So far in this lesson, you’ve learned how to recognize stories that fit into the genre of magical realism. In the 1920s, a new movement in art and literature emerged that eventually grew into something like a genre: surrealism, which is related to the word surreal. You may have heard someone use the word surreal to describe a situation that seemed too strange to be true or real. When something is surreal, it seems as though it might be happening in a dream rather than in real life.

^{Salvador Dali was perhaps the most famous Surrealist painter. His most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory, depicted a set of “melting” clocks on a bleak landscape. Here an artist has combined a portrait of Dali with elements of that work.}

The word surreal entered the English language as a result of the Surrealist movement in art and literature. Surrealists believed that the images and ideas that come to us in our dreams are just as important for knowing and understanding reality as our conscious thoughts are. Therefore, they tried to bring the two ways of knowing the world together in a single work of art.

Andre Breton and Valentine Hugo were two other prominent members of the Surrealist movement.
They collaborated with other artists to produce this bizarre drawing in 1930.

^{Image courtesy of: (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/breton-eluard-hugo-exquisite-corpse-t12005)}

Members of the Surrealist movement are remembered not only for their mysterious works of art but also for their inventive processes for creating art. They developed some novel approaches to collaboration, the most famous being the cadavre exquis, which is French for “exquisite corpse.” The image above is an example. To create these kinds of drawings, each person drew one section, usually starting from the bottom, and then folded the paper so that the next artist could only see the very top of the drawing and then was expected to add onto it. As you can imagine, artists using this process had to rely on intuition rather than logic to guide their pens. Can you see the lines made by folding the page in each of the examples below?

^{Image courtesy of: (https://www.brwnpaperbag.com/2013/07/23/time-travel-tuesday-exquisite-corpse/)}

^{Image courtesy of: (https://www.photo.rmn.fr/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=2CO5PC51YJXU)}

^{Image courtesy of: (https://www.gazette-drouot.com/lots/4947960?openModalAbonne=true)}