The Surreal World

Art comes in many different shapes and sizes. From drawing on a desk in high school to digital art on computers, we don't notice that art surrounds us everywhere. However, there is one particular art form that is gaining interest throughout the world, and has been around for years. This art form is known as Surrealism. Surrealism is the only form of art that truly lets you express your mind the way you want it to be expressed, with no limits or boundaries. In Surrealism, there is no gravity, words flow like water, objects can fly in the limitless skies, and images can swim. Basically, Surrealism has no rules; it is only the artist and his mind.

Around the early 1900's, soon after the First World War, a man by the name of Tristan Tzara disliked the idea of war, and was disgusted by what happened and why World War 1 started. Tzara thought that a society that creates such chaos as war does not deserve art. However, his attempt to humiliate the new commercial world did not go the way he planned. His anti-art became art. The new chaotic, rebellious images became the status quo. This was known as the Dada Movement. The Dada movement slowly faded into thin air, as a group of artists thought the Dada Movement destroyed the gift of what centuries of artists have learned and passed on about the craft of art. This is when the Surrealist Movement began.

Surrealism, the movement in literature and fine arts, was established by a French poet by the name of Andre Breton. The goal of this movement was to emphasize the unconscious mind in a creative way. It was to express the unconscious mind in a more orderly and serious manner. There are two groups of surrealists that formed throughout this movement. One of the groups is the Automatists. Automatists indulged in a more creative manner, they thought of their art as meaningless. This is not to say they didn't care about their art, but they simply did not have a definition of what they created. They believed that is was automatic the way images from the subconscious reached the conscious.

The other group of Surrealist are known as the Veristic Surrealists. The Veristics simply were almost the same as the Automatists. Except, the Veristics saw meaning in their work. The Veristics thought of their artwork as a metaphor for an inner reality. They hoped to find a way to follow the images of the subconscious until the conscience could understand their meaning. The language of the subconscious is the image, and the consciousness had to learn to decode that language so it could translate it into its own language of words.

One of the most famous surrealists was Salvador Dali. Born in 1904 in Spain, Dali was not only considered as a surrealist artist, but