Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which, before World War I, produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason. Surrealism’s emphasis, however, was not on negation but on positive expression. It did not inherit Dada’s nihilistic, antirationalist critiques of society and its unrestrained attacks on formal artistic conventions. However, Surrealism did adopt Dada’s preoccupation with the bizarre, the irrational, and the fantastic as well as Dada artists’ reliance on accident and chance.
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