c. 1924–1950

Surrealism

After the First World War, young poets and painters in Paris distrusted the reason that had led Europe into catastrophe. They sought a higher reality in dreams, chance and the unconscious. Surrealism became an international movement and still shapes art, film, fashion and advertising today.

A manifesto for the dream

In October 1924 a slim book titled Manifeste du surréalisme appeared in Paris. Its author, the 28-year-old poet and former medical student André Breton, defined a new word in it: Surrealism was “pure psychic automatism”, thought “in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern”.

Guillaume Apollinaire had coined the term back in 1917. Breton and his friends, many of them from the Paris Dada circle, turned it into a programme. They founded a “Bureau of Surrealist Research” and the journal La Révolution surréaliste. Their most important authority was Sigmund Freud, whose Interpretation of Dreams showed that a second, hidden reality lies behind conscious thought.

Chance as method

The Surrealists invented techniques to switch off the control of the intellect. In automatic writing and drawing, the hand was meant to move faster than thought. In the game of “cadavre exquis”, the exquisite corpse, several people drew or wrote in turn on a folded sheet without seeing what the others had contributed.

Max Ernst, who came from Brühl near Cologne and had been one of the founders of the Cologne Dada group, discovered frottage in 1925. He laid paper on floorboards and rubbed over it with a pencil until forests, birds and fabulous creatures emerged from the grain. Joan Miró painted pictures full of floating signs and figures, which by his own account he often developed from hallucinations brought on by hunger. His Harlequin’s Carnival is a teeming throng of fantastic creatures, ladders and musical instruments.

Painted dreams

Alongside automatism, a second, seemingly quite different direction developed: pictures in an Old Master technique of fine painting that show the impossible with photographic precision. The model was the Italian Giorgio de Chirico, with his deserted squares and long shadows.

The Frenchman Yves Tanguy, who had gone to sea as a young man, joined the Surrealists in 1925. He painted vast grey plains where ground and sky merge, with enigmatic forms resembling bones, stones or tools casting long shadows. In 1939 he moved to the United States, where he lived until his death in 1955.

The Belgian René Magritte painted a pipe and wrote beneath it: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, this is not a pipe. The picture, titled The Treachery of Images, asks what an image actually is. The Catalan Salvador Dalí joined the group in 1929 and developed his “paranoiac-critical method”. The Persistence of Memory, with its melting watches, became one of the best-known pictures of the 20th century. With Luis Buñuel he made the film Un Chien Andalou in 1929, whose scene with the razor and the eye still shocks today.

Things that should not exist

The Surrealists collected found objects at flea markets and turned them into “Surrealist objects”. The most famous was made in 1936 by the young Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim: a cup, saucer and spoon covered in gazelle fur. Breton gave it the title Breakfast in Fur. The Museum of Modern Art acquired it that same year.

Exhibitions as staging

The Surrealists turned exhibitions into experiences. At the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, Dalí gave a lecture in a diving suit and almost suffocated in it. In 1938 Marcel Duchamp hung 1,200 coal sacks from the ceiling of a Paris gallery, and visitors were handed torches.

Women in Surrealism

For a long time, women in Surrealism were regarded mainly as muses and models. In fact, numerous women artists belonged to the movement: the photographers Lee Miller, Dora Maar and Claude Cahun, the painters Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini and Remedios Varo. Carrington and Varo went to Mexico, where they developed a distinctive, fairy-tale body of work. Breton celebrated Frida Kahlo as a Surrealist, but she rejected the label: she had never painted dreams, she said, but her own reality.

Politics, quarrels and exile

Breton wanted to combine the revolution of the mind with political revolution. Several Surrealists joined the Communist Party, and there were splits and expulsions. Dalí, too, came into conflict with the group, over his attitude to Hitler and his commercial instincts. Breton mocked him with the anagram “Avida Dollars”.

During the Second World War, many Surrealists fled the Nazis, often via Marseille, where the American Varian Fry organised escape routes. In New York they met young American painters. The automatic painting process became an important impulse for artists such as Jackson Pollock. Max Ernst married the collector Peggy Guggenheim and later the painter Dorothea Tanning.

Why it still matters

Breton died in 1966, and three years later the Paris group dissolved. Yet the word “surreal” has long since entered everyday language. Advertising, music videos and film still draw on Surrealist imagery. For the manifesto’s centenary in 2024, museums in Brussels, Paris and other cities devoted major exhibitions to the movement, which also put its international breadth and the role of women artists centre stage.