surrealistadj.n.

1918 ‘G. Apollinaire’ Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1946) 9 Pour caractériser mon drame, je me suis servi d'un néologisme qu'on me pardonnera car cela m'arrive rarement et j'ai forgé l'adjectif surréaliste qui..définit..une tendance de l'art.]

1918 Egoist Apr. 56/1 Surréaliste is the denomination M. Guillaume Apollinaire..has attached to his play, Les Mamelles de Tirésias... Thus he must be credited with the foundation of a successor to the Unanimiste and Simultanéiste schools.

1925 R. Fry Let. 1 May (1972) II. 567 I went yesterday.. to see the works of the two great Sure-realist [sic] painters Miro and Masson.

1936 D. Gascoyne Man's Life is this Meat (verso title page) With the exception of Nos. 1–6, the poems in this collection are Surrealist poems.

1958 Sunday Times 26 Jan. 13/4 Behind the Empress, entirely dominating her..was the surrealist figure of Rasputin.

1964 M. McLuhan Understanding Media (1967) ii. xvii. 180 The elders of the tribe..had never noticed that the ordinary newspaper was as frantic as a surrealist art exhibition.

1978 K. J. Dover Greek Homosexuality iii. 133 ‘Surrealist’ elements are very rare in Greek art, but an exception is the ‘phallos-bird’ which has the legs, body and wings of a bird but a neck and head in the form of a curved penis.

1925 R. Fry Let. 11 Nov. (1972) II. 584 That beastly young Surrealist Masson.

1929 A. Huxley Do what you Will i. 167 The Surréalistes..have presented us..with the dream-like incoherencies which creative thought uses as its raw material.

1934 Sun (Baltimore) 25 Oct. 12/2 The Senator is the surrealist of politics—for surely he is above reality—or below it or to the right or left of it.

1940 L. Trilling in Kenyon Rev. Spring 157 The Surrealists have, with a certain inconsistency, taken from Freud a kind of scientific sanction for their program.

1942 E. Waugh Put out More Flags i. 39 I should have thought an air raid was just the thing for a surréaliste..limbs and things lying about in odd places.

1930 Nation 6 Dec. 326/1 The sheer absurdity of the characters' behaviour produced a sort of surréalistic poetry.

1959 M. Pugh Chancer 36 Your eyes are so bloody bloodshot that they look like surrealistic marbles.

1980 Notes & Queries Dec. 505/2 As usual in De Quincey's surrealistic dream prose, several ideas coalesce in a single image.

1934 Webster's New Internat. Dict. Eng. Lang. Surrealistically.

1958 Spectator 20 June 813/1 He produced Hauptmann's Hannele surrealistically as early as 1895.

1979 United States 1980–1 (Penguin Travel Guides) 129 You might hear along the way that Cleveland isn't the town it used to be, but surrealistically speaking, what place is?