As World War 1 came to an end, the Dada period began to evolve into a new movement. Through the inspiration and work of a French poet and critic, Andre Breton, Surrealism was born.
  As mentioned, Surrealism was a spawn of the movement known as Dadaism, an "art and literary movement reflecting nihilistic protests of all Western culture.
  What Surrealism accomplished was to "ephasize the role of the unconscious in creative captivity" and at the same time "employed the psychic unconsious in a more orderly and serious manner."
  Surrealistic art requires great content and technique. In fine tuning their talent, the artists of this movement researched and studied the works of "Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung." Subsequently some artists chose to express themselves in the abstract tradition, while others would express themselves in the symbolic tradition.
Through these grew two forms of Surrealism. Michael S. Bell found one could be catagorized as Automatism and the other Verisitic Surrealism.    Automatism was referred by artists as a "suppression of consciousness in favor of the subconscious." They believed their images should not be burdened with meaning. True to this interpretation, Automatists "saw the academic discipline of art as intolerant of the free expression of feeling." They believed "form, which had dominated the history of art, was a culprit in that intolerance." Through this system Automatists felt they could bring "life to their images of the subconscious level."
  The Veristic Surrealists believed that images must be faithfully represented "as a link between the abstract spiritual realities, and the real forms of the material world." Reality was simply a metaphor of their inner consception. Surrealists harnessed elements that brought conscious and unconscious thought "into one blinding vision of pure emotion."
(Anthony Oliver)