What is surrealist art?
Surrealism means “above or beyond reality”. It grew out of Dada after the First World War. In 1924 the poet André Breton wrote the first Manifesto of Surrealism in Paris. He had read the ideas of Sigmund Freud about dreams and the unconscious (the part of the mind we do not control), and asked artists to use them.
Surrealist pictures often look sharp and realistic, but what they show is impossible. That mix of real details and dream logic is what makes them strange.
Main ideas and techniques
- Dream logic. Things float, melt, double or change size.
- Juxtaposition. Two objects that do not belong together, put side by side.
- Automatism. Drawing or writing fast, without planning, to let the unconscious speak. Joan Miró and André Masson used it.
- Collage and frottage. Max Ernst cut and pasted pictures, and rubbed pencil over textured surfaces to find shapes (frottage).
- Exquisite corpse. A game where several people draw parts of one body without seeing the others' parts.
Two big styles: dream-realist (very sharp painting of impossible scenes, like Dalí and Magritte) and automatist (free, spontaneous marks, like Miró).
Key artists and works
- Salvador Dalí (Spain): The Persistence of Memory (1931) with soft melting clocks in a quiet landscape.
- René Magritte (Belgium): The Treachery of Images (1929), a pipe with the words “This is not a pipe”: it is a picture of a pipe, not a pipe. He also painted men in bowler hats, floating rocks and clouds in rooms.
- Joan Miró (Spain): playful shapes, stars and lines in bright colour.
- Max Ernst (Germany): collage, frottage, strange forests.
- Meret Oppenheim (Switzerland): Object (1936), a teacup covered in fur.
Influence on film and advertising
Film. Film can show dreams more easily than a painting. Un Chien Andalou (1929) by the Spanish film-maker Luis Buñuel and Dalí is a famous surrealist film. Alfred Hitchcock asked Dalí to design the dream scene of Spellbound (1945). Later directors, from Jean Cocteau to David Lynch and Michel Gondry, have used dream logic, strange sets and sudden changes of place.
Advertising and photography. A surprising picture makes people stop and look. Adverts use giant objects, floating products, impossible pairs and sharp, clean images, as in surrealist painting. Fashion photography and music videos use the same tricks.
Surrealism also reached design, fashion (Elsa Schiaparelli), theatre and comics. Spanish artists took an important part from the start.
Try it: make your own surreal picture
In the 3D, go to the last step. Pick Cloud and Room: this pair is surprising. Pick Apple and Room: normal. Now keep Apple and Room but set the size to ×3. It becomes surprising again, because size can be a surprise too.
At home: write five ordinary objects and five ordinary places on slips of paper. Draw one object and one place at random, and sketch them together. Add one detail from a dream you remember. You just used juxtaposition.
Key formulas and definitions
- Surrealism = “beyond reality”: dreams and the unconscious (from 1924, Paris)
- Founder voice: André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)
- Techniques: dream logic, juxtaposition, automatism, collage, frottage, exquisite corpse
- Key artists: Dalí, Magritte, Miró, Ernst, Oppenheim
- Influence: film (Buñuel and Dalí, Hitchcock), advertising, photography, fashion
Worked examples
1. A painting shows soft clocks melting over a branch in a calm desert. Which movement is it and what idea does it show?
Surrealism. A normal object (a clock) is changed into something impossible (soft) and put in a strange place. This is dream logic, as in Dalí's The Persistence of Memory.
2. An artist fills a page with fast curved lines without planning, then sees animals in the shapes and finishes the picture. Name the technique.
Automatism. The unconscious guides the hand first, and the artist develops the image later.
3. A chocolate advert shows a giant bar standing like a tower in a small town. Explain the link with surrealism.
The advert changes the size of an everyday object and puts it in an ordinary place, creating surprise. This borrows surrealist juxtaposition and scale change to make people stop and look.
4. Magritte painted a pipe and wrote “This is not a pipe”. What does he mean?
It is only a painting of a pipe, not a real pipe you can smoke. He makes us question how pictures and words stand for real things.
Common mistakes
- Thinking surrealism means messy or random pictures. Many surrealist pictures are very carefully and realistically painted.
- Mixing up surrealism with abstract art. Surrealist pictures usually show recognisable objects; abstract art may not show any.
- Saying Dalí founded surrealism. André Breton wrote the first manifesto in 1924; Dalí joined later and became its best-known painter.
- Believing surrealism only exists in painting. Film, photography, adverts and fashion all use it.