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The Z to A of Surrealism
Surrealism is an avant-garde movement that emerged in the early 20th century, primarily in Paris which has had a significant influence on art, literature, film and philosophy.
I t’s been 100 years since André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto, announcing a new artistic movement dedicated to the exploration of dreams and uncanny, whimsical logic. Sotheby’s is celebrating the occassion with a landmark exhibition, Surrealism and Its Legacy, in Paris on 18 October as well as a selling exhibition dedicated to the Spanish-American Surrealist Federico Castellón in Sotheby’s New York on 8-25 October. Meanwhile, objects of Classic Design – silver, ceramics, furniture – are reimagined through a Surrealist lens, blending functionality with the fantastical.
Despite its cultural influence and ubiquity, Surrealism remains a difficult-to-understand genre. Read on for a quick primer on the people and terms you need to know.
Z Is for the Zone (Between Reality and Imagination)
The core of Surrealism lies in this “zone,” where the boundary between reality and the imaginary dissolves.
Y Is for Kikuji Yamashita
Influential Japanese Surrealist, a prime mover in Japan’s post war avant-garde and committed political campaigner.
X Is for Xenia Kashevaroff Cage
Surrealist sculptor and leading light of the American branch of the movement during the 1930s and 1940s. A fiery, inspiring figure, her husband John Cage described her contributions to his avant garde performances as “the deftest of all living flowerpot and gong whackers.”
W Is for Women in Surrealism
Although the movement was initially dominated by men, a wave of female Surrealist artists such as Leonora Carrington, Méret Oppenheim, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning and Remedios Varo expanded and redefined Surrealism during the mid 20th century.
V Is for Veristic Surrealism
A strain of Surrealism that uses realistic depictions of dream-like or fantastical scenes, as seen in the works of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte.
U Is for the Unconscious Mind
The central concept in Surrealism. The movement mines the unconscious mind through various techniques, believing it to be the source of creativity and true expression.
T Is for Trompe-l’œil
A painting technique that creates an optical illusion of three-dimensionality, favoured by Surrealists to further fuddle the lines between reality and illusion.
S Is for Salvador Dalí
One of the most iconoclastic figures of the movement, Salvador Dalí’s work is known for its bizarre, dreamlike landscapes, eccentric imagery, and incredible technical skill.
R Is for René Magritte
One of the best known Surrealists, René Magritte’s signature approach of using veristic technique to depict bizarre imagery and juxtapositions profoundly impacted the Surrealists, and successive generations of artists.
Q Is for Questioning
At the heart of Surrealism was a fundamental questioning of artistic production. André Breton’s 1924 Surrealism Manifesto set out to challenge and up-end the established order of creative production, empowering adherents to interrogate truth, hierarchies and orthodoxy across the arts and wider society.
P Is for Paranoiac-Critical Method
Dreamt up by Salvador Dalí, this method of art-making involves tapping paranoia and delusions to unlock the unconscious and in doing so, create surreal imagery – a surefire way to unsettle the viewer by short circuiting their established sense of order.
O Is for Méret Oppenheim
This Swiss photographer was inspired to analyse and create work via Jungian interpretation of her dreams, collaborating with artists including André Breton, Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Man Ray.
N Is for Paul Nougé
Belgian poet who was a key figure in the founding of Surrealism in Brussels during the mid 1920s. Nougé, along with René Magritte, E.L.T. Mesens and André Souris, created the “constitution” of the Belgian Surrealist Group.
M Is for Joan Miró
The Spanish painter is celebrated for his playful, abstract compositions that often feature whimsical shapes, bold colors and surreal, dreamlike imagery. Joan Miró’s works, blending elements of Surrealism and abstraction, evoke a sense of spontaneity and childlike wonder. Today, his vibrant creations can be found on everything from posters to ceramics, embodying the enduring appeal of his unique visual language.
L Is for Leonora Carrington
A life simply too colourful and packed with incident to be summarised in a couple of sentences, but suffice to say, the British-born Mexican artist, writer, thinker and campaigner Leonora Carrington was one of the most important and accomplished Surrealists of the 20th century.
K Is for Franz Kafka
Although Kafka was not technically a paid-up member of the Surrealists himself, his works, such as The Metamorphosis, with its typically Surrealist technique of juxtaposing random subjects or ideas, are. Today, you’ll often hear people exclaim that something is “Kafkaesque!” when they really mean “It’s surreal!”
J Is for Juxtaposition
A key Surrealist technique where contrasting or unrelated elements are placed together with striking, often dreamlike, results.
I Is for Indigenous Art
As the movement spread globally, Surrealism drew heavily on the symbolism and motifs of Indigenous artists, around the world, from America to Australia.
H Is for Hypnagogia
The state between wakefulness and sleep. Surrealists often drew inspiration from this liminal phase, believing it was a hotline to the unconscious self. Salvador Dalí attributed his famous melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory to a semi-dream state in which he found himself thinking of melting Camembert (or Brie, depending who you believe) cheese.
G Is for Giorgio de Chirico
An Italian painter whose strange, dreamlike scenes and founding of the Scuola Metafisica (School of Metaphysics) had an enormous impact on the early Surrealists.
F Is for Federico Castellón
The subject of a selling exhibition at Sotheby’s New York, printmaker, painter, sculptor and illustrator Federico Castellón was “discovered” at an early age by Diego Rivera and would go on to be considered one of America’s first Surrealists, with a distinctly hypnotic touch defining his paintings, prints and etchings.
E Is for Exquisite Corpse
A collaborative game invented in 1925 in Paris by Yves Tanguy, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Jacques Prévert, this game necessitated artists to gather, drink copious amounts of booze and each contribute to a piece without seeing what the others had done. This reliably resulted in consistently surreal outcomes. The term cadavre exquis came about from the commonly agreed prize: le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau (“the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine”).
D Is for Dreams
Dreams fuelled Surrealism. The movement itself took root within Signmund Freud’s theories of dreams and the primacy of subconscious thought. The engine for Surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s, dreams and their interpretation defined the movement from the outset.
C Is for Collage
Commonly used by Surrealist artists, who employed various materials, images or objects to create unexpected juxtapositions. This was very much at the heart of Surrealism – the combination of seemingly disparate objects and media to inspire fantastical, mind-melting results.
B Is for André Breton
Known as “The Pope of Surrealism,” he was the prime mover behind shaping and codifying the movement in 1924 with his first Surrealist Manifesto. In it, Breton defined Surrealism as:
Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.
A Is for Automatism
The technique of creating art and text without conscious thought, placing a greater value on the results of subconscious expression. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s ideas shaped the Surrealists approach, with his theories on the unconscious mind, dreams, and psychoanalysis creating an exciting realm of artistic possibility.
