# subrealism
## English
### Noun

subrealism (uncountable)
* (art) An artistic movement that seeks to explore the basis of perception.
** 1937, Henry Rankin Poore, Art's Place in Education, page 90:The infection of Surrealism (subrealism) in the painter's and sculptor's art naturally found its way into the practice of the most universal of the arts.
** 1959, Luis Díez del Corral, The Rape of Europe, page 214:But as the development of cubism and other tendencies shows, contemporary art tends to slip away into antirealist abstraction, subrealism and subjectivist creationism, obeying no laws but its own.
** 1981, Arts Magazine, volume 56, page 154:[…] what André Breton called a higher reality—Surrealism. Herbert Read, ironically, called it Superrealism. I would like to suggest that it is a reality of depth, not height, thus—Subrealism. The sound and light of every painter is ultimately this kind, an intensity and unity that demands the courage to dig, the tenacity to cover the distance, and the poetry to bring it to terms.
** 1981, Charles Russell, The Avant-garde Today: An International Anthology, page 208:Give up surrealism that only nourishes subrealism; the two of them, along with the so-called "natural," have got a dubious stench of urinals and churches.
** 2018, Kenji Hasegawa, Student Radicalism and the Formation of Postwar Japan, page 99:Whereas surrealism sought to transcend reality from above, 'subrealism' sought to 'dive through the bottom of reality.' The three artists' activities in Shimomaruko were based on this idea.
** 2020, Adam Kern, Manga from the Floating World:The kibyōshi picture is a kind of visual paradox in this sense, presenting the reader with the spectacle of subrealism in its sketchiness and hyperrealism in its obsessive attention to trivia drawn from everyday life.
* (art) The artistic exploration of perverse and unpleasant subject matter.
** 1972, Leo Braudy, Focus on Shoot the Piano Player, page 71:While we wait for the necessary publication of a book about "subrealism" in the cinema, almost entirely devoted to French cinema, with an additional chapter on neo-subrealism , Shoot the Piano Player already presents us with a repertoire sufficiently stocked with the characteristic traits of the new school.
** 1995, Vladislav Todorov, Red Square, Black Square, page 121:Thus the fight between socialist realism and Gulag subrealism was not a fight for a dominant artistic method or aesthetic principle, nor even for an adequate epistemological approach, but a fight for the true communist ontology.
** 1999, Deepak Narang Sawhney, Must We Burn Sade?, page 69:But Sade's ethnographic subrealism exceeds Marx's historical analysis, supplementing Marx's theoretical enterprise with a monstrous form of critical literary engagement.
** 2010, Lara Anderson, J. P. Spicer-Escalante, Au Naturel: (Re)Reading Hispanic Naturalism, page 234:For the avant-garde poet and critic Juan Larrea, the inclination toward the low is approached as a “subrealism” (1944, 89).
* An attitude toward life that lacks genuine engagement or meaning.
** 1945, Pierre Combret de Lanux, European Manifesto, page 128:But our creative political vision of 150 years ago had so deteriorated through a century of short-time efficiency and subrealism, that people did not realize how great the moment was.
** 1966, Jim Evrard, Revolutionary Consciousness, page 15:Alas! after that labor of obstinate subrealism, the mind has not become more alert and more alive, but more weary and disenchanted.
** 1984, Hugo Kuyper Letiche, Learning and Hatred for Meaning, page 229:The inward-looking approach closes itself up in the classroom and misses the creative energy of mediation which achieves a higher level of reflection, not more exclusive and rigid (as in 'subrealism'), but more encompassing and complete.
** 2002, David Allen, Performing Chekhov:'It takes a great act of courage', he suggests, 'to break out of what is usually demanded: effective subrealism.
** 2019, Ronald Jeremiah Schindler, The Frankfurt School Critique of Capitalist Culture:Instead, many of our youth of today's generation look for solace in the subrealism of an eternally recurring hedonism.

#### Related terms

* superrealism
* surrealism