Q 01/05

Who coined the word 'surrealism' in 1917?

A) Stéphane Mallarmé

B) Guillaume Apollinaire

C) Blaise Cendrars

D) Jean Cocteau

Answer · why

B) Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire. He never saw what became of his word: weakened by a war wound, he died of Spanish flu in 1918, six years before André Breton to...

Q 02/05

Which earlier movement, born of disgust at World War I, most directly influenced Surrealism?

A) Cubism

B) Futurism

C) Impressionism

D) Dada

Answer · why

D) Dada

Dada. Breton and his friends threw themselves into Dada's stunts after the war, then broke away, wanting to build something from the unconscious where...

Q 03/05

In the word Surrealism, what does the French prefix 'sur' mean?

A) Against

B) Beyond

C) Without

D) Before

Answer · why

B) Beyond

Beyond. The aim, in the words of the 1924 manifesto, was to join dream and waking life in 'an absolute reality, a surreality'.

Q 04/05

Breton's 1924 manifesto defined surrealism as pure what?

A) Dream painting

B) Political revolt

C) Poetic collage

D) Psychic automatism

Answer · why

D) Psychic automatism

Psychic automatism. Painters took the idea up as well: André Masson let his pen move across the paper with no plan at all, drawing straight from the u...

Q 05/05

Before founding Surrealism, André Breton had trained in what field?

A) Law and philosophy

B) Medicine and psychiatry

C) Architecture

D) Catholic theology

Answer · why

B) Medicine and psychiatry

Medicine and psychiatry. Posted to a wartime military hospital in Nantes, he met the young Jacques Vaché, whose scorn for art and convention marked hi...