Designed By Dali; How surrealism inspired fashion and home decor.(Salvador Dali)

Byline: Ginanne Brownell

As an artistic movement, surrealism has never been easy to define. French author Andre Breton described it in his 1924 "Surrealist Manifesto" as a "pure psychic automatism [intended] to express the real process of thought." Belgian surrealist painter Paul Delvaux called it "a reawakening of the poetic idea in art." Indeed, as practiced by the likes of Salvador Dali, Man Ray and Jean Cocteau, surrealist art gave concrete form to unconscious, dreamlike associations. Perhaps ultimately it can best be defined the way one U.S. Supreme Court justice once explained pornography: we know it when we see it.

Now London's Victoria and ...