Periods, Cultures, Styles  > Surrealism

Surrealism

Surrealism was a playful literary and artistic movement influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud filtered through early 20th century French psychology. Their were several Surrealist factions, but in the visual arts, the most influential of these was led by the poet André Breton. Artists and writers experimented with processes that allowed them to explore subconscious thought and identity and bypass social convention. The subconscious was seen a wellspring of creative invention and there were various strategies employed to exploit this, for example Salvador Dalí's paranoiac-critical activity, Yves Tanguy's dreamscapes, or André Masson's automatic drawing. Many European Surrealists went into exile with the rise of Nazism spreading its impact around the world. Surrealism proved so influential it continued to be invoked by artists well into the postwar era.