{"id":234862,"date":"2025-10-23T17:01:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T17:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/234862\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T17:01:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T17:01:11","slug":"surrealism-is-better-known-for-its-strangeness-than-the-radical-politics-and-revolutionary-ambitions-of-its-creators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/234862\/","title":{"rendered":"Surrealism is better known for its strangeness than the radical politics and revolutionary ambitions of its creators"},"content":{"rendered":"

A large-scale exhibition of surrealism<\/a> that first opened in Paris<\/a> in 2024 will have its sole American iteration, \u201cDreamworld: Surrealism at 100<\/a>,\u201d at the Philadelphia Art Museum from Nov. 8, 2025, through Feb. 16, 2026. <\/p>\n

In everyday speech, people use \u201csurreal\u201d to refer to anything unbelievable, fantastic, bizarre. <\/p>\n

\u201cI found myself in the surreal position of explaining who I am \u2026\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cIn the middle of the story, things turned surreal.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a completely surreal situation!\u201d <\/p>\n

As an art historian and critic<\/a> who has closely studied 20th-century avant-garde movements, I find it remarkable that a word that originated in the arcane jargon of Paris\u2019 modern art circles a century ago has become so familiar. From the cafes and studios of the 1920s, the term has traveled into common parlance \u2013 touching a shared nerve for the strangeness and absurdity of modern life. <\/p>\n

But surrealism, the movement that coined the term and took it up as its moniker, was about more than ostentatious strangeness. If you think only of Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s limp watches swarming with ants<\/a>, or his extravagant moustaches<\/a> and even more extravagant (mis)behavior<\/a>, you are missing the better part of what continues to make surrealism one of the most compelling art movements of the 20th century \u2013 and the lessons it still holds today.<\/p>\n

\"Black<\/p>\n

Surrealist artist Salvador Dal\u00ed poses with his oil paintings at his New York City studio in 1943.
\n Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images<\/a><\/p>\n

Melding dream and reality<\/p>\n

Surrealism was founded by a group of young Parisian artists, mostly writers, who gathered around the charismatic figure of poet Andr\u00e9 Breton<\/a>. <\/p>\n

During World War I, Breton had treated front-line soldiers suffering from what was then termed \u201cshell shock<\/a>\u201d and today we understand as PTSD. This experience opened him to altered mental states and introduced him to new ideas from the Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud about the structure of the human mind<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In states of psychosis, but also in daily occurrences such as dreams and slips of the tongue, Freud saw glimpses of an uncharted region of the psyche, the unconscious. Why, Breton asked, shouldn\u2019t life, and art, take these aspects of human experience into account? Shouldn\u2019t the portion of existence spent dreaming also be recognized as having value? <\/p>\n

\"Orange<\/p>\n

The publication of Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s \u2018Manifesto of Surrealism\u2019 in 1924 is considered the birth of the surrealist movement.
\n Photo12\/Universal Images Group via Getty Images<\/a><\/p>\n

In a manifesto published in 1924<\/a>, Breton called for \u201cthe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Politics of revolution<\/p>\n

Freud had coined the term \u201cdreamwork\u201d to describe the activity that transformed residues of the day\u2019s memories into vehicles for the expression of our unconscious desires. <\/p>\n

For the surrealists, too, dreaming was no simple realm of idle fantasy. They understood the synthesis of sleeping and waking life as promising a liberation no less sweeping than that of the revolutionary workers\u2019 movement<\/a> of their time.<\/p>\n

Overcoming the contradiction between dream and reality, they believed, would complement the class struggle between the global proletariat and its bourgeois oppressors. Surrealism was much more than a merely artistic project \u2013 it was also a means toward a larger political end. <\/p>\n

From a century\u2019s distance, these may appear grandiose, even delusional claims. But 1924, the year of surrealism\u2019s founding, was only seven years after the Russian Revolution. The surrealists wagered on the power of both the revolution of modern art and poetry and the political transformation of society. <\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Transform the world,\u2019 Marx said; \u2018change life,\u2019 [French poet Arthur] Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us<\/a>,\u201d Breton said, speaking to a group of writers in Paris. In other words, the uncompromising project of remaking social existence would not be complete without the artistic reimagining of the human psyche, and vice versa.<\/p>\n

But by 1935, when Breton pronounced this succinct formulation, the surrealists\u2019 gamble on revolution had already effectively been lost. With Joseph Stalin\u2019s purges<\/a> underway in Moscow and Adolf Hitler consolidating power in Germany<\/a>, the window for radical change that had seemed to open in the years after World War I was definitively closing. <\/p>\n

Soon, the surrealists would find themselves dispersed into exile by a new global conflict. All that remained was for the museums and libraries to collect the relics of that heady ideal and to preserve the artworks and ephemera that registered surrealism\u2019s brief quest to unleash the forces of the unconscious in the name of a new, freer world.<\/p>\n

Surrealism\u2019s unfinished business<\/p>\n

The surrealists aimed to seduce their audiences. That seduction was not undertaken to sell their paintings, or even to provide their audiences a moment\u2019s respite from harried lives. It was done in the name of subversion. They wished \u2013 through artworks, films and books \u2013 to shatter people\u2019s complacency and move them to change their lives, and the world.<\/p>\n

\"Woman<\/p>\n

A visitor to the Paris exhibition walks past Ren\u00e9 Magritte\u2019s surrealist \u2018Alice in Wonderland,\u2019 painted in 1946.
\n AP Photo\/Christophe Ena<\/a><\/p>\n

The artwork wasn\u2019t a mere window through which to look onto a distant \u201cdreamworld.\u201d It was more like a revolving door one was invited to walk through. Breton and his colleagues desired a world in which individuals could live poetry, not just read it. <\/p>\n

Surrealist works of art, even as they hang peaceably on the museum\u2019s walls or sit quietly on library shelves, retain at least residues of that power. <\/p>\n

In my view, the best recent writing on the movement manages to recapture that urgency, that allure, for our own time. These include translator and author Mark Polizzotti\u2019s 2024 book \u201cWhy Surrealism Matters<\/a>\u201d and art historian Abigail Susik\u2019s 2021 volume \u201cSurrealist Sabotage<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The centenary of surrealism is a reminder of the movement\u2019s unfinished business of revolutionary seduction. After all, as Breton reminded his readers at the close of his 1924 manifesto, life is not bound to the realities of the world as currently given. <\/p>\n

\u201cExistence,\u201d he insisted, \u201cis elsewhere<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania<\/a>, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A large-scale exhibition of surrealism that first opened in Paris in 2024 will have its sole American iteration,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":234863,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-234862","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234862\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}