Surrealism found its levitating name almost as spontaneously as Dadaism, the only difference was that unlike Dadaism, the term Surrealism possessed an actual meaning: "above realism".
The inventor of the term was Guillaume Apollinaire, poet idol of the young avant-garde generation in early 20th century.
Apollinaire said that he did not want to imitate nature, he was aiming to be above its replication.
Apollinaire's work encouraged the ambition of many generations of creative artists that followed him. It is after being exposed to Appolinaire's poems that artists attempted to go outside the framework of the visible world and created art that described beyond what the eye could see.
At the beginning, Surrealism, like Dadaism before it, manifested itself in literature.
André Breton, the French writer and poet converted from Dadaism gibberish to the more meaningful Surrealist movement. He channeled his energy and almost maniac passion to lead his former friends into achieving what they tried to accomplish in their previous endeavors.
Surrealists rejected everything in art that was connected to realism. Breton tried so hard to destroy the classics and joined forces with the fresh Surrealist members hoping to have a better chance in achieving that mission.
For André Breton, Surrealism is a "means of total liberation of the mind and of everything in common with it"; Surrealism was not a poetic form to him anymore. It became a cry of the mind.
In 1925 the first joint exhibition of Surrealist painting was held in Paris. The featured artists were Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Man Ray, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso and Pierre Roy. They were later reinforced by incomers from other countries such as René Magritte from Belgium in 1928 and a then unknown artist from Spain in 1929 named Salvador Dalí.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the political events in Europe were bound to be reflected in the movement.
The Russian revolution in 1920s with Lenin and Trotsky's writings provoked a wave of unrest that hit the whole of Europe as a result and led heated polemics not only towards other groups of intellectuals in Paris but also between the Surrealists themselves.
By the mid-1930s, the Surrealist had arrived at a state of division where visual artists separated from the literary section of the movement.
It is after that separation from the Surrealist literates that Surrealist visual artists like Salvator Dalí and René Magritte conquered the international art world.
In fact, during World War II, most Surrealist artists and writers in Europe who opposed Fascism and Nazism fled to North America. The art community in New York City quickly embraced Surrealist idealism and their artists who gave an imagery to dreams and the subconscious.
Surrealists combined the science of psyche with some of the Expressionist spirituality and added centuries of European romanticism to clear up Dadaism irrational bitterness.
And it is with the heritage of all the preceding Modern Art movements that the Surrealists became a voice for optimism and spread the belief that a new better world could be realized.
