The first exhibition of surrealist art opened in Paris on November 13, 1925, a year after André Breton’s influential Manifeste du surréalisme (Surrealist Manifesto)was published. The surrealists were inspired by the theories of Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who proposed the existence of an unconscious part of the mind that contained emotions and impulses that were censored by the conscious mind. As Breton wrote: “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forces of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.”
Breton’s philosophy of surrealism, though initially attracting writers and poets, was soon embraced by artists. In the revolutionary spirit of the Dada art movement, through which several surrealists had passed, artists challenged the relevance of established artistic conventions. Surrealists embraced new models and developed techniques that highlighted the importance of the inner world and the creative transformation of society. They embraced the unknown and mysterious, depicted and interpreted dreams, found inspiration in nature and unexpected aspects of the everyday, and explored the “mad love” of unleashed passions.
While fascinated by psychoanalysis as a way to liberate repressed forces within the mind, the surrealists also allied themselves with leftist politics in opposition to growing totalitarianism in Europe between the World Wars. They rejected authoritarianism, colonialism with its repression and exploitation, and the inequalities embedded in capitalism. With its dual focus on individual freedom and social and political change, surrealism attracted many artists, writers, and intellectuals worldwide for decades after its initial appearance. International Surrealism from Tate: Fifty Years of Dreams gathers artworks from a range of centers and periods, highlighting the multiplicity of surrealist practices held in the Tate collection and introducing lesser-known artists alongside major individuals associated with the movement.
Automatism: Angel Images
In his founding Manifeste du surréalisme (Surrealist Manifesto), published in Paris in October 1924, André Breton famously defined surrealism as: “Psychic automatism in its purest state, by which one proposes to express . . . the actual functioning of thought.” He believed that overreliance on rational thinking hindered creativity. Breton instead advocated for “automatism,” a loosening of conscious control via processes indebted to the associative method of Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
In pursuit of uncovering repressed impulses, Breton encouraged surrealist writers to release latent poetic images by expressing spontaneous thoughts and juxtaposing unedited phrases. This would take the form of automatic writing, aimed at liberating the author from self-censorship by writing without correction and defying conventional meaning and grammar.
Breton’s manifesto was primarily focused on writing; the visual arts received only a brief mention in the footnote. However, by the time the first surrealist exhibition was held a year later in Paris, Breton encouraged artists to “draw upon a purely interior model.” This adaptive model of automatism was left to the imagination of each artist.
Many surrealist artists began to develop their own automatic processes, such as improvised drawing (often in a trance), gestural brushwork, dripping, spilling, or scraping paint across rough surfaces (called grattage) to stimulate new images. Automatism let artists’ suppressed thoughts and feelings flow outward, generating hidden forms that emerged from chance marks that could be accepted or augmented.
These processes revealed what artist Adrian Dax called in 1950 “a liberating re-education of sight.”
Politics: Public Thirst
While personal freedom initially motivated the surrealists, social and political freedom soon emerged as a crucial collective force. To be free to create, one had to be materially and politically free. At the core of surrealism was a desire for liberation of both the inner world—the realm of imagination, dreams, and the unconscious mind—and the outer world, encompassing material reality and social structures.
The movement opposed inequality, repression, and colonialism. While surrealists generally aligned with leftist politics, a complex tension existed between intellectual freedom and political ideology, especially as fascism gained momentum in Europe. In 1938, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union indirectly opposed each other in the Spanish Civil War, André Breton traveled to Mexico to meet the exiled politician and theorist Leon Trotsky. Together, they established the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art and published a manifesto demanding “every liberty in art.” Following this position, writer Suzanne Césaire soon after described surrealism as “a single magic word: liberty.”
The struggle against fascism also called for decolonization and the dismantling of empires. These principles inspired resistance to the French colonial wars of the 1950s in Algeria and Vietnam. They attracted new generations to the causes of self-determination and, in the United States, the abolition of segregation. Despite disagreements among artists, surrealism’s enduring legacy was the promotion of social and political liberty beyond Europe, advancing an internationalist agenda, represented in this section by artists including Wifredo Lam, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and Merlyn Evans.
Dreams: The Reckless Sleeper
André Breton was inspired by the startling work of the Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, whose popular foundational text Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams,1900) spread the theory that unconscious and repressed desires influenced behaviour and feelings in ways of which his patients may not have been aware.
While Freud sought to fulfill therapeutic goals, the surrealists were more concerned with the unrestrained creativity of the unconscious mind. For surrealist painters, the unconscious generated images that were familiar but refracted: people who were at once identifiable but unrecognizable, spaces charged with emotion, actions loaded with meaning. In “Une Vague de rêves” (“A Wave of Dreams,” 1924), Parisian poet Louis Aragon revealed how artists practiced entering trance states until they were overwhelmed by images: “We could no longer control them. We had become their domain, a setting for them.” They particularly admired artist Giorgio de Chirico (whose work is included at the beginning of this exhibition); between 1912 and 1918, he produced a stream of enigmatic paintings that he termed “metaphysical art.” The unexpected juxtapositions, plunging perspectives, and dehumanized mannequin figures appeared to reflect the uncanny experience of dreams.
Such distorted illusionism was a model for painters, photographers, and filmmakers who wished to capture the mysterious in their individual pictorial languages. For artists like René Magritte, this meant using a realist style to undermine the accepted conventions of representation in art. By placing familiar imagery in an irrational context, Magritte exposed repressed fears and desires hidden in the unconscious mind.
Desires: Sleeping Venus
In his 1936 book on surrealism, British art historian Herbert Read declared that the surrealists rejected established morality “that so distorts the sexual impulse that . . . millions waste their lives in unhappiness or poison their minds with hypocrisy.” Scorning such conventions, he declared that the surrealists’ “own code of morality is based on liberty and love.”
A 1930 surrealist manifesto described the cost of these ideals, stating that “love demands the sacrifice of every other value: status, family and honor.” Many people, exploring desires they had once repressed, were swept up by the intense power of what was called “l’amour fou” (or “mad love”), as André Breton titled his book of 1937.
To such romantic adoration, primarily by male surrealists of their female “muses,” was added the exploration of sexual freedom beyond the conventions of the time. This included erotic photography, publishing debates on sex, and admiration for the libertinism of such writers as the Marquis de Sade.
The surrealists’ focus on love and sexual freedom often reflected male desire and objectified women. This led to unequal treatment of women among so many revolutionary men, and maintained an ingrained convention unrecognized as a blind spot at the time. However, many women challenged the dominance of the male gaze. This section features works by Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, and Dorothea Tanning, who became known for emphasizing women’s desire. Artists like Claude Cahun, whose work is also included in this exhibition, explored gender fluidity, adding a gender-nonconforming perspective to the idea of liberation.
Uncanny Nature: The Invisibles
At the 1936 Exposition surréaliste d’objets (Exhibition of Surrealist Objects) in Paris, one display featured a glass melted by the 1902 volcanic eruption on the Caribbean island Martinique. Its shape, softened by nature’s power, showed the limits of human skill by comparison. In 1943, this force appeared again in Mexico when a new volcano formed at Parícutin, Michoacán. Artists like Wolfgang Paalen and Gordon Onslow-Ford were drawn to its unpredictable energy; for many surrealists, nature was magnetically stimulating in both its destruction and abundance.
Such powerful forces also invited parallels with the untamed, unconscious mind. The Parisian surrealists, adopting the position of big game hunters, would gather to compare, as the poet Louis Aragon recalled, “the tally of beasts we had invented, the fantastic plants, the images we had shot down.”
This external and internal disruption of rationality could conjure a sense of the uncanny, a term Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud used to describe a sense of anxiety caused by something recognizable yet weirdly unexpected or eerie. Some surrealists were intrigued by the potential of subjects drawn from nature, with André Breton imagining the existence of superior beings, “The Great Invisibles,” who were as alien to humankind as human behavior “must be to the mayfly or the whale.”
Objects: The Future of Statues
Surrealism can be understood as a way of life rather than a style. This engagement with the everyday became most obvious and subversive in the production of surrealist objects. Three-dimensional like sculpture, they nonetheless evaded classification as art and were intended to infiltrate daily reality. There, they served no rational function except to unsettle and provoke, to affirm the power of desire and the imagination.
These objects’ precursors lay in those of the Dada art movement made by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray (on view elsewhere in this exhibition), which elevated mundane manufactured items to the status of art. In the 1930s, Salvador Dalí sparked a wave of object production by proposing the “symbolically functioning object.” These often-complex assemblages were supposed to reveal suppressed desires through a simple assembly that did not require specialist technical skills. As a result, a wide range of surrealists contributed to the Exposition surréaliste d’objets (Surrealist Exhibition of Objects, Paris, 1936). Many of the objects exhibited arose spontaneously but attracted elaborate interpretation. Temporary in nature, some survive only in photographic evidence.
The chance discovery of “found objects,” whether handmade or extraordinary natural forms, also brought the power of the marvelous within reach. As with other aspects of surrealist practice, the making of objects retrieved value from the material discarded or ignored by modern life. Claude Cahun declared, “We must discover, handle, domesticate, make irrational objects for ourselves.” This approach encouraged searching flea markets for unique items and an enthusiasm for untrained but inspired amateurs who felt compelled to express themselves creatively.
