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Games People Play: The Signs and Symbols of Surrealism
A melting clock, a lobster telephone, a teacup covered in fur… The Surrealists were known for vibrant, startling imagery. Here’s a guide to some of the most iconic symbols of Surrealism.
P layful yet sinister, many of the most famous Surrealist objects served as powerful reminders of the strangeness lurking under the surface of everyday life. André Breton, in his Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, wrote that one of the movement’s guiding principles was to express the “real functioning of thought.” A coterie of writers and artists soon elaborated a vocabulary of enchantment that revealed the potential for splendid transformation within even the drabbest mass-produced object. In the new Surrealist order, the ludic – accessed via metaphysical experiments in hypnosis and psychic automatism – might eventually prevail over the logical.
These games, however, were serious: they aimed to overthrow the deadening crust of rationality that had settled in the wake of World War I.
André Breton’s Study and the Bureau of Surrealist Research
Revolutionary in mind and spirit, the Surrealists were also steeped in the language of art history. Their works pull omnivorously from Old Master paintings, Indigenous folklore, psychological research, political propaganda and commercial photography and design. The Surrealist spirit spanned the globe, moving beyond Paris to metropolitan centers in Spain, Egypt, Haiti, Mexico, Ethiopia, Cuba and Japan, as explored in recent canon-expanding exhibitions such as Surrealism Beyond Borders and Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940, as well as an upcoming survey at Centre Pompidou. One constant across geographic contexts was a devotion to grasping the world in all its vertiginous contradictions, ultimately in service of maintaining a state of productive political and creative disequilibrium.
The Anxieties of Modern Life
Modern life served as the primary target of the Surrealists: its clean, sensible order asked to be spoiled. Artists like Francis Picabia and Man Ray explored the anxieties and pleasures of mechanization and industrialization in detailed drawings, photographs, and through rigorous investigations of cutting-edge technology. Others looked to the past, invoking ancient symbolism to reawaken a spiritual connection with the preindustrial world, like the British-Mexican polymath Leonora Carrington whose densely populated mythologically inflected tableaux referenced Celtic legends and alchemical tracts, or the Spanish artist Federico Castellón whose hallucinogenic pictures restage Biblical scenes and eerie, erotic pageants, as seen in a selling exhibition at Sotheby’s New York.
The Strangeness of Everyday Attire
The wardrobe of everyday life inspired artists like the Belgian painter René Magritte. His uncanny suited men in bowler hats, arranged in groups or solo, have remained some of the most enduringly popular Surrealist images, from The Musings of a Solitary Walker (1926) to The Son of Man (1964). The world of high fashion, in turn, took cues from the Surrealists. In the late 1930s, the Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli collaborated with the Spanish provocateur Salvador Dalí on several iconic items inspired by his sketches, including her exuberant “Shoe Hat” and her austere, body-hugging “Skeleton Dress.”
Combining the Natural and Humanmade Worlds
For the Surrealists, the natural world offered similarly rich territory. Consider the lobster, a favorite subject of artists ranging from the mosaicists of Pompeii through the finest painters of the Dutch Golden Age. Perhaps the most famous crustacean of the 20th century is Salvador Dalí’s telephone, which the artist concocted in 1936 for the British poet Edward James. (The surprising combination made sense to those who knew Dalí: for the artist, both lobsters and telephones were associated with sex.) Several years later, preparing his Surrealist pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Dalí devised his infamous Dream of Venus installation, which included scantily clad models strutting around an aquarium in costumes made of seafood, answering “underwater” telephones.
Birds as Portents
Elsewhere, animals are abstracted in symbolic games. Joan Miró’s L’oiseau de proie fonce sur nous (1954) is a dynamic, disorienting vertical canvas depicting a bird of prey rushing headlong toward the viewer. For the German artist Max Ernst, birds symbolized death – an association he traced to childhood, when a cherished pet bird allegedly died at the moment of his younger sister’s birth. Years later Ernst made this connection explicit with the creation of Loplop, a curious and vaguely avian shapeshifting entity who served as the artist’s alter ego. While birds are commonly understood as symbols of freedom, restlessness and vitality, in Ernst’s imagination their correlation with death lends them an oracular and forbidding air.
The Language of Flowers
Floriography, or the language of flowers, is a complex code that assigns meaning and symbolic value to specific plants. The Surrealists, in their desire to upend traditional thought, found sly and subversive ways to incorporate flora into their work. Rose Meditative (1958), one of Dalí’s signature paintings from around the time he published his manifesto on Nuclear Mysticism, features an oversize blossom rendered in a lush spectrum of reds, hovering ominously like a mushroom cloud over a desolate desert landscape dotted with columns. In his manifesto, Dalí professed his belief in science and nuclear physics, shifting his allegiance from Sigmund Freud’s psychological theories toward the realm of physics, which he associated with Werner Heisenberg.
Clocks and Motifs of Time
From the waterclocks and sundials of ancient Egypt to the astrolabes perfected for princely collections in early modern Europe, humans have always looked for ways to measure the passage of time. But it wasn’t until the 19th century, with the advent of standardized time for the efficient operation of railroads across Europe and the continental United States, that this measurement began to reshape reality.
When Dalí painted his first melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory (1931), clocks and wristwatches were firmly established in most households as reliable metronomes, marking every hour, minute and second of the day with tyrannical precision. Here, the relentless march of time is halted, in playful defiance of linear progression. The painting, Dalí claimed, was created “to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.” Human memory, unlike the ideal machine, cannot be controlled with levers or via carefully calibrated mechanisms.
Classical Ruins
Perhaps nothing exemplifies the Surrealist desire for civilizational reset than the vision of a barren landscape populated with classical ruins. In the toppled Greek columns of Giorgio de Chirico and the sprawling wastelands of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, artists signal deliverance from the fallen order and the anticipation of rebirth. For his striking cover of Minotaure, Albert Skira’s legendary Surrealist magazine, Magritte filled a pale, barren foreground with enigmatic objects: fragmented body parts: nested midriffs and torsos, standalone feet; an overturned tuba wreathed in brilliant flames. At center, wrapped in a velvety black stole, stands the grinning skeleton of a minotaur.
The composition is striking, balanced, superficially coherent: it feels simultaneously ancient and modern, caught somewhere between historical and mythological time, set in a world of objects enchanted through their precise arrangement and juxtaposition. Any sense of meaning is difficult to parse, and in this momentary liberation from rational explanation, beauty, mystery and possibility again reign supreme.
