It was adopted by the Symbolists in the late 19th century, and revived by the Surrealists after World War I.

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So instead she has chosen to recount the soap-operatic lives of the surrealists, of their promiscuous, scandalous, perfidious and self-obsessed goings-on, all in the name of revolution.

ECONOMIST: 20th-century art

As a teenager, he was taken up by the European surrealists who had congregated in Mexico city, very much as an expatriate clique that did not bother to learn Spanish.

ECONOMIST: 20th-century art

In Paris the rudiments of what became pop art were there for the taking: the Dadaists had rejected tradition, Picasso had experimented with collage, the Surrealists pushed imagination to its limits.

ECONOMIST: Obituary

Five years later, the young man secured a banking job in Paris, where he and his wife, who had considerable artistic flair, met leading surrealists such as Max Ernst and Salvador Dali.

ECONOMIST: The

In homage to the Surrealists, Louboutin once created a pair of pumps with a hydrodynamic shape, a bulging eye above the pinkie toe, and tessellating rows of black and gold scales the foot as a fish.

NEWYORKER: Sole Mate

If having gears is a bit retro, the look of a Mille watch is anything but: "I wanted to break with the past, the way that the surrealists and the cubists did with art, " says Mille.

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