Surrealist movement: 1920-1930

Surrealism was an artistic and literary movement, dedicated to expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and convention. Surrealism inherited an anti-rationalist sensibility from Dada, and was shaped by emerging theories on our perception of reality, especially Sigmund Freud's model of the subconscious.

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali was a key artist in the surrealist movement. Though chiefly remembered for his painterly output, in the course of his long career he successfully turned to sculpture, printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and, perhaps most famously, filmmaking in his collaborations with Luis Bunuel and Alfred Hitchcock. His paintings also evince a fascination for Classical and Renaissance art, clearly visible through his hyper-realistic style and religious symbolism of his later work.

Max Ernst 

Max Ernst was a German-born Surrealist who helped shape the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in America post-World War II. Armed with an academic understanding of Freud, Ernst often turned to his work-whether sculpture, painting, or collage-as a means of processing his experience in World War I and unpacking his feelings of dispossession in its wake.

1920-30

Prohibition (increased crime rate, alcoholic poisoning, rise of gangsters)
Aftermath of WW1 (increased military power, political tension etc)
Crime and murder (gang violence)
Threat of communism, fascism and socialism
Taxes began to benefit big business over the wage earners

German Politics

The democratic German republic, known as the Weimar Republic (1919-33), was affected by hyperinflation and other serious economic problems. Nationalist elements under a variety of movements, including the Nazi Party led by the Austrian Adolf Hitler, blamed Germany's "humiliating" status on the harshness of the post-war settlement, on faults of democracy, on Social Democrats and Communists, and on the Jews, whom it claimed possessed a financial stranglehold on Germany.

In Germany, like in the radically diminished Austria, the citizens, or at least the educated classes, remembered the pre-war years under autocratic rule as prosperous – the post-war years under democratic rule (due to the failings of Proportional Representation under the Weimar Government), however, as chaotic and economically disastrous. Social tensions after the world wide economic depression following the Stock Market Crash of 1929 aggravated the political situation. Anti-democratic parties in the Reichstag (parliament), both left-wing and right-wing, obstructed the parliamentary work, while different cabinets resorted to governing by the special emergency powers of the Weimar constitution, which enabled the President and the Cabinet, in concert, to effectively bypass the parliament.

Hitler was appointed Reichskanzler (Chancellor) on January 30, 1933.