Surrealism is movement drawing on dreams and the unconscious to subvert rational reality.
Surrealism was founded in Paris in 1924 by André Breton, whose First Surrealist Manifesto called for 'pure psychic automatism' — accessing the unconscious directly, bypassing reason and moral preoccupation. The movement drew on Freudian psychoanalysis, on dreams as the authentic language of the mind, and on the Dadaist precedent of irrational juxtaposition. Salvador Dalí brought hallucinatory precision to dream imagery: his Persistence of Memory (1931) — the melting watches — remains the most recognised surrealist painting. Max Ernst used frottage (rubbing textures), grattage (scraping paint) and collage; Magritte played systematic games with the relationship between words, objects and images. Joan Miró developed a biomorphic abstract language from automatic drawing. Surrealism's influence extended into cinema (Buñuel), literature (Kafka's proximity to it), and advertising, which hijacked its visual language wholesale. Breton, a former psychiatric worker who had treated shell-shocked soldiers, drew directly on Freud's theories of dreams and repression, but reframed them as an artistic method rather than a clinical one. The movement split almost immediately into two working modes: 'automatism,' in which artists like Joan Miró and André Masson let the hand move without conscious control to bypass rational censorship, and 'veristic' Surrealism, in which Dalí and Magritte rendered dreamlike, impossible scenes with hyper-precise, almost photographic technique — the contradiction between realistic rendering and irrational content is exactly what makes their paintings unsettling. Surrealism was never confined to painting: it produced its own poetry, film (Buñuel and Dalí's 'Un Chien Andalou'), photography (Man Ray's rayographs), and even furniture and fashion, most famously Dalí's collaborations with Elsa Schiaparelli. Politically, the group aligned — uneasily — with Communism, seeing psychic liberation and social revolution as two fronts of the same war on bourgeois rationalism. Its afterlife is enormous: Surrealist strategies of juxtaposition and the uncanny run straight through to film noir dream sequences, to advertising's use of dislocated imagery, and to a large share of contemporary digital and AI-assisted art, which has revived the automatist idea of images generated beyond an artist's full conscious control.