This is a short introduction to the Dada and Surrealist art movements, with about 60 pages of text and 60 coloured illustrations of example artworks.

In both movements here art can be seen as a protest/revolutionary or social implement, with elements of the shocking, and non-conventional methods of production in common. Dada on the one hand is nihilistic, focusing on the absurd, the unthinking machine, and the primitive, among other themes. Surrealism on the other hand is less nihilistic (though nihilism plays a part in the philosophy of some Surrealists), however it generally focuses more on the portrayal of the idea, the pure item of thought, dreams, and the subconscious.

Dada was able to break away from more conventionally aesthetic types of art using the momentum of anger and frustration of the post-war group that formed the movement, and if anything this eased the ability of Surrealism to develop in this atmosphere away from mainstream movements, albeit along more philosophically disciplined lines than Dada. Some very strange and interesting characters were involved in the history of these movements, and it is anything but boring to read about what they were trying to do.

The history of the Surrealists is very complicated and involves quite a few different types of artists with very different views, and this fact is not hidden in this volume. Painting or the visual arts is not even the surrealists' stated focus, as many of them were more concerned with literature, film, or other forms of representation. For this reason, there is only a very concise view of Surrealism conveyed here, limited mainly to painting, and omitting many of the finer details of their thought. However what this book does well is to give a compressed and well-informed overview of the history of the Dada and Surrealist movements, what they stood for, and their revolutionary ideas. We learn how Dada led into the birth Surrealism, and the breaking away from conventional or Bourgeois society that had previously dominated art. Dada did not do this on its own, as Cubism, Impressionism etc. had already moved away from the precise figurative techniques of the past.

Given a piece of Surrealist and Dada art side-by-side, it would not always be possible to separate them, though some are much more obviously one than the other. This is in part due to their use of ambiguity, but also to the common methods, beliefs, and members of the groups. However what we see is a development of thought from the one to the other, with a shift of the overall trend towards something with more depth in its conception and inspiration, though it is often difficult for the viewer to understand the motives or particular ideas of the artist in either case.

Dada and Surrealism are interesting for their own merits and their peculiarity, but also for their later influence on the development of other movements. As a pocket-sized introduction this benefits from being very well illustrated, concise, and accessible, but for more detail on either of these movements there are more in-depth books available elsewhere. ( )