Surrealism emerged around the same time as German Expressionism, in the 1920s. The French writer André Breton is considered the founder of this artistic movement. He was the first to outline his vision of Surrealism in his manifesto. Generally accepted that this movement is based on a combination of the real and the imaginary, dreams and everyday life. Each artist or writer saw the world in their way and, through fanciful forms, tried to show what the world was like for them. Using their fertile imagination, they demonstrated the bizarre shapes and singularity of thinking that made their works the most bizarre paintings and writings.
The masterful combination of each artist’s unique traits made this trend the most advanced. It is also a fact that Surrealist painters often turned to otherworldly forces, starved, or drugged themselves to create Surrealist paintings. These were the things that helped reveal the performance to the full and experience the necessary emotions for writing a masterpiece. The most famous genre representatives were Salvador Dali, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Giorgio de Chirico, and Max Ernst; photographers were Philippe Hausmann, Man Ray, and Greta Stern; cinematographers were Jean Cocteau, and Luis Buñuel.
The development of Surrealism was unusually rapid and captured people’s minds around the world. Within just a couple of decades of its emergence, the genre was already gathering full exhibitions in various parts of the world. There were branches of their own, which saw the trend a little differently and gave it further development. Surrealism existed for more than 60 years and got a new life in the 1970s as Neo-surrealism. Nowadays, people are astonished by the works of the artists of that time and still visit galleries with a big interest.