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.

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 a 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, particularly seen in the paintings of the Belgian Surrealists René Magritte and Paul Delvaux. Delvaux’s enigmatic figures evoke a haunting tension, their mysterious stillness captured in often classical settings.

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.