Early on, influential art historians and critics identified the Halmstad Group as an interesting Swedish example of international surrealism. Others made fun of a supposedly odd combination of international avant-garde trends and manifestations of such an off-centre locality as the city of Halmstad. Individually the artists were both identified and denied as surrealists, depending on how strictly they were compared to preconceived notions about international surrealism. The artists themselves tried to balance this with independence in order to claim a type of surrealism of their own.