Abstract

The Surrealist Movement, whose purposes were defined first in the manifesto written by the movement’s leading figure Andre Breton, is considered to be one of the most ambitious and influential artistic and cultural protestation against the system prevailing at the time. Propounded by a group of artists who had either witnessed or experienced in person the atrocity and the genocides of the two world wars masked under the guise of Western Rationality, the surrealist movement approached Dadaism in its rebelliousness and hatred of order. Nevertheless, its attitude towards the problems was not nihilistic as in Dadaism but constructive. It held the belief that fighting against positive rationalism, Western morality, inequality and alienation caused by industrialism and capitalism is possible through recourse to imagination, dreams and intuitions which are within reach of the human’s capacities. The main emphasis in their manifestoes was to reconcile dream with reality through the Freudian psychoanalytic method of psychic automatism. Foregrounding the importance of dreams and intuitions in artistic production, this movement attempted to liberate art from the sanctity attributed to it by the Romantic tradition and to transform it to an experience in every person’s life; to this end, it suggested a reconciliation between art and life, and dream and reality against a harsh external reality. This, in a sense, was a sort of socialist utopia that aimed at a reconciliation of art and life, whose precursors could be traced back to figures such as Saint Simon, William Morris and Fourier.