The Brooklyn Rail

“If you love love, you’ll love Surrealism,” so the flyer read when Surrealism launched itself as an avant-garde movement and elected to literally cast its philosophy as papillons into the streets of Paris in 1925, one year after the publication of the first manifesto. Today it might smack of a bumper sticker or hashtag, and we are right to wonder if the legacy of Surrealism has become just that—a well-meaning but kitsch punch line that alludes to sexy, often sensationalist, ideas and images. However, these fliers also read “Parents, tell your kids your dreams,” and to my mind that’s how we need to think of Surrealism as we mark its one hundred years. Surrealism was an outlook, a philosophy, a rally cry, and most of all a generational revolt fuelled on a determination not to repeat the errors of the past, not to turn into our parents. To replace the rational world of “parents” with the ludic, desiring, terrifying, all-over messy and “childlike” world of dream. To attempt to re-educate and liberate the imagination through explorations of love and desire and dream and fear and everything in between. It sounds utopian; it is certainly far from the dystopian culture in which we currently live, but Surrealism insisted it could only combat the promotion of rational values and the institutions of power through such grand gestures.

In September 2024 as major museum shows (including the just opened Surréalisme at the Centre Pompidou Paris and more intimate gallery exhibitions on the left and right banks of Paris under the umbrella of the Pompidou) proliferate, there is a danger that Surrealism will get lost in a haze of buzzwords (dream-desire-magic-cosmos) and become reduced to an armchair revolution. But we must remember Surrealism exposed the “transparency” of the visible in the modern age, and repeatedly used catch phrases, advertising, immersive exhibition designs, and an exploitation of all things taboo to undermine the art market and status-quo alike. André Breton’s novel Nadja (1928) literally signalled where one signed up to the Parti communiste français through the illustration/photograph on one of its pages showing a sign above the Humanité bookstore in Paris reading “ON SIGNE ICI” with an arrow below it. Surrealism is like an invitation to act, competing and nestled amongst other invitations in our market-driven world.

Women artists were central to this work, whether official, manifesto-signing and exhibition participating members of the Surrealist collective or independent spirits who began in a group in London, Paris, Prague, New York, or Egypt only to run with Surrealism in their own ways. Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Maria Martins, Meret Oppenheim, Mimi Parent, Dorothea Tanning, and others exhibited as Surrealists but often defied Breton’s rule over its aesthetic direction. Critically, they also insisted they were not to be ghettoised into a women-only group within the collective; they wanted to destroy that binary model. In a 1990 interview in Bomb Magazine, Tanning mocked the label “woman”—when attached to the words “artist” or “Surrealist”—as an illogical descriptor, declaring the term “woman artist” was “as much a contradiction in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘elephant artist.’ You may be a woman and you may be an artist; but the one is a given and the other is you.”

Theirs was an eco-feminist stance avant la lettre, as Carrington’s 1970 statement “What is a Woman?” reflects: “If all the Women of the world decide to control the population, to refuse war, to refuse discrimination of Sex or Race and thus force men to allow life to survive on this planet, that would be a miracle indeed.” The burgeoning feminaissance in Surrealist studies and exhibitions, exemplified by the 2022 Venice Biennale dedicated to Carrington’s collection of children’s stories The Milk of Dreams, hopefully ensures these artists will be recognised for the ways in which they expanded Surrealist expression and aesthetics, including drawing attention to our loving responsibilities to each other and the planet.

In 1924–25 the Surrealist understanding of love formed part of a response to the trauma and horror of World War I—a warning that war breeds war. In 2024–25, with progress to that end pitiful, it is not surprising that younger artists are turning to Surrealism once more as a weapon against indifference and inhumanism, or that the public are lining up outside museums to enter its domain. The first Surrealist manifesto’s assertion that mankind is an “inveterate dreamer” remains as relevant as ever, as does the more rhetorical question: “Can’t the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life?”