Surrealism turns 100. See the dreamy paintings that made the movement so revolutionary

In October 1924, French writer Andre Breton published what is now known as the Surreal manifesto. The groundbreaking text – which advocated a new style of art and literature that would be “free from any control by reason, exempt from aesthetic or moral preoccupation” – helped spawn a new, avant-garde movement that spread all over the world.

Now, to mark the manifesto’s centenary, a new exhibition in Paris explores Surrealism’s lasting global impact. Titled “Surrealism”, the show includes more than 500 artifacts and works of art, 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 collaborated with the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music to create an artificial intelligence recording of Breton reading it.

The show initially started in Brussels in February, and it is currently on display at the Center Pompidou in Paris. After it leaves France next year, it will move on to Madrid, Hamburg and Philadelphia. A total of five institutions are organizing the exhibition, but each museum has its own unique curatorial approach.

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

In Paris, the exhibition presents Surrealism as a global movement – ​​not just a European movement. Although the movement originated in France, its core principles, which include “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.

“It is important to remember that surrealism was a movement that spread – and this is exceptional for an avant-garde movement – ​​all over the world, in Europe, but also in the United States, South America, Asia and the Maghreb ,” said Marie Sarré. who organized the exhibition at the Center Pompidou together with the museum’s deputy director, Didier Ottinger, tells the Guardianby Jennifer Rankin.

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

The exhibition, which is structured in a spiral and split into 13 sections, also explores themes of anti-colonialism and environmentalism. Curators hope to attract a younger audience who may not be familiar with surrealism but connect with some of its core beliefs.

Many younger museum visitors are “disillusioned by the idea of ​​progress and modernism,” says Sarré Art newspaper‘s Dale Berning Sawa. “They are politically and ecologically committed, anti-colonialist, anti-nationalist – in a way that echoes what the Surrealists did.”

All the while, the Surrealists were having a lot of fun too, as Jonathan Jones notes in a review for the Guardian.

“Of all the modernist art movements, it was the surrealists who enjoyed their revolution best,” he writes. “In the Pompidou’s perfectly judged exhibition, that pleasure comes through in meeting these artists, all now dead, not so much as giants of art history, but as highly entertaining companions.”

“Surrealism‘ can be seen in the Center Pompidou in Paris until January 13, 2025.

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