Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel 1913

Dada filled its statements with incoherence, on the grounds that life itself is incoherent, and played havoc with art because art lovers had lost the idea of art. "It is using all his strength to bring idiotic everywhere" Tzara.

To Walter de la Mare

Arnold Bocklin, Isle of the Dead 1886

"When the familiar scene is suddenly strange

Or the well known is what we have yet to learn,

And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change;

By whom, and by what means, was this designed?

The whispered incantation which allows

Free passage to the phantom of the mind?

By the delicate invisible web you wove- 

The inexplicable mystery of sound." TS Eliot

Oceanic Art

Unusual three-layered Gnau culture shell cache-sex from the Torricelli Mountains in the West Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. The fascination of surrealists with Oceanic art derived from nostalgia for a lost world: its signs suggested the possibility of a life in paradise.

Innocence

Negro Attacked by a Jaguar, Henri Rousseau 1910

unknown