The roots of surrealism begin with the dada movement. Dada was founded in 1915 in Zurich, Switzerland, by an international group of pacifist intellectuals and artists who fled to the neutral country in protest of World War I. This group felt that humanity's megalomania and industrial capitalism were the principle causes of the war, so they considered dada to be a "moral revolution." In the process of creating dada art, the artist held no special significance; he or she was merely the vessel through which the art emerged. The creative process became a work of automation, relying on chance to relay the voice of the unconscious. The dadaists felt that by allowing these random and impersonal forces to drive the creative process, art became a "cry from the bowels." The dada goal was to cast doubt on the power of language, literature, and art to represent reality, which they felt was absurdly chaotic and unrepresentable. They reveled in what they called the "anti-real." Dadaists saw art as a pretentious luxury, so they set out to change the context in which art was to be experienced. Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) abandoned painting in 1913 and instead began selecting what he called "readymades," everyday objects with seemingly no artistic value. Duchamp's most notorious readymade was Fountain, simply a urinal tipped on its side. Dada artists created stream-of-consciousness poetry, photomontage art, found-object sculptures, and raucous improvisational theater meant to anger audiences and shock them into questioning reason, taste, and the place of art in contemporary society. Often during a dada performance or gallery showing, the audience would be so incensed that a riot would break out, much to the delight of the performers.
Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) quickly took a position as head of the movement, publishing his Dada Manifesto in 1918. Under his leadership, dada flourished on nihilism, chaos, unseriousness, and a dark sense of humor. After World War I, Tzara introduced dada to the intellectuals of Paris in 1919. Soon after its initial shock, Paris began to accept dada—even embrace it. The movement, no longer fulfilling its goal of creating anxiety and chaos in society, began to disband. Conflicts developed between Tzara and Breton, who had begun investigating Sigmund Freud's research into the unconscious and wanted to bring his theories into the creative process of dada. Tzara saw psychoanalysis as an instrument of mystification and bourgeois ideals, which he felt to be counter to the dada anti-real; Breton felt that Tzara's lack of seriousness was the cause for dada's approaching self-destruction, and he wanted to reorganize and reinvigorate the movement. He incorporated his interest in Freud with the automatic processes of dada art, resulting in the new movement of surrealism.
By 1922, dada was dead. While many dadaists considered Breton to be a traitor to dada, others made the transition directly into surrealism. After a brief period of what was termed "le mouvement flou,"(the fuzzy movement) in which the surrealists defined the movement by reference to the discarded dada, Breton (known as the Pope of Surrealism) published the first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. It was surrealism's declaration of the rights of man through the liberation of the unconscious. The goal of surrealism was to synthesize dream and reality so that the resulting art challenged the limits of representation and perception. Surrealism abandoned the dada goal of art as a direct transmitter of thought and focused instead on expressing the rupture and duality of language through imagery.
The surrealist image could be either verbal or pictorial and had a twofold function. First, images that seem incompatible with each other should be juxtaposed together in order to create startling analogies that disrupt passive audience enjoyment and conventional expectations of art. This technique was perhaps an influence of Soviet montage theory, with which the surrealists were familiar. Second, the image must mark the beginning of an exploration into the unknown rather than merely representing a thing of beauty. The surrealist experience of beauty instead involved a psychic disturbance, a "convulsive beauty" generated by the startling images and the analogies they create in the mind of the viewer. The surrealist painter Salvador Dali used the technique of photographic realism in order to discredit the world of reality. By depicting dream objects (melting clocks, for example) in everyday surroundings, he blurred the line between reality and fantasy. His paintings relied heavily on Freudian imagery. Painter René Magritte (1898–1967) interrogated familiar objects (hats, apples, pipes) by separating them from their meaning in language and presenting them as absurd riddles.