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The surrealist movement originated in Paris in the 1920s and, during the interwar years, it spread to many countries in Europe and beyond. It began as a literary movement but assumed its fullest expression as an art movement. In her excellent guide to the exhibition, Jennifer Mundy (2001) wrote:
For the surrealists, desire was a weapon against the forces in society, and within the psyche, which would censor the human spirit and repress individual liberty; and love, poetry and the free expression of desire were the ultimate goals. (p. 9)
Conroy Maddox considered there to be a political component to surrealism. He argued that it both dissociated itself from the values of capitalist culture and struggled against it (Levy 1997). Mundy considered the surrealists to be united in a fierce and uncompromising rejection of the economic, legal and religious structures in society that allowed love to all but drown in a sea of convention and hypocrisy. They seemed to consider themselves to be a kind of brotherhood, with a revolutionary zeal. In the exhibition there were a number of group photographs, some including as many as 25 members. The surrealist movement was led by the charismatic André Breton, who was predominantly a poet. A preoccupation of the surrealist poets was a celebration of the union of lovers, both spiritually and carnally. In 1930, with Paul Eluard, Breton wrote, ‘The arms and thighs of the man are bound to the arms and thighs of the woman, wind mixes with smoke, hands take the imprint of desires’ (displayed on a wall of the exhibition). Not very inspiring, but you get the idea. Breton remained a uniting force within the movement until his death in 1966. His art output was not great, neither in quantity nor quality, but he has remained one of the most frequently cited of the surrealists, largely because of what he wrote. He considered the main thrust of surrealism to be a turning away from the external object and a focusing upon what he called internal perceptio