Why was Surrealism created?

Surrealism emerged as a response to the devastation of World War I, which revealed the bankruptcy of rational Western civilization. The unprecedented mechanized slaughter demonstrated that ‘progress’ and ‘reason’ could lead to catastrophic violence. Artists and writers sought new ways to access deeper truths beyond logic and failed rationality. Drawing on Freud’s theories of the unconscious and building on Dada’s anti-rational stance, Surrealists aimed to revolutionize human experience by liberating imagination from the constraints of bourgeois society and conventional thought. They believed that accessing the unconscious could reveal repressed desires and revolutionary potential, ultimately transforming not just art but life itself.