Surrealism was supposed to be more than a style of painting and Maddox and the Melvilles courted controversy to bring their disruptive aesthetic and political influence to bear across the city - using the resources of the relatively forward-looking Birmingham Group to sidestep the established Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts consensus that still reigned at Birmingham School of Art and the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, in favour of more radical and subversive artistic movements. John Melville had six of his paintings banned from an exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1938 as being "detremental (sic) to public sensibility", and in 1939 Robert Melville challenged Professor Thomas Bodkin of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in public debate, arguing that "Picasso's work invalidates conventional ways of thinking, for it is the work of a free man, he has enlarged the idea of reality".