CategoriesStyles and Movements
Surrealism
The movement founded in Paris in 1924 that sought the marvellous in dreams, chance and the unconscious, in painting, objects and photography.
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About
The poet André Breton launched Surrealism in Paris with a manifesto in 1924, drawing on Dada's contempt for reason and Sigmund Freud's writings on dreams. Breton's circle played games such as the exquisite corpse, in which several people add to a drawing or sentence without seeing the rest, to let chance and hidden impulses take over.
Two ways of working developed. One was automatic: André Masson let his pen wander, Joan Miró floated biomorphic signs across colour, and Max Ernst rubbed pencil over wood grain to find forests and creatures. The other painted impossible scenes with precise realism: René Magritte's pipe captioned “This is not a pipe” in The Treachery of Images (1929), Salvador Dalí's melting watches in The Persistence of Memory (1931). Meret Oppenheim lined a cup, saucer and spoon with fur in Object (1936). Wartime exile carried these ideas to New York and Mexico.