100 Years of Surrealism

In 1924, amid the wreckage of the Great War, Surrealism was born when the French poet André Breton published a treatise decrying the vogue for realism and rationality. Breton argued instead for embracing the “omnipotence of dreams” and exploring the unconscious and all that was “marvelous” in life. Art that could reach beyond the rational could liberate humanity, he felt. “The mere word ‘freedom’ is the only one that still excites me,” Breton wrote in his “Surrealist Manifesto.” It was a literary idea that became an art movement and revolutionized nearly all forms of cultural production.

Although Breton’s circle was mostly in Paris, Surrealism’s signature adherents were spread internationally: Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró were Spanish, Giorgio de Chirico was Italian, René Magritte was Belgian, Leonora Carrington was British, Wifredo Lam was Cuban, Frida Kahlo was Mexican and Roberto Matta was born in Chile.

The surrealist movement sought man's own reality in the unconscious, which became the source of artistic inspiration. A logical-rational “bourgeois” conception of art was radically and provocatively rejected. The artists strove to switch off the restrictive consciousness through dreams, sleep or intoxicants and allow the unconscious to express itself in an automatic, uncontrolled creative process (e.g. Écriture automatique). Other stylistic devices that became established were an overly precise style of painting, alienation or combinations of impossible things and conditions that transcend reality. Each artist found their own style within the movement: Miró, for example, developed an abstract formal language from strongly contoured surrealist signs; in Lam's art, surrealism was combined with elements of the Santería religion of his Cuban ancestors. Matta, on the other hand, used the surrealist methods of free association and automatic painting to create in-scapes (interior landscapes) and morphologies.

To mark the centenary of Surrealism, museum directors, curators and art historians around the world have once again measured the influence that the movement has exerted and continues to exert on the creation of art. There will be exhibitions everywhere: Art institutions around the world will present exhibitions that explore the movement, tracing all its areas of influence - from an exhibition of Surrealist works by artists from the Caribbean and African diaspora (Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) to a show on Surrealism in Eastern Europe (Eesti Rahva Muuseum).

The Centre Pompidou in Paris, which has one of the most extensive collections of Surrealist art in the world, has organized the largest of the exhibitions: a travelling exhibition that opened in Brussels on 21 February and will come to Paris on 4 September. In 2025, the show will then be on display at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and subsequently at the Fundación Mapfré Madrid, before ending 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.