Surrealism is a form of abstract art which came to prominence in the early twentieth century. It flourished in the periods between the first and second world wars.

The term Surrealism was coined by the French poet and playwright Apollinaire, Guillaume. It was used to describe his famous play Les Mamelles de Tirésias/The Breasts of Tiresias 1917. The word was said to mean a heightened reality or an over reality. Guilaume was a leading member of the Dada Movement (see The Surrealist Movement)

Surrealist artists studied the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung - the founding farthers of modern psychology. Surrealism draws upon the unconscious mind and attempts to capture and express it in the form of literature and, more notably, art.

Two schools of thought eventually emerged, The Automatists and the Veristics.

The Automatists believed that images reached the conscience mind in a automatic way. They were more concerned with the feeling of these images rather than an analysis of them. Automatist writers or artists would write or draw that which came into their conscious minds. The Automatists primarily came from the Dada tradition in the sense that their work lacked any real form. This was mainly deliberate as they saw this as a means of creative expression and also a way to rebel against the bourgeois establishment.

The Veristics were essentially the Automatists opposites. They still believed that images reached the conscious mind in an automatic way, but they also believed that these images should be captured and expressed in a traditional artistic form, so that their meanings could then undergo deeper analysis. They hoped that after these images were analysed, the conscious mind would be able to understand the unconscious minds thoughts.

Although two schools of thought emerged, not every surrealist artist fit exactly into one or the other and many had their own views on surrealism and their own unique style. However the most prominent among them belonged to the Surrealist Movement led by Andre Breton.