ABSTRACT
Surrealism, a schismatic outgrowth of Dadaism, was announced in Paris in 1924. Many of the more important Surrealist artists had been Dadaists, notably Arp, Ernst and Man Ray. Abstract art, it should be clearly understood, was no more a part of the Surrealist program than it had been of Dada. Surrealist painting may be divided into two kinds. The first might be called automatic pictures; the second dream pictures. From a formal, plastic point of view the first kind of Surrealist painting in its abstract aspects belongs not to the tradition of Cezanne and Cubism but to that which comes down from Gauguin and Redon through Matisse to Kandin-sky and Klee of the Blue Rider group in Munich. Of all the Surrealists Miro has the most plastic humor but at times he can drop his clowning and paint imposing compositions, unsurpassed among recent paintings in elegance of line and color.
