Activity: 100 years of surrealism

An international intellectual movement, whose center was mainly in Paris and which dealt with problems of thought and expression in all their forms. The Surrealists saw a deep crisis in Western culture and responded by revising values ​​at every level, inspired by the psychoanalytic discoveries of Freud and the political ideology of Marxism. In both poetry and visual art, this revision was undertaken through the development of unconventional techniques, of which automatism was the most important. The Parisian poets who formulated surrealist theory and orientation were officially identified in Andre Breton Manifeste du surrealisme (1924), Louis Aragon’s essay “Une Vague de reves” (October 1924), and the magazine La Revolution surrealiste, published two months later. Under Breton’s leadership, the movement remained powerful until World War II, surviving until his death in 1966.