Surrealism

Surrealism is a style in which fantastic visual imagery from the subconscious mind is used with no intention of making the artwork logically comprehensible.

Surrealism was founded by Andre Breton in 1924 and developed by the 20th-century literary and artistic movement. It was similar in some aspects to the late 19th-century Symbolism movement, but deeply influenced by the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Jung.

The Surrealism movement of visual art and literature flourished in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason. But Surrealism emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past and had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic Andre Breton, who published "The Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality." Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike. This movement continues to flourish at all ends of the earth. Continued thought processes and investigations into the mind produce today some of the best art ever seen.

The Surrealism circle was made up of many of the great artists of the 20th century, including Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray, Joan Miro, and Rene Magritte.

Salvador Dali is the single best-known Surrealism artist.