Surrealist Painting

A movement embracing the irrational as a means of creating art and experiencing life, whose founding document is the Surrealist Manifesto composed by André Breton in 1924. Taking pure psychic automatism as the ideal state of man, Surrealists believed that one could express the true functioning of thought in the unconscious. Initially, the most important aspect of the unconscious was desire, which they felt was central to humanity—the authentic voice of the inner self and the key to understanding human beings. Dreams, childhood, madness, non-Western art, and chance situations became central to discovering the irrational in Surrealist art.