Surrealism is an art and literary movement founded in Paris in 1924 by the poet André Breton. Its members tried to set down what the conscious mind normally filters out: the logic of dreams, the first thing that comes to mind.
Breton defined it as "psychic automatism in its pure state," thought set down with no control from reason.
The painters of the movement gave that idea its best-known images: dream scenes and impossible objects, painted with great care. The most famous is The Persistence of Memory, made in 1931 by the Spanish artist Salvador Dalí. On a deserted shore, soft watches hang over a branch and the edge of a ledge as if they were melting.
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Yet Surrealism did not begin with pictures. Breton wrote verse, and the full definition in his Manifesto of Surrealism, the text that launched the group, speaks of thought, speech and writing, never of brushes or canvas. Painters joined only later.
Before them, the movement lived on paper. The text Breton presented as the first purely Surrealist work, Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), was written with his friend Philippe Soupault. The two men used automatic writing: they filled page after page as fast as the words came, without stopping to correct or reread.
Apollinaire's word
Even the name of the movement was borrowed. The word surrealism was coined by the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, in Paris in 1917, for the program of a ballet…
What You'll Discover
How a doctor in Vienna shaped Breton's ideas.
The glove de Chirico hung in a painting.
Max Ernst's trick with paper and floorboards.
The sentence Magritte wrote under a pipe.
Where the Surrealists went when war came.