Surrealism was a revolution. Unlike such other modern movements as cubism and geometrical abstraction, it was not based on purely artistic innovation; its aim was nothing less than the liberation, in art and in life, of the resources of the subconscious mind. Sarane Alexandrian traces the development of surrealism from its origins in the Dada anti-art revolt of 1916-20 to the death of its guiding spirit, Andre Breton, in 1966, which marked the end of its existence as a formal entity. He discusses and illustrates an astonishing variety of surrealist artists, including not only such giants of the movement as Dali, Miro, Duchamp, Tanguy and Magritte, but a host of other sympathetic account of the one current within 20th-century culture which devoted itself to the pursuit of a sense of magic.
