This stimulating introductory survey traces the origins and development of these two roughly parallel revolutionary twentieth-century art movements, exploring the full range of artistic production, including film, photography, collage, painting, graphics and object making.

Matthew Gale skilfully places the art within a context of ideas ranging from the disillusionment and questioning of accepted values that resulted from the senseless destruction of World War I to the use of the creative forces of the unconscious to undermine convention.