BRUSSELS.- This is not an article. Its a fish in the shape of a piano, floating in a clear blue sky, seen through a keyhole.
Surrealism, the art movement that gave us disembodied eyeballs, melting clocks and animals with mismatched parts, was born in 1924 when French poet André Breton published a treatise decrying the vogue for realism and rationality.
Breton argued instead for embracing the omnipotence of dreams and exploring the unconscious and all that was marvelous in life. Art that could reach beyond the rational could liberate humanity, he felt. The mere word freedom is the only one that still excites me, Breton wrote in his Surrealist Manifesto.
It was a literary idea that became an art movement and revolutionized nearly all forms of cultural production. Its now commonplace to call pretty much any weird experience surreal.
A century later, what does surrealism still have to offer us? Do its philosophical and political arguments have anything to say about contemporary life? Do we still, even in the faintest way, hear that surrealist commandment: Transform the world, change life?
Museum directors, curators and art historians around the world will attempt to answer such questions this year, and surrealism exhibitions will be everywhere, all at once. From Paris to Fort Worth, Texas, from Munich to Gainesville, Florida, and all the way to Shanghai, art institutions are mounting shows that explore the movement.
In celebrating the centennial, curators are reclaiming surrealism for today: Some are elevating the often-forgotten female surrealists; others are connecting the dots to other art eras, such as German romanticism or early Netherlandish art; and some are focusing on surrealism in photography and film.
The Pompidou Center in Paris, which owns one of the most extensive collections of French surrealist art in the world, has organized the largest of the shows: a traveling exhibition that opened in Brussels on Feb. 21 and moves to Paris on Sept. 4. The show then goes to Hamburg, Germany, and Madrid, and wraps up at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2026.
By lending those museums about 30 major artworks by Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst and Man Ray, the Pompidou is giving each institution a base upon which to develop its own surrealism show, and each will have a different focus.
The first iteration Imagine! 100 Years of International Surrealism, at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium through July 21 links surrealism with symbolism, a 19th-century precursor movement with a similar disdain for realism.
With all these interpretations of surrealism floating around, it can seem difficult to pinpoint a definition of the term. What most experts agree on is that surrealism wasnt necessarily about art.
I hope that people will discover that surrealism is a state of mind and a way of looking at things, said Francisca Vandepitte, who curated the show at the Royal Museums. Its not something theoretical and very complicated. The main force is something that we all know. Its irrational, and its our dreams, and its liberating.
Invented in Europe in the wake of World War I, and following a flu pandemic, surrealism embraced Sigmund Freuds theories of the unconscious, rejected authoritarianism and colonialism, and, at first, espoused communism, though many followers later rejected it.
Although Bretons circle was mostly in Paris, surrealisms signature adherents were spread internationally: Dalí and Joan Miró were Spanish, de Chirico was Italian, René Magritte was Belgian, Leonora Carrington was British and Frida Kahlo was Mexican.
Even as surrealisms centennial is celebrated this year, some art historians see it as a much older impulse that runs like an electrical current throughout art history, with jolts in the Middle Ages, between the two World Wars, in the postwar era and in the 1960s.
The surrealists went back in history and claimed people like Hieronymus Bosch, or Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and said these were surrealists before there was surrealism, said Robert Zeller, the author of New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting.
Other art movements said, History is bunk and we want to start at year zero, Zeller added. The surrealists saw themselves as having had a legacy going backwards and forwards.
Zeller also pointed out that the origins of surrealism are not entirely unambiguous. Besides Bretons manifesto, there was another Manifesto of Surrealism, written by poet Yvan Goll, the leader of another surrealist faction, and published a month before Bretons. Goll rejected the Freudian aspect of Bretons vision, and argued for a surrealism grounded in reality, but taken to a higher plane.
Around the same time, Belgian poet Paul Nougé also published his own surrealist tracts called Correspondence, which are on display at an exhibition in Brussels at the Bozar art center.
Xavier Canonne, the shows curator, said that Nougé should be regarded as a founder of surrealism on par with Breton. If there is one thing Id like to come out of this show, its that people discover Paul Nougé, he said. And that people from outside Belgium discover that there was a real movement of surrealism in Belgium for more than 70 years.
Nougé influenced Magritte to shift from abstraction to surrealism, Canonne said, and Nougé also established a surrealist center in Brussels that attracted many other artists to the movement, even as Magritte moved to Paris in 1927 to join Bretons followers.
Patricia Allmer, an art history professor at the University of Edinburgh, said that this contest for ownership reflects how flexible and adaptable surrealisms basic principles could be.
Surrealism was indeed, from its beginnings, a multiplicity, she said. Bretons manifesto became the famous one, she said, but you cant claim it as a movement. Its a plurality. Thats why its so rich and so malleable: It can be used by different artists in different contexts.
Allmer also said surrealism didnt find its most profound uses until female artists adopted its methods in the post-World War II era, as she plans to show in an exhibition she is curating later this year at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England.
Breton always emphasized the surrealism breaks boundaries, but it often excluded women, Allmer said. Women artists took the truth of surrealism to make feminist political statements and push beyond the gender boundary.
The notion that art should be ideological, rather than representational, is central to the surrealist spirit, said Mark Polizzotti, whose book Why Surrealism Matters was published in January. He describes surrealism as a disrupter, and a way of thinking that perpetually challenges the existing paradigms and seeks new forms to maintain its emotional intensity.
Polizzotti points to the surrealists objection to French colonialism and racism, which he said were similar to the current discussions about racial equality and social justice. In his book, he quotes Bretons declaration Surrealism is allied with people of color, because it has always been on their side against every form of white imperialism and banditry.
In an interview, Polizzotti said: Were in a world today thats not unlike the world in which they emerged. We came out of a pandemic, there are questions about labor reform and anti-colonialism and exhibition strategies in the art world. These were things they were grappling with as well.
The Pompidous exhibition will end with the death of Breton in 1966, but the shows curator, Didier Ottinger, acknowledged that this wasnt surrealisms final chapter.
Acolytes of the surrealists tried to keep the idea of surrealism alive for a few years, he said. But in October 1969, one of its leaders, Jean Schuster, announced the formal dissolution of the surrealist group in the French newspaper Le Monde.
Many artists refused to accept this death decree, and wrote in protest to Le Monde. Letters came flooding in from all over the world from artists who said, No, we are alive, Ottinger said. So, as long as there were more artists, it could not die.
Polizzotti said that surrealism continued to extend into other art forms, like the tragicomic Theater of the Absurd and the bizarre skits of the British comedy troupe Monty Python. Surrealist tendencies also appear in the cinematic world of David Lynch, whose films, like Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, dive into dark psychosexual desires that lie beneath the surface of a seemingly tranquil world.
And it has certainly not died in the fine arts, either. In Zellers book, he identifies about 30 New Surrealists, including Polish painter Ewa Juszkiewicz, who makes portraits of women covered in plants, and Taiwanese artist Lin Shih-Yung, who paints humans with bananas for heads.
Its the transformative nature of surrealism that continues to make it relevant, Allmer said. Surrealism is inherently political. It started as a protest movement and a way to counter fascism and authoritarianism, so thats why it still can be a very powerful political weapon for today. It will always be relevant. I would say, its a future movement.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.