20th Design Century

Surrealism 

A 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter.


Surrealism, movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism's emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published "The Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality." Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.
     (Nicholas.P ,2002)

What i understand about Surrealism :

• an era of visual art
• positive expression
• can be accepted as a poet
• positive critics of World War II
• Art of reality

Surrealism was a factor that changed opinion of people that had negative view on some issues around the world. 

Reference:

Nicholas,P (2002)Surrealism.[Online].Available from : http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/glo/surrealism/. [Accessed 1 October 2014]