Surrealism is a style of art and literature developed principally in the 20th century, stressing the subconscious or non rational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or the exploitation of chance effects, unexpected juxtapositions, etc. It is a style where fantastic visual imagery from the subconscious mind is used with no intention of making the artwork logically comprehensible.
It was an artistic movement that brought together artists, thinkers and researchers in hunt of sense of expression of the unconscious. They were searching for the definition of new aesthetic, new humankind and a new social order. Surrealists had their forerunners in Italian Metaphyscal Painters (Giorgio de Chirico) in early 1910′s. Surrealism came into being after the French poet Andre Breton 1924 published that first Manifeste du Surrealisme. In this book Breton suggested that rational thought was repressive to the powers of creativity and imagination, thus inimical to artistic expression. An admirer of Sigmund Freud and his concept of the subconcious, Breton felt that contact with his hidden part of the mind could produce poetic truth.
Surrealism is credited as the force that kept expressive content alive in late 20th century art. Because it provided an alternative to the geometric side of abstraction, the organic branch of surrealism exerted a substancial influence on young painters of the early 1940′s who would become the abstract expressionists.
