Collection: Dada & Surrealism

Dada and Surrealism are two consecutive twentieth century movements that placed unreason, chance, and the unconscious at the centre of artistic practice. Dada took shape at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in February 1916, founded by Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Hans Arp, and Richard Huelsenbeck. The movement was a deliberate rejection of the cultural values that had produced the First World War, and its programme of anti-art performance, sound poetry, and chance composition spread to Berlin, Paris, Cologne, Hannover, and New York within four years.

Surrealism emerged in Paris in October 1924 with the publication of André Breton's first manifesto. Breton, who had trained in psychiatry, defined Surrealism as pure psychic automatism intended to express the actual functioning of thought free from rational control. The visual programme drew on Dada's working methods, on the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, and on the writings of Sigmund Freud. The movement absorbed Dada figures, including Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, who all crossed from the earlier movement into the new one.

Two principal styles divided Surrealist painting. Illusionistic Surrealism, exemplified by Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Yves Tanguy, used academic finish and rigorous perspective to render impossible juxtapositions with hallucinatory clarity. Automatist Surrealism, in the work of Joan Miró, André Masson, and Roberto Matta, gave space to free drawing and improvised mark making, opening the way for postwar gestural abstraction.

The international Surrealist exhibitions of 1936 in London, 1938 in Paris, and 1942 in New York carried the idiom across the Atlantic and shaped mid-century commercial illustration as well as the gallery space. The principal sub-movements include Dadaism, Surrealism, Metaphysical Painting, and Magic Realism.