The Surrealists sought to channel the unconscious to reveal the power of the personal imagination, heirs to the tradition of nineteenth-century Romanticism also in their interest in myth and primitivism.
The Surrealists sought to channel the unconscious to reveal the power of the personal imagination, heirs to the tradition of nineteenth-century Romanticism also in their interest in myth and primitivism. But unlike all their predecessors, these artists active in the mid-twentieth century believed in symbolic revelations of the unconscious, captured from everyday life and made to flow into a free and liberating poetics of nonmeaning. The early Parisian Surrealists used art as a respite from violent political situations and to address the unease they felt about societal uncertainties, employing fantasy and dreamlike imagery to generate works in a wide variety of media. As mentioned, André Breton had defined Surrealism as an expression of the actual functioning of thought, by means of the written word, and in any other way. Expressively, it was not a homogeneous group responding to a single program, and it did not produce a new univocal way of painting, photography, or sculpture.