The word Surrealism first appeared in 1917 by the writer Guillaume Apollinaire in Paris. It was used to describe the artistic innovation of Jean Cocteau’s ballet Parade (costume designed by Pablo Picasso) and also his own play Les Mamelles de Tiresias (The Breasts of Tiresias) The word was to describe the elements that were “truth beyond realism”. Then in 1924 Andre Breton adopted the word in “The Manifesto of Surrealism” which he founded and published.

The Surrealist group was formed in Paris in Oct. of 1924, among them were Ernst, Miro and Masson. Deeply affected by the tragedies and turmoil of World War I, the artists were looking for an escape as well as a reform of the existing art world. Freud also exerted a strong influence: to tap the creative and imaginative mind in the unconscious.

An early Surrealist historian Maurice Nadeau named it “The Season of Sleeps” (L’Epoquedes Sommeils) The surrealist artists were interested in the dreams, trances, hallucinations and altered states as described in Freud’s text “The Interpretation of Dreams and Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious” The group with Andre Breton experimented with hypnosis and automatic writing, words and sketches were made unconsciously. The early surrealist paintings had been referred to as oneiric (dreamlike). Unconscious thoughts were often expressed in symbols.

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