Collection: Surrealism

Surrealism is the movement André Breton (1896–1966) announced in the Manifeste du surréalisme, published in Paris in October 1924. The Bureau of Surrealist Research opened that year, and the journal La Révolution surréaliste ran from 1924 to 1929. The programme treated the dream, the chance encounter, and the involuntary association as primary creative materials, applying them across painting, sculpture, photography, film, and the printed book. The visual programme drew on Dada's earlier rejection of bourgeois rationality, on the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), and on the writings of Sigmund Freud.

Two principal styles divided the movement. Illusionistic Surrealism, exemplified by Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), René Magritte (1898–1967), Yves Tanguy (1900–1955), and Paul Delvaux (1897–1994), used academic finish to render impossible juxtapositions with hallucinatory clarity. Abstract Surrealism, in the work of Joan Miró (1893–1983), André Masson (1896–1987), Max Ernst (1891–1976), and Roberto Matta (1911–2002), gave space to automatism, frottage, decalcomania, and the exquisite corpse. Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, Méret Oppenheim, Wifredo Lam, and Pavel Tchelitchew extended the programme. The 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris consolidated the international scope. Paul Klee circled the movement without fully joining it.