THE artist Conroy Ronald Maddox was the last survivor of the prewar phase of the Surrealist movement in Britain.

Conroy Ronald Maddox was born in 1912 in Ledbury, Herefordshire. His father, Albert George, helped to run the long-established family agricultural seed business. Maddox’s education began in a ramshackle elementary school run by two sisters, “the Miss Wades”, where he won an art prize, and continued at the local grammar school. The 1929 Depression forced Albert George to move, with his wife, Eleanor, and his two children, to Chipping Norton, to run the Blue Boar hotel. Maddox converted a stable into a studio and spent his free time painting landscapes.

After a couple of years, the family moved to the Birmingham suburb of Erdington, where Albert George started a wine and spirit importing company. Maddox, in his early twenties, found work as a clerical assistant in a solicitor’s office, then as an assistant in an analytical laboratory, as a designer in a car-mascot casting firm and, by 1935, as a designer of trade-fair exhibition stands.

It was at this time that he discovered Surrealism by chance, while leafing through art books in Birmingham City Library. “It was a turning point, one of those doors that suddenly swings open to reveal a totally new direction,” he said later, and marked his lifelong commitment to Surrealism.

He found himself in an artistic vacuum until the late 1930s, when he met two kindred spirits: the painter John Melville and his brother Robert, a writer and art critic. With them he joined “the Surrealist Group in England” in 1938 and took part in the exhibition Living Art in England at the London Gallery, the nerve centre of Surrealism in Britain.

In search of Surrealism at its source he paid several visits to Paris, where he met and worked with leading Surrealists. His last visit in 1939 was cut short: “Seeing all the sandbags going up around the monuments, I decided it was time to get out.” He caught the last boat but one back to England before the outbreak of war, and found a “reserved” profession with the Birmingham firm Turner Brothers, manufacturers of aircraft parts.

The war in no way diminished Maddox’s artistic enthusiasm and in 1940 he played a key role in the momentous exhibition, Surrealism Today, at the Zwemmer Gallery, in London. He designed a window display in which a child’s cot with rumpled sheets was transfixed by a dagger. Passers-by were shocked and the display was dismantled. Later Scotland Yard seized his paintings on suspicion of their containing coded messages to the enemy.

That his work was arousing controversy made Maddox certain that he was on the right track as a Surrealist. Not only was his output at its height during the war, but it was also at its most subversive. One of his striking works was the Onanistic Typewriter (1940), which has vertical nails on each of its keys. The paper coming out of the roller reveals a streak of blood. Maddox explained that his aim was a “disturbance and demoralisation against the commonplace and rational ”. He also developed the semi-automatic process of écrémage — it involved skimming paper across water-dotted oil paint — as a contribution to the cache of unconscious Surrealist techniques such as coulage, fumage, grattage and decalcomania. In 1943 Maddox met Wilhelmina Nancy Burton, whom he married in 1948, by which time the couple had had two children.

As a Surrealist, Maddox was on a mission against all that limited the freedom of the mind. For him, religion and clerics were at the top of his hitlist: “No longer do I allow myself to see religion as anything but a brutal insignia of a slow moral decomposition,” he once wrote.

Admittedly, much of his anti-religious work amounted to irreverent jokes. He once staged a series of photographs in which he seduced a young woman dressed as a nun.

Maddox’s search for mental liberation took many paths. He explored madness, humour, the defamiliarisation of the commonplace. “Surrealism,” he said, “is a difficult outlook to propose, but it offers a way out of the type of society in which we live.” He clung to the belief that “society will change one day and we will escape from our incessant monotony, from this kind of life where we don’t link our dreams to reality”.

And he was indefatigable. Apart from organising and participating in hundreds of exhibitions, he also championed the theoretical purism of the movement.

When the Hayward Gallery put on the Dada and Surrealism Reviewed exhibition in 1978, he was furious that, as he saw it, Surrealism had not been properly represented, and promptly mounted a corrective counter-exhibition, Surrealism Unlimited.

Maddox never relinquished his vision of a transformed world but he realised that he might not live to see its vindication: “The work of Surrealism can never be conclusive,” he wrote. “It is more of an exploration, a journey, and a struggle. Paintings are signposts. To find where they lead I will have to carry on following them despite the continual obstacles that block the way. For that reason I will remain on my quest for surrealism until my last breath.”

Maddox’s wife and son predeceased him; he is survived by his daughter.

Conroy Maddox, Surrealist artist, was born on December 27, 1912. He died on January 14, 2005, aged 92.