Surrealism

• What is Surrealism?
• How is it provoked through media, fashion and beauty?
• What year was surrealism first introduced?

1. a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

Movement, which began in the 1920s, of writers and artists who experimented with ways of unleashing the subconscious imagination, includes the artists Salvador Dalí and René Magritte


There was no single style of surrealist art but two broad types can be seen. These are the oneiric (dream-like) work of Salvador Dalí, early Max Ernst, and René Magritte, and the automatism of later Max Ernst and Joan Miró. Freud believed that dreams revealed the workings of the unconscious, and his famous book The Interpretation of Dreams was central to surrealism. Automatism was the surrealist term for Freud’s technique of free association, which he also used to reveal the unconscious mind of his patients.

Surrealism had a huge influence on art, literature and the cinema as well as on social attitudes and behaviour.