Surrealism, Dada & Abstract

Dada arose during the First World War as a protest against the logic that had led to the slaughter, mocking art itself with chance, collage and provocation; Jean Arp and Man Ray were among its pioneers. Surrealism, launched in Paris in 1924, drew on dreams and the unconscious to create disturbing, irrational images, as in the work of Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí.

Abstraction took other routes: Hilma af Klint painted spiritual abstract works from 1906, although they were not shown publicly until the 1980s, and Piet Mondrian reduced painting to straight lines and primary colours. After 1945, in New York, Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock led Abstract Expressionism, in which the act of painting itself became the subject.