Surrealism is a movement in art. Sur-real means beyond reality, and surrealist art shows the importance of experiences, which are hidden, in normal life, such as dreams and memories.

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Surrealism is a movement in art. Sur-real means beyond reality, and surrealist art shows the importance of experiences, which are hidden, in normal life, such as dreams and memories.

The surrealists were a group of artists who invented and developed surrealism.

Surrealist painting exhibits great variety of content and technique. That of Dalí, for example, consists of a more or less direct and photographic transcription of dreams, deriving its inspiration from the earlier dream-like paintings of de Chirico. Arp's sculptures are large, smooth, abstract forms, and Miró, a formal member of the group for a short time only, employed, as a rule, fantastic shapes, which included deliberate adaptations of children's art and which also had something in common with the designs used by Catalan artists to decorate pottery. The Russian-American painter Pavel Tchelichew, while not a member of the Surrealist group, created Surrealist images in his paintings as well as in his numerous ballet designs.

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The Persistence of memory.

Salvador Dalí.

Possibly the greatest surrealist artist was Max Ernst; he seemed to be a surrealist by temperament. From an early age he had a fertile imagination, observing reality vividly and letting his fantasies play on it. Painting his fantasies and self-induced hallucinations seemed perfectly normal to him. Ernest often painted forests that are tightly packed and sinister. The sun shines down on them, but does not penetrate: sometimes in his cities are seen in the same way. These paintings are subtly frightening; the more you explore them the ...

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