Surrealism: everything you need to know about the renegade artists who fused dream and reality

Endlessly influential on art history and culture at large, Surrealism has its roots in World War I. Disillusioned by the widespread carnage and destruction caused by the war, European artists sought something entirely new. Life no longer made sense, and as a result, art became the space within which to explore its contradictions and challenge the basis of assumed realities.

Founded in Paris during the 1920s, Surrealism upended how people perceived art and the world around them. The movement’s leader, French poet and critic André Breton, wrote in his 1924 Manifeste du surréalisme that Surrealism’s aim was ‘to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.’

Few could have predicted what was once an obscure countermovement could flourish into an everlasting aesthetic and approach to life. Surrealism unleashed the creative possibilities of art, blurring the boundaries between genres, subjects, media and geographies. Here, discover some of its most salient influences, contributors and milestones.

Like Dada, Surrealism prized the unexpected

Whereas Surrealism responded to the atrocities of war in their aftermath, Dadaists were producing art at its catastrophic peak. The movement began in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916, and expanded to Paris and beyond during the 1920s. Opposing nationalism, colonialism and the conformity of bourgeois life, Dada aimed to destroy all art forms and traditional hierarchies.

The radical movement’s reliance on nonsensicality, humour and satire shook the art world, as did its controversial media. In addition to collage, photomontage and performance, everyday objects — none more famous than Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ urinal, Fountain (1917), and shovel, In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915)— redefined the constructs of what fine art could be.

Growing out of Dada, Surrealism took a more introspective, intellectual approach, endeavouring to revolutionise the human experience.

A ballet originally inspired the term Surrealism

By the time Breton penned his 1924 manifesto, the word surréalisme, meaning ‘beyond reality’, had already been in use for almost a decade. It was coined by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire in reference to Russian choreographer Léonide Massine’s 1916 Parade for the Ballets Russes. The diverse combination of forms and approaches that defined Parade — with costume and set design by Pablo Picasso, music by Erik Satie and scenario by Jean Cocteau — was an apt precursor to the revolutionary art movement to come.

Breton’s circle drew inspiration from psychiatry and technology

Breton’s training in psychiatry and medicine during World War I led to the group’s adoption of ideas from Sigmund Freud, which Breton had implemented in treating shell shock, or post-traumatic stress disorder, in soldiers. By probing the unconscious for artistic purposes, the Surrealists discovered a new creative freedom. They took a particular interest in dreams, which they saw as an expression of unconscious drives, offering unique insights into human existence that could not be gleaned from waking life.

Inspired by cultural philosophies of the time, Surrealists also looked towards the writing of Karl Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Walter Benjamin to establish the foundations of their movement. Philosophical methods, such as Hegel’s dialectic — where ideas were viewed as reality itself — were explored, while Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity helped shape their expressions of time and space.

The movement additionally coincided with significant developments in technology. The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière’s experiments in film had made the photographic process more widely available by the early 20th century, leading artists such as Man Ray to further advance the medium. Surrealists also adopted film as a means of exploring the limits of art, as exemplified by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s 1929 film Un Chien Andalou, which utilises the bricolage, shock value and dreamlike sequences that came to characterise the movement.

But, they also revelled in parlour games

One of Surrealism’s best-known practices was the collaborative drawing game Exquisite Corpse, or Cadavre Exquis, where one member would draw the top of body before folding the paper and passing it to another, leaving only guides as to where to continue. Rooted in play, the exercise promoted the circumvention of conscious, rational decision making, spurring its players to generate fantastical creatures with unfettered creativity.

The 2022 exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art spotlighted a 30-foot example conceived by Ted Joans, a Black American Surrealist. It includes contributions from 132 artists, including Dorothea Tanning, Allen Ginsberg and Mário Cesariny, between 1976–2005.

Surrealists explored a multitude of styles...

Merging the fantastical with the mundane, Giorgio de Chirico’s ‘metaphysical art’ was highly influential on Breton and the Surrealists for its dreamlike, eerie sensibility. Unlike other avant-garde art movements, which focused on a singular style, Surrealism harnessed both abstraction and figuration across an array of media. Figuration within the movement is often characterised by uncanny subject matter depicted with hyper-realistic, Renaissance-like precision seen in the paintings of René Magritte and Dalí.

Artists such as Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy were masters of Surrealist abstraction. Miró often relied on a balance of colour and organic linework to render his almost mystical compositions, while Tanguy's natural, even amorphous forms stand starkly against his simply coloured, tonal backgrounds. Other abstract Surrealists took inspiration from the theories of Carl Jung, exploring the subconscious, and how it could be expressed in art.

Automatism was a technique that grew out of unconscious gesture, mechanical processes and experiments in materiality. In works like André Masson’s sand paintings and Max Ernst’s collages and frottages, Surrealists sought to divorce their art making from conscious intention, employing unorthodox materials in actions that prioritised feeling over meaning, gesture over form.

The Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky befriended many of the Surrealists in New York during the 1940s and served as a bridge between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. The legacy of automatism can be seen throughout the latter movement, such as in Jackson Pollock’s splatter technique.

... and pushed the boundaries of nearly every medium

Though perhaps best known for painters such as Dalí, Magritte and Leonora Carrington, Surrealism was fundamentally multidisciplinary. Photographers and filmmakers, such as Kati Horna, Luis Buñuel and Man Ray, employed new capture technology, while writers like Philippe Soupault and Robert Desnos upended fiction and poetry. Joan Miró, Max Ernst and Oppenheim were innovative sculptors, alongside Alberto Giacometti. Carrington wrote fantastical novels and plays in addition to producing painting, sculpture and tapestry, while Dalí took part in making films, often alongside Buñuel.

Surrealists encouraged the integration of forms, giving rise to practices such as collage, rubbings (frottage) and scratching away at the painted surface of a work (grattage). Another technique, fumage, used smoke to produce unusual textures.

Ernst combined many of these techniques in his compositions, using different media and detritus to modify a surface. He and Óscar Domínguez also adopted decalcomania, a transfer technique where wet paint or ink is spread on a surface and then covered with foil, paper or glass, before being peeled away to reveal enigmatic, oneiric patterns.

Man Ray developed a new method of making photographic prints without a camera. In his Rayographs, as they became known, he placed everyday objects like wires, coils and thumbtacks on photosensitive paper to produce a silhouetted image that hovered between abstraction and representation.

Surrealists’ explorations frequently ventured into fashion and jewellery, perhaps, most famously Elsa Schiaparelli’s longstanding collaboration with Dalí, which began in 1935 with a powder case styled as a rotary phone dial.

The movement spread from Paris to New York…

In the 1930s, most modern art, including Surrealism, was labelled ‘degenerate’ by the Nazi Party. Artists were forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, among other sanctions. Some, such as the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, were imprisoned — he died in a concentration camp in 1945. During the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, many other artists, including Masson, Dalí and Yves Tanguy, fled Paris under extreme circumstances and adopted New York City as their home. With the arrival of these expatriate artists, New York emerged as the world’s new international art capital.

Peggy Guggenheim, one of the 20th century’s most important collectors, played an instrumental role in promoting the Surrealists through dedicated exhibitions at her The Art of This Century gallery, which she opened on 57th Street in Manhattan in 1942. She additionally helped put many undersung female artists on the map, such as Argentinian-born Italian surrealist Leonor Fini and the German-born Swiss Surrealist Meret Oppenheim. Until its closure in 1947, the space also served as a meeting point for artists including Breton, Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Robert Motherwell and Jean-Paul Sartre, amongst countless others.

…and flourished with a new generation of artists in Latin America

During the Second World War, European Surrealists also left the continent for Mexico City. Previous visits had brought Breton in contact with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who embodied the group’s vision of the region’s artistic production. After his relocation during the war, Breton was joined by other Surrealists like Jacquelina Lamba, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Kati Horna, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Wolfgang Paalen and Alice Rahon.

Mexico became a central hub for exiled Europeans, but it was also a gathering point and incubator for many of Latin America’s most important artists. Painters like Cuba’s Wilfredo Lam, Argentina’s Xul Solar, Chile’s Roberto Matta and the Mexicans Rufino Tamayo, María Izquierdo, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and Gunther Gerzso were all key to the evolution of Surrealism in Latin America.

The expat Europeans were inspired by Latin American folk art, while artists from the region incorporated Surrealist influences into their own practices, forging a new strain of the movement. Lam’s Surrealist works, for example, used abstraction and automatism while delving into his Afro-Cuban and Chinese heritage.

Women Surrealists rebelled against the norm

Women in the Surrealist circle, such as Meret Oppenheim and Leonor Fini, defied convention to pave the way for future generations of female artists. Though Fini never officially joined the movement, her dark figures, often blurring the lines between human and nature, were as enigmatic and theatrical as her own presence. Her depictions of powerful women and unabashed embrace of female sexual agency have cemented her as one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

Like Fini, Oppenheim, too, worked across media and advocated for a proposed ‘androgyny of the spirit’ over the term ‘woman artist.’ Her Objet (Déjeuner en fourrure) — a cup and saucer wrapped in fur — caused a sensation when it appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936 and has become a longstanding symbol of Surrealism’s playful and subversive spirit.

Some of the most important female Surrealists called Mexico their home. Painters, including Carrington, Varo and Rahon emerged as leaders of the scene. Carrington, who once said, ‘I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse…I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist’, found inspiration in local artistic traditions, combining them with spiritual practices such as witchcraft and Tarot.

100 years on, Surrealism has never been hotter

Since 2001, Christie’s has hosted an annual Art of the Surreal evening sale in London, and Surrealist works have smashed records in recent years. In 2022, Man Ray’s Le Violin d’Ingres sold for $12.4 million, becoming the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction. The same year a sculpture by Ernst set a $24 million auction record in Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection.

In recent years, institutions and books have celebrated Surrealism’s immense legacy, largely shining a brighter light on its many female figures, as intriguing as they were intrepid. In 2022, MoMA presented a solo show on Meret Oppenheim, for example, while in 2023, the Art Institute of Chicago presented Remedios Varo: Science Fictions.

During May 2024, Gallery Wendi Norris presented the Spanish-born artist’s first solo exhibition in New York in nearly 40 years. Leonor Fini made a splash in a joint presentation by Galerie Minsky and Weinstein Gallery at the 2023 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, and she will be the subject of multiple institutional exhibitions between 2024 and 2025.

Many institutions are also staging shows in celebration of Surrealism’s 2024 centennial. One highlight is IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism, conceived by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium with the Centre Pompidou, which is currently on show in Paris, and will travel to Hamburg, Madrid and Philadelphia. Elsewhere, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas presented Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940.

Outside of Breton-era Surrealists, the movement’s eternal influence can be felt in the work of a new generation of contemporary artists, such as in Louise Bonnet’s distorted bodily compositions or Ewa Juszkiewicz’s female sitters whose visages are swathed in fabric and hair. In 2023 the book, New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting (whose cover features a painting by the Polish artist), was published, chronicling the latest talents incorporating the movement’s tenets into their wide-ranging practices.

The Surrealists’ legacy is limitless

Beyond fine art, Surrealism’s radical embrace of the fantastical, strange and uncanny has infiltrated mainstream culture. Iconic surrealist motifs, from corporeal disembodied eyes and lips, to fantastical natural phenomena of lobsters, zebra and rhinoceroses, the surrealist visual lexicon has become ubiquitous in fashion and lifestyle brands, as have trompe-l’oeil designs by the likes of Loewe, Moschino and Thom Browne. The Couture house of Schiaparelli has once again emerged as one of the most in-demand names in fashion, its founder, in her time, having collaborated with Dalí, Giacometti and others on some of the most memorable surrealist fashion statements

More than a movement, Surrealism has become a mode of thought, a vehicle for expanding creative possibilities in ways that bridge the gap between dreams and reality. As artists and makers respond to the surreality of today’s world, its applications are limitless.

Christie’s 20th and 21st Century auctions in New York will take place on 19-22 November. Find out more about the preview exhibitions and sales here.