ABSTRACT
Dada had arguably played a vital role in releasing the artist from the past. It had introduced a caesura into the continuity of art; it had challenged orthodoxy in taste, in social habit and in moral assumptions; it had questioned conventional wisdom and defied inflexible criticism. In identifying their predecessors the surrealists were highly selective. The Romantics in England could regard themselves as part of a tradition which went back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The connection between surrealism and romanticism is a close one but the distinctions are equally real and revealing. While Andre Breton conceded the relationship he wisely insisted that surrealism was only the ‘prehensile tail’ of romanticism. The romantic tended to see the imagination as opening up a path to the great abstractions; to God, Beauty, Truth. The surrealist saw it as liberating man from such abstractions as it freed him from a restrictive logic.
