Surrealism

Surrealism is an art movement of the 1920–1980 period. The gallery holds 77 works in this movement, including works by Paul Klee, Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi and Luc Albert Moreau. Browse Surrealism paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Surrealism was an international cultural movement that crystallized in Paris in the early 1920s, formally launched when the poet and critic André Breton published his *Manifesto of Surrealism* in 1924. That same year Breton founded the Bureau of Surrealist Research and the journal *La Révolution surréaliste*, giving the movement institutional shape. Surrealism grew directly out of Dada's anti-rational provocations and was steeped in Sigmund Freud's theories of dreams and the unconscious. Breton defined it as "pure psychic automatism," a means of expressing the real functioning of thought freed from reason, aesthetic convention, and moral control. What had begun as a literary experiment with automatic writing soon expanded into the visual arts.

Two broad approaches emerged. The automatist wing—Joan Miró, André Masson, and the German émigré Max Ernst—courted chance and the unconscious through spontaneous mark-making and invented techniques such as frottage (rubbing over textured surfaces), grattage (scraping paint), and decalcomania. The veristic or hyperrealist wing—Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte—rendered impossible scenes with crisp, illusionistic precision, lending dream imagery the conviction of photographs. Both shared a taste for unexpected juxtaposition, metamorphosis, and the uncanny.

The movement's canonical works remain touchstones of twentieth-century art. Dalí's *The Persistence of Memory* (1931), with its limp watches melting across a barren shore, became Surrealism's defining image. Magritte's *The Treachery of Images* (1929), inscribed "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," interrogated the gap between objects, pictures, and words—a conceptual provocation held in this collection. Ernst, Miró, Tanguy, and Masson rounded out a roster that also embraced photography, film, and sculpture.

Surrealism drew heavily on precursors, above all Giorgio de Chirico's enigmatic Metaphysical painting and the dream-laden imagination of nineteenth-century Symbolism, while extending Dada's iconoclasm into a constructive program. When many of its members fled wartime Europe for New York in the early 1940s, their emphasis on spontaneity and the unconscious helped catalyze Abstract Expressionism, shaping painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Its influence persists across modern advertising, cinema, and contemporary art, making Surrealism one of the most far-reaching avant-gardes of the modern era.