Dada was a movement noted for cynicism, buffoonery, and nihilism. Born in Zurich in 1916, during World War I, the movement was made up of a mixture of diserters, writers, aartists, and refugees from European civilization. They met in a Zurich cabaret, initially to protest the insane war, but eventually their meetings spawned an arts movement involving preposterous activities. Among other things, they wrote poetry by cuttiing words out of seed catalogs, wore sill costumes, danced to the sound of barking dogs, and created pictures out of random arrangements of cut-out shapes. The name Dada (French for "hobbyhorse") was allegedly selected by opening a German-French dictionary and taking the first word that appeared. Dada spread to other cities including Paris, Cologne, and New York, but by 1922 it ahd faded away, leaving few lasting works of art. The examples of Dada gave rise to a reassessment of aesthetic values, a questioning that goes on to this day. It also played a role in fostering three major preoccupations of twentieth-century high culture: irony, absurdity, and the unconscious. SOme Dadaist leaders brought these preocupations with them to the next movement in European twentieth-century art, Surrealism.

Surrealism began in 1924 as a mainly literary movement. This one was formally founded and christened by the Dadaist poet Andre Brenton and his associates. In Brenton's conception of the movement, the unconscious--whether in dreams or in the undirected play of thought that occurs when one is awake--was to be given the highest priority. There are, basically, two kinds of Surrealist painting: realistic and abstract. In terms of style, the realistic variety is quite traditional; to a greater or lesser g\degree it indulges in all the devices of optical realism: shading, perspective, even cast shadows. In terms of subject matter, however, it is quite original. Essentially, it seeks to illustrate dreams. Surrealist images range from mildly puzzeling to the bizarre. The surrealism of Salvador Dali, who joined the movemnet in 1929, is not as subtle as others. Dali's style is supremely realistic; his subjects tend to be nightmarish. By means of of optical realism, along with a vivid imagination, hallucinations are given the credibility of photographs. Dali's surrealism tends to provoke, even shock, rather than to disturb.