How did Surrealists challenge rationalism in European culture?

Surrealists challenged the rationalism of European culture, which they blamed for the devastation of World War I, by seeking to bypass social conventions and logical thought processes in favor of the subconscious. Influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud, they viewed the unconscious as the true wellspring of imagination and aimed to reunite it with the conscious world to create an "absolute reality," or "surreality".12

To dismantle rationalist constraints, Surrealists employed several innovative techniques:

• Automatic Writing and Drawing: These methods involved the spontaneous, uncensored recording of images or text to allow the unconscious to erupt into the artist's consciousness.123
• Exquisite Corpse: A collaborative game where artists contributed parts of a composition without seeing the previous contributions, resulting in collective, non-logical works.12
• Juxtaposition: Artists placed recognizable objects in paradoxical or shocking contexts—such as a human eye appearing on a slice of ham—to force viewers to acknowledge the "sense" of the irrational.2
• Found Objects: By assembling familiar items in unfamiliar ways, such as a fur-covered cup, they disrupted conventional perceptions of everyday reality.2