Manifestoes of Surrealism

An art movement of the 1910s-1920s that preceded Surrealism. Many of the early Surrealists originated as Dadaists. Dada artists and writers embraced randomness and produced “anti-art” that rejected the cultural and aesthetic standards that dominated the conventional art world. Dada works included poetry built from random newspaper clippings dropped on the ground and “readymades,” everyday objects presented in galleries and exhibitions as art. In Manifestoes of Surrealism, Breton explains how he hopes to set Surrealism apart from Dada.

Psychic automatism is the core tenet of Breton’s brand of Surrealism. The phrase refers to a practice by which artists and writers attempt to produce work that is free of conscious processing. They believed that this would reflect deeper truths than those that derive from work with pre-planned meaning. "Soluble Fish” is an example of a text written using psychic automatism.