was inspired by an unhappy love affair. It became an instant success and is still one of Neruda's most popular books. The verse in Twenty Love Poems is vigorous, poignant, and direct, yet subtle and very original in its imagery and metaphors. The poems express young, passionate, unhappy love perhaps better than any book of poetry in the long Romantic tradition.

The experimental poet as diplomat

At age 20, with two books published, Neruda had already become one of the best-known Chilean poets. He abandoned his French studies and began to devote himself entirely to poetry. Three more books appeared in quick succession: Tentativa del hombre infinito (1926; "Attempt of the Infinite Man"); Anillos (1926; "Rings"), in collaboration with Tomás Lago; and El hondero entusiasta (1933; "The Enthusiastic Slingshooter"). Yet his poetry was not a steady source of income, so he translated hastily from several languages and published magazine and newspaper articles. Neruda's future looked uncertain without a steady job, so he managed to get himself appointed honorary consul to Rangoon in Burma (now Yangôn, Myanmar). For the next five years he represented his country in Asia. He continued to live in abject poverty, however, since as honorary consul he received no salary, and he was tormented by loneliness.

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From Rangoon Neruda moved to Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He increasingly came to identify with the South Asian masses, who were heirs to ancient cultures but were downtrodden by poverty, colonial rule, and political oppression. It was during these years in Asia that he wrote Residencia en la tierra, 1925-1931 (1933; Residence on Earth). In this book Neruda moves beyond the lucid, conventional lyricism of Twenty Love Poems, abandoning normal syntax, rhyme, and stanzaic organization to create a highly personalized poetic technique. His personal and collective anguish gives rise to nightmarish visions of disintegration, chaos, decay, and death that he recorded in a cryptic, difficult style inspired by Surrealism. These puzzling and mysterious poems both attract and repel the reader with the powerful and awe-inspiring vision they present of a modern descent into hell.

In 1930 Neruda was named consul in Batavia (modern Jakarta), which was then the capital of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). There he fell in love with a Dutch woman, Maria Antonieta Hagenaar, and married her. In 1932 Neruda returned to Chile, but he still could not earn a living from his poetry. In 1933 he was appointed Chilean consul in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There he met the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who at that time was traveling in Argentina and who was to become a close friend and an enthusiastic defender of Neruda's poetry.

Communism and poetry

In 1934 Neruda took up an appointment as consul in Barcelona, Spain, and soon he was transferred to the consulate in Madrid. His success there was instantaneous after García Lorca introduced him. Neruda's new friends, especially Rafael Alberti and Miguel Hernández, were involved in radical politics and the Communist Party. Neruda shared their political beliefs and moved ever closer to communism. In the meantime, his marriage was foundering. He and his wife separated in 1936, and Neruda met a young Argentine woman, Delia del Carril, who would be his second wife until their divorce in the early 1950s.

A second, enlarged edition of the Residencia poems entitled Residencia en la tierra, 1925-35 was published in two volumes in 1935. In this edition, Neruda begins to move away from the highly personal, often hermetic poetry of the first Residencia volume, adopting a more extroverted outlook and a clearer, more accessible style in order to better communicate his new social concerns to the reader. This line of poetic development was interrupted suddenly by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, however. While García Lorca was executed by the Nationalists and Alberti and Hernández fought at the front, Neruda traveled in and out of Spain to gather money and mobilize support for the Republicans. He wrote España en el corazón (1937; Spain in My Heart) to express his feelings of solidarity with them. The book was printed by Republican troops working with improvised presses near the front lines.

In 1937 Neruda returned to Chile and entered his country's political life, giving lectures and poetry readings while also defending Republican Spain and Chile's new centre-left government. In 1939 he was appointed special consul in Paris, where he supervised the migration to Chile of many defeated Spanish Republicans who had escaped to France. In 1940 he took up a post as Chile's consul general in Mexico. He also began work on a long poem, Canto general (1950; "General Song," Eng. trans. Canto general), resonant with historical and epic overtones, that would become one of his key works. In 1943, during a trip to Peru, Neruda climbed to the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu. The strong emotions aroused by the sight of this spectacular ruin inspired one of his finest poems, Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1943; Heights of Macchu Picchu). This powerful celebration of pre-Columbian civilization would become the centrepiece of Canto general.

In the meantime, Neruda suffered a stunning reversal in his native country. He had returned to Chile in 1943, was elected a senator in 1945, and also joined the Communist Party. He campaigned for the leftist candidate Gabriel González Videla in the elections of 1946, only to see President Videla turn to the right two years later. Feeling betrayed, Neruda published an open letter critical of Videla; as a consequence, he was expelled from the Senate and went into hiding to avoid arrest. In February 1948 he left Chile, crossing the Andes Mountains on horseback by night with the manuscript of Canto general in his saddlebag.

In exile Neruda visited the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and Mexico. In Mexico he again met Matilde Urrutia, a Chilean woman whom he had first encountered in 1946. Their marriage would last until the end of his life, and she would inspire some of the most passionate Spanish love poems of the 20th century. The third volume of Neruda's Residencia cycle, Tercera residencia, 1935-45 (1947; "Third Residence"), completed his rejection of egocentric angst and his open espousal of left-wing ideological concerns. His communist political beliefs receive their culminating expression in Canto general. This epic poem celebrates Latin America-its flora, its fauna, and its history, particularly the wars of liberation from Spanish rule and the continuing struggle of its peoples to obtain freedom and social justice. It also, however, celebrates Joseph Stalin, the bloody Soviet dictator in power at the time.

born

July 12, 1904
Parral, Chile

died

September 23, 1973 (aged 69)
Santiago, Chile

title / office

senate, Chile (1945-1948)

notable works

movement / style

awards and honors

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Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He was perhaps the most important Latin American poet of the 20th century. Neruda was the son of José del Carmen Reyes, a railway worker, and Rosa Basoalto.

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Summary of Surrealism

The Surrealists sought to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock the power of the imagination. Disdaining rationalism and literary realism, and powerfully influenced by psychoanalysis, the Surrealists believed the rational mind repressed the power of the imagination, weighing it down with taboos. Influenced also by Karl Marx, they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution. Their emphasis on the power of personal imagination puts them in the tradition of Romanticism, but unlike their forebears, they believed that revelations could be found on the street and in everyday life. The Surrealist impulse to tap the unconscious mind, and their interests in myth and primitivism, went on to shape many later movements, and the style remains influential to this today.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

André Breton defined Surrealism as "psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought." What Breton is proposing is that artists bypass reason and rationality by accessing their unconscious mind. In practice, these techniques became known as automatism or automatic writing, which allowed artists to forgo conscious thought and embrace chance when creating art.

The work of Sigmund Freud was profoundly influential for Surrealists, particularly his book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Freud legitimized the importance of dreams and the unconscious as valid revelations of human emotion and desires; his exposure of the complex and repressed inner worlds of sexuality, desire, and violence provided a theoretical basis for much of Surrealism.

Surrealist imagery is probably the most recognizable element of the movement, yet it is also the most elusive to categorize and define. Each artist relied on their own recurring motifs arisen through their dreams or/and unconscious mind. At its basic, the imagery is outlandish, perplexing, and even uncanny, as it is meant to jolt the viewer out of their comforting assumptions. Nature, however, is the most frequent imagery: Max Ernst was obsessed with birds and had a bird alter ego, Salvador Dalí's works often include ants or eggs, and Joan Miró relied strongly on vague biomorphic imagery.

Overview of Surrealism

Building upon the anti-rationalism of Dada, the Surrealists made powerful art and offered a new direction for exploration, as Max Ernst said: "creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition."

Artworks and Artists of Surrealism

Carnival of Harlequin (1924-25)

Artist: Joan Miró

Miró created elaborate, fantastical spaces in his paintings that are an excellent example of Surrealism in their reliance on dream-like imagery and their use of biomorphism. Biomorphic shapes are those that resemble organic beings but that are hard to identify as any specific thing; the shapes seem to self-generate, morph, and dance on the canvas. While there is the suggestion of a believable three-dimensional space in Carnaval d'Arlequin, the playful shapes are arranged with an all-over quality that is common to many of Miró's works during his Surrealist period, and that would eventually lead him to further abstraction. Miró was especially known for his use of automatic writing techniques in the creation of his works, particularly doodling or automatic drawing, which is how he began many of his canvases. He is best known for his works such as this that depict chaotic yet lighthearted interior scenes, taking his influence from Dutch 17 th-century interiors.

Oil on canvas - Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

The Human Condition (1933)

Artist: René Magritte

The iconic and enigmatic René Magritte's works tend to be intellectual, often dealing with visual puns and the relation between the representation of something and the thing itself. In The Human Condition a canvas sits on an easel before a curtained window and reproduces exactly the scene outside the window that would be behind the canvas, thus the image on the easel in a sense becomes the scene, not just a reproduction of the landscape. There is in effect no difference between the two as both are fabrications of the artist. The hyperrealist painting style often used by Surrealists makes the odd setup seem dreamlike.

Oil on canvas - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Mama, Papa is Wounded! (1927)

Artist: Yves Tanguy

The most pivotal moment for Tanguy in his decision to become a painter was his sighting of a canvas by Giorgio de Chirico in a shop window in 1923. The next year, Tanguy, the poet Jacques Prévert, and the actor and screenwriter Marcel Duhamel moved into a house that was to become a gathering place for the Surrealists, a movement he became interested in after reading the periodical La Révolution surréaliste. André Breton welcomed him into the group in 1925. Tanguy was inspired by the biomorphic forms of Jean Arp, Ernst, and Miró, quickly developing his own vocabulary of amoeba-like shapes that populate arid, mysterious settings, no doubt influenced by his youthful travels to Argentina, Brazil, and Tunisia. Despite his lack of formal training, Tanguy's mature style emerged by 1927, characterized by deserted landscapes littered with fantastical rocklike objects painted with a precise illusionism. The works usually have an overcast sky with a view thatseems to stretch endlessly.

Mama, Papa is Wounded depicts Tanguy's most common subject matter of war. The work is painted in a hyperrealist style with his distinctive limited color palette, both of which create a sense of dream-like reality. Tanguy often found the titles of works while looking through psychiatric case histories for compelling statements by patients. Given that, it is difficult to know if this work is relevant to his own family history as he claimed to have imagined the painting in its entirety before he began it. His brother was killed in World War I and the bleakness of the landscape may refer generally to losses suffered in the war by thousands of French families. De Chirico's influence on Tanguy's work is obvious here in his use of falling shadows and a classical torso in the landscape.

Oil on Canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Accommodations of Desire (1929)

Artist: Salvador Dalí

Painted in the summer of 1929 just after Dalí went to Paris for his first Surrealist exhibition, The Accommodations of Desire is a prime example of Dalí's ability to render his vivid and bizarre dreams with seemingly journalistic accuracy. He developed the paranoid-critical method, which involved systematic irrational thought and self-induced paranoia as a way to access his unconscious. He referred to the resulting works as "hand-painted dream photographs" because of their realism coupled with their eerie dream quality. The narrative of this work stems from Dalí's anxieties over his affair with Gala Eluard, wife of artist Paul Eluard. The lumpish white "pebbles" depict his insecurities about his future with Gala, circling around the concepts of terror and decay. While The Accommodations of Desire is an exposé of Dalí's deepest fears, it combines his typical hyper-realistic painting style with more experimental collage techniques. The lion heads are glued onto the canvas, and are believed to have been cut from a children's book.

Oil and cut-and-pasted printed paper on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Battle of Fishes (1926)

Artist: André Masson

Masson was one of the most enthusiastic followers of Breton's automatic writing, having begun his own independent experiments in the early 1920s. He would often produce art under exacting conditions, using drugs, going without sleep, or sustenance in order to relax conscious control of his art making so that he could access his unconscious. Masson, along with his neighbors Joan Miró, Antonin Artuad, and others would sometimes experiment together. He is best known for his use of sand. In an effort to introduce chance into his works, he would throw glue or gesso onto a canvas and then sand. His oil paintings were made based on the resulting shapes.

Battle of the Fishes perhaps references his experiences in WWI. He signed up to fight and after three years, was seriously injured, taking months to recover in an army hospital and spending time in a psychiatric facility. He was unable for many years to speak of the things he witnessed as a soldier, but his art consistently depicts massacres, bizarre confrontations, rape, and dismemberment. Masson himself observed that male figures in his art rarely escape unharmed. Battle of Fishes has subdued color, but the fish seem involved in a vicious battle to the death with their razor-like teeth and spilled blood. Masson believed that the use of chance in art would reveal the sadism of all creatures - an idea that he could only reveal in his art.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Object (1936)

Artist: Meret Oppenheim

Oppenheim was one of the few women Surrealists whose work was exhibited with the group. Like Giacometti she worked primarily with objects. This work, also known under the title Luncheon in Fur, with its unsettling juxtaposition of a domestic object and animality, is a quintessential example of Surrealist ideas. The artist makes strange a teacup, saucer, and spoon purchased at typical department store - objects that were familiar are made disturbingly off-putting as the viewer must imagine drinking tea from a fur-covered cup.

Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Beginnings of Surrealism

Surrealism grew out of the Dada movement, which was also in rebellion against middle-class complacency. Artistic influences, however, came from many different sources. The most immediate influence for several of the Surrealists was Giorgio de Chirico, their contemporary who, like them, used bizarre imagery with unsettling juxtapositions (and his Metaphysical Painting movement). They were also drawn to artists from the recent past who were interested in primitivism, the naive, or fantastical imagery, such as Gustave Moreau, Arnold Bocklin, Odilon Redon, and Henri Rousseau. Even artists from as far back as the Renaissance, such as Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Hieronymous Bosch, provided inspiration in so far as these artists were not overly concerned with aesthetic issues involving line and color, but instead felt compelled to create what Surrealists thought of as the "real."

The Surrealist movement began as a literary group strongly allied to Dada, emerging in the wake of the collapse of Dada in Paris, when André Breton's eagerness to bring purpose to Dada clashed with Tristan Tzara's anti-authoritarianism. Breton, who is occasionally described as the 'Pope' of Surrealism, officially founded the movement in 1924 when he wrote "The Surrealist Manifesto." However, the term "surrealism," was first coined in 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire when he used it in program notes for the ballet Parade, written by Pablo Picasso, Leonide Massine, Jean Cocteau, and Erik Satie.

Around the same time that Breton published his inaugural manifesto, the group began publishing the journal La Révolution surréaliste, which was largely focused on writing, but also included art reproductions by artists such as de Chirico, Ernst, André Masson, and Man Ray. Publication continued until 1929.

The Bureau for Surrealist Research or Centrale Surréaliste was also established in Paris in 1924. This was a loosely affiliated group of writers and artists who met and conducted interviews to "gather all the information possible related to forms that might express the unconscious activity of the mind." Headed by Breton, the Bureau created a dual archive: one that collected dream imagery and one that collected material related to social life. At least two people manned the office each day - one to greet visitors and the other to write down the observations and comments of the visitors that then became part of the archive. In January of 1925, the Bureau officially published its revolutionary intent that was signed by 27 people, including Breton, Ernst, and Masson.

Surrealism: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Surrealism shared much of the anti-rationalism of Dada, the movement out of which it grew. The original Parisian Surrealists used art as a reprieve from violent political situations and to address the unease they felt about the world's uncertainties. By employing fantasy and dream imagery, artists generated creative works in a variety of media that exposed their inner minds in eccentric, symbolic ways, uncovering anxieties and treating them analytically through visual means.

Surrealist Paintings

There were two styles or methods that distinguished Surrealist painting. Artists such as Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte painted in a hyper-realistic style in which objects were depicted in crisp detail and with the illusion of three-dimensionality, emphasizing their dream-like quality. The color in these works was often either saturated (Dalí) or monochromatic (Tanguy), both choices conveying a dream state.

Several Surrealists also relied heavily on automatism or automatic writing as a way to tap into the unconscious mind. Artists such as Joan Miró and Max Ernst used various techniques to create unlikely and often outlandish imagery including collage, doodling, frottage, decalcomania, and grattage. Artists such as Hans Arp also created collages as stand-alone works.

Hyperrealism and automatism were not mutually exclusive. Miro, for example, often used both methods in one work. In either case, however the subject matter was arrived at or depicted, it was always bizarre - meant to disturb and baffle.

Surrealist Objects and Sculptures

Breton felt that the object had been in a state of crisis since the early-19 th century and thought this impasse could be overcome if the object in all its strangeness could be seen as if for the first time. The strategy was not to make Surreal objects for the sake of shocking the middle class a la Dada but to make objects "surreal" by what he called dépayesment or estrangement. The goal was the displacement of the object, removing it from its expected context, "defamilarizing" it. Once the object was removed from its normal circumstances, it could be seen without the mask of its cultural context. These incongruous combinations of objects were also thought to reveal the fraught sexual and psychological forces hidden beneath the surface of reality.

A limited number of Surrealists are known for their three-dimensional work. Arp, who began as part of the Dada movement, was known for his biomorphic objects. Oppenheim's pieces were bizarre combinations that removed familiar objects from their everyday context, while Giacometti's were more traditional sculptural forms, many of which were human-insect hybrid figures. Dalí, less known for his 3D work, did produce some interesting installations, particularly, Rainy Taxi (1938), which was an automobile with mannequins and a series of pipes that created "rain" in the car's interior.

Surrealist Sculpture - Movement Page

Surrealist Photography

Photography, because of the ease with which it allowed artists to produce uncanny imagery, occupied a central role in Surrealism. Artists such as Man Ray and Maurice Tabard used the medium to explore automatic writing, using techniques such as double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization, the latter of which eschewed the camera altogether. Other photographers used rotation or distortion to render bizarre images.

The Surrealists also appreciated the prosaic photograph removed from its mundane context and seen through the lens of Surrealist sensibility. Vernacular snapshots, police photographs, movie stills, and documentary photographs all were published in Surrealist journals like La Révolution surréaliste and Minotaure, totally disconnected from their original purposes. The Surrealists, for example, were enthusiastic about Eugène Atget's photographs of Paris. Published in 1926 in La Révolution surréaliste at the prompting of his neighbor, Man Ray, Atget's imagery of a quickly vanishing Paris was understood as impulsive visions. Atget's photographs of empty streets and shop windows recalled the Surrealist's own vision of Paris as a "dream capital."

Dada & Surrealist Photography - Movement Page

Surrealist Film

Surrealism was the first artistic movement to experiment with cinema in part because it offered more opportunity than theatre to create the bizarre or the unreal. The first film characterized as Surrealist was the 1924 Entr'acte, a 22-minute, silent film, written by Rene Clair and Francis Picabia, and directed by Clair. But, the most famous Surrealist filmmaker was of course Luis Buñuel. Working with Dalí, Buñuel made the classic films Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930), both of which were characterized by narrative disjunction and their peculiar, sometimes disturbing imagery. In the 1930s Joseph Cornell produced surrealist films in the United States, such as Rose Hobart (1936). Salvador Dalí designed a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).

The Rise and Decline of Surrealism

Though Surrealism originated in France, strains of it can be identified in art throughout the world. Particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, many artists were swept into its orbit as increasing political upheaval and a second global war encouraged fears that human civilization was in a state of crisis and collapse. The emigration of many Surrealists to the Americas during WWII spread their ideas further. Following the war, however, the group's ideas were challenged by the rise of Existentialism, which, while also celebrating individualism, was more rationally based than Surrealism. In the arts, the Abstract Expressionists incorporated Surrealist ideas and usurped their dominance by pioneering new techniques for representing the unconscious. Breton became increasingly interested in revolutionary political activism as the movement's primary goal. The result was the dispersal of the original movement into smaller factions of artists. The Bretonians, such as Roberto Matta, believed that art was inherently political. Others, like Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning, remained in America to separate from Breton. Salvador Dalí, likewise, retreated to Spain, believing in the centrality of the individual in art.

Later Developments - After Surrealism

Abstract Expressionism

In 1936, the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged an exhibition entitled Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, and many American artists were powerfully impressed by it. Some, such as Jackson Pollock, began to experiment with automatism, and with imagery that seemed to derive from the unconscious - experiments which would later lead to his "drip" paintings. Robert Motherwell, similarly, is said to have been "stuck between the two worlds" of abstraction and automatism.

Largely because of political upheaval in Europe, New York rather than Paris became the emergent center of a new vanguard, one that favored tapping the unconscious through abstraction as opposed to the "hand-painted dreams" of Salvador Dalí. Peggy Guggenheim's 1942 exhibition of Surrealist-influenced artists (Rothko, Gottlieb, Motherwell, Baziotes, Hoffman, Still, and Pollock) alongside European artists Miró, Klee, and Masson, underscores the speed with which Surrealist concepts spread through the New York art community.

Abstract Expressionism Movement Page

Feminism and Women Surrealists

The Surrealists have often been depicted as a tightly knit group of men, and their art often envisioned women as wild "others" to the cultured, rational world. Work by feminist art historians has since corrected this impression, not only highlighting the number of women Surrealists who were active in the group, particularly in the 1930s, but also analyzing the gender stereotypes at work in much Surrealist art. Feminist art critics, such as Dawn Ades, Mary Ann Caws, and Whitney Chadwick, have devoted several books and exhibitions to this subject.

While most of the male Surrealists, especially Man Ray, Magritte, and Dalí, repeatedly focused on and/or distorted the female form and depicted women as muses, much in the way that male artists had for centuries, female Surrealists such as Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning, sought to address the problematic adoption of Freudian psychoanalysis that often cast women as monstrous and lesser. Thus, many female Surrealists experimented with cross-dressing and depicted themselves as animals or mythic creatures.

British Surrealism

Interestingly, many notable female Surrealists were British. Examples include Eileen Agar, Ithell Colquhoun, Edith Rimmington, and Emmy Bridgwater. Particular to the British interpretation of Surrealist ideology was an ongoing exploration of human relations with their surrounding natural environment and most prominently, with the sea. Alongside Agar, Paul Nash developed an interest in the object trouvé, usually in the form of items collected from the beach. The focus on the border where land meets the sea, and where rocks anthropomorphically resemble people struck a cord with British identity and more generally, with Surrealist principles of reconciling and uniting opposites.

The International Surrealist Exhibition (1936) held in London was a particular catalyst for many British artists. Headed by Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, the movement thrived in Britain, creating the international icons Leonora Carrington and Lee Miller, and also spurring on the practice of another important circle of artists surrounding Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore. Overall, the privileging of an eccentric imagination and essential rejection of standardized and rational modes of doing things resonated well from the outset. This golden period for art in general in the UK, and more specifically the legacies of British Surrealism continue to influence the country's art practice today.

Useful Resources on Surrealism

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The Surrealists unlocked images of the unconscious exploring worlds of sexuality, desire, and violence. Iconic art and ideas of Dali, Magritte, Oppenheim+

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Around 3000 workers miners within Chile decided to go on strike asking for better working conditions and better pay. Many of the workers also brought their family members to the strike. Silva-Renard, a Chilean military chief (ordered by president Montt), demanded that the organizers of the event tell everyone to leave. Silva was told to get rid of the protesters by any means necessary. When the organizers refused the military came into the area and started to fire at the workers and their families. Many people died (estimated 2,000) and survivors were ordered to go back to work. At the time the bodies were taken to a mass grave and the events were covered up by the Chilean government.

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Marxism is the collective term for the economic, social, and political philosophy of Karl Marx. It was the worldview, based on the 19th Century, on the ideas of humanity. This philosophy states that capitalism would lead to a revolution of the working class. Which would lead to the establishment of a classless society.

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Marxism definition, the system of economic and political thought developed by Karl Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, especially the doctrine that the state throughout history has been a device for the exploitation of the masses by a dominant class, that class struggle has been the main agency of historical change, and that the capitalist system, containing from the first the seeds of its own decay, will inevitably, after the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, be superseded by a socialist order and a classless society.

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The second Spanish republic is relevant to Neruda because it was at this time he had decided to create a creative outlet.In order to express an opinion about his politics in order to call out the form of government that he was experiencing

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Political Poetry in the Wake of the Second Spanish Republic: Rafael Alberti, Pablo Neruda, and Nicolás Guillén

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Political Poetry in the Wake of the Second Spanish Republic analyzes the simultaneous development of politics and poetics in three Spanish-language poets, Rafael Alberti, Nicolás Guillén, and Pabl...

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What happened after Neruda published his work about this?

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What happened after Neruda published his work about this?

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Neruda's ideologies change and got seen after his publishing of  "Political Poetry in the Wake of the Second Spanish Republic".It talked about Neruda's opposition of the government in place at the time he was living there

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context about the second Spanish Republic 

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context about the second Spanish Republic 

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- The republic falls into four phases
- 1 the provisional government, it lasted until the religious issue forced its resignation
- this government was a coalition government (a form of gov where in which political parties cooperate to form a gov)
- the reason for this type of governing style is so no single party has absolute majority
- 2 the governments of the Left Republicans and Socialists, they ruled from October 1931 until November 1933
- 3 the conservative government of the Radical Republicans and the Roman Catholic, punctuated by the revolution of October 1934 and ended with the electoral victory of the popular front in February 1936
- 4 the government of the Popular Front and “the descent into violence”, culminated in the military uprising of July

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Primo de Rivera

Primo de Rivera was a political improviser who believed his mission was to save Spain from the old politicians and to hand over government (after an interval of personal rule) to "clean" patriots. He failed to complete the process because his rule became increasingly unpopular, especially among the intellectuals and Catalans. The September 1923 coup by which he had gained power had been widely welcomed in Catalonia, where, as captain general, Primo had listened sympathetically to Catalan demands. However, Primo soon became a Spanish patriot and permitted an "anti-Catalan crusade." His followers' attempts to build up a political party (the Patriotic Union) to run a regenerated Spain and provide it with an ideology collapsed.

At first Primo ruled via the army. In spite of initial quarrels with the African commanders, whom he forced to retreat in Morocco, the Military Directory was responsible for final victory in the protectorate. The Spanish, collaborating for the first time with the French, landed at Alhucemas (Al-Hoceima) in September 1925 and defeated the most successful tribal leader, Abd el-Krim. By 1927 the whole of the protectorate was successfully occupied.

The Civil Directory (1925-30) was responsible for a thorough overhaul of local government and for an ambitious public works program to increase irrigation, hydraulic power, and road building. Primo's economic nationalism entailed strict protectionist policies and an attack on foreign oil monopolies. The complicated bureaucratic control of industry did not endear him to capitalists after 1926; on the other hand, he collaborated successfully with the UGT while suppressing the CNT. The Civil Directory failed in its chief task, that of winning sufficient political support in the National Assembly summoned for 1928 to facilitate a return to quasi-constitutional government.

Primo oversaw an economic expansion based on favourable terms of trade for Spanish exports during the early years of his dictatorship. His governments carried out a policy of economic nationalism that included public works, the creation of numerous state regulatory agencies, the nationalization of foreign petroleum interests, and the establishment of a state-owned petroleum company. By 1929, however, the peseta (the Spanish currency) began to fall in value despite desperate measures to prop it up. Economic recession alone would not have forced the dictator from office, but he also lost the support of both the army and the king. The army turned against him as a result of his attempts to abolish the privileges of the artillery and engineer corps, and the king believed that student protests, the growing discontent in Catalonia, and the increasing conspiracies of the "old" politicians imperiled the dynasty.

On January 28, 1930, Alfonso forced Primo's resignation. However, the king acted too late. His earlier support of the dictatorship tarnished him in the eyes of the politicians and public. The weak governments of General Dámaso Berenguer and Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar could barely keep order. At San Sebastián (August 17, 1930) an alliance of former liberal monarchists, Catalan politicians, and Republicans agreed to overthrow the monarchy. The failure of a Republican military rising at Jaca (December 12, 1930) saved them from having to establish a republic by force. The municipal elections of April 12, 1931, proved that the great cities were overwhelmingly Republican. Rather than face civil war and street demonstrations in Madrid, Alfonso XIII left Spain.

The history of the Second Republic falls into four distinct phases: (1) the Provisional Government, which lasted until the religious issue forced its resignation in October 1931, (2) the governments of the Left Republicans and Socialists, which ruled from October 1931 and were defeated in the elections of November 1933, (3) the conservative government of the Radical Republicans and the Roman Catholic right from November 1933 to February 1936, which was punctuated by the revolution of October 1934 and ended with the electoral victory of the Popular Front in February 1936, and (4) the government of the Popular Front and "the descent into violence" that culminated in the military uprising of July 1936.

The Provisional Government was a coalition government presided over by Niceto Alcalá Zamora, a former monarchist converted to republicanism, whose Catholicism reassured moderate opinion. Another conservative Catholic, Miguel Maura, was minister of the interior. The coalition included all the groups represented at San Sebastián: Lerroux's Radicals, the Catalan left, the Socialists, and the Left Republicans dominated by Manuel Azaña y Díaz.

The elections to the Constituent Cortes strengthened the Socialists and Left Republicans and thus upset the parliamentary balance between moderate Catholic Republicans and the left. The left imprinted its views on the constitution, especially its religious clauses. Historically conditioned anticlericalism had already led the government to tolerate an outburst of church burning (May 1931). The Socialists and Left Republicans inserted in the constitution an attack on religious education and the regular orders, which forced the resignation of Alcalá Zamora and Maura.

This direct and ill-advised clash with Catholic sentiment provided a base for the formation of a right-wing party devoted to the reversal of the church settlement. This party, established by the Catholic politician José María Gil Robles, was known as Acción Popular and became the main component of the right-wing electoral grouping, the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas; CEDA). The left viewed CEDA's "accidentalism" (the doctrine that forms of government are irrelevant provided the church can fulfill its mission) as suspect, and these suspicions were only exacerbated by a proclivity among Gil Robles's followers, especially the youth wing, for fascist styles.

From October 1931 the government, with Azaña as premier, was controlled by Left Republicans and Socialists, with the Catholic right, the Basque Catholics, the Navarrese Carlists, and Lerroux's Radicals in opposition. Azaña aimed to create a modern democracy; labour legislation would be the work of the Socialists, with the UGT leader, Francisco Largo Caballero, as minister of labour.

In April 1931 there was a danger that Catalonia might declare its independence within a federal state. Overcoming conservative Republican opposition to limited home rule under the Generalitat, which was controlled by the Catalan left (Esquerra) under Lluis Companys, Azaña was able to settle the Catalan question-perhaps his greatest achievement. Largo Caballero's legislation provided labour with a strong negotiating position but could not in itself mitigate the mounting unemployment, which was particularly serious in the latifundios of the southwest. Because new machinery for the settlement of labour disputes was dominated by the UGT, it was opposed by the CNT, now influenced by the extreme revolutionary apoliticism of an anarchist group, the Iberian Anarchist Federation (Federación Anarquista Ibérica; FAI). Violent strikes were frequent.

Sedition from the right came to a head in General José Sanjurjo's pronunciamiento in Sevilla (August 10, 1932). Politically more dangerous than Sanjurjo's abortive coup, however, were the steady growth of Gil Robles's Acción Popular and the Socialists' desertion of the Azaña coalition, as Largo Caballero, influenced by increasing discontent with the slow pace of reform among Socialists, wearied of cooperation with "bourgeois" parties. In the elections of November 1933, therefore, the left was divided and the right relatively united behind CEDA. Given an electoral law that favoured electoral coalitions, the CEDA and Lerroux's Radicals, now a respectable middle-class party, triumphed. Although the CEDA had more seats than any other party, President Alcalá Zamora refused to call on Gil Robles to form a government and turned instead to Lerroux, who was unable to govern without the support of Gil Robles. With power in sight, Gil Robles accentuated his legalism, to the distaste of the militant monarchists among his supporters.

The election defeat further radicalized the Socialists, especially Largo Caballero, who was influenced by Luis Araquistaín, Spain's ambassador in Berlin when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933. Throughout 1934 the Socialists threatened an uprising should the CEDA, which they saw as a clearly fascist party, be invited to join the cabinet.

When four members of CEDA entered Lerroux's government in October 1934, the Socialists staged the revolution they had been threatening. Poorly planned, it was a total failure everywhere except the coalfields of Asturias, where the failure of the Republic to bring any improvement to their situation had a particularly radicalizing effect on the miners there. Revolutionary councils were established in the mining districts of Asturias, where there was considerable destruction of property. In Barcelona the revolution was led by Catalan nationalists, who believed autonomy was imperiled by the actions of the Madrid government in overruling an agrarian law passed by the Generalitat. Unsupported by the CNT, the revolution was quickly suppressed.

The October Revolution of 1934 was the dividing point in the Second Republic. The Socialists, fearing the fate of their Austrian and German brothers, had revolted against a legal government and thereby established in the minds of the right the fear of a "Red" rebellion. In the subsequent repression by the army lay the emotional origins of the Popular Front against " fascism "-a re-creation of the Azaña coalition of Left Republicans and Socialists.

When the Radicals collapsed in late 1935 following a series of scandals, Alcalá Zamora dissolved parliament and called new elections for February 1936. The campaign was violent, and the Popular Front won by a narrow majority. Spain was politically polarized, and this division intensified. The Popular Front government was exclusively Republican. Under Largo Caballero's leadership, the left Socialists put increasing pressure on the government, using revolutionary language if not intending revolution, and agricultural workers in the south and west staged a number of land seizures. Largo Caballero's revolutionary rhetoric concealed his hope that the orthodox Republicans could be eased from power, leaving the field open to a pure Socialist government, which his followers, using the language of Russian Communist Party founder and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, chose to call the " dictatorship of the proletariat."

Just as the fears of the "fascism" of the right justified the defensive reaction of the Socialists, so the right argued that the Republican government was a prisoner of the revolutionary left. The Falange, a fascist party founded in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the son of the former dictator, grew significantly as the failure of Gil Robles's legalist strategy became clear. The Falange was primarily responsible for the marked increase in political street violence in the months after the 1936 election. Conservatives rallied behind the right-wing National Front, which openly appealed to the military to save Spain from Marxism.

The army played a decisive role. By the early summer of 1936 a young officers' conspiracy was backed by Generals Emilio Mola, Manuel Goded, and, finally, Francisco Franco. The murder of José Calvo Sotelo, the leader of the extreme right, with the connivance of government security forces, was the final outrage for the right and the army.

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Spain - Primo de Rivera (1923-30) and the Second Republic (1931-36)

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Spain - Spain - Primo de Rivera (1923-30) and the Second Republic (1931-36): Primo de Rivera was a political improviser who believed his mission was to save Spain from the old politicians and to hand over government (after an interval of personal rule) to "clean" patriots.

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In 1925, Chile introduced a new constitution which increased presidential powers and seperated church from state. In 1927, General Carlos Ibanez del Campo gained power and control of Chile. Between 1938 and 1946, a popular front coalition was formed by Socialists (people with the political/economic opinion that the means of production, distrobution, exchange, etc, owned by the society/community). This coaliton introduced economic policies established upon the US New Deal. In 1948, because of the start of the Cold War, communism was banned in Chile until in 1958 when it was legalized again. In 1973, president Salvador Allende was killed by Pinochet and then created a dictatorship. In 1990, he stepped down.

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Chile in the 20th century was consistently growing. The railways had made travel easier, towns were growing, a new culture and social ways of lives were forming, a new middle class was organizing in the Radical Party, and a new working class was forming, too. During all of this, the modern Chilean trade union movement was born. In the conditions of the growing social conflict, there were often emerge leaders who claim to bridge the conflicting interests of all social classes. The massacre at Santa María de Iquique symbolizes the struggles of Chile’s mineworkers in the early 1900s. These experiences, combined with the organizing work of Recabarren, laid the foundations of Chile’s strong trade union.

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From democracy to military rule and back to democracy - the 20th century saw extraordinary reversals in Chile's political, social, and economic arenas.

The civil war of the 1890s tilted the balance of power in favor of the Congress and against the presidents, who were reduced to refereeing the fights for cabinet posts among the parties. But by this time there were new actors on the political scene. The railways had made travel easier and the towns were growing, and with them a new cultural and social life. A new middle class was organizing in the recently founded Radical Party. A strong force within it were the freemasons, whose lodges were political debating centers.

A new working class was forming, too. Industry had grown up in the early and mid-century in specific centers - everything from biscuit and pasta factories in Valparaíso that supplied passing ships, to breweries started by German settlers in the south. The new railways needed workshops, and the growing towns needed textiles, shoes, soap, and furniture. Business boomed, as did the numbers of urban artisans.

It was getting ever harder to scratch a living in the countryside, so many peasants were drawn to the nitrate mines of the north. Once there, they were often trapped, earning low wages paid in tokens that could only be exchanged for goods in the company store. Schools, a police force, and courts were practically non-existent. Alcohol was easier to come by than water in the northern mining camps of the pampas (lowlands).

Birth of the trade unions

It was in these harsh conditions that the modern Chilean trade union movement was born, evolving out of the early mutual aid societies. The miners formed the basis for Chile's early political movements, anarchist at first and later socialist. One figure stands out in that early history of working-class organization. Luis Emilio Recabarren, a former print worker, traveled the country as a union organizer. He got an audience among the miners for his political message by publishing newspapers which carried news from other parts of the country. They helped the immigrants isolated in the pampas to keep in touch with their homes, and also provided a means of communication between groups of workers in the cities, the mines, and the countryside, who until then had been isolated from one another. In 1912, Recabarren founded the Chilean Socialist Workers' Party. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, it was the basis of the Chilean Communist Party.

Recabarren traveled to Russia, and met Lenin and Trotsky, as well as trade union and political leaders from across the world. He was elected to the Chilean parliament twice during this period, though he was never allowed to take his seat. Although he was a key figure in the early history of the Chilean left, Recabarren's relationship with the Communist Party was always difficult. Political difficulties may well have been the cause of his suicide in 1928.

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Desert slaughter

The massacre at Santa María de Iquique, a remote mining town in northern Chile, has come to symbolize the struggle of Chile's mineworkers in the early 1900s. In 1907, the miners went on strike for better pay and conditions. When an envoy was sent from central government to speak with them, the miners and their families gathered in the town center to hear what he had to say. Four-and-a-half thousand of them were crammed into the local school, and 1,500 more were in Plaza Manuel Montt. An eyewitness gave a chilling account of what happened as squads of soldiers began to appear in the plaza.

"On the central balcony... stood 30 or so men in the prime of life, quite calm, beneath a great Chilean flag, and surrounded by the flags of other nations. They were the strike committee... All eyes were fixed on them just as all the guns were directed at them. Standing, they received the shots. As though struck by lightning they fell, and the great flag fluttered down over their bodies."

In 1969, the musician Luis Advis composed a famous oratorio based on the tragedy at Santa María de Iquique which he performed and recorded with his folk music group, Quilapayún.

Most thought that was the end of the incident. But, said the witness, "There was a moment of silence as the machine guns were lowered to aim at the schoolyard and the hall, occupied by a compact mass of people who spilled over into the main square... There was a sound like thunder as they fired. Then the gunfire ceased and the foot soldiers went into the school, firing, as men and women fled in all directions."

The army general later reported that there had been 140 victims. The eyewitness quoted talked to doctors and others involved, and estimated the figure at 195 dead and 390 wounded. Others reported many more.
Miners on strike in Santa María de Iquique prior to the massacre. Source: Wikimedia Commons/public domain
Social inequalities

Experiences like these, combined with the organizing work of Recabarren, laid the foundations of Chile's strong trade union tradition. At one stage, before and during World War I, sections of the ruling classes gave some consideration to the implementation of basic social welfare legislation - the nitrates industry, after all, was booming as a result of the war. But the discovery of artificial nitrates had a powerful impact on Chile, putting a swift end to the boom, and all such proposals were shelved.

Agriculture was stagnant, dominated by huge landed estates whose owners lived either in town or in Europe, and had little interest in raising productivity or modernizing. Import figures for 1907 show the ruling class's priorities: 3.7 million pesos were spent on importing agricultural and industrial machinery, while 6.8 million went on the purchase of French champagne, jewels, silk, and the latest perfume from Paris. As tax revenues from nitrates declined and the foreign debt grew, increasing numbers of ordinary Chileans found themselves without work or the possibility of it, and facing poverty and collapsing living standards.

Power struggles

In conditions of growing social conflict, there often emerge leaders who claim to bridge the conflicting interests of all social classes. In Chile, that "figure above society" was Arturo Alessandri, the son of an Italian immigrant.

Typically, his rhetoric was nationalistic and deliberately vague, enabling him to appeal to different sections of Chilean society at the same time. His election to the presidency in the early 1920s did not give him the power over Congress he aspired to, and in deepening conditions of crisis he turned to the younger and more restless sections of the army.

The result was a military coup in 1928, which gave military caudillo Colonel Carlos Ibáñez del Campo dictatorial powers. His models were Mussolini and Spain's José Primo de Rivera, and he was a fierce critic of the traditional political structures, especially the parties, some of whose leaders he "invited" to leave the country. But he was even more fiercely anti-Communist, and had Communists and union leaders arrested and deported. It was a return to authoritarianism such as Chile had not seen since the years of Diego Portales.

In a sense, the coup brought an end to a system of power which had observed the democratic rules but within a limited framework, in which power was simply exchanged between sections of the ruling classes. Chile has a reputation for a long democratic tradition; yet this was pushed aside in the 1920s, as it would be again in the 1970s, with considerable ease.

Ibáñez set about creating a powerful state sector of the economy, establishing the national airline and a daily government newspaper La Nación. This was an attempt to shift resources into new areas of the economy, placing them under national control and overcoming the resistance of the traditional ruling classes, using the state as an instrument of economic control.

Recession and social unrest

This was a bad time to be increasing state expenditure. With the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and the world recession that followed, the Chilean economy went into a crisis. Nitrate sales had long been declining, and now the expanding copper industry was also hit as the Great Depression squeezed its markets. There was widespread unemployment and social unrest. The government set up an emergency employment program, and printed money to pay for it. Inflation rose, and so did the protests.

Ibáñez was forced to resign. He left for exile in July 1931, but his elected successor was promptly overthrown by a military-civilian junta. In June 1932, a "Socialist Republic" was installed by Colonel Marmaduque Grove. Grove belonged to a group of radical young officers whose aim was to bring about a redistribution of wealth, particularly through land reform, that would set the economy to work again. The new republic lasted only 100 days, however, before Grove was exiled to Easter Island and Arturo Alessandri returned with a draconian program in October 1932. He purged the army of dissident elements, clamped down on trade unions, banned strikes, and closed down the opposition press.

Although Grove's social experiment had achieved very little, some proposals had reached the statute book: 40 years later, President Salvador Allende would begin to implement some of the changes that Grove had envisaged.

Recovery and reform

A new Chilean government, elected in 1938, offered a program of mild economic and social reform. Headed by a Radical, Pedro Aguirre Cerda, it enjoyed the support of both the Communist and the Socialist parties, but disputes later broke the alliance. Aguirre Cerda's elected successor, another radical, quickly outlawed the Communists.

During World War II, and later in the Korean War, the US government bought copper from US-owned copper companies in Chile at a special low price, which meant a substantial loss of tax revenues for the Chilean state.

The radicals boosted the state sector of the economy substantially, with a steel industry and a nationwide electrification program. But in the countryside, government intervention had a negative effect. Strict price controls on farm produce meant that the landowners had little incentive to invest and produce more. Public opinion was beginning to sense that farming would simply never take off under ruling-class ownership and that the only hope was to take away the land and give it to those who could produce.

The other conflict that began to loom was the ownership of the copper mines. The main deposits had always been owned and worked by US corporations. Control of such a major source of national wealth was bound to become an issue.

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The caudillo returns

By the late 1940s, party infighting and petty corruption had again paved the way for a "strong man." Carlos Ibáñez was returned to power by the electorate in 1952, demanding "a fundamental change of direction," and brandishing a symbolic broom with which he would sweep away politicking and corruption. He had the support of a redoubtable figure, María de la Cruz and her Feminine Party of Chile - women got the vote, finally, in 1949 and promptly strengthened the conservative forces.

Ibáñez had the personal charisma to get himself elected, but no organized support. He tried to get the Constitution reformed to give more power to the presidency, failed, and sat out the rest of his term in political impotence. In 1958, Arturo Alessandri's son, Jorge, succeeded the old general, elected almost entirely on the strength of his father's name. He was Chile's last elected president from the political right for over 50 years.

The Christian Democrats

The center and the left were now grouped in two easily definable camps. In one were the Socialist and the Communist parties - full-blooded Marxist-Leninists who talked of armed struggle to overthrow "the bourgeois state," but who were actually engaged in building up their electoral strength to win it by peaceful means.

Their rival, proposing very similar reforms in, for example, land ownership and nationalization of the copper mines, was the Christian Democrat Party. It developed in the 1930s out of a movement started by a group of young Catholics from the Conservative Party, initially with vaguely Fascist leanings, who called themselves the Falange Nacional. By the end of the 1950s their ideas had been modified to Christian socialism and they were growing rapidly among both the middle and working classes. They had strong links to the Catholic Church and a comparably strong anti-Communist message. There was not a vast difference between the programs of the two camps.

In the early 1960s when the influence of the Cuban revolution was sweeping through Latin America, the Christian Democrats throughout the region appeared to many people to be the best answer to the Marxist threat. The Chilean Christian Democrat Party was the first of its kind in Latin America to get into government, in 1964, with a good deal of North American financial support. The following year they won a solid majority in Congress, with party leader Eduardo Frei Montalva becoming the first president in Chilean history to have at least theoretical control over both the executive and the legislature.

Success went to their heads, and they boasted that Christian Democrats would govern for the next 30 years (like their Italian counterparts). However, the Frei government made two powerful enemies: the old landowning class, who opposed its attempt at land reform, and the military, who felt underpaid and unappreciated. An army general, Roberto Viaux, led an uprising in 1969 to protest against their conditions.
Statue of Salvador Allende. Photo: Richard Espinoza/Wikimedia Commons
The old political right, which had helped vote Frei into office, now withdrew to reform itself into a new party, the Nationals. Tensions within Frei's own party led to a split in 1969, and his left-wingers, who felt that the reforms had not gone far enough, went off to join the Marxists.

The Allende years

In 1970 a left-wing coalition known as Popular Unity put forward as their candidate a middle-class doctor turned socialist senator, Salvador Allende. Allende won his fourth attempt at the presidency by a paper-thin margin (36.3 percent). One of the first electoral promises he honored was to give every poor child in Chile a pair of shoes, and to provide free milk in schools.

But the new government faced formidable enemies in the United States. President Nixon's government pumped in approximately US$8 million in covert financing over the next three years to boost the opposition and to help, for example, to keep the anti-Allende publishing group El Mercuri o in business.

At home the government had some early successes. In 1971, it got all-party support in Congress for the nationalization of the copper mines. But Allende's decision not to pay compensation to the North American owners sparked an official US boycott of non-military aid and credits for Chile. The US government also tried to ban Chilean copper from world markets.

Social discontent

The political tension grew. When Fidel Castro visited Chile in November 1971, upper- and middle-class women held the first "march of the empty saucepans" to demonstrate against food and other shortages. A year later, the shortages were even worse and truck owners went on strike following a government proposal to create a state transportation system.

Doctors, shopkeepers, and bus owners joined in, and industrialists staged lockouts. Workers in small factories reacted by taking over their workplaces. Neighborhood committees set up their own retail networks, bringing goods direct from the factories. By this time the opposition had convinced itself that Allende was out to install a full-blooded Marxist state. The far left of Allende's own Socialist Party encouraged this view - ironically, the Communists were moderators in the unruly coalition, committed to a "peaceful road to socialism."

US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger condemned Allende's reform program, saying that he did not see why the US should stand idly by "and let a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people."

The tanks roll in

In March 1973, despite the growing chaos, the government won an increased majority (44 percent) in the parliamentary elections. The opposition decided that it could not wait until the next presidential elections, which were scheduled for 1976. In late August, Congress declared the government unconstitutional. Days later, on the morning of September 11, tanks rolled into the streets of Santiago, and the military took over the radio stations and announced a curfew, calling on President Allende to resign.

Besieged in the presidential palace with only a few advisers, Allende refused to resign. Photographs from the palace show him in a helmet and armed with a machine gun given to him by Fidel Castro, and the popular image remains of Allende fighting to the end. In his final broadcast to the nation, he ordered his supporters not to resist, yet he himself refused an offer of a safe conduct to the airport and exile. Allende's doctor testified that he died by his own hand, alone, in the ruined palace which the air force had bombed.

Pinochet's rise to power

The Chilean coup sent shock waves around the world. For some, the 1970 elections had proved the possibility that social change could occur peacefully, gradually, and via the ballot box. That hope now lay in ruins. Chile's reputation as a haven of democracy in a subcontinent given to resolving its political problems by violent means had now lost its legitimacy - in fact, military intervention had been a feature of 20 th-century political life in the country.

The Italian film Il Postino was based on the novel Ardiente Paciencia, by Chilean novelist Antonio Skármeta, which depicted the weeks following the 1973 Pinochet coup.

Though the coup was led by a junta of the heads of all the armed forces, it was Augusto Pinochet who would emerge over the following two years as its undisputed head. And it was he who was largely responsible for the violence that followed the coup. The military took power quickly, pursuing and detaining all those who had led the trade unions, popular organizations, student groups, and cultural movements most identified with the Allende regime.

The descent into brutality

The particularly brutal murder of the singer Víctor Jara came to symbolize thousands of other, equally violent deaths, as the foreign journalists who were herded into the National Stadium together with Jara and other suspected left-wingers to suffer beatings and torture, would later testify. Thousands of people were murdered, many more were tortured, and hundreds of thousands went into exile to escape persecution.
Augusto Pinochet and Eugenia Garrido in the 1980s. Photo: Emilio Kopaitic/Wikimedia Commons
All opposition activity was banned. The last demonstration in Chile for some 10 years was the funeral of Chile's great poet Pablo Neruda, who died just two weeks after the coup. The 3,000 mourners who marched between ranks of soldiers through the streets of Santiago shouted slogans against the military and carried placards bearing the names of Neruda and Allende. Thereafter there would be no more public expressions of hostility to Pinochet until the 1980s.

Initially, churches provided refuge for those who could not find asylum in foreign embassies. From its formation in 1976, the Vicariate of Solidarity, organized by the Catholic Church, helped the victims of repression to find legal aid and became a focus for protests against the human rights abuses that continued in the years following the coup.

Free-market economics

By 1977 it was clear that Pinochet's regime had its own economic as well as political agenda. The crude anti-Communism of the earlier years now combined with a new economic philosophy of neo-liberalism, or complete openness to the world market - ideas advocated by Milton Friedman and a group of his Chilean acolytes known as the "Chicago boys". Their recipe was free-market policies and the "trickle-down effect" - the theory that wealth created by the private sector would flow down and benefit the workers. These policies were imposed by a military dictatorship in a country without a Congress, without a free press, and with restricted labor organizations - ideal, if abnormal, conditions for such an experiment.

But the regime's economists made some bad mistakes, even on their own terms. In the late 1970s, the Finance Ministry fixed Chile's exchange rate for more than two years, and lifted controls on bank lending. When the peso finally had to be devalued, there was a near-fatal bank crash. As a result, the state had to bail out most of the private banks, but many companies went bankrupt, mortgage repossessions soared, and an economic recession followed, lasting until the mid-1980s. The high unemployment and economic hardship of this period were key factors in mounting discontent with the dictatorship.

Crisis and disintegration

In 1983 trade unions again began to call strikes, and there was widespread protest as gross domestic product (GDP) collapsed. All political organizations remained illegal, and most of the left-wing groups had been destroyed after the coup. In this new climate of protest, however, they began to reorganize.

The Communist Party had taken a moderate line under Allende, and had argued after 1973 that the coup happened because things had gone too far too fast in the Allende years. The party now turned in a radical direction as a new generation of young people joined its ranks. By 1985, the creation of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front marked a commitment to armed struggle, which culminated in the failed attempt to assassinate Pinochet in 1986.

Thereafter the old enemies came together in a series of agreements to build a joint campaign for a "No" vote in Pinochet's 1988 plebiscite, which was designed to confirm him in power for another eight years at least. In the event, and to the dictator's evident surprise, 54 percent of the Chilean people voted "No."

Elections followed in 1989, amid intense negotiations at a number of levels. The pace and direction of the return to democracy had to be agreed on by businessmen and trade unionists, Christian Democrats, and Communists who supported the "No" campaign - people whose purposes were very different. The hopes for a peaceful transition led the campaign into a series of talks with Pinochet. While he yielded the presidency, and formal authority, it could hardly be said that he relinquished power.

The end of the party for Pinochet

A new constitution written by the dictatorship in 1980 remained largely in force; the judiciary was dominated by Pinochet's appointees; some senators would continue to be nominated directly by the armed forces, giving them a controlling voice in parliament; the financial gains Pinochet had made as president would remain untouched. Pinochet stayed on until 1998 as head of the army and, while a commission of investigation would seek the truth about the "disappeared" and the human rights abuses that had occurred under his rule, there would be neither revenge nor restitution.

The memories of the 1973 coup and its aftermath were sufficiently fearsome for the suggestion of renewed military intervention to silence any complaints. Thus it was that Pinochet could display such absolute confidence and certainty when, in March 1998, he retired as commander-in-chief of the army, at the age of 82. He had already been named senador vitalicio - a senator for life - and in this capacity was given effective immunity from prosecution for crimes against human rights committed in Chile during his regime, for which there were some 200 cases pending in the Chilean courts.

It was with the same confidence that he left for Britain in September 1998 for medical treatment. Pinochet's period in power had largely coincided with the governments of Margaret Thatcher in Britain, and her relationship with him had always been cordial and admiring - as had US President Ronald Reagan's with them both.
Patricio Aylwin. Photo: Gobierno de Chile
In the meantime, a series of cases had been brought before courts elsewhere on behalf of the families of Pinochet's non-Chilean victims. Among the cases pending was one brought before a Spanish court by a team of lawyers including Joan Garcés, ex-adviser to Allende. While Pinochet was in London, the Spanish Justice Ministry initiated extradition proceedings with Britain, and he was placed under house arrest. An extraordinary chain of events was set in motion, as the House of Lords in London confirmed by a majority that he had a case to answer under international law, and later overturned their own ruling when it was revealed that one of the Law Lords had links with the human rights group Amnesty International. Meanwhile, journalists and commentators began to revisit the experience of Chile in 1973, while those Chileans still in their countries of exile even after 1990 emerged in demonstrations.

In March 2000, the British Home Secretary agreed to the release of Pinochet on the grounds of ill health, opening the way for his return to Chile. The local courts later removed his immunity from prosecution, but then declared that the former dictator was unfit to stand trial.

Forced to resign his Senate seat and, subsequently, further discredited by the revelation of secret multimillion-dollar bank accounts held abroad in his name and those of family members, the former dictator gradually disappeared from public life and died in December 2006.

An economic example

By the late 1980s, the Chilean economy was well on the way to recovering from the 1982-3 crisis. Exports were growing rapidly, with the development of the forestry, fruit farming and wine industries that were later to play a key role in driving the country's economic growth. There was also a lot of interest from foreign investors and the dictatorship's creation of a private pension (AFP) system to replace the former state pay-as-you-go system had laid the foundations of an active capital market.

Income distribution, however, remained extremely unequal and one of the first challenges of the center-left Concertación coalition, which took office in March 1990 under Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin (1990-4), was to attempt to narrow the huge gap between the very rich and the very poor, without upsetting Chile's healthy balance of payments and finances. The coalition accepted the main tenets of the macroeconomic policies of the "Chicago boys" and even the Socialist Party admitted that "the market has the main role in assigning resources".

With the grudging assent of the right-wing political parties, the Aylwin government raised corporate and income taxes to finance improvements in health and education. The new government also battled some fairly timid labor reforms through Congress to help improve wages and working conditions, and give the unions more strength to defend their members. These were much more controversial than the tax increases. The business community insisted that low wages for miners, forestry, and industrial workers were crucial if Chile's exports were to remain competitive in world markets.

At the same time, Chile began to recover the international integration denied it under Pinochet because of repudiation of his dictatorship's human rights violations. The free trade agreements subsequently signed with the country's main markets, including the United States, the European Union, Japan, and China, played a key role in the sustained growth of its exports.

Road to development

Aylwin was succeeded in 1994 by President Eduardo Frei, a son of the 1960s Christian Democrat president, heading a government of the same center-left coalition, the Concertación. As well as launching major school and criminal justice reforms, President Frei, a civil engineer by profession, concentrated on projects like improving roads and airports (usually through private concessions), and on privatizing ports and water companies. These reforms vastly improved infrastructure - laying the foundations for the international-standard highways seen in Chile today - and increased productivity as the key to the international competitiveness of the small Chilean economy.

President Ricardo Lagos (2000-6) headed the Concertación's third government. A moderate socialist, he sought to combine economic growth with greater social justice and to extend the benefits of increased prosperity not only to the urban poor, but also to provincial Chile. Despite slower economic growth from 1999 through 2003, owing mainly to the weakness of international export markets, his government introduced unemployment insurance and embarked on a major reform of public and private health services in a bid to increase their efficiency and achieve greater equality of access to care, guaranteeing timely and low-cost attention for a growing number of important illnesses.

A national census, carried out in 2002, revealed a radical improvement in material welfare since the previous census a decade earlier. Ninety-six percent of Chile's homes had access to electricity, up by a fifth on 1992, and 91 percent had drinking water, representing an increase of more than a quarter. Similarly, 82 percent had a refrigerator, as compared with 55 percent in 1992, while 79 percent had a washing machine, as compared with 48 percent a decade earlier.

Fees at Chile's top private schools, at around US$700 per month, are over ten times the per-pupil subvention received by state schools in Chile.

Impatience for change

By 2006, the poverty rate had, moreover, dropped to less than 14 percent, down from 40 percent in 1990 and per capita income had reached US$8,900, up from just US$2,400 in 1990 (by 2010, it was running at almost US$12,000). However, despite the impact on living standards, the unequal distribution, combined with improvements in education, only fueled social demands. According to a government survey in 2009, the richest tenth of the population received 40.2 percent of national income while, at the same time, seven out of ten university students were the first in their family to go on to higher education.

These pent-up demands came to the fore under President Michelle Bachelet (2006-10), a socialist who headed the Concertación's fourth term and was the country's first woman president. Only a matter of months after she took office, marches and sit-ins organized by secondary schoolchildren in support of better state education mushroomed into the largest show of civil defiance since the Pinochet days. The movement was another symptom of the maturing of Chilean democracy - with no memory of the Pinochet dictatorship, the schoolchildren lacked their parents' fears for its potential fragility.

After initially floundering in face of the protests, Bachelet went on to focus on "social protection" as the theme of her government. The first major overhaul of the private pension (AFP) system left in place by the Pinochet dictatorship increased the role of state in supporting low-income senior citizens and, as it comes into gradual effect, is significantly increasing their (albeit still meager) pensions. Her government's creation of new state childcare centers for poor families also laid the foundations for an increase in women's participation in the labor force which had been very low, even by Latin American standards. In addition, she continued to reduce the housing deficit, with a greater emphasis on the standards of the social housing built by private companies with state support and their future owners' participation in the process.

However, despite these spending increases, her government also maintained the fiscal and macroeconomic discipline that had characterized Chile since 1990. In a key step, it established two offshore sovereign wealth funds into which part of fiscal revenues are paid when the price of copper - a key source of government income - is high. This was one of the complaints of the protesting schoolchildren who accused the government of "tightfistedness" but it stood Chile in good stead in 2009 when its small, open economy was hit by the international crisis and GDP contracted by 1.7 percent. Mitigating the impact of the crisis, the government used part of these savings to finance a fiscal stimulus plan worth US$4 billion that, relative to GDP, was one of the largest such plans in the world.

The right returns

Bachelet ended her term with record popularity ratings and may run again in the next presidential election in 2013 (consecutive periods are not permitted under Chile's constitution). However, after 20 years in office, the Concertación was tired, had lost much of its original mystique and was widely perceived as having become complacent in power. The result was the election of President Sebastián Piñera who took office in March 2010 at the head of center-right Alianza por Chile coalition. This was the first time that Chile had elected a president from the right since the 1950s.

A former businessman and billionaire, Piñera comes from the National Renewal Party, the smaller, more centrist party in the government coalition where its partner is the Independent Democratic Union, many of whose older members served under the Pinochet dictatorship. His position, close to the center of the political spectrum, and his family ties with the Christian Democrat Party and his opposition to the dictatorship in its latter days were important factors in his triumph.

The government's first months in power were devoted to grappling with the consequences of the February 2010 earthquake and its promised greater efficiency in government was apparent in these early days, particularly in getting public infrastructure back into working order, although it has been less successful in the longer-haul task of rebuilding housing and, according to critics, has failed to take into account the views of the affected families.

Piñera's popularity surged later in 2010 during the two-month operation to rescue 33 miners trapped underground in the San José gold and copper mine near Copiapó in northern Chile. He personally received the miners as, one-by-one, they were hauled to the surface. The success of the operation was certainly a triumph of perseverance against the odds and of Chilean engineering (although international mining companies operating in Chile also made an important contribution) and was facilitated by Piñera's ability to take quick decisions and lack of aversion to risk.

In 2011, however, his approval ratings sunk to the lowest level of any president since 1990, despite strong economic growth and virtually full employment. Like President Bachelet, he faced protests about the quality of state education, led this time by university students, rather than schoolchildren. As well as standards, their demands extended to the cost of education − monthly university tuition fees start at around a third of the country's average wage − and in response, the government agreed to increase the number of state grants and reduce their cost.

In 2010, it was widely assumed that Piñera's election marked the start of a relatively long period of right-wing government in Chile. However, with the economy set to slow in 2012, it is no longer clear that this will be the case.

Constitutional reform

On many indicators, Chile is close to becoming a developed country. In the UN Development Programme's 2011 Human Development Index, for example, it ranked in 44 th place, only three places below Portugal and in top place within Latin America. Its progress was also recognized in 2010 when it became the first country in South America to join the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Since Argentina ceased to export natural gas, Chile has faced a tight energy supply that has been compounded by public opposition to new coal plants and hydroelectric dams. Electricity prices are among the highest in Latin America.

However, in its last mile to development, it still faces a number of important challenge, including not only the inequality of income distribution but also Chileans' mounting demand for a greater say in decisions that affect their lives. This has become more acute because the return of the right to power has heightened the perception that the country is closely controlled by a small political-business elite which is, moreover, supported by its main media.

Complaints focus partly on the 1980 constitution. A reform in 2005 repealed some of its least democratic provisions, including the existence of nine non-elected senators who previously sat alongside the 38 elected senators (four appointed by the armed forces, three by the Supreme Court and two by the president). Increased participation in elections has also been facilitated by a reform, which came into force in early 2012, under which voter regulation became automatic for all those aged 18 and over. In a reversal of the country's previous tradition under which registry had been compulsory, the 1980 constitution made it voluntary and, moreover, requiring a personal visit to an election service office with only limited opening hours in the weeks prior to an election. Partly as a result, only 8.3 million people were registered to vote in the 2009 presidential and congressional elections (out of an estimated population of 16.9 million) as compared to the 7.6 million voters registered for the 1989 elections when the population reached 13.2 million.

The key barrier to increasing the representativeness of democracy is, however, the binominal electoral system, also introduced by the 1980 constitution. Under this system, unique to Chile, each constituency returns two representatives to each house of Congress, with the party or coalition that comes second only needing a third of the vote to take one of the two seats. Designed to force political parties into two broad coalitions and ensure that neither has a large majority, it guarantees that, in most constituencies, the government and opposition coalitions will each take one of the two seats.

This not only means that the political parties, in practice, "designate" their representatives in Congress, it also makes it very difficult for minority parties outside the two main coalitions to obtain representation. Several attempts to reform the system have been made since 1990 but all failed in the face of the vested interest of incumbent members of Congress in maintaining the existing system. President Piñera himself is in favor of reform - like, according to polls, some 60 percent of the population - on the grounds that the system, although useful in providing stability during Chile's transition to democracy, has now served its purpose. However, his proposal to present a reform bill to Congress during 2012 met with a storm of protest from the Independent Democratic Union and is unlikely to prosper.

Planning a trip to Chile? Look no further than our selection of fantastic tailor-made trips.

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Chile In The 20th Century History and Timeline Overview - Major Historical Events in Chile In The 20th Century, Chile | Insight Guides

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The civil war of the 1890s tilted the balance of power in favor of the Congress and against the presidents, who were reduced to refereeing the fights for cabinet posts among the parties. But by this time there were new actors on the political scene.

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Marxism | Definition, History, Ideology, Examples, & Facts | Britannica

Marxism was developed by Karl Marx and was practiced by various socialist movements, those calling for public works rather than private ownership. Karl Marx desired to make his written work become a reality through philosophy.

Karl Marx believed that the power relationship between capitalists and workers was fundamentally unfair thus leading to a class-type conflict. This would lead to the working class bringing down the capitalists and controlling the economy.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marxism.asp

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Where did Marxism come from?

Why is Marxism important?

How is Marxism different from other forms of socialism?

How does Marxism differ from Leninism?

Marxism, a body of doctrine developed by Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, by Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century. It originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, and an economic and political program. There is also Marxism as it has been understood and practiced by the various socialist movements, particularly before 1914. Then there is Soviet Marxism as worked out by Vladimir Ilich Lenin and modified by Joseph Stalin, which under the name of Marxism-Leninism ( see Leninism) became the doctrine of the communist parties set up after the Russian Revolution (1917). Offshoots of this included Marxism as interpreted by the anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky and his followers, Mao Zedong's Chinese variant of Marxism-Leninism, and various Marxisms in the developing world. There were also the post-World War II nondogmatic Marxisms that have modified Marx's thought with borrowings from modern philosophies, principally from those of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger but also from Sigmund Freud and others.
(Read Leon Trotsky's 1926 Britannica essay on Lenin.)

The thought of Karl Marx

The written work of Marx cannot be reduced to a philosophy, much less to a philosophical system. The whole of his work is a radical critique of philosophy, especially of G.W.F. Hegel's idealist system and of the philosophies of the left and right post- Hegelians. It is not, however, a mere denial of those philosophies. Marx declared that philosophy must become reality. One could no longer be content with interpreting the world; one must be concerned with transforming it, which meant transforming both the world itself and human consciousness of it. This, in turn, required a critique of experience together with a critique of ideas. In fact, Marx believed that all knowledge involves a critique of ideas. He was not an empiricist. Rather, his work teems with concepts (appropriation, alienation, praxis, creative labour, value, and so on) that he had inherited from earlier philosophers and economists, including Hegel, Johann Fichte, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill. What uniquely characterizes the thought of Marx is that, instead of making abstract affirmations about a whole group of problems such as human nature, knowledge, and matter, he examines each problem in its dynamic relation to the others and, above all, tries to relate them to historical, social, political, and economic realities.

In 1859, in the preface to his Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), Marx wrote that the hypothesis that had served him as the basis for his analysis of society could be briefly formulated as follows:

In the social production that men carry on, they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and intellectual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence; it is on the contrary their social existence which determines their consciousness.

Raised to the level of historical law, this hypothesis was subsequently called historical materialism. Marx applied it to capitalist society, both in Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (1848; The Communist Manifesto) and Das Kapital (vol. 1, 1867; "Capital") and in other writings. Although Marx reflected upon his working hypothesis for many years, he did not formulate it in a very exact manner: different expressions served him for identical realities. If one takes the text literally, social reality is structured in the following way:

1. Underlying everything as the real basis of society is the economic structure. This structure includes (a) the "material forces of production," that is, the labour and means of production, and (b) the overall "relations of production," or the social and political arrangements that regulate production and distribution. Although Marx stated that there is a correspondence between the "material forces" of production and the indispensable "relations" of production, he never made himself clear on the nature of the correspondence, a fact that was to be the source of differing interpretations among his later followers.

2. Above the economic structure rises the superstructure, consisting of legal and political "forms of social consciousness" that correspond to the economic structure. Marx says nothing about the nature of this correspondence between ideological forms and economic structure, except that through the ideological forms individuals become conscious of the conflict within the economic structure between the material forces of production and the existing relations of production expressed in the legal property relations. In other words, "The sum total of the forces of production accessible to men determines the condition of society" and is at the base of society. "The social structure and the state issue continually from the life processes of definite individuals . . . as they are in reality, that is acting and materially producing." The political relations that individuals establish among themselves are dependent on material production, as are the legal relations. This foundation of the social on the economic is not an incidental point: it colours Marx's whole analysis. It is found in Das Kapital as well as in Die deutsche Ideologie (written 1845-46; The German Ideology) and the Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844 (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844).

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Marxism | Definition, History, Ideology, Examples, & Facts

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Marxism, a body of doctrine developed by Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, by Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century. It originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, and an economic and political program.

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Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) was the pen name of the Chilean poet Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. Neruda is considered one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century and one of the most influential figures in the history of Latin American literature. Neruda’s poetry…

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After the Spanish Civil War, Neruda became more political and made him focus less on private works. He focused more on the direction of collective obligation, or socialism.