Surrealism was a twentieth-century literary, philosophical, and artistic movement that explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the poetic, and the revolutionary. The Surrealist art movement began in the 1920s, when visual artists like Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Joan Miró, and Yves Tanguy adopted automatism, a literary technique that relied entirely on the subconscious for creativity.

This tool had been recently pioneered and popularized by André Breton and other Surrealist writers in Paris, who paved the way for the art form with their dream-like texts and Dada-inspired interest in experimentation.

Surrealism aims to revolutionize the human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams. The movement’s artists find magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional. At the core of their work is the willingness to challenge imposed values and norms, and a search for freedom.

The word ‘surrealist’ (suggesting ‘beyond reality) was coined by the French avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire in the preface to a play performed in 1917. But it was André Breton, leader of a new grouping of poets and artists in Paris, who, in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), defined surrealism as: “pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.” Source: Tate.

It’s worth noting another famous representative of the Surrealism art movement: René Magritte. René Magritte was a Belgian artist, who became well known for creating a number of witty and thought-provoking images.

Often depicting ordinary objects in an unusual context, his work is known for challenging observers’ preconditioned perceptions of reality. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art, and conceptual art. Unfortunately, due to the fact that most of his paintings aren’t in the Public Domain, we won’t be able to include any of his art in our shop.

Different is the case of our beloved Paul Klee. He was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee’s art will be happily displayed at ArtTeeShop.