Andre Breton.

The artists who became the surrealists gathered around poet Andre Breton in Paris in the 1920's. The first Surrealist Manifesto was published in 1924, declaring the artistic goals of the organization, especially as conceived by Breton. For Breton, surrealism was a creative method that employed many of the ideas of Sigmund Freud, the Austrian doctor who developed psychoanalysis as a method of treating mental illness. The basic strategy for Breton was automatism, a process for tapping …

…the Spanish film director Luis Bunuel on two surrealist feature films--Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) (1929) and L'Age d'or (The Golden Age) (1930) Two branches of surrealist painting developed in Paris in the mid-1920's. Abstract surrealism included the work of Andre Masson of France and Joan Miro of Spain. Illusionist surrealism included the work of Salvador Dali of Spain, Max Ernst of Germany, Yves Tanguy of France, and Paul Delvaux and Rene Magritte of Belgium.