Surrealism

Surrealism was launched in Paris in 1924, when the writer André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto.
Surrealists were inspired by the ideas of Sigmund Freud about the unconscious mind and dreams.
They wanted to free the imagination from logic and reason.
It grew out of Dada, an earlier movement that mocked traditional art and society during and after the First World War.

Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904 to 1989): detailed, dreamlike scenes such as The Persistence of Memory (1931), with soft, melting clocks.
René Magritte (Belgian, 1898 to 1967): ordinary objects in strange situations, such as a painting of a pipe with the words 'This is not a pipe' (The Treachery of Images, 1929), and a man whose face is hidden by a floating green apple (The Son of Man, 1964).
Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893 to 1983): playful, abstract shapes and signs.
Meret Oppenheim (Swiss, 1913 to 1985): Object (1936), a cup, saucer and spoon covered in fur.
Leonora Carrington (British-born, 1917 to 2011) worked mostly in Mexico.

Juxtaposition: placing unrelated things together to surprise, such as fur and a teacup.
Changing scale: making ordinary objects huge or tiny.
Transformation: one thing turning into another.
Automatism: drawing quickly without planning, to let the unconscious take over.
Exquisite corpse: a game in which people each draw part of a figure on a folded sheet without seeing the other parts.
Frottage: rubbings, developed by Max Ernst (German).