Surrealism is an artistic movement that officially proclaimed its existence with the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. The movement owes its name to French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who in 1917 uses the term 'sur-réaliste' to describe a form of expression that surpasses realism. Originally, surrealism was essentially a literary phenomenon: the proving-ground of the surrealists, with the French writer and poet André Breton at the fore, consisted in hitherto unheard of language experiments.