The year 1915 marked the beginning of two radically influencial aesthetic movements in Twentieth Century art. The origins of both the Surrealist aesthetic and that of the Dadaists can be traced back to the same point in this century. Set in the context of Europe after the first World War, these two artistic movements focused their intellectual and creative attention on fantasy and the construction of the unreal. Emerging out of the destruction and choas of the early Twentieth Century, the artists within these two aesthetic camps viewed abstraction as the key to authentic expression because it revealed the pure, subconscious, dream-like realm of the human condition. The aesthetics of both the Dadaists and the Surrealists concentrated on the creation of art, and the expression of an aesthetic, which lingered above the real.

Philosophically, Surrealism concentrated on the associative nature of thought, and the importance of its free, unmitigated expression. Dada and Surrealist aesthetics stressed the essence of pure thought. Consequently, their art expressed an attraction to play within the realm of the subconscious. Ideally, the exposition of this playful thought was unconstrained by reason and societal conditions. Thought was believed to be more free and more real than any external method of communication. Thus the Surrealist aesthetic was an exploration into the free reality of the dreamscape.