The dadaists’ radical critique of art and reason had a strong appeal for an artistic and literary movement that was founded in 1924: surrealism. The surrealists, however, wanted to put a more positive spin on dada’s pessimistic message. They were inspired by the writings of Freud, who had argued that the human mind was split between the conscious mind and the inaccessible unconscious mind, where a person’s innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires lay repressed. The surrealists set out to gain access to these private wishes and feelings through dream imagery, random association of words, and art. The artists seeking ways of accessing the unconscious mind included André Breton, André Masson, and Yves Tanguy of France, René Magritte of Belgium, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí of Spain, and Max Ernst of Germany.

Two distinct styles emerged within surrealism. Some artists, such as Dalí and Magritte, attempted to suggest dream imagery by depicting objects accurately, but juxtaposing them in an irrational manner. An example of this strategy is Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York City). In this painting, pocket watches hang limply from a dead branch, while insects, a tabletop, and a distorted face lie in a barren landscape that leads back to a seashore and cliffs. The merging of these incongruous elements suggests an alternative, or a sur-reality, as the movement’s name implies.

Other surrealists attempted to allow the hand to wander across the canvas surface without any conscious control, a technique they called automatism. The automatists reasoned that if the conscious mind were allowed to relax its hold, the unconscious could begin to manifest itself. The lines of the painting would then be motivated not by the conscious mind, which conforms to social convention and training, but by the powerful store of emotions hidden in the unconscious. Automatism began with Paris surrealists, such as Picabia, Arp, and Masson, but in the 1940s gained a strong following in New York City and in Montréal, Canada. André Masson’s Panic (1963, Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Paris) is more abstract than the dream imagery of Dalí, though it nonetheless invites the viewer to examine its complex surfaces in search of visual clues to hidden meanings. These are meanings that Masson may not have intended but that he believed were nonetheless connected to his innermost emotions and desires.