Surrealism Is Turning 100. See the Dreamlike Paintings That Made the Movement So Revolutionary

In October 1924, French writer André Breton published what’s now known as the Surrealist Manifesto. The seminal text—which argued for a new style of art and literature that would be “free from any control by reason, exempt from aesthetic or moral preoccupation”—helped give rise to a new, avant-garde movement that spread around the world.

Now, to mark the manifesto’s 100th anniversary, a new exhibition in Paris is examining Surrealism’s enduring global impact. Titled “Surrealism,” the show incorporates more than 500 artifacts and artworks, including poems, drawings, sculptures and paintings.

Pages from Breton’s original handwritten manuscript are also on display, thanks to a loan from the French national library. To bring the historic document to life, the museum worked with the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music to create an artificial intelligence recording of Breton reading it aloud.

The show initially opened in Brussels in February, and it’s currently on display at Paris’ Pompidou Center. After it leaves France next year, it will move on to Madrid, Hamburg and Philadelphia. In total, five institutions are hosting the exhibition, but each museum is taking its own unique curatorial approach.

“I hope that people will discover that Surrealism is a state of mind and a way of looking at things,” Francisca Vandepitte, who curated the show at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, tells the New York Times’ Nina Siegal. “It’s not something theoretical and very complicated. The main force is something that we all know. It’s irrational, and it’s our dreams, and it’s liberating.”

In Paris, the exhibition presents Surrealism as a global movement—not just a European one. Though the movement originated in France, its core principles, including “challenging rationality, embracing the unconscious and exploring alternative realities,” struck a chord with a diverse group of artists from different backgrounds and cultures, writes Artnet’s Sofia Hallström.

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“It is important to remember that Surrealism was a movement that spread—and this is exceptional for an avant-garde movement—around the world, in Europe, but also the United States, South America, Asia and the Maghreb,” Marie Sarré, who co-curated the Pompidou Center exhibition with the museum’s deputy director Didier Ottinger, tells the Guardian’s Jennifer Rankin.

Items on display include works by well-known artists such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, as well as pieces by lesser-known Surrealists like Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo and Japanese artist Tatsuo Ikeda. The Pompidou Center also shines a light on often-overlooked women in the Surrealist movement, including Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington and Dora Maar.

The exhibition, which is laid out in a spiral and split into 13 sections, also explores themes like anticolonialism and environmentalism. Curators hope to attract younger audiences, who may not be familiar with Surrealism but might connect with some of its core beliefs.

Many younger museumgoers are “disillusioned with the idea of progress and Modernism,” Sarré tells the Art Newspaper’s Dale Berning Sawa. “They’re politically and ecologically engaged, anticolonialist, antinationalist—in a way that chimes with what the Surrealists were doing.”

All the while, the Surrealists were also having a great deal of fun, as Jonathan Jones notes in a review for the Guardian.

“Of all the Modernist art movements, it was the Surrealists who were best at enjoying their revolution,” he writes. “In the Pompidou’s perfectly judged exhibition, that pleasure shines through as you meet these artists, all dead now, not so much as giants of art history as extremely amusing companions.”

“Surrealism” is on view at the Pompidou Center in Paris through January 13, 2025.

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.