Explore surreal

Surrealism is a 20th-century artistic, literary, and philosophical movement that celebrated the poetic, revolutionary, and irrational and explored the workings of the mind, such as dreams.

The word “surrealist” was coined by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in the preface to a play performed in 1917, referring to the notion of being “beyond reality.” André Breton, who led a group of artists and poets in Paris, defined the philosophy in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924) as “pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought.”

Notable figures of the movement include Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Leonora Carrington, and Joan Miró.