Spawned from the brutality of the first world war, Surrealism as an artform displayed the hysteria of imagery young men had to endure in the horrific conditions of trench warfare. Shattering conventional ideas about the world, Artists such as Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel challenged the traditional norms of art, which up until the first world war was mainly based on making art pieces reflective of the worlds reality’s. Instead these artists strived to show the realm of the unconscious, the dreamlike state off mind and fantasy’s that wasn’t represented in art.

By the Second World War, many surrealist artists, threatened by the highly conservative third Reich, fled Europe for survival. Through this, the movement began to spread to places such as the United States, were western artists such as Jackson pollock were made and created new ideas of surrealism as a global art movement.