Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks

and writings. The aim was to 'resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality.' Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself.[1] Surrealism works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artefact. Leader Andr Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement. Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory. The word surrealist was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirsias, which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. World War I scattered the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and in the interim many became involved with Dada, believing that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought the conflict of the war upon the world. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued. During the war, Andr Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from shell-shock. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vach, Breton felt that Vach was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry. He admired the young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, "In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautramont, but it is Jacques Vach to whom I owe the most."[2]

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Andr Masson. Automatic Drawing. 1924. Ink on paper, 23.5 x 20.6 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. The movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games, discussed the theories of Surrealism, and developed a variety of techniques such as automatic drawing. Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage and decalcomania. Soon more visual artists became involved, including Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Joan Mir, Francis Picabia, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dal, Luis Buuel, Alberto Giacometti, Valentine Hugo, Mret Oppenheim, Toyen, Kansuke Yamamoto and later after the second war: Enrico Donati. Though Breton admired Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and courted them to join the movement, they remained peripheral.[8] More writers also joined, including former Dadaist Tristan Tzara, Ren Char, and Georges Sadoul.
Writing continues

Ren Magritte's "This is not a pipe." The Treachery of Images 192829, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The first Surrealist work, according to leader Breton, was Les Champs Magntiques (MayJune 1919). Littrature contained automatist works and accounts of dreams. The magazine and the portfolio both showed their disdain for literal meanings given to objects and focused rather on the undertones, the poetic undercurrents present. Not only did they give emphasis to the poetic undercurrents, but also to the connotations and the overtones which "exist in ambiguous relationships to the visual images." Because Surrealist writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize their thoughts and the images they present, some people find much of their work difficult to parse. This notion however is a superficial comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton's initial emphasis on automatic writing as the main route toward a higher reality. Butas in Breton's casemuch of what is presented as purely automatic is actually edited and very "thought out". Breton himself later admitted that automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and other elements were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of visual artists in the movement forced the issue, since automatic painting required a rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus such elements as collage were introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling juxtapositions as revealed in Pierre Reverdy's poetry. Andas in Magritte's case (where there is no obvious recourse to either automatic techniques or collage)the very notion of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation in and of itself. Surrealism was meant to be always in fluxto be more modern than modernand so it was natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new challenges arose. Surrealists revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym Comte de Lautramont, and for the line "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", and Arthur Rimbaud, two late 19th century writers believed to be the precursors of Surrealism