Collection: Surrealism & Modern Art

Surrealism took shape in Paris in 1924, when André Breton's first manifesto announced the movement's intention to free thought from the constraints of reason and habitual perception. Its visual programme drew on Dada's earlier rejection of bourgeois rationality, on the Pittura Metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico, and above all on the writings of Sigmund Freud. The dream, the chance encounter, and the involuntary association became its working materials, applied across painting, sculpture, photography, film, and the printed book.

Two principal styles divided the movement. The first, sometimes called illusionistic Surrealism, used academic finish and rigorous perspective to render impossible juxtapositions with a hallucinatory clarity. Salvador Dalí pushed this approach to its public limit, while René Magritte produced his quieter, more philosophical version of the same logic in Belgium. The second tendency, abstract or biomorphic Surrealism, gave space to automatism, free drawing, and improvised mark making. Joan Miró, André Masson, and Roberto Matta worked in this register, opening the way for the gestural abstraction of the postwar New York School.

Surrealism reached well beyond Western Europe. Marc Chagall circled it without joining, his floating figures and Russian Jewish iconography sharing the movement's investment in the irrational image while keeping a lyrical autobiographical centre. The international exhibitions of 1936 in London, 1938 in Paris, and 1942 in New York carried the idiom across the Atlantic and shaped the visual language of mid century commercial illustration and advertising as well.

The prints gathered here include lithographs, etchings, and illustrated books that circulated Surrealist imagery beyond the gallery. The collection sits between the gallery's Cubism & Abstract Art holdings, from which several Surrealists had emerged, and the Art Deco & American Modernism selection, the parallel idiom that dominated commercial design while Surrealism reshaped the gallery space.