Beginning Monday, the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art will give the first exhibition of Surrealiste Art to be shown in Boston or Cambridge. The show will consist of paintings, drawings, and photographs, and will continue through March 6.

Begun in 1924, Surrealisme sprang from a scientific background. Of the three founders of the movement, Breton, Aragon, and Soupault, the first two were physicians and neurological specialists.

These men were interested in the psychic, the subconscious, and the unconscious, and in the work of Freud and Jastrow, as well as in the metaphysics of the British spiritualists.

Surrealisme Explained

In explaining the movement, Mrs. P. M. Herzog writes in the catalogue of the exhibition:

"The Surrealiste artist is interested in externalizing the experiences that take place in the remote spaces of consciousness. He attempts to reclaim for painting the regions that lie beyond logic. He is experimenting at the very edge of the expressable and the communicable. Surrealisme has the triple lure of the unexpected, the censurable and the remote; and at its best it is embarrassingly comprehensible."

Works of the following artists will be shown: Pierre Roy, Chirico, Picasso, Coetean, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Masson, Mire, and Viollier.

The show is the first to be given under the direction of the recently elected student executive board.