Between the twenties to the sixties many bold experiments and flimsy tricks were associated with the Surrealists: their explicit straightaway orientation to the outside, the passion to scare the men on the streets and “to plunge a dagger in the heart of Paris”, as Salvador Dalí would say, made them to one of the loudest art-groups in history. Many had previously tried to play with the meanings of dreams and words, dive into the subconsciousness of the individual and society, and emerge with sketches and pictures. Almost every artist who lived at this time have produced works of surrealist style - from Marcel Duchamp to Pablo Picasso

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Why surrealism captured the world, and why pop-culture is overbrimmed with quotations from Dalí and Magritte is a mystery to most art critics. Obviously, not all the artists from this circle were revolutionaries- many replicated and patterned for years. But if you ask contingent passerby on the street about what the magic in art is according to them, they are most likely to recall soft melting pocket watches (The Persistence of Memoryby Salvador Dali) or rain of men in overcoats and bowler hats (Golcondaby Rene Magritte). Surrealism remains attractive because it seems to have frozen in time, incorporating vivid images, crazy verses and witty movies - it is a pleasure to glide through the pages of its history. It’s probably the most understandable art of the 20th century - the keys to its essence are all still within reach. And no matter how much sur there is in the surrealistic picture; the highlight is the realism, recognition of existing objects that are distorted and sometimes interchanged. It is always more pleasant to learn and find solutions, than to get lost and not understand.

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You could say that Surrealism as a cultural movement ended in the early 1940s: many artists then emigrated to America, and those who stayed in Europe ceased to actively participate in the artistic life - only Salvador Dali regularly reminded the public of himself through rumours about his own death. Immediately after the WWII, new advanced art directions were born, and surrealism turned into salon or office art. There were few pictures of the surrealists on the market (most of them were bought earlier), but the works of countless imitators were sold with great success. Surrealism attracted primarily by its deliberate mystery and irrationality. Surrealists “translated” those complex philosophical and psychoanalytic thoughts into a simple, easily accessible language of painting. Such pictures should be read with pleasure deciphering their meanings and names (one of the most famous pictures by Max Ernst is called The Head of a Man Watching the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly). Surrealism speculated on the "mystery of creativity" that the average man would expect from art. But when surrealistic paintings started to be sold in almost every gallery, interest to surrealism as a high, rather than commercial art, disappeared.

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Now it has revived again. Surrealists ideology is completely leftist: “Surrealistic Revolution” is the name of the magazine, published in the 1920s; its main themes are “Dream”, “City”, “Eroticism”, “Night”, “Desire”. The movement was tightly connected to Freud and psychoanalysis. Through all these factors we can see that surrealism played important role in the development of the art of the XX century. The works of the surrealists no longer seem strange, but I guess, it is because they formed the modern forms of perception and thinking. That is why man can say that “surrealistic revolution” has long been accomplished, and today we are reaping its fruits: surrealism is our everything. ”Desire” was one of the central themes for a surrealistic view of love, poetry, freedom. Desire is the inner voice of consciousness and the key to understanding a person. Modern society is tired of postmodern artistic concepts, of the art where ugliness can be easily excused and the presence of innovative artistic ideas is the only requirement. Surrealism is one of few schools in XX century art which reconciled modernity with artistic tradition. From the view point of its formal characteristics/qualities, the surrealistic picture is very conservative - it is a classical painting based on Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Caravaggio and so on. But it reflects the achievements of modern science and civilization. So, when today's society, willing to return to traditional values, but not to look misoneistic, surrealism serves as a kind of alibi.