Surrealism

I didn't study art so when I first saw Salvador Dali's paintings it really got me interested. Surrealism was an art and literary movement that began in the 1920's. It's leader Andre Breton had earlier worked in a mental hospital and had even met Sigmund Freud, perhaps it was this meeting that got him interested in the study of the unconscious for he founded the surrealist movement, which he considered a revolutionary movement. Surrealism seeks to free the unconscious to express itself. The first technique was automatic writing which Breton expressed in 1924 as pure psychic automatism - by which the real processes of thought could be expressed. It is the dictation of thought free from control from reason and any aesthetic or moral considerations. If this seems odd it gets odder still when we view the surrealist paintings. 

A few years ago I read a book by a famous scientist that someone had left behind by mistake, and in it he says that while fields like physics were truly profound, artist pretend to have done something great by describing their work in a profound way, even going to the extent of using extravagant names, while in reality it is nonsense. I think that you will agree this is an unkind way to describe an artist. Some artists work sells at hundreds of millions of dollars while this scientist books fetch him a relatively small amount. The reason for this is that there are at least some instances when an artist can capture our imagination far more than famous physicist can and when this happens its not called nonsense, its called magic........