essays on surrealism

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

The Jewish Angel

Giorgio de Chirico

Gala Éluard

Photo: This Is the Color of My Dreams

Nude Standing by the Sea

Pablo Picasso

The Accommodations of Desire

Salvador Dalí

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box)

Marcel Duchamp

Hans Bellmer

The Barbarians

Self-Portrait

Leonora Carrington

The Satin Tuning Fork

Yves Tanguy

Being With (Être Avec)

Roberto Matta

The Great Sirens

Paul Delvaux

The Eternally Obvious

René Magritte

James Voorhies Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early ’20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious. Officially consecrated in Paris in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by the poet and critic André Breton (1896–1966), Surrealism became an international intellectual and political movement. Breton, a trained psychiatrist, along with French poets Louis Aragon (1897–1982), Paul Éluard (1895–1952), and Philippe Soupault (1897–1990), were influenced by the psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the political ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883). Using Freudian methods of free association, their poetry and prose drew upon the private world of the mind, traditionally restricted by reason and societal limitations, to produce surprising, unexpected imagery. The cerebral and irrational tenets of Surrealism find their ancestry in the clever and whimsical disregard for tradition fostered by Dadaism a decade earlier.

Surrealist poets were at first reluctant to align themselves with visual artists because they believed that the laborious processes of painting, drawing, and sculpting were at odds with the spontaneity of uninhibited expression. However, Breton and his followers did not altogether ignore visual art. They held high regard for artists such as Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Francis Picabia (1879–1953), and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) because of the analytic, provocative, and erotic qualities of their work. For example, Duchamp’s conceptually complex Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23; Philadelphia Museum of Art) was admired by Surrealists and is considered a precursor to the movement because of its bizarrely juxtaposed and erotically charged objects. In 1925, Breton substantiated his support for visual expression by reproducing the works of artists such as Picasso in the journal La Révolution Surréaliste and organizing exhibitions that prominently featured painting and drawing.

The visual artists who first worked with Surrealist techniques and imagery were the German Max Ernst (1891–1976), the Frenchman André Masson (1896–1987), the Spaniard Joan Miró (1893–1983), and the American Man Ray (1890–1976). Masson’s free-association drawings of 1924 are curving, continuous lines out of which emerge strange and symbolic figures that are products of an uninhibited mind. Breton considered Masson’s drawings akin to his automatism in poetry. Miró’s  Potato ( 1999.363.50 ) of 1928 uses comparable organic forms and twisted lines to create an imaginative world of fantastic figures.

About 1937, Ernst, a former Dadaist, began to experiment with two unpredictable processes called decalcomania and grattage. Decalcomania is the technique of pressing a sheet of paper onto a painted surface and peeling it off again, while grattage is the process of scraping pigment across a canvas that is laid on top of a textured surface. Ernst used a combination of these techniques in The Barbarians ( 1999.363.21 ) of 1937, a composition of sparring anthropomorphic figures in a deserted postapocalyptic landscape that exemplifies the recurrent themes of violence and annihilation found in Surrealist art.

In 1927, the Belgian artist René Magritte (1898–1967) moved from Brussels to Paris and became a leading figure in the visual Surrealist movement. Influenced by de Chirico’s paintings between 1910 and 1920, Magritte painted erotically explicit objects juxtaposed in dreamlike surroundings. His work defined a split between the visual automatism fostered by Masson and Miró (and originally with words by Breton) and a new form of illusionistic Surrealism practiced by the Spaniard Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), the Belgian Paul Delvaux (1897–1994), and the French-American Yves Tanguy (1900–1955). In The Eternally Obvious ( 2002.456.12a–e ), Magritte’s artistic display of a dismembered female nude is emotionally shocking. In The Satin Tuning Fork ( 1999.363.80 ), Tanguy filled an illusionistic space with unidentifiable, yet sexually suggestive, objects rendered with great precision. The painting’s mysterious lighting, long shadows, deep receding space, and sense of loneliness also recall the ominous settings of de Chirico.

In 1929, Dalí moved from Spain to Paris and made his first Surrealist paintings. He expanded on Magritte’s dream imagery with his own erotically charged, hallucinatory visions. In The Accommodations of Desire ( 1999.363.16 ) of 1929, Dalí employed Freudian symbols, such as ants, to symbolize his overwhelming sexual desire. In 1930, Breton praised Dalí’s representations of the unconscious in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism . They became the main collaborators on the review Minotaure (1933–39), a primarily Surrealist-oriented publication founded in Paris.

The organized Surrealist movement in Europe dissolved with the onset of World War II. Breton, Dalí, Ernst, Masson, and others, including the Chilean artist Matta (1911–2002), who first joined the Surrealists in 1937, left Europe for New York. The movement found renewal in the United States at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century, and the Julien Levy Gallery. In 1940, Breton organized the fourth International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City, which included the Mexicans Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) and Diego Rivera (1886–1957) (although neither artist officially joined the movement). Surrealism’s surprising imagery, deep symbolism, refined painting techniques, and disdain for convention influenced later generations of artists, including Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) and Arshile Gorky (1904–1948), the latter whose work formed a continuum between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism .

Voorhies, James. “Surrealism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/surr/hd_surr.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Ades, Dawn. Dada and Surrealism Reviewed . London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978.

Alexandrian, Sarane. Surrealist Art . New York: Thames & Hudson, 1985.

Brandon, Ruth. Surreal Lives: The Surrealists, 1917–1945 . London: Macmillan, 1999.

Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism . Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969.

Krauss, Rosalind E., and Jane Livingston. L'Amour Fou: Photography & Surrealism . Exhibition catalogue. New York: Abbeville, 1985.

Mundy, Jennifer, ed. Surrealism: Desire Unbound . Exhibition catalogue. London: Tate Publishing, 2001.

Rubin, William S. Dada and Surrealist Art . New York: Abrams, 1968.

Additional Essays by James Voorhies

• Voorhies, James. “ Europe and the Age of Exploration .” (October 2002)
• Voorhies, James. “ Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) .” (October 2004)
• Voorhies, James. “ Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) and the Spanish Enlightenment .” (October 2003)
• Voorhies, James. “ Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) .” (October 2004)
• Voorhies, James. “ School of Paris .” (October 2004)
• Voorhies, James. “ Art of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in Naples .” (October 2003)
• Voorhies, James. “ Elizabethan England .” (October 2002)
• Voorhies, James. “ Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and His Circle .” (October 2004)
• Voorhies, James. “ Fontainebleau .” (October 2002)
• Voorhies, James. “ Post-Impressionism .” (October 2004)
• Voorhies, James. “ Domestic Art in Renaissance Italy .” (October 2002)

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Summary of Surrealism

The Surrealists sought to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock the power of the imagination. Disdaining rationalism and literary realism, and powerfully influenced by psychoanalysis, the Surrealists believed the rational mind repressed the power of the imagination, weighing it down with taboos. Influenced also by Karl Marx , they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution. Their emphasis on the power of personal imagination puts them in the tradition of Romanticism , but unlike their forebears, they believed that revelations could be found on the street and in everyday life. The Surrealist impulse to tap the unconscious mind, and their interests in myth and primitivism, went on to shape many later movements, and the style remains influential to this today.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• André Breton defined Surrealism as "psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought." What Breton is proposing is that artists bypass reason and rationality by accessing their unconscious mind. In practice, these techniques became known as automatism or automatic writing, which allowed artists to forgo conscious thought and embrace chance when creating art.
• The work of Sigmund Freud was profoundly influential for Surrealists, particularly his book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Freud legitimized the importance of dreams and the unconscious as valid revelations of human emotion and desires; his exposure of the complex and repressed inner worlds of sexuality, desire, and violence provided a theoretical basis for much of Surrealism.
• Surrealist imagery is probably the most recognizable element of the movement, yet it is also the most elusive to categorize and define. Each artist relied on their own recurring motifs arisen through their dreams or/and unconscious mind. At its basic, the imagery is outlandish, perplexing, and even uncanny, as it is meant to jolt the viewer out of their comforting assumptions. Nature, however, is the most frequent imagery: Max Ernst was obsessed with birds and had a bird alter ego, Salvador Dalí's works often include ants or eggs, and Joan Miró relied strongly on vague biomorphic imagery.

Key Artists

Overview of Surrealism

Building upon the anti-rationalism of Dada, the Surrealists made powerful art and offered a new direction for exploration, as Max Ernst said: "creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition."

Artworks and Artists of Surrealism

Carnival of Harlequin (1924-25)

Artist: Joan Miró

Miró created elaborate, fantastical spaces in his paintings that are an excellent example of Surrealism in their reliance on dream-like imagery and their use of biomorphism. Biomorphic shapes are those that resemble organic beings but that are hard to identify as any specific thing; the shapes seem to self-generate, morph, and dance on the canvas. While there is the suggestion of a believable three-dimensional space in Carnaval d'Arlequin , the playful shapes are arranged with an all-over quality that is common to many of Miró's works during his Surrealist period, and that would eventually lead him to further abstraction. Miró was especially known for his use of automatic writing techniques in the creation of his works, particularly doodling or automatic drawing, which is how he began many of his canvases. He is best known for his works such as this that depict chaotic yet lighthearted interior scenes, taking his influence from Dutch 17 th -century interiors.

Oil on canvas - Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

The Human Condition (1933)

Artist: René Magritte

The iconic and enigmatic René Magritte's works tend to be intellectual, often dealing with visual puns and the relation between the representation of something and the thing itself. In The Human Condition a canvas sits on an easel before a curtained window and reproduces exactly the scene outside the window that would be behind the canvas, thus the image on the easel in a sense becomes the scene, not just a reproduction of the landscape. There is in effect no difference between the two as both are fabrications of the artist. The hyperrealist painting style often used by Surrealists makes the odd setup seem dreamlike.

Oil on canvas - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Mama, Papa is Wounded! (1927)

Artist: Yves Tanguy

The most pivotal moment for Tanguy in his decision to become a painter was his sighting of a canvas by Giorgio de Chirico in a shop window in 1923. The next year, Tanguy, the poet Jacques Prévert, and the actor and screenwriter Marcel Duhamel moved into a house that was to become a gathering place for the Surrealists, a movement he became interested in after reading the periodical La Révolution surréaliste . André Breton welcomed him into the group in 1925. Tanguy was inspired by the biomorphic forms of Jean Arp, Ernst, and Miró, quickly developing his own vocabulary of amoeba-like shapes that populate arid, mysterious settings, no doubt influenced by his youthful travels to Argentina, Brazil, and Tunisia. Despite his lack of formal training, Tanguy's mature style emerged by 1927, characterized by deserted landscapes littered with fantastical rocklike objects painted with a precise illusionism. The works usually have an overcast sky with a view thatseems to stretch endlessly. Mama, Papa is Wounded depicts Tanguy's most common subject matter of war. The work is painted in a hyperrealist style with his distinctive limited color palette, both of which create a sense of dream-like reality. Tanguy often found the titles of works while looking through psychiatric case histories for compelling statements by patients. Given that, it is difficult to know if this work is relevant to his own family history as he claimed to have imagined the painting in its entirety before he began it. His brother was killed in World War I and the bleakness of the landscape may refer generally to losses suffered in the war by thousands of French families. De Chirico's influence on Tanguy's work is obvious here in his use of falling shadows and a classical torso in the landscape.

Oil on Canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Accommodations of Desire (1929)

Artist: Salvador Dalí

Painted in the summer of 1929 just after Dalí went to Paris for his first Surrealist exhibition, The Accommodations of Desire is a prime example of Dalí's ability to render his vivid and bizarre dreams with seemingly journalistic accuracy. He developed the paranoid-critical method, which involved systematic irrational thought and self-induced paranoia as a way to access his unconscious. He referred to the resulting works as "hand-painted dream photographs" because of their realism coupled with their eerie dream quality. The narrative of this work stems from Dalí's anxieties over his affair with Gala Eluard, wife of artist Paul Eluard. The lumpish white "pebbles" depict his insecurities about his future with Gala, circling around the concepts of terror and decay. While The Accommodations of Desire is an exposé of Dalí's deepest fears, it combines his typical hyper-realistic painting style with more experimental collage techniques. The lion heads are glued onto the canvas, and are believed to have been cut from a children's book.

Oil and cut-and-pasted printed paper on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932)

Artist: Alberto Giacometti

Giacometti was one of the few Surrealists who focused on sculpture. The Palace at 4 a.m. is a delicate construction that was inspired by his obsession with a lover named Denise the previous year. Of the affair he said, "a period of six months passed in the presence of a woman who, concentrating all life in herself, transported my every moment into a state of enchantment. We constructed a fantastical palace in the night - a very fragile palace of matches. At the least false movement a whole section would collapse. We always began it again." In 1933, he told Breton that he was incapable of making anything that did not have something to do with her. The work includes representations or symbols of his love interest as well as perhaps of his mother. Other imagery, such as the bird, is less easy to interpret. Thus, the work is characterized by its bizarre juxtaposition of objects and a title that is seemingly unrelated to the constructed scene, giving the piece an undercurrent of mystery and tension as if something frightening is about to occur. The work, in its child-like simplicity, captures the fragility of memory and desire. Giacometti's postwar interest in Existentialism is already evident here in how he represents the isolation of the various figures.

Wood, glass, wire, and string - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Battle of Fishes (1926)

Artist: André Masson

Masson was one of the most enthusiastic followers of Breton's automatic writing, having begun his own independent experiments in the early 1920s. He would often produce art under exacting conditions, using drugs, going without sleep, or sustenance in order to relax conscious control of his art making so that he could access his unconscious. Masson, along with his neighbors Joan Miró, Antonin Artuad, and others would sometimes experiment together. He is best known for his use of sand. In an effort to introduce chance into his works, he would throw glue or gesso onto a canvas and then sand. His oil paintings were made based on the resulting shapes. Battle of the Fishes perhaps references his experiences in WWI. He signed up to fight and after three years, was seriously injured, taking months to recover in an army hospital and spending time in a psychiatric facility. He was unable for many years to speak of the things he witnessed as a soldier, but his art consistently depicts massacres, bizarre confrontations, rape, and dismemberment. Masson himself observed that male figures in his art rarely escape unharmed. Battle of Fishes has subdued color, but the fish seem involved in a vicious battle to the death with their razor-like teeth and spilled blood. Masson believed that the use of chance in art would reveal the sadism of all creatures - an idea that he could only reveal in his art.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Object (1936)

Artist: Meret Oppenheim

Oppenheim was one of the few women Surrealists whose work was exhibited with the group. Like Giacometti she worked primarily with objects. This work, also known under the title Luncheon in Fur , with its unsettling juxtaposition of a domestic object and animality, is a quintessential example of Surrealist ideas. The artist makes strange a teacup, saucer, and spoon purchased at typical department store - objects that were familiar are made disturbingly off-putting as the viewer must imagine drinking tea from a fur-covered cup.

Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Barbarians (1937)

Artist: Max Ernst

Max Ernst was known for his automatic writing techniques including frottage, grattage, and collage. Here he uses grattage, which requires taking a painted canvas, placing it on a textured surface, and scraping off paint. The method introduces elements of chance and unpredictability to the work as the artist is forced to release some control of the creative process. The grattaged canvas was then used by Ernst as inspiration for further imagery. The Barbarians is typically Surrealist as it is fraught with bizarre juxtapositions, mysterious figures, and dream-inspired symbols. The bird imagery is one of the staples of Ernst's work - he experienced a childhood trauma related to the death of his pet bird and as an adult developed a bird alter ego named Loplop.

Oil on wood with painted wood elements - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Mannequin (1938)

Artist: Man Ray

Mannequin depicts André Masson's mannequin at the Exposition International du Surrealisme, Galerie des Beaux-Arts, in Paris 1938. Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Maurice Henry, and others also designed these weird mannequins to fill a room with uncanny female forms that looked both monstrous and sexually alluring. Man Ray photographed them all as discreet characters, of which this is one example. He repeatedly photographed his assistant, artist Lee Miller, and many other women, both living and inanimate. Like Hans Bellmer, an artist peripherally associated with the group, Ray was obsessed with the female form as the perfect embodiment of male desire, and sought to capture it formally in fantastical ways. Man Ray also pioneered many photographic techniques, including rayographs , named after himself, that incorporate elements of chance and in which subjects appear to glow in dream-like silver auras.

Assemblage of wood, oil, metal, board on board, with artist's frame - National Gallery of Australia

Birthday (1942)

Artist: Dorothea Tanning

Birthday is a self-portrait that Dorothea Tanning painted to commemorate her 30th birthday. Viewed up close, one notices the infinite rooms recessing into the background, symbolizing Tanning's unconscious mind. Many Surrealists felt architectural imagery was well-suited to expressing notions of a labyrinthine self that changes and expands over time; Birthday is one of the best examples of this. Also notable is the gargoyle at the subject's feet. Tanning said this was her rendition of a lemur, which has been associated with death spirits. Tanning juxtaposed natural imagery, like the skirt made of roots, against objects representing high culture, like fancy apparel and interior design, to pay homage to culture as well as to express nature and wilderness as a feminine construct.

Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Beginnings of Surrealism

Surrealism grew out of the Dada movement, which was also in rebellion against middle-class complacency. Artistic influences, however, came from many different sources. The most immediate influence for several of the Surrealists was Giorgio de Chirico , their contemporary who, like them, used bizarre imagery with unsettling juxtapositions (and his Metaphysical Painting movement). They were also drawn to artists from the recent past who were interested in primitivism, the naive, or fantastical imagery, such as Gustave Moreau , Arnold Bocklin , Odilon Redon , and Henri Rousseau . Even artists from as far back as the Renaissance , such as Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Hieronymous Bosch , provided inspiration in so far as these artists were not overly concerned with aesthetic issues involving line and color, but instead felt compelled to create what Surrealists thought of as the "real."

The Surrealist movement began as a literary group strongly allied to Dada , emerging in the wake of the collapse of Dada in Paris, when André Breton's eagerness to bring purpose to Dada clashed with Tristan Tzara's anti-authoritarianism. Breton, who is occasionally described as the 'Pope' of Surrealism, officially founded the movement in 1924 when he wrote "The Surrealist Manifesto." However, the term "surrealism," was first coined in 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire when he used it in program notes for the ballet Parade , written by Pablo Picasso , Leonide Massine, Jean Cocteau , and Erik Satie.

Around the same time that Breton published his inaugural manifesto, the group began publishing the journal La Révolution surréaliste , which was largely focused on writing, but also included art reproductions by artists such as de Chirico, Ernst, André Masson, and Man Ray. Publication continued until 1929.

The Bureau for Surrealist Research or Centrale Surréaliste was also established in Paris in 1924. This was a loosely affiliated group of writers and artists who met and conducted interviews to "gather all the information possible related to forms that might express the unconscious activity of the mind." Headed by Breton, the Bureau created a dual archive: one that collected dream imagery and one that collected material related to social life. At least two people manned the office each day - one to greet visitors and the other to write down the observations and comments of the visitors that then became part of the archive. In January of 1925, the Bureau officially published its revolutionary intent that was signed by 27 people, including Breton, Ernst, and Masson.

Surrealism: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Surrealism shared much of the anti-rationalism of Dada, the movement out of which it grew. The original Parisian Surrealists used art as a reprieve from violent political situations and to address the unease they felt about the world's uncertainties. By employing fantasy and dream imagery, artists generated creative works in a variety of media that exposed their inner minds in eccentric, symbolic ways, uncovering anxieties and treating them analytically through visual means.

Surrealist Paintings

There were two styles or methods that distinguished Surrealist painting. Artists such as Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte painted in a hyper-realistic style in which objects were depicted in crisp detail and with the illusion of three-dimensionality, emphasizing their dream-like quality. The color in these works was often either saturated (Dalí) or monochromatic (Tanguy), both choices conveying a dream state.

Several Surrealists also relied heavily on automatism or automatic writing as a way to tap into the unconscious mind. Artists such as Joan Miró and Max Ernst used various techniques to create unlikely and often outlandish imagery including collage , doodling, frottage, decalcomania, and grattage. Artists such as Hans Arp also created collages as stand-alone works.

Hyperrealism and automatism were not mutually exclusive. Miro, for example, often used both methods in one work. In either case, however the subject matter was arrived at or depicted, it was always bizarre - meant to disturb and baffle.

Surrealist Objects and Sculptures

Breton felt that the object had been in a state of crisis since the early-19 th century and thought this impasse could be overcome if the object in all its strangeness could be seen as if for the first time. The strategy was not to make Surreal objects for the sake of shocking the middle class a la Dada but to make objects "surreal" by what he called dépayesment or estrangement. The goal was the displacement of the object, removing it from its expected context, "defamilarizing" it. Once the object was removed from its normal circumstances, it could be seen without the mask of its cultural context. These incongruous combinations of objects were also thought to reveal the fraught sexual and psychological forces hidden beneath the surface of reality.

A limited number of Surrealists are known for their three-dimensional work. Arp, who began as part of the Dada movement, was known for his biomorphic objects. Oppenheim's pieces were bizarre combinations that removed familiar objects from their everyday context, while Giacometti's were more traditional sculptural forms, many of which were human-insect hybrid figures. Dalí, less known for his 3D work, did produce some interesting installations, particularly, Rainy Taxi (1938), which was an automobile with mannequins and a series of pipes that created "rain" in the car's interior.

Surrealist Photography

Photography, because of the ease with which it allowed artists to produce uncanny imagery, occupied a central role in Surrealism. Artists such as Man Ray and Maurice Tabard used the medium to explore automatic writing, using techniques such as double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization, the latter of which eschewed the camera altogether. Other photographers used rotation or distortion to render bizarre images.

The Surrealists also appreciated the prosaic photograph removed from its mundane context and seen through the lens of Surrealist sensibility. Vernacular snapshots, police photographs, movie stills, and documentary photographs all were published in Surrealist journals like La Révolution surréaliste and Minotaure , totally disconnected from their original purposes. The Surrealists, for example, were enthusiastic about Eugène Atget's photographs of Paris. Published in 1926 in La Révolution surréaliste at the prompting of his neighbor, Man Ray, Atget's imagery of a quickly vanishing Paris was understood as impulsive visions. Atget's photographs of empty streets and shop windows recalled the Surrealist's own vision of Paris as a "dream capital."

Surrealist Film

Surrealism was the first artistic movement to experiment with cinema in part because it offered more opportunity than theatre to create the bizarre or the unreal. The first film characterized as Surrealist was the 1924 Entr'acte , a 22-minute, silent film, written by Rene Clair and Francis Picabia , and directed by Clair. But, the most famous Surrealist filmmaker was of course Luis Buñuel . Working with Dalí, Buñuel made the classic films Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930), both of which were characterized by narrative disjunction and their peculiar, sometimes disturbing imagery. In the 1930s Joseph Cornell produced surrealist films in the United States, such as Rose Hobart (1936). Salvador Dalí designed a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).

The Rise and Decline of Surrealism

Though Surrealism originated in France, strains of it can be identified in art throughout the world. Particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, many artists were swept into its orbit as increasing political upheaval and a second global war encouraged fears that human civilization was in a state of crisis and collapse. The emigration of many Surrealists to the Americas during WWII spread their ideas further. Following the war, however, the group's ideas were challenged by the rise of Existentialism , which, while also celebrating individualism, was more rationally based than Surrealism. In the arts, the Abstract Expressionists incorporated Surrealist ideas and usurped their dominance by pioneering new techniques for representing the unconscious. Breton became increasingly interested in revolutionary political activism as the movement's primary goal. The result was the dispersal of the original movement into smaller factions of artists. The Bretonians, such as Roberto Matta , believed that art was inherently political. Others, like Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning, remained in America to separate from Breton. Salvador Dalí, likewise, retreated to Spain, believing in the centrality of the individual in art.

Later Developments - After Surrealism

Abstract expressionism.

In 1936, the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged an exhibition entitled Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism , and many American artists were powerfully impressed by it. Some, such as Jackson Pollock , began to experiment with automatism, and with imagery that seemed to derive from the unconscious - experiments which would later lead to his "drip" paintings. Robert Motherwell , similarly, is said to have been "stuck between the two worlds" of abstraction and automatism.

Largely because of political upheaval in Europe, New York rather than Paris became the emergent center of a new vanguard, one that favored tapping the unconscious through abstraction as opposed to the "hand-painted dreams" of Salvador Dalí. Peggy Guggenheim's 1942 exhibition of Surrealist-influenced artists (Rothko, Gottlieb, Motherwell, Baziotes, Hoffman, Still, and Pollock) alongside European artists Miró, Klee, and Masson, underscores the speed with which Surrealist concepts spread through the New York art community.

Feminism and Women Surrealists

The Surrealists have often been depicted as a tightly knit group of men, and their art often envisioned women as wild "others" to the cultured, rational world. Work by feminist art historians has since corrected this impression, not only highlighting the number of women Surrealists who were active in the group, particularly in the 1930s, but also analyzing the gender stereotypes at work in much Surrealist art. Feminist art critics, such as Dawn Ades, Mary Ann Caws, and Whitney Chadwick, have devoted several books and exhibitions to this subject.

While most of the male Surrealists, especially Man Ray, Magritte, and Dalí, repeatedly focused on and/or distorted the female form and depicted women as muses, much in the way that male artists had for centuries, female Surrealists such as Claude Cahun , Lee Miller , Leonora Carrington , and Dorothea Tanning , sought to address the problematic adoption of Freudian psychoanalysis that often cast women as monstrous and lesser. Thus, many female Surrealists experimented with cross-dressing and depicted themselves as animals or mythic creatures.

British Surrealism

Interestingly, many notable female Surrealists were British. Examples include Eileen Agar , Ithell Colquhoun , Edith Rimmington , and Emmy Bridgwater . Particular to the British interpretation of Surrealist ideology was an ongoing exploration of human relations with their surrounding natural environment and most prominently, with the sea. Alongside Agar, Paul Nash developed an interest in the object trouvé , usually in the form of items collected from the beach. The focus on the border where land meets the sea, and where rocks anthropomorphically resemble people struck a cord with British identity and more generally, with Surrealist principles of reconciling and uniting opposites.

The International Surrealist Exhibition (1936) held in London was a particular catalyst for many British artists. Headed by Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, the movement thrived in Britain, creating the international icons Leonora Carrington and Lee Miller , and also spurring on the practice of another important circle of artists surrounding Ben Nicholson , Barbara Hepworth , and Henry Moore . Overall, the privileging of an eccentric imagination and essential rejection of standardized and rational modes of doing things resonated well from the outset. This golden period for art in general in the UK, and more specifically the legacies of British Surrealism continue to influence the country’s art practice today.

Useful Resources on Surrealism

• The Art Story Blog: Dalí and The Surrealists - Master Marketers Top 10 marketing stunts by Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, and Salvador Dalí
• The Art Story Blog: Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist Scenes Find Muse in Hieronymus Bosch's Christian Fantasies Carrington borrow's her Surrealist ideas from the 16 th -century artist
• The Art Story Blog: Leonora Carrington in Pop Culture Madonna and W Magazine fashion shoots based on Carrington's visions
• Surrealism (2010) By Mary Ann Caws
• Surrealism: Desire Unbound (2005) By Jennifer Mundy, Dawn Ades, and Vincent Gille
• Surrealism: Themes and Movements (2004) Our Pick By Mary Ann Caws
• Surrealist Women : An International Anthology (1998) By Penelope Rosemont
• André Breton's Manifestos of Surrealism By André Breton, Richard Seaver, Helen R. Lane
• History of the Surrealist Movement Our Pick By Gerard Durozoi
• Nadja (1928) Our Pick By Andre Breton
• A Book of Surrealist Games (1995) By Alastair Brotchie and Mel Gooding
• Surrealism (Basic Art Series 2.0, 2015) By Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy
• The Surrealism Reader: An Anthology of Ideas (2016) By Dawn Ades, Michael Richardson, and Krzysztof Fijalkowski
• Leonora Carrington Rewrote the Surrealist Narrative for Women By Anwen Crawford / The New Yorker / May 2017
• Dalí in a diving helmet: How the Spaniard almost suffocated bringing Surrealism to Britain Our Pick By Joanna Moorhead / The Guardian / June 2016
• From Dada to Surrealism - Review Our Pick By Phillippe Dagen / The Guardian / July 19, 2011
• Surrealist America By Lewis Kachur / Artnet Magazine / July 21, 2005
• ART REVIEW; In Old Age, Surrealism Still Charms By William Zimmer / The New York Times / February 4, 2004
• Surrealism For Sale, Straight From The Source; André Breton's Collection Is Readied for Auction Our Pick By Alan Riding / The New York Times / December 7, 2002
• ART/ARCHITECTURE; An Early Surrealist on His Own Revolutionary Terms By Ken Shulman / The New York Times / March 24, 2002
• ART REVIEW; Trolling the Mind's Nooks and Crannies for Images Our Pick By Grace Glueck / The New York Times / June 4, 1999
• Man Ray's films on Ubuweb Our Pick
• René Clair's Entr'act, a film written by Francis Picabia and Erik Satie
• Photomontage of Claude Cahun's self portraits
• Surrealist Movement in the U.S. Contemporary Surrealist Movement Information Site
• Surrealism Today Blog Dedicated to contemporary Surrealism in its many manifestations

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Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

Surrealism, an introduction

Reshaping the world.

When you think of maps, what comes to mind?  An informative document used by travelers? Demarcations of national borders and geographic features?  At the very least, we might think of some factual representation of the world, not one that is fictitious or subjective.

Imagine a map of the world. Now take a moment to examine the following map, created by members of the Surrealist movement and published in the Belgian journal Variétés in June 1929.

Le monde au temps des Surrealistes (The World at the Time of the Surrealists) , image from p. 26-27 in special issue “Le Surrealisme en 1929″ of Varietes: Revue mensuelle Illustree de l’espirit contemporain (June 1929)

This anonymous map might seem unsettling; it emphasizes certain areas while removing others, and changes dramatically the size of landmasses. How is this map different from the world we know? And, although it might seem like an odd place to begin, what can it tell us about the ideas and approaches of the Surrealists?

Marcel Jean, Spector of the Gardenia, 1936, plaster head, painted black cloth, zippers, film, velvet-covered wood base (MoMA)

Psychic freedom

Historians typically introduce Surrealism as an offshoot of  Dada . In the early 1920s, writers such as André Breton and Louis Aragon became involved with Parisian Dada. Although they shared the group’s interest in anarchy and revolution, they felt Dada lacked clear direction for political action. So in late 1922, this growing group of radicals left Dada, and began looking to the mind as a source of social liberation. Influenced by French psychology and the work of Sigmund Freud, they experimented with practices that allowed them to explore subconscious thought and identity and bypass restrictions placed on people by social convention. For example, societal norms mandate that suddenly screaming expletives at a group of strangers—unprovoked, is completely unacceptable.

Man Ray, Recording a waking dream seance session, Bureau of Surrealist Research, c. 1924

Surrealist practices included “waking dream” seances and automatism. During waking dream seances, group members placed themselves into a trance state and recited visions and poetic passages with an immediacy that denied any fakery. (The Surrealists insisted theirs was a scientific pursuit, and not like similar techniques used by Spiritualists claiming to communicate with the dead.) The waking dream sessions allowed members to say and do things unburdened by societal expectations; however, this practice ended abruptly when one of the “dreamers” attempted to stab another group member with a kitchen knife. Automatic writing allowed highly trained poets to circumvent their own training, and create raw, fresh poetry. They used this technique to compose poems without forethought, and it resulted in beautiful and startling passages the writers would not have consciously conceived.

Envisioning Surrealism: automatic drawing and the exquisite corpse

In the autumn of 1924, Surrealism was announced to the public through the publication of André Breton’s first “Manifesto of Surrealism,” the founding of a journal ( La Révolution surréaliste ), and the formation of a Bureau of Surrealist Research. The literary focus of the movement soon expanded when Max Ernst and other visual artists joined and began applying Surrealist ideas to their work. These artists drew on many stylistic sources including scientific journals, found objects, mass media, and non-western visual traditions. (Early Surrealist exhibitions tended to pair an artist’s work with non-Western art objects). They also found inspiration in automatism and other activities designed to circumvent conscious intention.

André Masson, Automatic Drawing , 1924, ink on paper, 23.5 x 20.6 cm (MoMA)

Surrealist artist André Masson began creating automatic drawings , essentially applying the same unfettered, unplanned process used by Surrealist writers, but to create visual images. In Automatic Drawing (left), the hands, torsos, and genitalia seen within the mass of swirling lines suggest that, as the artist dives deeper into his own subconscious, recognizable forms appear on the page.  

Another technique, the exquisite corpse , developed from a writing game the Surrealists created. First, a piece of paper is folded as many times as there are players.  Each player takes one side of the folded sheet and, starting from the top, draws the head of a body, continuing the lines at the bottom of their fold to the other side of the fold, then handing that blank folded side to the next person to continue drawing the figure. Once everyone has drawn her or his “part” of the body, the last person unfolds the sheet to reveal a strange composite creature, made of unrelated forms that are now merged. A Surrealist Frankenstein’s monster, of sorts.

Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, and Man Ray, Untitled (Exquisite Corpse) , 1926-27, colored pencil, pencil, and ink on paper, 35.9 x 22.9 cm (MoMA)

Whereas automatic drawing often results in vague images emerging from a chaotic background of lines and shapes, exquisite corpse drawings show precisely rendered objects juxtaposed with others, often in strange combinations. These two distinct “styles,” represent two contrasting approaches characteristic of Surrealists art, and exemplified in the early work of Yves Tanguy and René Magritte.

Left: Yves Tanguy, Apparitions , 1927, oil on canvas, 92.07 x 73.02 cm (Dallas Museum of Art); right: René Magritte, The Central Story , 1928, oil on canvas (Private collection)

Tanguy began his painting Apparitions  (left) using an automatic technique to apply unplanned areas of color. He then methodically clarified forms by defining biomorphic shapes populating a barren landscape. However, Magritte, employed carefully chosen, naturalistically-presented objects in his haunting painting, The Central Story . The juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated objects suggests a cryptic meaning and otherworldliness, similar to the hybrid creatures common to exquisite corpse drawings. These two visual styles extend to other Surrealist media, including photography, sculpture, and film.

The Surrealist experience

Today, we tend to think of Surrealism primarily as a visual arts movement, but the group’s activity stemmed from much larger aspirations. By teaching how to circumvent restrictions that society imposed, the Surrealists saw themselves as agents of social change. The desire for revolution was such a central tenet that through much of the late 1920s, the Surrealists attempted to ally their cause with the French Communist party, seeking to be the artistic and cultural arm. Unsurprisingly, the incompatibility of the two groups prevented any alliance, but the Surrealists’ effort speaks to their political goals.

In its purest form, Surrealism was a way of life. Members advocated becoming flâneurs –urban explorers who traversed cities without plan or intent, and they sought moments of objective chance— seemingly random encounters actually fraught with import and meaning. They disrupted cultural norms with shocking actions, such as verbally assaulting priests in the street. They sought in their lives what Breton dubbed surreality , where one’s internal reality merged with the external reality we all share. Such experiences, which could be represented by a painting, photograph, or sculpture, are the true core of Surrealism.

Meret Oppenheim. Object , 1936. Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, cup 4-3/8 inches in diameter; saucer 9-3/8 inches in diameter; spoon 8 inches long, overall height 2-7/8″ (The Museum of Modern Art)

The “Nonnational boundaries of Surrealism”*

Returning to The Surrealist Map of the World , let’s reconsider what it tells us about the movement. Shifts in scale are evident, as Russia dominates (likely a nod to the importance of the Russian Revolution). Africa and China are far too small, but Greenland is huge. The Americas are comprised of Alaska (perhaps another sly reference to Russia’s former control of this territory), Labrador, and Mexico, with a very small South America attached beneath. The United States and the rest of Canada are removed entirely. Much of Europe is also gone. France is reduced to the city of Paris, and Ireland appears without the rest of Great Britain. The only other city clearly indicated is Constantinople, pointedly not called by its modern name Istanbul. An anti-colonial diatribe, the Surrealists’s map removes colonial powers to create a world dominated by cultures untouched by western influence and participants in the Communist experiment. It is part utopian vision, part promotion of their own agenda, and part homage to their influences.

It also reminds us that Surrealism was an international movement. Although it was founded in Paris, pockets of Surrealist activity emerged in Belgium, England, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, the United States, other parts of Latin America, and Japan. Although Surrealism’s heyday was 1924 to the end of the 1940s, the group stayed active under Breton’s efforts until his death in 1966. An important influence on later artists within Abstract Expressionism, Art Brut, and the Situationists, Surrealism continues to be relevant to art history today.

*André Breton, “Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism,” in Free Rein , trans. Michel Parameter and Jacqueline d’Amboise (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp. 7-18.

Additional resources:

Surrealism on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) Surrealism Reviewed: a selection of audio interviews and music (UbuWeb) Four Surrealist films by Man Ray Digital archive of Surrealist journals from Spain, Chile, and Argentina (in Spanish)

Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:

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What Was Surrealism?

By Rachel Wetzler

Rachel Wetzler

Senior Editor, Art in America

SURREALISM RECEIVED THE MUSEUM TREATMENT early in its history—early enough that André Breton, the movement’s charismatic ringleader and chief evangelist, was aggrieved at learning that he would not be allowed to dictate the selection and presentation of works, as he had for virtually every other Surrealist exhibition since the group’s 1925 debut at Galerie Pierre in Paris. Organized by Alfred H. Barr Jr., at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, the show, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,” was conceived as a companion to “Cubism and Abstract Art,” held at the museum earlier that year, both part of a series of exhibitions that would, according to Barr, “present in an objective and historical manner the principal movements of modern art.” Yet if Barr recognized that Surrealism must be reckoned with, he was nevertheless equivocal about its significance, in a way that he was decidedly not about Cubism’s: “When [Surrealism] is no longer a cause or a cockpit of controversy,” he writes in the catalogue, “it will doubtless be seen to have produced a mass of mediocre and capricious pictures and objects, a fair number of excellent and enduring works of art, and even a few masterpieces.”

This comparative ambivalence extended to the show’s contextualization of the movement. Whereas “Cubism and Abstract Art” advanced a causal history of modernism, tracing a direct genealogy from the broken brushwork of Impressionism to the faceted planes of Cubism, and from Cubist dissection of form to the abstract geometry of Suprematism and De Stijl, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” introduced a more haphazard lineage: the loose, transhistorical category of “fantastic art” encompassed an eclectic range of materials, from the work of premodern fabulists like Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Hieronymus Bosch, and William Blake, to art made by children and the mentally ill, advertisements, and even a Walt Disney cartoon. As Barr suggests, Surrealism is inherently resistant to the kind of formalist reading that anchored the previous exhibition: in the catalogue, he writes that under Breton’s leadership Surrealism springs from the ashes of Paris Dada after its 1922 demise, harnessing its predecessor’s anarchic anti-rationalism into a more systematic theoretical program, rooted in the exploration of the unconscious mind—but not in a corresponding aesthetic program. Surrealism was not a style, but a “mental attitude and a method of investigation,” as writer Georges Hugnet contends elsewhere in the show’s catalogue. This, for Barr, explains the fact that Surrealist artistic output tended in two formally irreconcilable directions: on the one hand, the dream imagery characteristic of Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte, in which impossible scenes are rendered with naturalistic precision, and on the other, the biomorphic pseudo-abstractions of André Masson and Joan Miró, rooted in the practice of automatic drawing. Per Hugnet: for the Surrealists, “what a work of art expresses formally is of no importance—only its hidden content counts.”

Three decades later, with the 1968 exhibition “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage,” MoMA revisited the movement, this time retrospectively. In curator William Rubin’s account, two years after Breton’s death, European Surrealism is officially done as a living, breathing movement, the advanced art baton long since handed off to Abstract Expressionism and Pop in New York. While Rubin reiterates Barr’s sentiments about Surrealism’s privileging of a shared philosophy over a cohesive style, he nevertheless attempts to find a place for these unruly avant-gardes in MoMA’s essentially formalist narrative of modern art: “No matter what the radicality of an artist’s démarche, or his commitment to extrapictorial concerns, he sets out from some definition of art,” Rubin wrote in the show’s catalogue. “Hence, despite the postures assumed by some of the Dada and Surrealist artists, they were all in an enforced dialogue with the art that preceded them.” But even as Rubin sets out to bring Surrealism—scathingly, and in some circles fatally, dismissed by Clement Greenberg as literary, reactionary, and academic—back into the modernist fold, an element of Barr’s initial skepticism persists in his exhibition’s overdetermined narrative, which is, in the end, primarily concerned with the “heritage” of the show’s title. By the early 1940s, the Surrealist émigrés who flee Europe for New York during World War II have little left to say as artists in their own right, Rubin argues, but their arrival is nevertheless catalytic for the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. In this account, long dominant in Anglophone art history, Surrealism’s capital achievement is opening a door for a generation of wayward American painters, who quickly pass through it and never look back.

Critics and historians of modern art may have regarded Surrealism with suspicion but the public loved it: both MoMA shows drew significant crowds and traveled to multiple additional venues; that Rubin’s show was met by protesters—a mix of Yippies, Chicago Surrealists, and members of the anarchist art collective Black Mask—outraged at what they saw as the premature memorialization of a still-active movement only seemed to heighten its allure. In the popular imagination, Surrealism was stripped of its politics, understood instead as an art of outré hijinks embodied by the madcap figure of Dalí.

This picture was complicated by the 1978 exhibition “Dada and Surrealism Reviewed” at the Hayward Gallery in London, which placed the production of little magazines and journals at the center of Dada and Surrealist activity, both as the movements’ “principal platforms” for reaching an audience and their most coherent articulation of group identity and collective authorship. Emphasizing the central significance of magazines likewise directed new attention toward the Surrealist use of photography, both in terms of its treatment of the found image and the camera experiments of Surrealist artists.

Rosalind Krauss cites the show as a turning point in her 1981 essay “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” in which she argues that the conventional art-historical privileging of painting and sculpture by figures such as Rubin had led to a fundamental misreading of Surrealist art. For Krauss, photography was not only the medium in which the Surrealists made their most significant artistic contributions, but “the key to the dilemma of Surrealist style,” namely its confounding lack of one. Informed by semiotic theory, Krauss argues that the crux of Breton’s hazily defined concept of “convulsive beauty”—and thus Surrealist aesthetics as a whole—is “an experience of reality transformed into representation,” emblematized by the uncanny manipulations of the real produced by Surrealist photographers. Krauss elaborated on this argument in 1985 in the exhibition “L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism,” co-curated with Jane Livingston, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., but Krauss’s dense catalogue essays, simultaneously published in the journal October , were arguably more influential than the show itself, recasting Surrealism as an art of fetishistic transgression rather than baroque fantasy, and an ideal screen for theoretical projection.

“Surrealism Beyond Borders,” which debuted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this past October and is currently on view at Tate Modern in London, attempts to shift the terms of Surrealist history once again. The show opens under the sign of exile: Marcel Jean’s Armoire Surréaliste (1941), a massive painting on hinged wooden panels bearing a trompe l’oeil rendering of a wardrobe’s doors and drawers opening to reveal a landscape stretching out into the distance. Made while the artist and his wife were stranded in Budapest—where they had moved temporarily from Paris in 1938 and then found themselves unable to return due to the war—it directs the Surrealist trope of everyday objects transformed into the stuff of dreams toward a more concrete, and politically poignant, desire for a secret passage to elsewhere. As signaled from the outset, the show’s conception of a Surrealism “beyond borders” is defined by people and concepts in motion, voluntarily or otherwise. Instead of a Paris-based interwar movement whose precepts and membership rolls were determined by Breton, Surrealism, in this telling, is an idea invented and reinvented in many times and places—Prague, Belgrade, Port au Prince, Mexico City, Tokyo, Cairo, Chicago, and, yes, Paris—with Breton’s inaugural circle one interconnected node among many. In a sense, the show proposes that Surrealism isn’t an art movement at all, but something more diffuse: a phenomenon, a network, an impulse in the air, or, as the show’s lead curators, Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, put it in their catalogue essay, a model of “rhizomatic connectivity.”

The choice of Jean’s Armoire Surréaliste as an opening salvo also hints at other more subtle but no less significant historiographic revisions that the show proposes. The first is its relatively late date, after what is commonly held to be the heyday of Surrealism, which is posited here as roughly the movement’s midpoint rather than its end—in fact, the show includes more postwar objects than prewar ones. The second is its medium, painting, conveniently and perhaps conservatively restored to the center of the Surrealist story, with both photography and Surrealist objects—sculptural agglomerations of incongruous found materials—largely confined to their own dedicated subsections, presented at the Met in small side galleries.

Departing from Jean’s imaginary portal, the sprawling show unfolds as a sequence of broad thematic clusters that intermingle works from different periods and locations, leveling the priority of Paris and the heroic interwar phase. One of the largest groupings, “The Work of Dreams,” which was spread across a long wall at the Met in a playfully undulating hang, sets canonical examples of Surrealist dream imagery like Max Ernst’s Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924) alongside those likely to be familiar only to regional specialists. The Polish-Jewish painter Erna Rosenstein’s Ekrany (Screens, 1951) depicts the heads of her murdered parents floating, in grisaille, against a crisp blue backdrop, as if projected on one of the titular screens. Behind it is an eerie nocturnal forest, alluding to the nightmarish memory of the couple’s 1942 death in the woods at the hand of a smuggler who was supposed to help the family escape Nazi-occupied Poland. (The artist managed to survive the attack, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.) Skunder Boghossian’s Night Flight of Dread and Delight (1964), made while the Ethiopian-born artist was living in Paris, is a celestial panorama occupied by winged creatures soaring into outer space, synthesizing the influences of Coptic art, Négritude, the Surrealist paintings of Wifredo Lam and Roberto Matta, and the work of Nigerian magical realist writer Amos Tutuola.

Though the section “Beyond Reason,” which takes up the Surrealist antipathy toward logic and order, includes textbook contributions like René Magritte’s Time Transfixed (1938), portraying a miniature train hovering in midair as it speeds out of the fireplace of an elegant bourgeois interior, the wall text prioritizes the work of Japanese “Scientific Surrealists,” who responded to accusations of escapism from members of the country’s ascendant proletarian art movement by asserting they would use reason as a “weapon.” Koga Harue’s Umi (The Sea, 1929), for instance, among the show’s standout works, combines technological imagery from mass media sources—including depictions of a submarine, a German zeppelin, and a factory cross-section—into a mechanized seascape, with a young woman in a bathing suit and cap, copied from a postcard set depicting “Western beauties,” raising her arm to preside over the scene. Another section, “Revolution, First and Always,” juxtaposes Dalí’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) , 1936, a gruesome depiction of a decaying body pulling itself apart in a desolate landscape, with an untitled 1967 work depicting a crowded field of graphically outlined monsters with bloodied claws and fangs by Mozambican painter Malangatana Ngwenya, an allegory for his experiences of political persecution as a member of the Liberation Front of Mozambique fighting for independence from Portugal in the 1960s.

These thematic groupings are punctuated by smaller sections devoted to “convergence points,” framed as particularly instructive hotbeds of group activity: Paris, with its Bureau of Surrealist Research, founded in 1924, serving as both a publicity organ and a clearinghouse for information and correspondence; Cairo, whose group Art et Liberté /al-Fann wa-l-Hurriyya issued a 1938 manifesto, “Long Live Degenerate Art!,” proclaiming art’s absolute independence from any state ideology; Mexico City, where many European exiles, including Breton, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, Wolfgang Paalen, and Alice Rahon, were drawn during and after World War II, making contacts with existing avant-garde groups like the circle around the journal Contemporáneos , eager for alternatives to the dominant muralism; and Chicago, where a countercultural Surrealist group formed in 1966, devoted primarily to the production of antiwar agitprop, direct action, and underground publications rather than conventional artworks. More unwieldy is “Haiti, Cuba, Martinique,” which doesn’t so much name a meeting point, or three, for that matter, as identify the homes of influential artists and writers who intermittently left for the metropole and returned, among them the Cuban painter Lam and Martinican writers Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, taking Surrealism and transforming it into a more rigorous and politically committed vision of antifascist, anticolonial liberation. Conversely, other sections function as case studies of lesser-known figures—the Illinois-born Black poet and jazz musician Ted Joans; documentary photographer Eva Sulzer, part of the circle around the Mexico City–based journal Dyn ; and the Spanish painter Eugenio Granell—who exemplify the show’s emphasis on Surrealism as an art of “travel, exile, [and] displacement” by rarely staying in one place for long. Granell, for instance, a leftist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, fled Spain after the fall of the republic, initially for the Dominican Republic, until that country’s military dictatorship sent him into exile once again, then Guatemala, where he was soon driven out as a result of his opposition to an increasingly influential faction of Stalinist artists and writers. Eventually offered a teaching position at the University of Puerto Rico in 1950, where he remained for seven years before relocating to New York, he played an influential role in introducing Surrealism to the island: displayed alongside Granell’s own creaturely paintings are works by the members of El Mirador Azul (The Blue Lookout), a Surrealist group formed by his students, attesting to the long aftereffects of these itinerant wanderings.

“Surrealism Beyond Borders” arrives at the tail end of a decade-long wave of “global exhibitions” like “Other Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum (2014) and “International Pop” at the Walker Art Center (2015): revisionist histories of canonical movements heretofore assumed to be the exclusive province of Western Europe and North America, now revealed to be far more dynamic and geographically dispersed. What distinguishes this one is that Surrealism was explicitly international from the outset; this was, indeed, part of its mythology and self-image. Surrealist circles sprang up around the world—the first ones, in Tokyo and Belgrade, appeared almost immediately after the Manifesto’s publication—with varying degrees of allegiance to Breton, adapting Surrealist ideas to local circumstances. Surrealism could be malleable enough to offer artists in different places whatever they needed from it: a rejection of the status quo, of bourgeois order, of colonial power, of social and political restriction. The Paris circle was also far from exclusively French, with many of its most recognizable participants arriving from abroad: Man Ray, Max Ernst, Magritte, Dalí, Miró. All this is acknowledged even in conventional accounts like Barr’s and Rubin’s, but taken primarily as a sign of Breton’s enlightened despotism and the Paris movement’s resounding success in disseminating its vision of the avant-garde. The show’s revision, then, is primarily a shift in priority or emphasis rather than a wholesale redefinition.

In eschewing chronology and, for the most part, geography, as organizing criteria, the curators wish to push against the perception that Surrealism is primarily a Parisian movement, bequeathed by Breton to provincial, often colonial, satellites. Rejecting the notion that the Surrealism practiced in Colombia or Turkey in the 1950s is merely a belated reiteration of the innovations of 1920s France, they insist, instead, that artists outside Breton’s immediate orbit had just as much claim to Surrealist strategies and watchwords.

Yet this thematic approach also largely lets Breton and company set the terms, unquestioningly accepting the categories and concepts that the Paris circle held up as central to Surrealist theory and practice, and slotting in works from elsewhere accordingly, giving each grouping a grab-bag quality. In many of the sections, the work is genuinely remarkable enough to distract from this categorical flimsiness; elsewhere it shows. In the wall text for the section devoted to Automatism, the concept is polemically introduced by way of the short-lived 1940s journal Surreal , based in Aleppo, rather than Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto, though neither the journal nor the Aleppo Surrealists’ work is actually on view. Instead, it is represented by an eclectic and mostly unremarkable group of works, largely characterized by anodyne abstraction. A massive canvas by the French painter Jean Degottex, L’espace dérobé (The Hidden Space, 1955), featuring two informel -ish slashes of muddy color on a grubby white ground, is perhaps the show’s nadir: an utterly nondescript work taking up too much wall space, with little to say about Surrealism’s postwar trajectory—particularly given that the artist never joined the group—except that, according to the wall text, Breton happened to be a fan. What is the advantage of including this work as an exemplar of automatism instead of, say, one of Masson’s 1920s sand paintings, for which he threw sand over spontaneously applied areas of wet gesso, allowing the resulting forms and the chains of associations they inspired to dictate the rest of the composition, if not simply for the sake of being noncanonical?

Moreover, this approach threatens to obfuscate as much as illuminate, avoiding as it does sufficient historical context to explain when, why, and how Surrealist practice took hold in different places, and what it meant at different moments, under varying sociopolitical circumstances. Is the everyday made strange in Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer’s Byt (The Flat, 1968)—a stop-motion short clandestinely produced in the run-up to the Prague Spring, in which a man is held captive by his seemingly possessed apartment—coterminous with that of Brassaï’s “Involuntary Sculptures” (1932), close-up photographs of found detritus, made monumental by the camera’s framing, or Raoul Ubac’s Le Combat des Penthésilées (1937), a solarized tangle of fragmented bodies, titled after Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 tragedy about the mythological queen of the Amazons? All three are yoked together in the section “The Uncanny in the Everyday,” which ostensibly explores how Surrealist photographers “tapped into the rich vein of estrangement embedded in the ordinary world,” but in practice flattens radically disparate work into an almost undifferentiated mass of weird pictures. The same might be said for almost all the show’s thematic sections. While the substantial scholarly catalogue fills in many of these contextual blanks, its form—dozens of short essays homing in on particular circles or phenomena—prevents a syncretic view. That this is by design doesn’t make it less frustrating: the show dedicates an entire subsection to the fascinating figure of Ted Joans, who committed himself to Surrealism as a child after encountering the movement in copies of avant-garde periodicals like Minotaure tossed out by his aunt’s white employers, formally joining the movement after a chance encounter with Breton in Paris in the early 1960s, yet after multiple visits to the exhibition and a close read of the catalogue, I remain unsure of who else belonged to the group at the time of his arrival.

Nevertheless, the exhibition’s accomplishments are undeniable, not least in the sheer volume of research undertaken by the curatorial team (D’Alessandro and Hale, along with Carine Harmand, Sean O’Hanlan, and Lauren Rosati), highlighting any number of heretofore marginal figures in the annals of Surrealism whose future prominence now seems assured. Its most decisive intervention is in putting to rest the long-held belief that Surrealism had sputtered out by the onset of World War II, just as art-world hegemony passed from Paris to New York: as the show makes abundantly clear, outside that particular Atlantic axis, Surrealism took new shape in response to a radically reoriented postwar world order.

But there is a fundamental question that the show refuses to answer even provisionally, and without which its narrative collapses under the weight of methodological indecision: what makes an artist a Surrealist? The show’s criteria for inclusion is murky, encompassing both those who explicitly identified with Surrealist groups and “fellow travelers” who participated in Surrealist activities or circles without ever formally joining, along with artists like Hector Hyppolite and Maria Izquierdo, whose works were claimed by Breton for Surrealism, regardless of their own interests and motivations, and others with no direct connection to Surrealism at all, among them Yayoi Kusama (who has explicitly denied a Surrealist element to her work) and the Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Golestan, killed by a landmine on assignment in Iraq in 2003, included on the basis of a striking, if uncharacteristic, 1976 photographic series, “Az Div o Dad” (Of Demon and Beast), comprising composites of Qajar Dynasty monarchs and animals made by holding archival images in front of the camera with the shutter left open. On the other hand, I will admit to being stumped by Kitawaki Noboru’s spare and schematic painting Diagram of I Ching Divination (Heaven and Earth) , 1941, which seems fundamentally remote from Surrealist concerns as elaborated elsewhere in the exhibition, regardless of the artist’s self-identification. In attempting to keep the tent as big as possible, the exhibition dilutes the definition to the point of meaninglessness, exacerbated by the nonchronological installation, which elides the particulars of each artist’s encounters with Surrealism in favor of perceived affinities and thematic allegiances.

I suspect that this sense of evasiveness, dubiously spun as an advantage in D’Alessandro and Gale’s surprisingly circumlocutory introductory essay, reflects a profound anxiety about the very enterprise of a “global exhibition,” and the gambit of canon formation, or reformation, that it inevitably entails. Hesitant to replace old protagonists with new ones, to pick winners, to pluck new masterpieces out of obscurity, the show declines to commit to any position at all, preferring a view of Surrealism as undefinable and amorphous—in today’s parlance, more a vibe than anything else. But as a result, the Pope in Paris paradoxically looms larger than ever, even if he rarely appears outright: in the absence of an affirmative definition of what Surrealism is or was, all routes eventually pass through Breton, as the shared point of contact who holds together heterogeneous artists and groups. But if the show fails to convincingly knock Breton off his pedestal, or to advance a coherent narrative to rival the received ones it wishes to displace, it is generative in its breadth, gesturing toward the possibility of more complete and complex histories of Surrealism that may one day be written.

This article appears in the April 2022 issue, pp. 44 –51 .

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Surrealism and Film

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Surrealism and Film by Robin Walz LAST REVIEWED: 19 December 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 19 December 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0139

Affinities between surrealism and film have been noted since the beginning of the surrealist movement in the 1920s. The nascent motion picture industry at the dawn of the 20th century was by definition experimental, a new media form that combined and extended features of serial publications, theater, photography, and collage. The objective and technical processes of filmmaking shared affinities with the surrealist project of disassembling reality into a multiplicity of images, and then reassembling those images to achieve a marvelous and uncanny “dream world” that redoubled reality and captured the consciousness of mass audiences. The early surrealists wrote enthusiastically about the cinema of their time, particularly the comedies of Mack Sennett, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin, and the criminal exploits of the silent film serials Les Mystères de New York , Fantômas , and Les Vampires . Moving from a surrealist reception of film to the production of surrealist cinema, an article on Un Chien andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí appeared in the countersurrealist journal Documents (June 1929) and the film scenario was published in the final issue of La Révolution Surréaliste (15 December 1929). Beginning in the 1930s, avant-garde, commercial, and experimental filmmakers continued to produce films that, in some aspect or another, came to be critically recognized as surrealist. Yet, unlike poetry, fiction, painting, photography, and collage, film never became a dominant medium of surrealist art. Consequently, scholarship on surrealism and film is extremely varied, having developed in stages and having moved in multiple directions. The earliest approach was to examine film, both popular movies and avant-garde productions, through writings of mainly French surrealists on the cinema. A second wave of scholarship from film studies focused upon a canonical body of surrealist films, directors, and scenarios, most notably on the work of Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel. In recent decades, contemporary scholars internationally have examined the intersection of surrealism and cinema with the goal to develop theoretical concepts and nomenclature applicable to the fields of literary theory, critical theory, and cultural studies. This bibliography is designed to assist researchers informed by any of these approaches while remaining inclusive of all of them.

Scholarly works concerned with the intersection of surrealism and film began to appear in the mid-20th century with Kyrou 2005 . An eminent film critic affiliated with the French cinema journal Positif , Kyrou considered film an inherently surrealist medium. Subsequent scholarship has sought more precision in identifying affinities and critical intersections in surrealist preoccupations with the cinema. The foundational works in English are Matthews 1971 and Kovács 1980 , each of which moves from the general interest of the surrealists in the cinema to an examination of specific cinematic aspirations of the surrealists. Two of the strongest contemporary works in this vein are Short 2008 , which examines films by Buñuel and other surrealist filmmakers, and Richardson 2006 , which discusses many surrealist filmmakers and works typically absent or neglected in general overviews of the topic. Williams 1981 ushered in a theoretical turn in scholarly focus on surrealism and film with a Lacanian psycholinguistic analysis of surrealist film. Two contemporary collections of essays, Kuenzli 1996 and Harper and Stone 2007 , express this newer theoretical impulse in the study of surrealist cinema, the former focusing primarily on French surrealist cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, while the latter widens the cultural field to include international films from a variety of genres.

Harper, Graeme, and Rob Stone, eds. The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film . London: Wallflower, 2007.

A collection of contemporary critical essays on surrealist films, canonical and iconoclastic. Considers a wide range of surrealist impulses in cinema internationally, from the canonical surrealist films of Luis Buñuel in Spain and Jan Švankmajer in the Czech Republic to a wider range of commercial, animated, documentary, and digital films from the United States, Britain, Japan, and Russia.

Kovács, Steven. From Enchantment to Rage: The Story of Surrealist Cinema . Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980.

Explores the issues of why the surrealists were interested in movies and how their aims and concerns were expressed through films. In this work primarily focused on the 1920s, Kovács discusses both realized and unrealized film projects of Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Antonin Artaud, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel.

Kuenzli, Rudolf, ed. Dada and Surrealist Film . Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1996.

Originally included in the issue of the journal Dada/Surrealism 15 (1986), this collection of critical essays covers a number of films and scenarios by members of the Dada and surrealist movements in the 1920s and 1930s. In addition, the volume contains a useful bibliography of books, dissertations, and theses on Dada and surrealist films as well as books and articles on individuals from these movements involved in filmmaking.

Kyrou, Ado. Le surréalisme au cinéma . Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 2005.

Explores surrealist tendencies in film across the spectrum, from highbrow cinema classics to lowbrow horror movies and popular Hollywood musicals. Animated more by a shared enthusiasm for surrealism and the movies than by a critical perspective, Kyrou’s work remains a valuable starting point for surrealism and film broadly conceived. For selections in English translation, see Hammond 2000 (cited under Surrealist Writings on Film ). Originally published in 1953.

Matthews, J. H. Surrealism and Film . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971.

In this foundational scholarly work in English, Matthews emphasizes the ability of films to produce the surrealistic sensations of disorientation and the “marvelous” in movie audiences, toward the goal of achieving a higher poetic reality. These issues are explored in relation to the commercial cinema, surrealist film scripts and films, and the movies of director Luis Buñuel that aimed to produce a cinema that was both surrealist and commercial.

Richardson, Michael. Surrealism and Cinema . Oxford: Berg, 2006.

This major reevaluation of surrealism and the cinema examines the tensions between the aspirations and activities of the surrealists as historically realized through specific films. Richardson moves beyond surrealism in the 1920s and the films of Luis Buñuel to examine a range of surrealist films and scenarios, the collaborative projects of Panique , and surrealist aspects of Hollywood films, documentaries, and the contemporary cinema.

Short, Robert. The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema . Los Angeles: Solar, 2008.

A superb recent overview of films made by surrealists. Short examines the scandalous receptions of Un Chien andalou and L’Âge d’or by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, respectively, the tensions between Antonin Artaud and Germaine Dulac concerning experimental cinema in The Seashell and the Clergyman , and the influence of Hans Richter, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray upon surrealist cinema.

Williams, Linda. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.

The foundational psychoanalytic-semiotic study of surrealism and film. Williams employs a Lacanian approach in psycholinguistics to examine how interactions among language, imagery, and the unconscious that are constructed into the surrealist films of Luis Buñuel produce “figures of desire.”

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Surrealism Development Research Paper

Introduction, the beginnings and growth of surrealism, the emerging of groups from surrealism, two opposing approaches to art, the struggle of surrealism and its current status, future of surrealism, works cited.

The beginning of the twentieth century was marked by major tumultuous changes. World War 1 and the Russian Revolution greatly influenced how people understood the world.

The findings of Freud and Einsten, as well as the technological innovations of the Machine Age, registered distinctively new ‘modernist’ modes of feeling and perception. In cultural terms, more transformed human awareness was progressed by the publication of books that defined the modernist sensibility. The early twentieth century art movements effectively depict this new mind-set.

One of these is the cultural movement called Surrealism. The French poet, Andre Breton, initiated it in 1924. This art and literary movement grew in Europe between The First World War and the Second World War. Surrealism sprang out of the previous Dada movement. It was a way of life that most artists tried to escape their disparities by adopting the Sigmund Freud theories.

Dadaism developed nearly at the same time in Zurich, New York, and Paris during the First World War. It further made appearance in Germany before concentrating in France.

It flourished from 1966 to 1922. With the aim of ridiculing what its adherents regarded to be the worthlessness of the modern world, it promoted anti-war and anti-art works (De la Croix and Tansey, 705). Many people joined the movement since they disputed the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests. This is because many of them believed they were the major causes of the First World War.

Therefore, the Dadaists conveyed their denunciation of the ideology using artistic expressions. These expressions appeared to reject the reason and logic of bourgeois capitalist society, which resulted in the First World War. In general, the Dadaists embraced chaos and irrationality.

The movement of Dada was anti-art since anything for which art stood, it depicted as opposite (“Dada and Surrealism, para.1). This was an attempt by the Dadaists to purify art by mocking it. This made the proponents of this movement to develop pieces that were very playful and teasing.

For example, Marcel Duchamp developed a popular portrait of the Mona Lisa having a mustache. Nearly every Dada piece arouses a reaction, which was the intended objective since the movement hoped to annihilate all the traditional elements of culture and aesthetics. Despite existing for a short time, Dadaism left an enduring legacy to contemporary art, advertising and the social order, and if it were not present, it is unlikely that Surrealism and other modern art movements would have existed.

Surrealism is largely considered as an outgrowth of the earlier Dada movement, but its ideas are better organized and more relevant to the real world (Klingsohr-Leroy and Grosenick, 7). Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism, was trained in medicine and psychiatry.

During the First World War, he employed his skills in a neurological hospital where he helped soldiers who were suffering from a condition referred to as combat stress reaction or battle fatigue. In the hospital, he found Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic methods to be vey helpful in treating the soldiers. When the war ended, Breton moved back to Paris where he joined the Dada movement. While he was in France, together with his two friends, Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, he founded the literary journal called

Litterature

Thereafter, based on Sigmund Freud’s theories that the unconscious was a wellspring of imagination, they started by experimenting with automatic writing in which they spontaneously noted down their thoughts without censoring them. They then published the writings in the journal together with some accounts of dreams.

Breton and Soupault continued their investigations on surrealist automatism and published The Magnetic Fields in 1919, which is considered by most people to be the first truly surrealist text. As they delved deeper into automatism, more and more people embraced surrealist principles since they considered them better approaches for transforming the society than Dada attack on prevailing values.

The surrealist philosophers and artists felt that Dadaism did not allow categories and labels. The proponents of surrealism perceived that ordinary and depictive expressions are essential in liberating the imagination. However, they upheld the idea that the sense of that arrangement ought to be in full arrangement according to the Hegelian dialectric and the Marxist dialectric.

The surrealists adapted the thoughts of Sigmund Freud to suit their own purposes (“Historical Origins of Surrealist, para. 7). They considered Freud’s ideas as the accidental rediscovery of the power of dreams and imagination, which had been hidden for a long time under the purely rational outlook that was common during the early twentieth century.

The surrealists predicted that as the artists would develop perspectives that would give them the strength of freeing themselves from the control of reason, a new intellectual tendency will inevitably come up.

Freud had attempted to define and illustrate the subconscious mind as a genuine phenomenon that controlled thought and behavior; therefore, the surrealists translated this understanding into an artistic and literary methodology that was based on the subconscious and the imagination. They believed that these had been repressed by rationalism, civilization, and progress.

In 1924, the Surrealist movement was officially founded when Breton published the first “Surrealist Manifesto” which defined its intentions (“Surrealism,” para.1).

The document defined Surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state by which we propose to express- verbally, in writing, or in any other manner- the real process of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason and outside any aesthetic or moral concerns” (Leslie, 59). This implies that surrealists advocated for nonconformity, which was not as excessive as that of the Dadaists.

This is because when Dada was existing, it was considered as an art. The document gives many instances in which Surrealist thoughts can be applied to poetry and literature. However, it emphasizes that Surrealist principles are relevant in any circumstance of life. This implies that they are not limited to the artistic realm.

The text outlines the vital role that the earlier Dada movement played in the Development of Surrealism (Hopkins, 17). The manifesto highlights the essence of the dream as a reservoir of Surrealist inspiration and details the experiences of Breton with the surreal in a famous description of a hypnagogic state whereby a strange phrase mysteriously came into his view.

The text, which was written with a great deal of absurdist humor, has references to several precursors of Surrealism that represented the Surrealist spirit before the declaration of the manifesto and the works of other Surrealists, who participated in the development of the Surrealist style, are also included.

The manifesto concludes by affirming that the activities of the movement do not follow any plan or conventional pattern. Besides Breton, other renowned Surrealists, who acknowledged that they are ultimately nonconformists, signed the manifesto.

After officially launching the movement, Breton and his team published the foundational issue of a journal called La Revolution surrealist (Andrews, 60) . Thereafter, publications for the journal, which was considered constantly scandalous and revolutionary, continued up to 1929.

The Surrealists also established the Bureau of Surrealist Research in Paris where they could play collaborative drawing games, discuss the principles of Surrealism, and develop different skills such as automatic drawing. The second Surrealist Manifesto, supervised by Breton, was issued to the public in 1930. The proclamation included anti-idealist principles, which led to the development of hybrid Surrealism. This made the surrealists to reveal the base instincts of humans.

Breton was ruling the Surrealist movement like a dictator. He firmly observed the theories of surrealism. His strong stand made many people to be expelled from the group while others simply defected. One of these is Salvador Dali who was ‘excommunicated’ in 1937 since Breton thought that his theories were misguided. Nonetheless, the other Surrealists, such as Paul Eluard and Robert Desnos, continued publishing their principles until the start of the Second World War.

Even though most Surrealists were poets, others attempted prose writing, for example, Breton successfully published a novel called Nagja . Surrealism had a great influence in the early twentieth century. It motivated related movements in areas such as painting, sculpture, movie production, and performance of plays. More so, it has a lasting influence on the field of creative arts as a whole.

The Surrealists eventually divided into two groups: the Automatists and the Veristic Surrealists. Ortolano explains that the “Automatists were only interested in the artistic expression but oblivious to finding meaning to it, that is, they considered the abstract expression to be more important than analyzing it” (27). Their motto was “No meaning, just expression.” As implied in the earlier sections of this paper, Automatists followed Breton’s form of Surrealistic art.

On the other hand, Veristic Surrealists differed from Automatists by defining the unconscious as psychiatrist Carl Jung visualized it; therefore, they endeavored to communicate deeper thoughts by analyzing the metaphoric importance of the work of art and its relationship with the universal unconscious. Veristic Surrealists held the belief that Surrealism could best express the unconscious when the images of the dreams are captured in an art form and later decoded through analysis.

The universal expression of the unconscious was according to Jung’s position who maintained that every person has an inherent knowledge and comprehension of images that are usually universal in nature and are portrayed in most literature and art.

The theories of Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso are the two conflicting art theories that define the direction that art should take in this century. Dali had excellent painterly skills and in the early 1930s, he developed the Paranoic-critical method in the production of paintings and artworks.

This technique requires an artist to let the images to arrive at the conscience. Thereafter, the artist is required to freeze them on a canvas so as to give consciousness ample time for grasping their full meaning. After sometime, he brought in other aspects and called the technique the Oniric – Critical Method.

In this case, the artist is required to concentrate on his dreams, freeze them through art, and simultaneously evaluate them (“History of Surrealism,” para. 15).On the other hand, through embracing the scandal and chaos of Dadaism and the position of the Automatists, Picasso took a different approach to art. He refused to acknowledge the ability to become ‘primitive.’

Since even in his early years he exhibited a mysterious talent in art, he decided that the ingenuity of childhood should form the foundation of art and artists should paint as children, that is, become less preoccupied with the craft. However, Dali was for the idea of upholding the inquisitiveness and enthusiasm of a kid all through the life of a person, not just painting as a kid.

Veristic Surrealists assert that one should learn from the mystery of nature. On the other hand, Automatists maintain that one should never become conscious of the mystery of nature. The approach to art that was promoted by Picasso is acceptable by almost everyone. However, few people have embraced the approach that was promoted by Dali.

Currently, Veristic Surrealism aim to seek for freedom and the change of man’s consciousness through visual arts, literature, film, and music. From the beginning of Surrealism, renowned men have struggled with the perennial questioning of philosophy, the investigation of psychology, and the spirit of mysticism with the aim of enabling us consciously develop our full human potential.

Even though surrealism encountered difficulties during the late 20 th century and was slowly substituted by the artistic philosophy of modernism, it is still evident today. Surrealist examples exist in modern art and film in an attempt to regain its once major cultural force.

For example, Miyazaki’s 2005 film Howl’s Moving Castle uses aspects of Surrealism to depict the condition of the early twentieth century English towns. Several children in primary grades are instructed on self-portraiture techniques based particularly on the portraits by Picasso, and in literature, magical realism in works by writers such as Gabriel Marquez contain aspects of surrealism.

The advent of modernism has made many people to reject Surrealist principles. However, although it has existed in silent seclusion for about a half a century, its evolution will bring a new form of art that will be appealing to everybody. As professional interest in it will be aroused, the world will again experience the aesthetic pleasures on art.

Surrealism is essential in helping us to understand the architecture of the psyche and those who have dedicated their time to analyzing the images of the subconscious can have the opportunity of educating the world on the workings of the spiritual, psychological, and the physical planes of human existence.

Surrealism as a cultural movement of visual arts and writings borrowed some of its tenets from the earlier Dada movement. Most of the Surrealist artists had great imagination and the works of the earlier philosophers such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung influenced their Surrealistic thoughts. The publication of the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 served as a turning point for the movement since the declaration enabled it to gain official status.

As Surrealism advanced, two groups of Automatists and Veristic Surrealists emerged from it. Although they have been in silent seclusion for sometime now, their resurgence in the future will ensure that they once again have a dialogue with the public in expressing the workings of the subconscious.

Andrews, Wayne. The Surrealist parade . New York, N.Y.: New Directions, 1990. Print.

“Dada and Surrealism.” The artchive, n.d. Web.

De la Croix, Horst, and Richard Tansey. Art Through the Ages . Atlanta: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1970. Print.

“Historical Origins of Surrealist.” Lithgallery, n.d. Web.

“ History of Surrealism .” Go Surreal, n.d. Web.

Hopkins, David. Dada and Surrealism: a very short introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.

Klingsohr, Cathrin, and Uta Grosenick. Surrealism . Köln ; Los Angeles : Taschen, 2006. Print.

Leslie, Richard. Surrealism: The Dream of Revolution . New York: Smith mark, 1997. Print.

Ortolano, Glauco. Humaniqueness: The Gift of Your Inner God. Raleigh, North Carolina: Lulu Enterprises, 2008. Print.

“ Surrealism .” Heilbrunn timeline of art history . The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010. Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, January 3). Surrealism Development. https://ivypanda.com/essays/surrealism/

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IvyPanda . (2024) 'Surrealism Development'. 3 January.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Surrealism Development." January 3, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/surrealism/.

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• Salvador Dali: Surrealist Self-Portrait
• The Life of Salvador Dali
• Historical Art Periods: A Critical Evaluation of Baroque and Rococo Artistic Styles
• Lovely to Look at: Ornamentation and Function in the Era Of Imperial Privilege
• Van Doesburg and the International Avante-Garde: Constructing a New World
• Modern and Postmodern Art: The Book Theories of Modern Art
• Relational Aesthetics: No Limits and Restrictions

The Afrosurreal Manifesto: A Living Document

In his introduction to the classic novel Invisible Man (1952), ambiguous black and literary icon Ralph Ellison says the process of creation was “far more disjointed than [it] sounds […] such was the inner-outer subjective-objective process, pied rind and surreal heart.”

Ellison’s allusion is to his book’s most perplexing character, Rinehart the Runner, a dandy, pimp, numbers runner, drug dealer, prophet, and preacher. The protagonist of Invisible Man takes on the persona of Rinehart so that “I may not see myself as others see me not.” Wearing a mask of dark shades and large-brimmed hat, he is warned by a man known as the fellow with the gun, “Listen Jack, don’t let nobody make you act like Rinehart. You got to have a smooth tongue, a heartless heart, and be ready to do anything.”

And Ellison’s lead man enters a world of prostitutes, hopheads, cops on the take, and masochistic parishioners. He says of Rinehart, “He was years ahead of me, and I was a fool. The world in which we live is fluidity, and Rine the Rascal was at home.” The marquee of Rinehart’s store-front church declares:

“Behold the Invisible!

Thy will be done O Lord!

I See all, Know all, Tell all, Cure all.

You shall see the unknown wonders.”

Ellison and Rinehart had seen it, but had no name for it.

In an introduction to prophet Henry Dumas’ 1974 book Ark Of Bones and Other Stories , Amiri Baraka puts forth a term for what he describes as Dumas’ “skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one […] the Black aesthetic in its actual contemporary and lived life.” The term he puts forth is Afro-Surreal Expressionism.

Dumas had seen it. Baraka had named it.

This is Afro-Surreal!

THIS IS NOT AFRO-SURREAL

A) Surrealism:

Léopold Senghor, poet, first president of Senegal, and African Surrealist, made this distinction: “European Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical.” Jean-Paul Sartre said that the art of Senghor and the African Surrealist (or Négritude) movement “is revolutionary because it is surrealist, but itself is surrealist because it is black.” Afro-Surrealism sees that all “others” who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist, per Frida Kahlo. The root for “Afro-” can be found in “Afro-Asiatic”, meaning a shared language between black, brown, and Asian peoples of the world. What was once called the “third world,” until the other two collapsed.

B) Afro-Futurism:

Afro-Futurism is a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future. Afro-Surrealism is about the present. There is no need for tomorrow’s-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afro-Surrealist, the Tasers are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long ago to recall. What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.

Afro-Surrealists expose this from a “future-past” called RIGHT NOW.

RIGHT NOW, Afro-Surreal is the best description to the reactions, the genuflections, the twists, and the unexpected turns this “browning” of White-Straight-Male-Western-Civilization has produced. THE PRESENT, OR RIGHT NOW

San Francisco, the most liberal and artistic city in the nation, has one of the nation’s most rapidly declining black urban populations. This is a sign of a greater illness that is chasing out all artists, renegades, daredevils, and outcasts. No black people means no black artists, and all you yet-untouched freaks are next. Only freaky black art — Afro-Surreal art — in the museums, galleries, concert venues, and streets of this (slightly) fair city can save us!

San Francisco, the land of Afro-Surreal poet laureate Bob Kaufman, can be at the forefront in creating an emerging aesthetic. In this land of buzzwords and catch phrases, Afro-Surreal is necessary to transform how we see things now, how we look at what happened then, and what we can expect to see in the future.

It’s no mere coincidence that Kool Keith (as Dr. Octagon) recorded the 1996 Afro-Surreal anthem “Blue Flowers” on Hyde Street, or that Samuel R. Delany based much of his 1974 Afro-Surreal urtext Dhalgren on experiences in San Francisco.

An Afro-Surreal aesthetic addresses these lost legacies and reclaims the souls of our cities, from Kehinde Wiley painting the invisible men (and their invisible motives) in NYC to Yinka Shonibare beheading seventeenth (and twenty-first) century sexual tourists of Europe. From Nick Cave’s soundsuits at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to the words you are reading right now, the message is clear: San Francisco, America, the world is ready for an Afro-Surreal art movement.

Afro-Surrealism is drifting into contemporary culture on a rowboat with no oars, entering the city to hunt down clues for the cure to this ancient, incurable disease called “western civilization.” Or, as Ishmael Reed states, “We are mystical detectives about to make an arrest.” A MANIFESTO OF AFRO-SURREAL

Behold the invisible! You shall see unknown wonders!

1. We have seen these unknown worlds emerging in the works of Wifredo Lam, whose Afro-Cuban origins inspire works that speak of old gods with new faces, and in the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who gives us new gods with old faces. We have heard this world in the ebo-horn of Roscoe Mitchell and the lyrics of DOOM. We’ve read it through the words of Henry Dumas, Victor Lavalle, and Darius James. This emerging mosaic of radical influence ranges from Frantz Fanon to Jean Genet. Supernatural undertones of Reed and Zora Neale Hurston mix with the hardscrabble stylings of Chester Himes and William S. Burroughs.

2. Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it. Like the African Surrealists, Afro-Surrealists recognize that nature (including human nature) generates more surreal experiences than any other process could hope to produce.

3. Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past. We revisit old ways with new eyes. We appropriate nineteenth century slavery symbols like Kara Walker, and eighteenth century colonial ones like Yinka Shonibare. We re-introduce “madness” as visitations from the gods, and acknowledge the possibility of magic. We take up the obsessions of the ancients and kindle the dis-ease, clearing the murk of the collective unconsciousness as it manifests in these dreams called culture.

4. Afro-Surrealists use excess as the only legitimate means of subversion, and hybridization as a form of disobedience. The collages of Romare Bearden and Wangechi Mutu, the prose of Reed, and the music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Antipop Consortium express this overflow.

Afro-Surrealists distort reality for emotional impact. 50 Cent and his cold monotone and Walter Benjamin and his chilly shock tactics can kiss our ass. Enough! We want to feel something! We want to weep on record.

5. Afro-Surrealists strive for rococo: the beautiful, the sensuous, and the whimsical. We turn to Sun Ra, Toni Morrison, and Ghostface Killah. We look to Kehinde Wiley, whose observation about the black male body applies to all art and culture: “There is no objective image. And there is no way to objectively view the image itself.”

6. The Afro-Surrealist life is fluid, filled with aliases and census-defying classifications. It has no address or phone number, no single discipline or calling. Afro-Surrealists are highly-paid short-term commodities (as opposed to poorly-paid long term ones, a.k.a. slaves).

Afro-Surrealists are ambiguous. “Am I black or white? Am I straight, or gay? Controversy!”

Afro-Surrealism rejects the quiet servitude that characterizes existing roles for African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, women and queer folk. Only through the mixing, melding, and cross-conversion of these supposed classifications can there be hope for liberation. Afro-Surrealism is intersexed, Afro-Asiatic, Afro-Cuban, mystic, silly, and profound.

7. The Afro-Surrealist wears a mask while reading Léopold Senghor.

8. Ambiguous as Prince, black as Fanon, literary as Reed, dandy as André Leon Tally, the Afro-Surrealist seeks definition in the absurdity of a “post-racial” world.

9. In fashion (John Galliano; Yohji Yamamoto) and the theater (Suzan Lori-Parks), Afro-Surreal excavates the remnants of this post-apocalypse with dandified flair, a smooth tongue and a heartless heart.

10. Afro-Surrealists create sensuous gods to hunt down beautiful collapsed icons. AFRO-SURREALISM IN ACTION

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the African Diaspora present the works of Mutu, William Pope.L, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Glenn Ligon, Wiley, Shonibare, and Walker en masse, with Lam’s Jungle as a center piece. Lorraine Hansbury Theater stages Genet’s The Blacks and Baraka’s The Dutchman , while San Francisco Opera adapts Aimé Césaire’s Caliban and the Fillmore has an Afro-punk retrospective. Afro-Surreal adaptations of Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1937), and Marvel’s Black Panther will grace the silver screen.

These are the first steps in an illustrious and marvelous journey. When we finally reach those unknown shores, we will say, with blood beneath our nails and mud on our boots:

Comments ( 2 )

Thank you so much for this manifesto, exploring Afro-surrealism. I am currently brainstorming my own piece of Afro-surrealist literature based on my experiences as an immigrant university student in North America. This manifesto is my guide. I hope to birth something special out of it in the vain of this under explored and evolving branch of human and literary expressive brilliance. Wish me luck. Thanks.

Afro-surrealism offers a world of the marvelous, a gate to a flourishing of humanity, a fountain of eternal inspiration! We need this now!

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Art Fair Review

Surrealism Reigns at Tefaf Art Fair

Objects made under the influence of the art movement have inspired many contemporary and modern dealers at the 10th edition of Tefaf New York.

By Martha Schwendener

This is the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist manifesto , a document written in France for a radical art movement whose resonance endures in our chaotic moment at the 10th edition of the Tefaf New York art fair. Throughout the Park Avenue Armory, among the fair’s 89 exhibitors from 15 countries, objects made during the heyday of Surrealism, from the 1930s to the 1950s, pop up frequently. The ethos of Surrealism, which celebrated dreams, nightmares, the unconscious mind and odd juxtapositions is also prevalent.

This is a bit of a switch for Tefaf, the grand old art fair started in Maastricht, the Netherlands, which started off as a place to buy deaccessioned museum pieces and bona fide old masters. The New York edition focuses on modern and contemporary art and even the handful of dealers here specializing in antiquities, jewelry or design seem to have followed the Surrealist theme. Here are a few among this very manageable fair with exceptional wares.

Leon Tovar (366)

Surrealism was especially embraced in Latin America (although everywhere, really, as the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition “ Surrealism Beyond Borders ,” which opened in late 2021, attested). Leon Tovar Gallery , which started in Bogotá before moving to New York a little over 20 years ago, is showcasing a terrific painting by the Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo titled “Claustrofobia” (1954). The red, pink and orange canvas with a wooden frame that looks as if it’s been clawed as much as carved, highlights an insectoid figure banging around inside a geometric armature. Tamayo worked at the archaeology museum in Mexico City, later absorbed into the National Museum of Anthropology, and was inspired by pre-Columbian art, but this painting also shows his affinity with Francis Bacon, whom Tamayo knew in 1940s New York.

Galerie Jacques Lacoste (301)

Another object with an impeccable Surrealist pedigree is over at Jacques Lacoste , which is showing French design from the 1930s. Here is a soft, peach-hued sofa conceived by the wunderkind Salvador Dalí and executed by the designer Jean-Michel Frank that mimics the lips of the saucy actress Mae West. The sofa was part of a set commissioned by a baron with the idea that the home was a kind of stage or theatrical set. (Frank was the only architect included in a landmark 1936 exhibition of Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, organized by the museum’s first director, Alfred Barr .)

Osborne Samuel (360) and Thaddaeus Ropac (345)

The work of female artists is another thread running through the fair, and Osborne Samuel has several sculptures by the British artist Barbara Hepworth (as well as the ethnographic-influenced sculptures of Lynn Chadwick, a male artist), while Thaddaeus Ropac has a solo presentation of the American painter Joan Snyder . Hepworth’s sensuous sculptures — which are often compared to Henry Moore’s — were contemporaneous with the Surrealist boom in the 1930s and a taste for abstract biomorphic form, while Chadwick leaned into angular forms culled in part from his architectural training. Snyder is a contemporary American master whose abstract paintings include organic materials like flowers and plants. The arresting presentation at Ropac includes several decades of painting and rawer works on paper.

David Zwirner (347) and Di Donna Galleries (334)

Odd juxtapositions were a standby in Surrealism: The author Lautréamont’s unsettling quip about a “chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” served as a road map for many artists. Zwirner follows this logic, pairing the beloved Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi with the lauded Mississippi pottery master George Ohr , also known as the “Mad Potter of Biloxi,” who died in 1918. Morandi specialized in muted still life paintings with a spare array of vessels and Ohr made unusually shaped vessels that looked ahead to abstract expressionism. Meanwhile, over at Di Donna are two paintings from the 1940s by Yves Tanguy, who was part of the 1920s Surrealist circle in Paris (although, by this time living in Connecticut with his second wife, the Surrealist poet and artist Kay Sage). Tanguy’s eerie, uneasy paintings — stark and filled in their lower registers with bulbous, spiky forms — illustrate both that battle-weary moment and, of course, our own.

TEFAF New York Art Fair Opens Thursday by invitation. Friday-Tuesday, May 10-14, at Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue at 67th Street, in Manhattan; tefaf.com . $55 for one day single entry; $25 for students.

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of an author. He was Lautréamont, not Lautréament.

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Here's How Museums Worldwide are Celebrating 100 Years of Surrealism

Posted: May 10, 2024 | Last updated: May 10, 2024

Here’s How Museums Worldwide are Celebrating 100 Years of Surrealism

In 1924, amid the wreckage of the Great War, French poet André Breton railed against the values of the world as it was and could never again be, one ruled by realism and rationality. “The mere word ‘freedom’ is the only one that still excites me,” Breton wrote in his Surrealist Manifesto . Revelations of the soul or society weren’t coming in the daytime. Only “the omnipotence of dreams,” he wrote, could liberate humanity. True or not, the ferocity of his belief inspired a century of strange poetry, paintings, sculpture, and more.

To mark the centennial of Surrealism, museums have once again measured the influence that the movement exerted—and still exerts—on art making. From an exhibition of Surrealist works by Caribbean and African Diasporic artists to a show of Surrealism from Eastern Europe, we’ve rounded up the dedicated programming worth catching worldwide.

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The Pompidou Center in Paris has organized the year’s largest show of Surrealist art, which makes sense as the institution boasts one the most prodigious collections of such art in the world. “Imagine! 100 Years of International Surrealism” opened in Brussels in February and will arrive at the Pompidou on September 4. From Paris, it will go to Hamburg and Madrid, and finish its run at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2026.

Each partner museum will bring to the core exhibition its own holdings and its own slant on the subject. Its Belgium iteration, for example, pays particular attention to links between Surrealism and Symbolism, an earlier art movement that likewise prioritized visual metaphor over implicit meaning. For the Brussels-bound: the Bozar art center has on view a show focused on Belgian Surrealism, as established by writings of local poet Paul Nougé (through June 16, 2024).

“Imagine! 100 Years of International Surrealism,” Royal Museums of Fine Arts Belgium, Brussels, through July 21, 2024; Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'Art Moderne, Paris, September 4, 2024 through January 13, 2025; Hamburger Kunsthalle, June 12 through October 12, 2025; Fundación Mapfré Madrid, February 4 through May 11, 2025; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fall 2025 through Spring 2026

Wakefield, UK

Have you ever wished to stand, even for a second, in the desert of Salvador Dalí’s dripping clocks, or have high tea with the minotaur of Leonora Carrington’s dreams? “Forbidden Territories,” at theHepworth Wakefield in northern England, explores the fantastic settings of Surrealist works, where flora and fauna fuse and bodies contort beyond recognition, to tantalizing and repulsive effect. Historical and thematic groupings of artworks will pair Breton’s inner circle from the 1920s with the next generation of Surrealists, such as Man Ray and Lee Miller, and with contemporary practitioners.

“Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes,” Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK, November 23, 2024 through April 27, 2025

“Fantastic Visions: 100 Years of Surrealism,” organized by Shanghai’s Museum of Art Pudong with the National Galleries of Scotland, draws entirely from the collection of the National Galleries’ prodigious holdings of Surrealist art. The show features more than 100 works by over 50 artists—including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Dorothea Tanning, Joan Miró, and Leonora Carrington—and spanning painting, sculpture, books, collage, and photography. Notably, all of the works on display are being presented in China for the first time.

“Fantastic Visions: 100 Years of Surrealism from the National Galleries of Scotland,” Museum of Art Pudong (MAP), Shanghai, through August 31, 2024

Surrealism, for all its interest in dreams and the unconscious, was born in the political and moral wreckage of World War I. Its acolytes denounced all forms of societal oppression, from fascism to colonialism and authoritarianism. “But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism + Anti-Fascism,” at Munich’s Lenbachhaus, recontextualizes Surrealism in its political origins and legacy by illustrating how its tenets were embraced by emancipatory episodes in history such as the American civil rights movement and the liberation of North Africa from European occupation. Logically, the artist list extends beyond Paris and includes Manuel Álvarez Bravo from Mexico, the Romanian painter and sculptor Victor Brauner, Chilean abstract expressionist Roberto Matta, and Spanish painter Maruja Mallo.

“But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism + Anti-Fascism,” Lenbachhaus, Munich, October 15, 2024 through March 2, 2025

Gainsville, Florida

“Surrealism at the Harn: A Centennial Celebration,” at the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida, presents more than 40 works from the museum’s holdings representing 100 years of Surrealism, from its birth in 20th-century Paris to its ongoing global diffusion. Skunder Boghossian (Ethiopia-Armenia), Wifredo Lam (Cuba), and Rufino Tamayo (Mexico) are among the artists who applied, to dazzling effect, the Surrealist ideology to their singular political and natural contexts. Americans Jerry Uelsmann and Celeste Roberge, a photographer and sculptor, respectively, are among the 21st-century cohort.

“Surrealism at the Harn: A Centennial Celebration,” Gainesville, Florida, through June 2, 2024

Fort Worth, Texas

Curated by María Elena Ortiz, “Surrealism and Us ” centers the associated histories of Surrealism and the Caribbean and African diaspora within the United States. This is the first intergenerational show dedicated to the subject at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; it takes its inspiration from the essay “1943: Surrealism and Us” by the Martiniquais writer and activist Suzanne Césaire, which leads fantastically with: “Many have believed that surrealism was dead. Many wrote so. Childish nonsense.” The presentation includes more than 80 artworks from the 1940s to today, each testifying to the diverse localizations of the movement.

“Surrealism and Us: Surrealism from Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940,” Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, through July 28, 2024

Tartu, Estonia

At the Eesti Rahva Muuseum in Tartu, Estonia, “Surrealism 100: Prague, Tartu and Other Stories” opens a dialogue between Czech and Estonian Surrealism. This isn’t as unlikely a pairing as it may seem at first glance, given that “the two countries share a complicated history under the influence of the Soviet Union in the 20th century,” according to the museum. Even amid rising institutional interest in how Surrealism migrated out of France, art from Central and Eastern Europe has been largely left out of those in-progress histories. And how can that be? Prague was one of the leading centers of Surrealism during its first run, and its avant-garde residents kept in close touch with their Parisian counterparts. 

“Surrealism 100: Prague, Tartu and Other Stories,” Eesti Rahva Msuuseum, Tartu, Estonia, through September 8

Heilbronn, Germany

Opening in late summer at the Kunsthalle Vogelmann in Heilbronn, Germany, “Surrealism: Worlds in Dialogue” puts the Surrealist canon in conversation with its contemporary successors, demonstrating how deeply the movement’s themes and processes guide the zeitgeist. Artists including Yves Tanguy, René Magritte, and Claude Cahun will be paired with the likes of Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas, and David Lynch, illuminating the political, gender, and racial dimensions often overshadowed by the fantastical aesthetic. Around 120 objects, from paintings and works on paper to film and an augmented-reality installation, will be on view.

“Surrealism: Worlds in Dialogue,” Kunsthalle Vogelmann, Heilbronn, Germany, August 3, 2024 through January 5, 2025

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Canada Reads winner Michelle Good among finalists for 2024 Indigenous Voices Awards

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Canada Reads winner Michelle Good is among the authors shortlisted for the 2024 Indigenous Voices Awards. 

Since 2017, the IVAs have recognized emerging Indigenous writers across Canada for works in English, French and Indigenous languages. The shortlists have been announced for four $5,000 categories: Published Prose, Published Poetry, Published Story and Fiction in French and Published Drama and Poetry in French. 

The CBC Poetry Prize is open for Canadian writers from April 1 to June 1

Good's essay collection  Truth Telling   is a finalist for the published prose category. 

In  Truth Telling , Good explores many issues that are currently affecting Indigenous people in Canada while incorporating her own experience and family's legacy in seven personal essays. She contextualizes contemporary discussions about reconciliation, the emergence of Indigenous narratives and more through historical knowledge, essentially providing a resource to mobilize Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians alike into active change. 

Good is a Cree writer and retired lawyer, as well as a member of Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan.  Five Little Indians , her first book, won the  2020 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction  and  the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award.  It also won  Canada Reads  2022 when it was championed by Ojibway fashion journalist  Christian Allaire .

Other notable writers on the shortlists include Alicia Elliott, Angela Sterritt and Brandi Bird. 

Elliott is shortlisted in the published prose category for  And Then She Fell , a horror novel which follows a young woman named Alice struggling to navigate the early days of motherhood and live up to the unrealistic expectations of those around her.

Get your first look at Alicia Elliott's  And Then She Fell

Elliott is a Mohawk writer currently based in Brantford, Ont. Her writing has been published most recently in Room, Grain and The New Quarterly. She is also the author of the nonfiction book  A Mind Spread Out on the Ground ,  a columnist for CBC Arts  and  CBC Books  named her  a writer to watch in 2019 . She was  chosen by Tanya Talaga as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award .

Sterritt is a finalist for the published prose award for her memoir  Unbroken . In  Unbroken , she shares her story from navigating life on the streets to becoming an award-winning journalist. As a teenager, she wrote in her notebook to survive. Now, she reports on cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, showing how colonialism and racism create a society where Indigenous people are devalued.  Unbroken  is a story about courage and strength against all odds.

Angela Sterritt's memoir emphasizes the importance of empathy in journalism and storytelling

Sterritt is a journalist, writer and artist. She has previously worked as a host a reporter with CBC Vancouver. Sterritt is a member of the Gitxsan Nation and lives on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh territories in Vancouver.

Bird is shortlisted for the published poetry award for her debut collection  The All + Flesh . The book explores both internal and external cultural landscapes and lineages from the perspective of a Saulteaux, Cree and Métis writer.  

The All + Flesh  was shortlisted for two League of Canadian Poets prizes . 

Bird is an Indigiqueer writer from Treaty 1 territory who is currently studying at the University of British Columbia. Their poems have been featured in various publications such as Catapult and Room Magazine.  The All + Flesh  is their first book. 

The 2024 jurors are Frances Koncan, Emily Riddle, Shelagh Rogers, Smokii Sumac, Jordan Abel, Francis Langevin and Maya Cousineau Mollen.

The complete list of shortlisted authors is below.

Prose in English

• There is Violence and There is Righteous Violence and There is Death or, The Born-Again Crow  by Caleigh Crow 
• And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott
• Truth Telling  by Michelle Good  
• The Secret Pocket  by Peggy Janicki, illustrated by Carrielynn Victor 
• Green Fuse Burning  by Tiffany Morris
• Unbroken  by Angela Sterritt

Poetry in English

• The Star Poems by Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber 
• The All + Flesh  by Brandi Bird
• Elements  by Jamesie Fournier, translated by Jaypeetee Arnakak
• Building a Nest from the Bones of my People by Cara-Lyn Morgan

Story and Fiction in French

• La vallée de l'étrange   by J. D. Kurtness 
• Piisim Napeu   by Georges Pisimopeo 
• Envole-toi, Mikun by Moira-Uashteskun Bacon 

Poetry and Drama in French

• Akuteu  by Soleil Launière 
• Marguerite: le feu  by Émilie Monnet 
• Nipinapunan  by Alexis Vollant

The winners will be announced on National Indigenous Peoples Day, which is June 21, 2024. 

The IVAs also announced the winners of their unpublished categories, who were awarded $500 and editorial support and possible publication from Yarrow Magazine. Yarrow is a digital magazine co-founded by Jordan Abel, Conor Kerr, Jessica Johns and Chelsea Novak that focuses on Indigenous prose, poetry and nonfiction in English. 

The list of winners are as follows:

Unpublished Poetry

• Coming of Age  by Leah Baptiste
• Nanabush Trails and Four Others by Hannah Big Canoe
• styrofoam love  by sakâw laboucan
• On the Threshold, I Taste Lightning  by Jordan Redekop-Jones 

Unpublished Prose

• Kristopher with a K  by Dennis Allen
• Hungry by Jenn Ashton
• Our Rez Anomaly  by Henry Heavyshield 
• łuk'é náte by Kaitlyn Purcell 

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