The influence of Surrealism stretched far beyond the confines of the movement, as individual artists made their own explorations of the irrational and the unconscious.

Artists from Pablo Picasso to Jackson Pollock drew strength from the Surrealist movement, harnessing its energies to produce work of an extraordinary intensity. One reason for this wider diffusion of Surrealist themes was a feeling that the unfolding horrors of twentieth-century history had shown the overwhelming power of the irrational. Hybrid figures, part-human and part-animal, began to appear in works of art made on both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps reflecting the anxieties of an age marked by dehumanising conflicts. New insights into the human propensity for brutality were provided by cultural and psychoanalytic theories, such as Sigmund Freud's ideas of sex and death as primal drives, and the archetypes identified by Carl Jung. The richer anthropological understanding of non-western cultures also helped to shape the way in which western culture was analysed and criticised.

There was a widespread sense of doubt about how to continue to make art - and, indeed, how to live - in this time of crisis. It seemed to be present in Picasso's constant reinvention of the figure, which suggested a loss of fixed identity. It was prominent in novels such as Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938). In different ways it was also evident in Pollock's violent figurative works and in Germaine Richier's insect-like creatures, whose encrusted surfaces suggest the eruption from within the individual of suppressed anxieties and liberating powers.

Text by Matthew Gale