Surrealism was a cultural and artistic movement founded in Paris in the early 1920s, formally established by writer André Breton with his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism. Growing out of the anti-art sentiment of Dadaism , Surrealism sought to liberate thought and human experience from the constraints of logic by unlocking the power of the unconscious mind. Its central goal was to create a "super-reality," or surreality, by merging the worlds of dream and everyday reality.

Heavily influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, the Surrealists used techniques like automatism (automatic writing or drawing) and the depiction of dream imagery to bypass rational thought. The resulting artworks are known for their bizarre, illogical scenes and surprising juxtapositions, as seen in the hyper-realistic dreamscapes of Salvador Dalí and the conceptual paradoxes of René Magritte. For its members, Surrealism was primarily a revolutionary philosophical movement, with the artworks themselves being artifacts of their psychological and social experiments.

Surrealism began as a literary movement in Europe in the late 1910s and early 1920s that experimented with a new way of expression.

André Breton, the creator of Surrealism, published the Manifesto of Surrealism in Paris in 1924, which was officially consecrated.

Surrealism rejected any rational version of life and favored a vision that was influenced by dreams and the unconscious mind. Some surrealists would draw or write without paying much attention to what they were creating, while others sought to depict their dream worlds.