The chart is an interactive lineage map. Surrealism sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.

For Surrealism (1924 – 1960s), it traces two movements that shaped it, all well-established links: Dada and Metaphysical painting; it runs alongside one parallel movement, a well-established link: Magic realism; it fans out to 14 movements it went on to influence, all well-established links: Abstract expressionism, Action painting, Art Informel, Assemblage, Dau-al-Set, Fantastic realism, Les Automatistes, Letterism, Massurrealism and Neo-romanticism, and four more.