SURREALISM & POLITICS By Ara H. Merjian “SURREALISM PERSISTS IN THE POPULAR imagination as a predominantly visual phenomenon. Almost a century after its founding, the name remains virtually interchangeable with the work of its most prominent painterly exponents, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte chief among them. Nearly as familiar as their imagery is the movement’s fixation on Freudian psychology: used not as a therapeutic tool, but as a thread to plumb the untapped depths of the unconscious, its stifled drives and desires.”