Surrealism at 100: does it still have the power to disrupt?

In 1916, a trainee doctor befriended a wounded young soldier in a hospital in Nantes. André Breton was working in the neurological ward and reading Freud. Jacques Vaché was a war interpreter, moving across the front between the Allied positions and disrupting where he could; he once collected cast-off uniforms from different armies, including enemy forces, and sewed them together to make his own “neutral” costume. He sent Breton letters describing his “comatose apathy” and indifference to the conflict, though, he wrote, “I object to dying in wartime”.

Weeks after the Armistice, Vaché killed himself in a hotel room. Breton hailed him “the deserter from within” and one of the key inspirations for “The Surrealist Manifesto”, published in Paris in 1924.

This slim volume turned out to be the most influential artistic pronouncement of the century. Breton argued that rational realpolitik had created the catastrophe of the first world war. Championing the irrational, the subconscious, dream states — “pure psychic automatism” — he called for a revolution of the mind: “thought dictated in the absence of all control exercised by reason.”

Breton’s group initially consisted of poets experimenting with automatic writing, but it was in the clash of incongruous images in visual art that Surrealism achieved its disquieting icons: Salvador Dalí’s “Lobster Telephone” (1938), Luis Buñuel’s sliced eyeball in “Un chien andalou” (1929), Man Ray’s nude as a musical instrument “Le Violon d’Ingres” (1924).

When René Magritte inscribed “this is not a pipe” beneath his realist painting of one, and called it “The Treachery of Images” (1929), he nailed the conviction behind the comedy: by sweeping away conventions, Surrealism set out to change how we perceive the world.

A century on, we are still teasing out its puzzles, the enigma of its success, while centenary events prove its keen influence on leading artists now. Thomas Adès’s radical, disturbing The Exterminating Angel, based on Buñuel’s film of a bourgeois party descending into savagery, has its French premiere at the Bastille Opera next month. Among neo-Surrealists celebrated in the Blanton Museum’s Long Live Surrealism! 1924-Today is polka-dot pumpkin queen Yayoi Kusama, the 21st century’s best-selling female artist, who lives in a psychiatric hospital. Heilbronn’s Surrealism: Worlds in Dialogue features David Lynch’s hallucinatory films, Cindy Sherman’s masquerade photographs.

Why is Surrealism so fertile and fascinating? Can it still challenge how we think, or merely offer escapist nostalgia? What does Surrealism’s ascendancy now tell us about ourselves and our age?

If each generation seizes the chance to remake Surrealism in its own image, that is because, firstly, as Tate’s 2022 exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders demonstrated, it crosses geographic, chronological and intellectual frontiers, and secondly, because it expresses an essential truth which cannot date.

For Breton did not, of course, invent Surrealism: the creative process has always depended on the workings of the unconscious. Indeed Breton and his gang trumpeted preceding writers and artists engaged in fantasy and the absurd — Bosch, Gogol, Kafka — as Surrealists avant la lettre. What Breton’s Manifesto did was to codify and define the process. By calling aloud for ventures into the mind’s uncharted territories, he opened a floodgate of opportunities: to a way of thinking, not just of making art.

As the tantalising philosophical titles of some of its most beloved works suggest — Magritte’s steam train bursting out of a fireplace in “Time Transfixed” (1938), for example, or Dali’s melting watches in “The Persistence of Memory” (1931) — Surrealism invites us to question fundamental ideas. In art, it does so through its characteristic invention of exuberant, shape-shifting, hybrid forms, embodying hopes of freedom and change. Anything can suddenly become something else: Max Ernst’s bird-man alter ego Loplop; the fabulous back-to-front horse, lizard in a conical hat, pine tree with eye, eyelashes and dangling multicoloured ear in Joan Miró’s first Surrealist painting “The Tilled Field” (1923-24).

“Room must always be made for joy in this world”, wrote Surrealist Eileen Agar, and there is a timeless appeal in Surrealism’s playful visual delight. It began as an art of enlarged tolerance, and although Breton’s Parisian crowd were mostly European heterosexual men, it liberated possibilities, embracing the strange, the fragmentary, the sexually frank, which was an invitation to those who felt disconnected from white, male cultural tradition. Their responses are crucial to Surrealism’s continuing interest in our own times.

The importance of women and black artists and thinkers to Surrealism’s evolution is only beginning to be recognised. It yields new ground, partly explaining Surrealism’s recent surge as museums worldwide seek to balance their collections by gender, race, place. Surrealism’s global reach is rewarding: whereas Impressionism and Cubism, also Paris-based, became merely imitative when artists further afield adopted them, Surrealism took fire as it travelled and mutated.

In Mexico, for example, Surrealism was feminised by a group around Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Kati Horna, their paintings suffused by allusions to Mexico’s ancient matriarchal societies, sorceresses, pagan rites. Varo’s “Harmony (Suggestive Self-Portrait)” (1956), a self-depiction as a mystic in a hallowed space, evocative of Renaissance depictions of St Jerome, fetched $6.2mn in 2020. A retrospective at Chicago Institute of Art followed, the museum’s first exhibition dedicated to a woman Surrealist.

Carrington’s “The Garden of Paracelsus” (1957), featuring a ghostly goddess, sold for $3.3mn in 2022 — a record for an artist more or less unknown in the 20th century. Curator Cecilia Alemani sited Carrington at the heart of the nearly all-female line-up at Venice’s 2022 biennale, which traced Surrealist antecedents in contemporary art. Chilean Cecilia Vicuña won the Golden Lion, the biennale’s top prize; her “Bendígame Mamita” (1977), a Surrealist portrait of her mother dreaming, half occluded by an enormous guitar, was the biennale’s poster image, pasted across the city, reproduced on the sides of the vaporetti. In Venice and in Tate’s exhibition Brain Forest Quipu in 2022, Vicuña’s monumental, lyrical installations of swaying rope and hanging debris, immersed us in a fantasy rainforest, alluding to environmental destruction.

Vicuña, 75, was obscure before starring in Venice; she is among many female Surrealists, or those currently employing Surrealist strategies, now coming to the fore, refining understanding of women’s contribution to art history as a whole. Not all the work is good: Surrealism is more than easy figurative painting with a weird twist. But a strength of original, thoughtful artists such as Vicuña is the subversive, poetic spirit, bringing nuance to today’s culture wars. Vicuña is an eco-activist but her work never hectors.

Stand-out among the original woman Surrealists is Meret Oppenheim, and no work produced in our age of #MeToo and gender anxiety is so eloquent a mockery of patriarchy as her fur-covered cup and saucer “Object” (1936). Fetishistic, bizarre, the opposite of strident, it provokes wonderfully contradictory interpretations. Robert Hughes called it “the most intense and abrupt image of lesbian sex in the history of art”. Breton renamed the work “Luncheon in Fur”, referring to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s sadistic novel Venus in Furs. Others see metaphors for oral sex — phallic spoon, open cup — or erotic monster fantasies, or our animal spirits overwhelming the porcelain delicacy of restrained behaviour.

Intriguingly, the word surreal was first used in connection with gender: by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917 to describe “The Breasts of Tiresias”, his “drame surréaliste” where a Frenchwoman called Thérèse decides to become a man, and her breasts fly away like balloons. Queer and transgender artists have always made a weapon of Surrealist games of identity and masks, from Claude Cahun’s startling androgynous self-portraits begun in the 1920s to Christina Quarles’ paintings of fractured, melting, entangled bodies, limbs like tentacles. Her “Night Fell Upon Us” (2019) sold for $4.5mn in 2022.

But the richest fusion of Surrealism with ideology was, and still is, with anti-colonialism. In Martinique in 1943, Suzanne Césaire framed this conversation in “Surrealism and Us”, seeking “the marvellous” over “miserabilism” in black art and writing. Her essay gives its title to Fort Worth museum’s exhibition Surrealism and Us, exploring how Caribbean and African diaspora artists assimilated Surrealism within a history of resistance — the Afro-Surrealism of Rigaud Benoit’s voodoo scene paintings, René Ménil’s “Tropiques”, embedding anti-colonial arguments in West Indian folklore. Its legacy is Afro-Futurism: innovative sculptures and installations by contemporaries including visual artists Nick Cave, Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu.

Cave began his “Soundsuits”, wearable sculptures that include African ceremonial regalia as well as a recycled mishmash of fur, feathers, twigs, glass, in response to the Los Angeles police beating of Rodney King in 1991; he imagined his extravagant costume-sculptures, concealing the wearer’s colour and gender, as fanciful protective armour.

Surrealism has been such a fruitful source for black artists because works such as these remain connected to the movement’s roots as protest. Can there be a more resonant piece for our statue-bashing era than Magritte’s disembodied cast of Napoleon’s head painted as a cloud, floating away? It is called “The Future of Statues” (1937), and implies there isn’t one — no hero can stand scrutiny.

We sometimes forget that Breton, a mediocre poet, inspired chiefly as a prophet: he believed Surrealism would change the world. A committed Marxist, he joined the French Communist party in 1927; in a sense, one can read Surrealism as the 20th-century child of the seminal 19th-century thinkers Marx and Freud, both now utterly unfashionable.

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The unravelling of Surrealism’s political aspect today is vexed. A paradoxical position vis-à-vis capitalism was already recognised in 1929: Walter Benjamin argued in his essay “Surrealism — The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” that Surrealist techniques of colliding diverse, surprising images only happened as a product of modern, expanding, capitalist cities, their advertising hoardings, bright plentiful shop windows, neon lights, a delirious vista of consumer desire.

“The Surrealists believed that by championing the subconscious, society would be freed up and capitalism might even be overthrown. In our late capitalist condition, you could argue that our subconscious has instead been colonised by capitalism and is in fact being shaped even more by social media,” says Anna Weile Kjaer, curator of Another Surrealism, a Danish touring exhibition (2022-23). She suggests the label “capitalist Surrealist” for works such as Tora Schulz’s “The Devil’s Contract” (2021), red Prada stilettos whose heels are pitchforks, or Isa Genzken’s eclectically dressed shop mannequins “Die Schauspieler” (2013-14) — consumerist descendants of Hans Bellmer’s infamous, sinister dolls.

Surrealism is anathema for me. Because the Surrealists made a joke of everything. And I consider life a tragedy

Perhaps Surrealism is so popular today because we are all capitalist Surrealists now, hooked on endless streams of disconnected pictures flowing through our phones, as incongruous as any Surrealist montage. In its abundance — of screens, objects, reproduced images — that stream expresses precisely the capitalist grip on the mind, unassailable in the 21st century, which the Surrealists wanted to vanquish.

What then is left of Surrealism as a disruptive force? In Why Surrealism Matters (Yale, forthcoming in March), Mark Polizzotti argues that its “true legacy is . . . as a disruptor, something that perpetually challenges the existing paradigms and seeks new forms to maintain its emotional intensity . . . Surrealist works are animated by an emphatic dissociation from the reigning orthodoxy, whether political, societal or aesthetic.”

I think this is a vital factor in Surrealism’s attraction and meaning now, when many of us are, like Breton’s “deserter from within”, alienated from state and society, appalled by the bellicose jingoism and populism, now rising globally, against which Breton spoke in 1924.

While other modern movements — Cubism, abstraction — are hermetic, Surrealism deals with war, oppression, terror, in an accessible language, laced with humour, mixing high, low and everyday references. It is a distinctive aesthetic, the paint itself contributing to these dream/nightmare scenarios — for how dry, airless, claustrophobic these paintings are, with their polished surfaces and meticulous detail. They persuade as pictures by a particular method: applying finely honed, smooth academic realism to fantastical images. Thus the suffocating atmosphere in Dorothea Tanning’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” (1943), girls trapped in a corridor of closed rooms, threatened by a voracious sunflower, or in Dalí’s “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)” (1936), the self-destructive monster a symbol of civil war destroying a country from within.

This pessimistic painting was chosen as poster image for 2024’s Brussels/Paris blockbuster exhibition Imagine! 100 Years of Surrealism. Other forthcoming and recent exhibitions, including Vicuña at Tate and the Hepworth’s Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes, demonstrate our responsiveness to Surrealism’s long-held fears for an environment destroyed by man’s greed: the doomed landscape of smoky horizon, grey, arid plain, stunted plants in Yves Tanguy’s “Mama, Papa is Wounded!”; giant birds menacingly striding the Earth in Ernst’s “The Barbarians”.

But if the point of Surrealism is always to challenge, perhaps its vibrant painting disrupts most when it is not a reflection of our values. Today, it disturbs especially when we cannot deny the power of brutal images of violence against women, intolerable because they are presented as grotesque jokes. What to think of — how or even whether to display — Giacometti’s “Woman with her Throat Cut” (1932), the bronze figure thinned down to a sprawling, slashed insect shape, or Magritte’s “The Rape” (1934), the face depicted as a torso — breasts as eyes, genitals as mouth?

Louise Bourgeois, whose feminist sculptures used Surrealist methods of uncanny juxtapositions and evocations of the unconscious, insisted “Surrealism is anathema for me. Because the Surrealists made a joke of everything. And I consider life a tragedy.”

Yet, as the plethora of exhibitions and neo-Surrealist works in the past decade shows, it is when the time is out of joint that interest in Surrealism rises. In the immediate postwar period of belief in progress and peace, when Bourgeois emerged as an artist, the study of Surrealism was a backwater. Prices for Surrealist art were low, compared with other modern movements, until the 2000s. Now they soar. One of Magritte’s “The Empire of Light” sold for £59.4mn in 2022.

Surrealism’s survival a century after Breton’s manifesto surely proves its significance. In 1978, when it was less flourishing, Robert Hughes in Time magazine wrote a benign obituary: “Beyond the froth — the ideological absurdities, the rampant narcissism, the window display and chic decor — Surrealism remains one of the century’s noblest proposals of liberty”. No one then could have imagined democracy and free speech under threat as now; we need Surrealism’s voice today.

Jackie Wullschläger is the FT’s chief visual arts critic

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