what exactly is it ?

Of course, I want to be clear. I find "surrealism," at least in my present understanding rather repellant. That was what motivated me to start asking questions about it in the first place. I find the remaining fasicination that Latin peoples feel for Jim Morrison and the Doors, Pink Floyd and 1950s Americana utterly repugnant. Thankfully these things are beginning to fade at long last. The Grease soundtrack is no longer played in discos here.

I don't understand places and people with flat roof-tops, but I try to. I don't understand why mediteraneans and Mexicans, young and old, see fit to make out, kissing heavily in public places, either. Seems decidely indiscreet to me. I've more than once crossed a city park here and disturbed a not-at-all attractive pair of office workers enjoying a triste on a bench. That's never happened to me in the US.

It is easy for me, though, to think of early Russian abstraction, Suprematism and such as precursors of Surrealism. Fauvism, likewise, is not so much scientistic as it is expressionistic, but expressing what ? Liberation ? I'd argue it was all a bit more emotional than expository.

If we pick up anything from the early 20th century though, it seems decidely more italian in all of the nasty and pedantic political posturing. And that's where I'll pick up next time... to discuss Abstract Expressionism and the real split with "thinking."