We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed. We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

Futurist Manifesto, 1909

The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. The face of the new art. The square is a living, regal infant. The first step of pure creation in art.

“What is real is not the external form but the essence of things.”

Constantin Brancusi: The Newborn1915Marble, 8 1/2 x 6"Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louis and Walter Arensberg Collection

DADA

Hannah Hoch, Cut with a Kitchen Knife, 1919 collage

"as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella".

Lautremont

Man Ray

Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). Oil on canvas. 57 7/8" x 35 1/8". Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Whether Mr. Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.

Bicycle Wheel, 1913In Advance of a Broken Arm, 1915

Elle a chaud au cul

Scuola Metafisica

Andre Breton

Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.

Encyclopedia: Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.

IdThe id comprises the unorganised part of the personality structure that contains the basic drives. The id acts as according to the "pleasure principle", seeking to avoid pain or unpleasure aroused by increases in instinctual tension.

The Ego acts according to the reality principle; i.e. it seeks to please the id’s drive in realistic ways that will benefit in the long term rather than bringing grief

The Super-ego can be thought of as a type of conscience that punishes misbehavior with feelings of guilt. For example: having extra-marital affairs

Salvador Dali. Self Portrait as Mona Lisa. 1954

The Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940)

The Persistence of Memory, 1931

Two Children Are Threatened by a NightingaleMax Ernst (French, born Germany. 1891-1976)1924. Oil on wood with painted wood elements and frame, 27 1/2 x 22 1/2 x 4 1/2" (69.8 x 57.1 x 11.4 cm).

Joseph Cornell, Untitled, 1942

Private collection, NY

The Maya

Lady Xox’s Vision of a Giant Snake, Maya

Shield Jaguar and Lady Xoc, Lintel 24, Temple 23, Yaxchilan, Mexico, c.725, 3’ x 6’, British Museum

The Aztecs

The Goddess Coatlicue, Aztec

Hosteen Klah, Whirling Log Ceremony, c.1925