A big-scale exhibition of surrealism that first opened in Paris in 2024 could have its sole American iteration, “Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100,” on the Philadelphia Artwork Museum from Nov. 8, 2025, via Feb. 16, 2026.
In on a regular basis speech, folks use “surreal” to discuss with the rest improbable, improbable, ordinary.
“I found myself in the surreal position of explaining who I am …”
“In the middle of the story, things turned surreal.”
“It was a completely surreal situation!”
As an artwork historian and critic who has carefully studied Twentieth-century avant-garde actions, I in finding it exceptional {that a} phrase that originated within the arcane jargon of Paris’ trendy artwork circles a century in the past has develop into so acquainted. From the cafes and studios of the Twenties, the time period has traveled into not unusual parlance – touching a shared nerve for the strangeness and absurdity of contemporary lifestyles.
However surrealism, the motion that coined the time period and took it up as its moniker, used to be about greater than ostentatious strangeness. In case you suppose best of Salvador Dalí’s limp watches swarming with ants, or his extravagant moustaches and much more extravagant (mis)habits, you’re lacking the simpler a part of what continues to make surrealism one of the crucial compelling artwork actions of the 20 th century – and the teachings it nonetheless holds these days.
Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí poses together with his oil art work at his New York Town studio in 1943.
Michael Ochs Archives by means of Getty Pictures
Melding dream and fact
Surrealism used to be based by way of a gaggle of younger Parisian artists, most commonly writers, who accrued across the charismatic determine of poet André Breton.
Throughout Global Battle I, Breton had handled front-line squaddies affected by what used to be then termed “shell shock” and these days we perceive as PTSD. This revel in opened him to altered psychological states and presented him to new concepts from the Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud concerning the construction of the human thoughts.
In states of psychosis, but in addition in day by day occurrences reminiscent of desires and slips of the tongue, Freud noticed glimpses of an uncharted area of the psyche, the subconscious. Why, Breton requested, shouldn’t lifestyles, and artwork, take those facets of human revel in under consideration? Shouldn’t the portion of lifestyles spent dreaming even be known as having worth?
The newsletter of André Breton’s ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ in 1924 is thought of as the start of the surrealist motion.
Photo12/Common Pictures Team by means of Getty Pictures
In a manifesto revealed in 1924, Breton known as for “the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”
Politics of revolution
Freud had coined the time period “dreamwork” to explain the job that reworked residues of the day’s recollections into automobiles for the expression of our subconscious wants.
For the surrealists, too, dreaming used to be no easy realm of idle fable. They understood the synthesis of slumbering and waking lifestyles as promising a liberation no much less sweeping than that of the progressive staff’ motion in their time.
Overcoming the contradiction between dream and fact, they believed, would supplement the category battle between the worldwide proletariat and its bourgeois oppressors. Surrealism used to be a lot more than a simply inventive venture – it used to be additionally a method towards a bigger political finish.
From a century’s distance, those might seem grandiose, even delusional claims. However 1924, the 12 months of surrealism’s founding, used to be best seven years after the Russian Revolution. The surrealists wagered at the energy of each the revolution of contemporary artwork and poetry and the political transformation of society.
“‘Transform the world,’ Marx said; ‘change life,’ [French poet Arthur] Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us,” Breton stated, talking to a gaggle of writers in Paris. In different phrases, the uncompromising venture of remaking social lifestyles would now not be whole with out the inventive reimagining of the human psyche, and vice versa.
However by way of 1935, when Breton pronounced this succinct formula, the surrealists’ gamble on revolution had already successfully been misplaced. With Joseph Stalin’s purges underway in Moscow and Adolf Hitler consolidating energy in Germany, the window for radical alternate that had perceived to open within the years after Global Battle I used to be definitively ultimate.
Quickly, the surrealists would in finding themselves dispersed into exile by way of a brand new international struggle. All that remained used to be for the museums and libraries to assemble the relics of that heady best and to keep the works of art and ephemera that registered surrealism’s temporary quest to unharness the forces of the subconscious within the title of a brand new, freer international.
Surrealism’s unfinished trade
The surrealists aimed to seduce their audiences. That seduction used to be now not undertaken to promote their art work, and even to supply their audiences a second’s respite from harried lives. It used to be achieved within the title of subversion. They needed – via works of art, movies and books – to shatter folks’s complacency and transfer them to modify their lives, and the arena.
A customer to the Paris exhibition walks previous René Magritte’s surrealist ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ painted in 1946.
AP Picture/Christophe Ena
The art work wasn’t a trifling window wherein to seem onto a far off “dreamworld.” It used to be extra like a revolving door one used to be invited to stroll via. Breton and his colleagues desired an international by which folks may are living poetry, now not simply learn it.
Surrealist artistic endeavors, at the same time as they dangle peaceably at the museum’s partitions or take a seat quietly on library cabinets, retain a minimum of residues of that energy.
In my opinion, the most productive fresh writing at the motion manages to recapture that urgency, that attract, for our personal time. Those come with translator and writer Mark Polizzotti’s 2024 guide “Why Surrealism Matters” and artwork historian Abigail Susik’s 2021 quantity “Surrealist Sabotage.”
The centenary of surrealism is a reminder of the motion’s unfinished trade of progressive seduction. In any case, as Breton reminded his readers on the shut of his 1924 manifesto, lifestyles isn’t certain to the realities of the arena as lately given.
“Existence,” he insisted, “is elsewhere.”
