Surrealism

Surrealists were always looking for the unusual, the surprise, the oddity. The movement began in Paris in the 1920s, after World War I, and spread around the world, infiltrating film, music, literature, and culture. A popular example of surrealism can be found in Rene Magritte's painting of a pipe with the caption "This is not a pipe." Other well known surrealists are Marc Chagall and Salvador Dali.

Salvador Dali

Born in 1904 in Spain, Salvador Dali has been called "the most important Surrealist artist who ever lived." Even though Dali's surrealism contains elements of the bizarre or deformed, his portrayals are excruciatingly detailed. His art also reflects his fascination with science, from Freud's psychoanalysis to Einstein's theory of relativity. His best known work, The Persistence of Memory--with clocks melting in a barren landscape--was completed in 1931. Other favorite objects that appeared in many of his paintings were eggs, elephants, and cubes. In his lifetime, Dali produced over 1500 paintings, as well as drawings, sculptures, and illustrations for books, lithographs, and theater set designs, and he had great influence on fashion, photography, and design.