Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100
Philadelphia Museum of Art
November 8, 2025\u2013February 16, 2026
Philadelphia, PA<\/p>\n
Before the Great War, we lived in \u201ca static world, where the values appeared stable and where the meanings of abstractions seemed permanent and reliable,\u201d the literary historian Paul Fussell wrote. \u201cEveryone knew what Glory was, and what Honor meant.\u201d1 But by 1929 Ernest Hemingway could write in A Farewell to Arms that \u201cabstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers….\u201d2 After the violent upheavals of World War I and the unsettling events that immediately followed\u2014the Spanish flu (which took between fifty and a hundred million lives worldwide), the political revolutions in Germany and Russia, and a crippling global recession that lasted through 1921\u2014reality itself felt unstable.<\/p>\n
The traumas of the teens prompted artists to create Dada, which swept reality away, the extreme cynicism of German \u201cNew Objectivity,\u201d and Constructivism, which attempted to build an imagined utopia from the ruins. In Paris, the frenetic and uncertain reality produced Surrealism. And against the backdrop of the Roaring Twenties, hyperinflation and the market crash, flappers and cabarets, Surrealism turned inward toward the psyche, privileging unconscious emotions, fears, and fantasies. The architects of Surrealism were writers. Guillaume Apollinaire invented the term surr\u00e9aliste in 1917 to describe his absurdist play Les mamelles de Tir\u00e9sias (The Breasts of Tireseas); Andr\u00e9 Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philippe Soupault inaugurated the journal Litt\u00e9rature in February 1919 as Surrealism\u2019s first vehicle. Artaud described Surrealism as a \u201ccomplete liberation of the mind.\u201d3 Breton defined it as \u201cpsychic automatism…the dream state.\u201d4<\/p>\n
Surrealism began as a literary movement and only later burst into celebrity as an art movement. Nevertheless, the list of visual artists who signed on, formally or informally during the 1920s and 1930s, is a roster of giants. Among the seventy artists included in the Philadelphia Museum\u2019s current exhibition, Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, are such artists as Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Jean Arp, Andr\u00e9 Masson, Max Ernst, Joan Mir\u00f3, Yves Tanguy, Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Ren\u00e9 Magritte, Salvador Dal\u00ed, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Joseph Cornell, and Claude Cahun. Still more artists came to Surrealism in the 1940s and 1950s, when automatism and metamorphic imagery lay the foundation for such major developments as American Abstract Expressionism and then international Pop Art respectively. This vibrant, dynamically evolving, often theatrical movement remained prominent for forty years.<\/p>\n
Curated by Matthew Affron, Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100 now in the Philadelphia Museum, lays out the story of Surrealism\u2014its themes, its central preoccupations and its various and evolving morphologies\u2014with brilliant clarity. Moreover, as much as a third of the roughly 200 works come from the museum\u2019s own collections. The Arensberg and Gallatin collections, which came in 1950 and 1952, made the Philadelphia Museum one of the world\u2019s great collections of modern, and especially Surrealist, art. Each of the five venues for this show \u2013 previously in Paris, Brussels, Madrid, and Hamburg\u2014undertook to tell a distinct variation of the story as it pertained to their own history and collection, making each showing unique. This in itself creates a dynamic dialogue and a rejuvenatingly fresh take.<\/p>\n
Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100 in Philadelphia opens with the museum\u2019s famous painting of The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913) by Giorgio de Chirico. This object sets many of the themes of the Surrealist dreamworld \u2013 a world of illusions, with mysterious meanings, illogical juxtapositions, allusions to classical myth displaced into contemporary settings, and wonder at the extraordinary in nature. It\u2019s all about freedom of thought and the re-enchantment of the everyday. Affron casts \u201cSurrealism as a rebellious philosophy of life,\u201d a way of \u201crethinking the human condition.\u201d5 The first rooms show us the complex dreamscape that set the movement\u2019s preoccupations. In the following rooms, the exhibition takes a deep dive into a half dozen of the defining concerns, which the Surrealists thought would liberate the mind, while the sequence also roughly tracks the movement\u2019s chronology. These sections explore \u201cthe marvelous\u201d in nature, sexuality and Eros, and the strange, terrifying monsters of Ernst, Masson, Mir\u00f3, and Picasso that foreshadow the onset of totalitarianism and war in the 1930s; here, Dal\u00ed\u2019s well-known Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)\u00a0(1936) \u2014also in the Philadelphia collection\u2014stands out. The exhibition then follows the flight of the artists from Europe and their regroupings in New York and Mexico City.<\/p>\n
The last section of Dreamworld, \u201cMagic Art,\u201d examines the Surrealists\u2019 turn in the 1940s to an increasingly esoteric imagery of magical and alchemical beings, celestial figures, and symbols of the occult, as in such works as Maya Deren\u2019s 1943 film The Witch\u2019s Cradle and Dorothea Tanning\u2019s 1942 Birthday. In the catalogue, Affron relates the story of Max Ernst\u2019s visit to the studio of Dorothea Tanning, looking for works for an exhibition of women artists,6 and seeing this self-portrait on her easel,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100Philadelphia Museum of ArtNovember 8, 2025\u2013February 16, 2026Philadelphia, PA Before the Great War, we lived…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57449,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[6889,23849,23848,23850,19296,8090,23852,23853,23847,6033,1338,23855,5646,7865,23854,69,71,70,23851,8938,1483],"class_list":{"0":"post-57448","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-art-books","10":"tag-art-critic","11":"tag-art-reviews","12":"tag-artists","13":"tag-books","14":"tag-brooklyn-art","15":"tag-brooklyn-culture","16":"tag-contemporary-art","17":"tag-culture","18":"tag-dance","19":"tag-fiction","20":"tag-film","21":"tag-music","22":"tag-new-york-art-scene","23":"tag-philadelphia","24":"tag-philadelphia-headlines","25":"tag-philadelphia-news","26":"tag-phong-bui","27":"tag-poetry","28":"tag-theater"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}