began in Paris in the 1920s, born out of Dadaism, out of social disillusion in Europe following World War I, and out of the popularity of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Primarily a literary movement in the beginning, its founding father was André Breton, who issued his First Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. Basically a search for a higher reality through the tapping of the subconscious, repressed desire and the imagery of dreams, Surrealism sought to free the psyche from its enslavement to logic and to aesthetic and moral concerns. Painters officially came to the Surrealist Movement in 1925 when Pablo Picasso, André Masson, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico and others exhibited together at a Paris gallery.

Jean Varda was a well-known artist who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito during the "Bohemian period" of the 1950s. One of his art designs is displayed in a glass mosaic at the Union City BART Station. A tribute to Varda also exists in the form of a 16 x 20-foot mosaic tile mural at the site of the Sausalito Art Festival’s "Artist Gallery." The mosaic was raised in 1988 through the efforts of Friends of the Festival, the Sausalito Chamber of Commerce and the Sausalito Rotary Club.

Austrian-born Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959) began his career under the influence of Impressionism. By 1935 he was affiliated with the Surrealists in Paris. In 1939, at the invitation of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, he emigrated to Mexico and organized the International Exposition of Surrealism with André Breton. After nearly a decade in Mexico City, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. For three years he traveled between California, Mexico, and New York, returning to Paris in 1951, and then moving back to Mexico in 1953, where he remained until his death.

André Breton (1896-1966) was a French poet, critic, and a leader of the Surrealist movement. His Manifestos of Surrealism (1924, 1930, 1942) are the most important theoretical statements of the movement. 

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish painter and sculptor, was an originator, with Georges Braque, of Cubism, and probably the most famous and prolific painter of the twentieth century, creating more than 20,000 works of art during his lifetime. 

The French painter Georges Braque (1882-1963) was another major painter of the twentieth century. His partnership with Picasso from 1908-1914 generated Cubism in Paris.

Max Ernst (1891-1976), German painter-poet, was a member of the Dada movement and a founder of Surrealism. In 1925, he showed his work at the First Surrealist Painting Exhibition in Paris.

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) French-American Dadaist/Surrealist/Cubist. He is particularly well known for his theory that art exists as "idea," and for his series of "ready-mades" based on everyday or "found" objects. He proposed that an object is art if an artist says it is. His Dadaist ideas led to Pop Art in the late 1950s and 1960s, and later Conceptual Art. 

Jean Arp (1887-1966), German-French sculptor, painter and poet, was a dominant figure within Dada, Surrealism and abstract art. He is known best for his reliefs and sculptures. Although he was identified with other Parisian artists who believed in abstract forms, he never formally broke with the Surrealists.

Joan Miró (1893-1983) was a Spanish painter who moved to Paris in the 1920s and joined the Surrealist Movement. In 1929 he introduced Salvador Dali to the Surrealists.

Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) participated in the Surrealist Movement from 1930 to 1935. Primarily known for his sculpture, he also produced drawings and paintings. His dramatically elongated, emaciated bronze figures are often associated with Existentialism, possibly due to his close friendship with French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. 

Augustin Lesage (1876-1954), a miner in the Pas-de-Calais, heard voices ordering him to paint when he was thirty-five years old. He made drawings of a mediumistic nature. His first picture took him two years to complete (1912-13). He claimed, "I never knew what the picture would be like, no matter what stage I was at. A picture is made detail by detail without my ever having a mental view of what was coming. My guides told me: ‘Don’t try to know what you are doing.’ I give myself up to their influence. I draw the figures they impose on me."

Joseph Crépin (1875-1948) began painting at age sixty-three. In 1939, Crépin (friend and disciple of Lesage) heard voices telling him that he would have to finish 300 paintings before WWII would end. He obeyed and started painting. He finished his 300th work on May 7, 1945.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was an original member of the Beat Generation, a group of poets and writers in North Beach in San Francisco, in the 1950s. With Peter Martin he began a magazine called City Lights and in 1953 they opened the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.