ABSTRACT
Dramatic and oxymoronic, the term 'convulsive beauty' arises in a context that associates surrealist beauty with the unknown, with desire and with the promise of revelation. Classical concepts of beauty are based above all on an appreciation of ideal human form and privilege symmetry, order and proportion; as they have been assimilated into the history of art, the qualities of beauty are inevitably asserted in the context of reason. By qualifying beauty as convulsive, Andre Breton immediately hoists the idea out of dominant understandings of beauty, and into a set of associations that makes it available for correspondence with other key surrealist concepts and strategies such as automatism, the image, the marvellous, objective chance and love, situating it at the heart of surrealism's proposed resolution of opposing states. Surrealist productions, especially in the visual arts, deal with the issue of formal beauty in more ambivalent ways.
