Surrealism is a movement launched in Paris, France, by the poet Andre Breton, who described the idea of surrealism as the "pure pure psychic automatism by which is intended to express verbally in writing or in any other way, the true process of thought. It is dictation of thought free from the exercise of reason and every esthetic of moral preoccupation.

Surrealism was born from Dadaism in the early 1920's. Dadaism began in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916, as an anarchic satire on what was believed to be the defunct traditions of art and the wickedness found in war wrached society.

Surrealist art can be classified into two forms, one being organic surrealism organic surrealists included Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Andre Masson, Yves Tanguy, and Joan Miro, these artists worked with Imaginatively suggestive and Emotionally Expressive but non-representational organic forms.
The second kind of surrealism is a narrative surrealism, artists in this field inclided Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali, Pierre Roy and paul Devaux. The formula for this narrative surrealism painted precisely depicted hallucinatory world which elements were specifically represented but in nothing that made rational sence.

Surrealistic artists held the belief that their art should shock, or astonish the viewer, or make the viewer feel a sence of unease.

Surrealism is credited as the force that kept expressive content alive in the twentieth century, because it provided an alternative to the geometric side of abstraction