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Beyond Reality: Exploring the Influence of Surrealist Dreamscapes on Contemporary Art

In the wake of WW1, Surrealism made a name as a revolutionary art movement, questioning established views of reality by exploring the subconscious and its relationship to creative representation. This research paper aims to look at the impact of surrealist dreamscapes on modern art. The course will dig into surrealist art's ideas, methods, and settings, emphasizing dream depiction and the social, cultural, and historical forces that inspired the movement. This paper will examine the influence of surrealism on the aesthetic landscape of the twentieth century as well as look over how surrealism prepared the way for the creation of contemporary art via a study of chosen artworks and critical writings by such as Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Juan Miro, and Andre Masson. The study intends to contribute to a better understanding of surrealist art's significance in influencing contemporary art and to stimulate more research on the topic.

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Surrealism was an artistic and literary movement that was devoted to expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams; unshackled from the conscious control of reason and convention. Surrealism assumed a non-rational approach from Dada, and was built on the emerging theories that revolved around our perception of reality. Sigmund Freud's model of the subconscious was especially influential on Surrealist artists’ imagery. The Movement was founded in Paris in 1924 by André Breton with his Manifesto of Surrealism. The aim of Surrealism, he believed, was to reveal the unconscious and reconcile it with rational life. Therefore, this art movement could be described as the first attempt at undertaking a subjective and emotional study of the subconscious. Surrealism was also aimed at social and political revolution that was raging past WW1, and for a time was affiliated to the Communist party. This may be because many of the artists involved had communist beliefs. There was no single style of Surrealist art but two broad types have emerged. These are the early dream-like work of Salvador Dali, and Rene Magritte, and the later free form or automatisic work by artist such as Max Ernst and Joan Miro. Surrealism has had a huge influence on art, literature and the cinema as well as on social attitudes and behaviour.

Through an analysis of some key theoretical texts of historical Surrealism, this article elucidates the connection between the theor y and practice of artistic Surrealism and the Kellyan concept of reconstruction. Its main thesis is that Surrealism originates in a reconstruction of the most superordinate construct in both Western aesthetics and Western ontology—the construct real/unreal—and that the ultimate aim of Surrealist poetics is to provoke a similar reconstruction in the audience.

Decolonizing the Imagination: The Case of Surrealism, 2019

Imagination is a key aspect for many political and intellectual movements. Barren expectations can make nobody be involved with any aspect of the misery of the world, expecially when its our own misery. Thus, emancipating the imaginary and founding new relations is critical for many modern movements. Surrealism, was one of them.

Art History, 1987

The expression of dream content, of ‘unrestricted imagination’ within Surrealist work, consistently contains a sexual undercurrent as, according to Freud, most dreams can be ‘traced back by analysis to erotic wishes.’ Armed with this hypothesis, this paper examines two examples of erotic dream imagery: the Dream of Venus pavilion, constructed by Salvador Dalí for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and Sleeping Venus, a painting executed by Paul Delvaux in 1944.

Resemblance of Surrealism and Sufism is very exciting. Surrealism, the influential avant-garde movement and offspring of 20th century Modernism, strives for truth by plumbing depths of psychic plane and going beyond concrete reality. Sufism, the Islamic mystical discipline, as well, involves a spiritual pilgrimage toward the Absolute Unity above and beyond all created real objects. Confrontation with supra-reality leads to similar paradoxical symptoms in both Surrealism and Sufism expressions. Pertinently, disclosures of Surrealists manifest in their art and literature; and present article tends to compare their substratum, principles and methods with those of Sufi’s ecstatic and theopathetic exclamations or shat’h. The comparison digs for deeper sources from which both Surrealism and Sufism flow, as they are believed to overlap hitherto. Introduction The allegorical language of Surrealist literature and art and Sufi shat’h share many crucial features in the context of form, as much...

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International journal of surrealism, the definitive journal in the growing field of surrealist studies.

Edited by Katharine Conley and Alyce Mahon

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International Journal of Surrealism (IJS) creates a welcome space for critical ideas and debate centered on Surrealism, its international history, and its ongoing worldwide influence on contemporary culture. The journal seeks to document, celebrate, and interrogate the intellectual and aesthetic repercussions of the Surrealist movement across a wide array of fields: literature and literary theory; painting, sculpture, and photography; performance, film, and music; and philosophy, political thought, and new media.

Encompassing both scholarly and creative perspectives on Surrealism and its global manifestations, IJS is committed to exploring the practice and reception of Surrealism around the world, throughout the Global South as well as in Europe and the Global North, within and by Indigenous cultures and international movements. IJS is attentive to individualism and collective identity; global and transcultural modernity and modernism; and science, ecology, and natural history. 

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Kate Conley, William & Mary, Dartmouth (emerita)

Alyce Mahon, University of Cambridge

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Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Norwich University of the Arts

Felicity Gee, University of Exeter

Andrea Gremels, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt

Rachael Grew, Loughborough University

Catherin Hansen, University of Tokyo

Christina Helflin,  University of Paris-Panthéon-Sorbonne

Danielle Johnson,  Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University

Natalya Lusty, University of Melbourne

Catriona McAra,  University of Aberdeen

Jacqueline Rattray, King’s College London

Raymond Spiteri, Victoria University of Wellington

Abigail Susik, Willamette University

Simon Weir, University of Sydney

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Sam Bardaouil, Art Reoriented & Hamburger Bahnof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart

Stephanie D’Alessandro, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Julia Drost, Deutsches Forum für Kunstgerschichte Paris

Jonathan P. Eburne, Pennsylvania State University

Adrienne Edwards, Whitney Museum of American Art

Brent Hayes Edwards, Columbia University

Fabrice Flahutez, Université Jean Monnet de Saint-Étienne, Institut Universitaire de France

Terri Simone Francis, University of Miami

Effie Rentzou, Princeton University

Donna Roberts, University of Helsinki

Pierre Taminiaux, Georgetown University

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Call For Papers

2.2: surrealism and the black world, deadline: 1 june 2024.

Recent museum exhibitions, university courses, and humanities publications have initiated new narratives on the minor histories of Surrealism outside of those of French poet and philosopher André Breton. Not only are Breton’s influences—Aimé and Suzanne Césaire and African diasporic art—cast aside in studies of the surrealist canon, so are the ways in which Surrealism has been used to articulate Black experience before, during, and after the long twentieth century. But the relationship between Blackness and Surrealism is rich. Articulations of this relationship show up in the literature of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Henry Dumas; Amiri Baraka’s concept of “Afro-Surrealist Expressionism;” RomareBearden’s collages; D. Scot Miller’s 2013 Afrosurreal Manifesto; popular media by Jordan Peele, Donald Glover, Boots Riley, and Michaela Coel; the Afro-Gothic; Aria Dean’s “Black Bataille;” Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian and Hervé Télémaque’s paintings; Stephanie Dunning’s “the Black Weird;” and experimental films by Sarah Maldoror, Ousman Sembene, and those spotlighted in Terri Francis’ Afrosurrealist Film Society.

For the IJS 2.2 (Spring 2025 ) edition of the IJS we invite scholars and practitioners of art and art history, Black study, feminist study, literature, poetry, history, sociology, anthropology, museum studies, film andmedia studies, and other humanities disciplines to submit artwork and essays that address the relationship between Blackness and

Surrealism in global and transnational contexts. The goal of this issue is to explore how Black artists and intellectuals have grappled with Surrealism as a political, ontological, and aesthetic category and tool. It is also to consider how Black lived experience at once expands and undoes staid notions of Surrealism, of museum practice, and of art history’s disciplinary boundaries. Submissions that upend the whiteness of Surrealism and compose new framings of past, present, and future Black surrealist practices that exceed narratives of recuperation and repair are especially welcome.

Submissions should be 5000-7000 words in length, including footnotes, and be accompanied by up to 6 images per article (with copyright secured). They must conform to the Chicago Manual of Style. Manuscripts in languages other than English are accepted but must be accompanied by a detailed summary in English (generally of 5000 – 1000 words) and must be translated into English if they are recommended for publication. Manuscripts should be submitted in Microsoft Word format. The International Journal of Surrealism does not accept manuscript that have been previously published in any language. All content is double-blind peer-reviewed.

Essays should be submitted to: [email protected] and [email protected]

Queries and Correspondence should be addressed to: [email protected]

Guest Editors

Dr. Tiffany E. Barber is a prize-winning, internationally-recognized scholar, curator, and critic whose writing and expert commentary appears in top-tier academic journals, popular media outlets, and award-winning documentaries. Her work spans abstraction, dance, fashion, feminism, film, and the ethics of representation, focusing on artists of the Black diaspora working in the United States and the broader Atlantic world. Her latest curatorial project, a virtual, multimedia exhibition for Google Arts and Culture , examines the value of Afrofuturism in times of crisis. Dr. Barber is currently Assistant Professor of African American Art at the University of California-Los Angeles as well as curator-in-residence at the Delaware Contemporary. She is the recipient of the Smithsonian’s 2022 National Portrait Gallery Director’s EssayPrize.

Carine Harmand is the John Ellerman Foundation Curator at Tate Liverpool, and was a co-curator of the exhibition ‘Surrealism Beyond Borders’ at Tate Modern, London. She is a trustee of Mimosa House, London, a space dedicated to platforming women and queer artists and focusing on the fluidity of identity. Harmand is also on the advisory board of the Santo Domingo Centre for Excellence in Latin American Research at the British Museum, London. She has worked previously in a curatorial capacity in Cameroon, Mozambique and South Africa, and was co-curator of the exhibition I am Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria at the British Museum in 2016. She holds an MA in Archaeology and Curatorial Studies from the School of the Louvre, Paris and an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory from the University of Essex.

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Surrealism at 100: A Reading List

On the centennial of the founding of Surrealism, this reading list examines its radical beginnings, its mass popularity, and its continued evolution.

On October 15, 1924, French poet André Breton published his Manifeste du surréalisme , arguing for a new form of literary creation that would unlock the subconscious. He defined Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express…the real process of thought. It is the dictation of thought, free from any control by reason and of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.”

Breton’s publication was actually a bit belated. Two weeks earlier, French-German poet Yvan Goll had published Surréalisme , his version of a manifesto for the movement. Both were men inspired by the visionary writing of French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had died in the 1918 flu pandemic two years after he was injured in World War I. Those crises and the wake of uncertainty they had left in Europe would inspire Surrealists, like the Dadaists who had come before them, to embrace the irrational and absurd in the face of a society where reason seemed to have lost its supremacy.

Although the genesis of Breton’s interpretation of Surrealism was in the Paris literary scene, its global legacy would be most visible in art. This included unexpected mashups of objects such as Salvador Dalí ‘s 1938 Lobster Telephone that covered the receiver with a crustacean and Meret Oppenheim’s 1936 Object that wrapped a teacup with fur, as well as the dreamlike paintings of Leonora Carrington, René Magritte , and Remedios Varo. It also extended to film, such as the unnerving eyeball slicing of the 1929 Un chien andalou by Luis Buñuel, and photography, such as Man Ray’s transformation of a woman into a musical instrument in the 1924 Le Violon d’Ingres .

On the occasion of the centennial of Surrealism, this reading list examines the movement’s radical beginnings, its surprising popularity as mass entertainment, and its continued relevance in informing contemporary movements like Afrosurrealism.

Willard Bohn, “ From Surrealism to Surrealism: Apollinaire and Breton ,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36, No. 2 (Winter 1977): 197–210.

The poet Guillaume Apollinaire is credited with coining the term “Surrealism” in 1917—years before the movement would be considered officially underway—in a preface to a play, using it to describe work that favored surprise and interiority. Art historian Willard Bohn discusses the differences between this definition of Surrealism and the one that followed, while noting the influence of Apollinaire on Breton and others in the Surrealist movement.

“Though their artistic efforts tended in opposite directions, they shared one common meeting ground,” Bohn writes. “At the heart of the two surrealisms lies a fascination with the imagination and its capabilities.”

Charles W. Millard, “ Dada, Surrealism, and the Academy of the Avant-Garde ,” The Hudson Review 22, No. 1 (Spring 1969): 111–117.

Dada and Surrealism are frequently lumped together, as they were both avant-garde movements pivotal in shaping twentieth-century modernism in Europe. Even as the ideas of some artists, writers, and thinkers overlapped, the movements developed distinct perspectives. Dada began in 1916, embracing absurdity to respond to the upheaval and perceived pointlessness of the violence of World War I.

“Surrealism intellectualized Dada by using Freudian rather than artistic or mechanical references, and the search for the subconscious meaning led to attempts at calling up specific emotions, as in Magritte’s Pleasure , and eventually to the exploration of dream imagery,” writes art historian Charles W. Millard.

Millard highlights that Surrealism didn’t just build on Dada but also responded to and incorporated other styles and movements that came before. Renaissance painting techniques like one-point perspective and chiaroscuro light and dark contrasts, notably things that had been dismissed as passé by many nineteenth-century artists, were reconsidered by the Surrealists.

Jack J. Spector, “ André Breton and the Politics of Dream: Surrealism in Paris, ca. 1918–1924 ,” American Imago 46, No. 4 (Winter 1989): 287–317.

“The Surrealists were of course not the first to put the dream to literary use; but they were the first avant-garde group to make the dream central to their artistic and political goals, and important in their everyday exchanges,” writes art historian Jack J. Spector in this chronicle of the ways Surrealists such Breton elevated the dream from the depths of the subconscious to art. His analysis includes Breton’s published dreams—just some of those recorded by Surrealists as evidence for how sleep could be a space of creation—and a consideration of how Surrealist attempts at collective dreaming led to an interest in political collective action.

Laurent Jenny, “ From Breton to Dali: The Adventures of Automatism ,” October 51 (Winter 1989): 105–114.

Automatism—a method of creation where automatic rather than planned action guides writing, drawing, or other media—was prominent in the early years of Surrealism, fueled by the automatic writing of the movement’s leader, Breton. Yet as Surrealism expanded beyond Paris, these approaches changed. French critic Laurent Jenny, in a piece translated by Thomas Trezise, contrasts Breton and Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, who, beginning in 1930, challenged some of the ideas of automatism. Jenny writes of this view, quoting from Dalí’s article in the journal Minoataure , in which the artist argued that “[d]reams, like all states of passivity and automatism, deserve to be saved, sublated, provided they are turned to account ‘on the very level of action,’ made to intervene ‘interpretively in reality, in life.’” Dalí’s embrace instead of a “paranoiac-critical method,” in which a paranoid state was entered and interpreted symbolically, as well as the increasing commercialization of his work, would further distance him from Breton.

Georges Hugnet, “ In the Light of Surrealism, ” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 4, No. 2/3, Dada and Surrealism: Essays by Georges Hugnet (November-December 1936): 19–32.

Just over a decade after Breton published the Manifesto of Surrealism , the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York organized Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism . The 1936–37 exhibition included art by Surrealists including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Meret Oppenheim. French artist Georges Hugnet’s essay on the still-evolving practice of Surrealist painting was published alongside the show and translated by Margaret Scolari. Throughout, he notes the blurred lines between Surrealist visual and literary expression, writing that “Surrealism is a mental attitude and a method of investigation; its action runs parallel in every field; time has proved valid the behaviour that it has established for itself.”

Henri Peyre, “ The Significance of Surrealism ,” Yale French Studies 2, Modern Poets: Surrealists, Baudelaire, Perse, Laforgue (1948): 34–49.

“Through an apparently spontaneous flow of images, Surrealism thaws the crust of blunted perceptions and of deductive reasoning which separates us from our deepest life and from the remnants of childhood buried in our subconscious,” wrote French scholar Henri Peyre in this 1948 essay that argues for the movement’s continued importance even after its early twentieth-century peak. Some of the language in the piece is now dated, particularly that used to reference the African and Polynesian art that inspired many Surrealists. Still, it’s illuminating to read how Surrealism was being evaluated for its cultural influence in the aftermath of World War II, with Peyre touching on everything from its pioneering of non-literary literature to how its poets expressed love.

Irene E. Hofmann, “ Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection ,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 22, No. 2, Mary Reynolds and the Spirit of Surrealism (1996): 130–149+197.

Following the initial manifestos, publishing continued to be important for the development of Surrealism. This overview of journals related to Surrealism and Dada demonstrates how they served as platforms for spreading ideas and offering an essential place for collaboration. Irene E. Hofmann, writing about the collection of these journals at the Art Institute of Chicago, observed, “Publications introduced the group’s poetry and imagery and provided a forum for interpretations of dreams and experiments with automatic writing and imagery, and offered a medium for exploring relationships between text and image.” For instance, La Révolution surréaliste in 1927 was the first to publish examples of the popular “exquisite corpse” drawing game, while, after many artists fled Europe for New York at the outbreak of World War II, magazines such as View and VVV were vital for exiled writers and artists.

Katharine Conley, “ Surrealism and Outsider Art: From the ‘Automatic Message’ to André Breton’s Collection ,” Yale French Studies 109, Surrealism and Its Others (2006): 129–143.

Intuition and automatism were central to Surrealist creation, and its adherents were drawn to work by visionaries, people with mental illnesses, and mediums who claimed to channel messages from the dead. Art historian Katharine Conley investigates the relationship between Surrealism and what’s now known as “outsider art.” Similar to French artist Jean Dubuffet, who saw a purity of expression in art created at the margins, André Breton valued this work as being untarnished by expectations of “high” culture. Conley observes that the approach to outsider and Surrealist art was also often similar.

“Surrealist objects, assembled like collages and glued together in shapes and boxes, or found and renamed, had a psychoanalytic rather than an aesthetic function. Anyone could make them just like anyone could hear the ‘subliminal message’ of surrealist automatism,” Conley writes.

Martine Antle, “ Dada and Surrealism Faced with Colonialism ,” South Central Review 32, No. 1, Special Issue: Dada, Surrealism, and Colonialism (Spring 2015): 116–119.

Along with drawing attention to outsider art, the Surrealists were interested in the art and artifacts of Latin America, Oceania, and the Pacific Northwest Coast. The visual culture of these places had largely been overlooked as fine art by Europeans. Yet the interest of the Surrealists was rarely informed by actual engagement with people living in these places.

“For despite their faith in their ideology of liberation and their immense and openhearted fascination with other cultures, the surrealists often saw those cultures as exotic objects rather than collectives of real human beings with whom they might productively enter into true dialogue,” writes scholar Martine Antle.

However, some Surrealists, particularly Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo in Mexico, did spend time immersing in and understanding local culture in a way that didn’t merely appropriate it. Antle’s article is part of a South Central Review issue on Dada, Surrealism, and colonialism, with other pieces covering topics such as André Breton and Vodou in Haiti and ethnographic Surrealism in the 1940s .

Pierre Taminiaux, “ Breton and Trotsky: The Revolutionary Memory of Surrealism ,” Yale French Studies 109, Surrealism and Its Others (2006): 52–66.

The political side of Surrealist artists and writers is often overlooked, even in considerations of their response to what they perceived as a dissolution of reason and logic in post-World War I Europe. Scholar Pierre Taminiaux explores the connections between the Surrealists and communism, especially following the economic crash of 1929 and the Russian Revolution . For instance, André Breton had a personal relationship with Leon Trotsky , with whom he published a collaborative text about how art and literature could support the struggle for freedom by the people. Although there were some Surrealists who created political art, Taminiaux concludes that it was never what propelled the movement.

“The aesthetics of surrealism definitely outlasted its politics,” he writes. “If the movement survived well after World War II, it was precisely because of its status as an avant-garde movement and not because of its revolutionary rhetoric.”

Chinghsin Wu, “ Reality Within and Without: Surrealism in Japan and China in the Early 1930s ,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 26, Commensurable Distinctions: Intercultural Negotiations of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Visual Culture (December 2014): 189–208.

Although much scholarly attention has been focused on Europe, Surrealism had an international footprint. Art historian Chinghsin Wu examines the ways Japanese and Chinese artists engaged with Surrealism in the early 1930s, as “[s]eeing European surrealist painters’ works and learning the main methodologies of surrealism inspired many young artists who were looking for innovative modes of expression to distinguish themselves from conventional art practice.” Wu highlights several influential creators who were inspired by European Surrealism but took its ideas in fresh new directions, such as Koga Harue, who replicated depictions of scientific innovations in his paintings, and Zhao Shou, who involved Eastern philosophy in his approach to the avant-garde.

Sheryl Conkelton, “ American Surrealist Photography ,” MoMA 16 (Winter–Spring 1994): 20–22.

Surrealism made a major impact in the United States, where it particularly informed photography from the 1930s to the mid-1950s. In this article, timed to run alongside the 1994 American Surrealist Photography exhibition at MoMA in New York, art historian Sheryl Conkelton notes that this influence is most evident in “the appropriation of Surrealist motifs and techniques that made familiar subjects seem strange and expressed a spirit of the ineffable.” This rising interest in distortions of reality in photography and fixations on the uncanny was further given a platform through Surrealist publications like View and VVV . Artists such as Man Ray, Clarence John Laughlin, and Maya Deren often used the advancing technical possibilities of the camera to further play with chance and attempt to capture the unconscious in their images.

Keith L. Eggener, “ ‘An Amusing Lack of Logic’: Surrealism and Popular Entertainment ,” American Art 7, No. 4 (Autumn 1993): 30–45.

Although Surrealism was born in the wake of World War I as something revolutionary, with manifestos and a politically radical motivation in advocating for freedom from reason, it arrived in American popular culture mainly as an aesthetic, with Dalí rather than Breton at the forefront in the mid-1930s.

“When Americans at this time spoke of Surrealism’s attachment to Marx, they were usually talking about Groucho or Harpo,” writes art historian Keith L. Eggener. (He notes, for instance, that in the 1936–37 MoMA exhibition, Walt Disney was included alongside the European artists, something that possibly would not have happened if their Communist leanings were more evident.)

Hannah Crawforth, “ Surrealism and the Fashion Magazine ,” American Periodicals , Vol. 14, No. 2 (2004): 212–246.

Part of the mainstream presence of Surrealism was fashion. ​​Readers of Harper’s Bazaar could flip to a multiple exposure image by Man Ray of a dramatically asymmetrical gown by Elsa Schiaparelli, while patrons of Vogue could puzzle over a cover illustrated by Salvador Dalí.

“Far from what has thus far been frequently mis-read as a one-way traffic of surrealist ideas and creativity into the fashion magazines, I would suggest that surrealism as a movement was quick to appropriate many of the tropes of the style press, and to make full use of the commercialism inherent to the genre in its own project,” writes scholar Hannah Crawforth in this article on Surrealism’s manifestation in major fashion magazines.

Haim Finkelstein, “ The Incarnation of Desire: Dalí and the Surrealist Object ,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 23 (Spring 1993): 114–137.

The sculptural “Surrealist object,” where found materials embodied dreamlike, often subversive ideas, was part of the movement from its beginning when Breton presented the concept of “dream objects.” Much like the Surrealist popularity in entertainment and fashion, these objects experienced a curious mainstream interest.

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“However provocative, impertinent, and aggressively ‘anti-artistic’ these objects may have been in the 1930s, especially in the latter half of the decade, they became quite fashionable and were wholeheartedly embraced by the same bourgeois consumers whom they were supposed to befuddle and enrage,” writes art historian Haim Finkelstein in this examination of this history through the work of Dalí.

Terri Francis, “ Introduction: The No-Theory Chant of Afrosurrealism ,” Black Camera 5, No. 1 (Fall 2013): 95–111.

Surrealism’s legacy in literature and art has continued into the twenty-first century, such as through Afrosurrealism, which responds to the experience of living in a racist society through absurdity and fantastic imagery. With this perspective, it is distinct from much of the Surrealism of the twentieth century, during which Black art was mostly only appropriated without inviting the participation of its creators.

“Part of the work that Afrosurrealism does, alongside Afromodernism, is then to re-center blackness at the core of surrealism and modernism, not as catalytic matter but as the manifestations of black artists’ own modalities,” writes historian Terri Francis. Francis’s piece leads a series of articles further examining Afrosurrealism including through the work of artist Kara Walker and filmmaker William Greaves .

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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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Surrealism as Epistemology

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Catriona McAra, Surrealism as Epistemology, Art History , Volume 34, Issue 1, February 2011, Pages 214–218, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2010.00811.x

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Art-historical research on surrealism and its satellites continues to accumulate and accelerate. In the last few years there seems to have been an unprecedented number of conferences, exhibitions and book-length studies devoted to research on the movement, expanding the scope of knowledge from the local to the global, and from private to public. The three studies reviewed here access the history of the movement via such varied themes and perspectives as the erotic, the scientific and the criminological. These lend weight to the views of the British writer Angela Carter who believed that ‘Surrealism was not an artistic movement but a theory of knowledge.’ 1

Marcel Duchamp and Eroticism arose out of a colloquium held on 7–9 December 2005 at the University of Orléans, coinciding with an exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts entitled Marcel Duchamp R Rose Sélavy . Marc Décimo’s compilation includes twenty research papers on Duchamp by scholars, artists and curators from a wide variety of specialisms and backgrounds as well as new voices to the discipline. This both democratizes the study of Duchamp and provides the opportunity for new and detailed perspectives embraced under the theme of ‘eroticism’, an area which has engendered much scholarship in recent years including Alyce Mahon’s probing study Surrealism and the Politics of Eros (2005) and the current research project ‘Non-Normative Sexualities’ at the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and Its Legacies supported by the Universities of Essex and Manchester and Tate. 2 In the history of art more generally, eroticism has tended to be dressed-up as an aestheticization of sexuality, but perhaps more bluntly understood by those such as Carter as ‘pornography for the elite’. 3 Décimo’s volume once again projects eroticism into the intellectual’s domain, variously, ‘kaleidoscopic[ally]’, though at times a little too loosely, defined as ‘proof of difference’ or, as Duchamp himself would have it, ‘the only influential “ism”’ (22). The range of definitions on offer in this book are perhaps evidence enough as to why the ever-elusive Duchamp was so drawn to it conceptually. Eroticism is re-presented in all its glorious ambiguity, shattering the popular image of Duchamp as the cerebral acetic.

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Surrealism, an intellectual and artistic movement, that originated in Paris before attracting followers around the world, was envisioned as a means of knowledge about oneself through the unconscious, the marvelous, the dream, and the simulation of hallucinatory states of mind. Surrealism was defined as “pure, psychic automatism” by the French poet and critic André Breton (1896–1966) in The Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). Automatic techniques were devised in writing, drawing, painting, and even photography as a way to bypass rational control and subvert bourgeois social conventions, in order to foster creativity and empower the possibility of new thought and actions consistent with new values. Following a summary of the state of research on Surrealism, this entry will review the founding principles of Surrealism, and trace a brief history of Surrealist art and theory as it relates to the possible.

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Introduction

The possible in the life and work of rené magritte.

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Lipinski, L. (2022). Surrealism. In: Glăveanu, V.P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90913-0_150

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The AHRB Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies.

• Lomas, David (PI)
• Art History and Cultural Practices

Project Details

Description, key findings.

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• Research Councils Social Sciences 100%
• UK Social Sciences 75%
• Legacy Arts and Humanities 75%
• Surrealism Arts and Humanities 75%
• Contemporary Art Social Sciences 24%
• Cultural History Social Sciences 24%
• Research Centre Social Sciences 24%
• Cultural Theory Social Sciences 24%