Surrealist Style

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s which refers to creative acts of revolt and efforts to liberate imagination. It has been defined as pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express the real functioning of thought. Surrealism as a visual movement sought to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization but designed to evoke empathy from the viewer. Subject matter included elements of the impossible or distorted realism, such as Dali’s melting timepieces or Magritte’s raining bowler-hatted men. The characteristics of this style are a combination of the depictive, the abstract and the psychological. These came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the period, combined with reaching more deeply into the psyche, such as the depiction of dream worlds.

Surrealist Painters