ohOne hundred years ago, in a tiny one-room apartment in Paris’s Bohemian district, a former medical student turned writer attempted to define Surrealism once and for all. In his Surrealist Manifesto, André Breton called for a new kind of art and literature driven by the unconscious, “the expression of thought free from the control of reason and free from aesthetic or moral concerns.”
Far from “fully” establishing Surrealism, this handwritten document became the launch pad for a far-reaching, subversive movement filled with nightmares, haunting landscapes, fantastical alien creatures, unsettling portraits, and optical tricks. Now, a century later, a major exhibition opening at Paris’s Pompidou Centre in September celebrates how Surrealism spread far beyond the confines of the French capital and across the globe.
The Paris show is the second of five consecutive exhibitions. The show began in Brussels and will travel to Madrid, Hamburg and Philadelphia in 2025. Organizers say this is an unprecedented way to mount an exhibition: while works and themes will remain constant in each city, others will change, with each museum telling its own story.
So it’s a perfect fit for a movement that has always sought to subvert traditional artistic norms.
The last time the Pompidou Centre mounted a major exhibition on Surrealism was in 2002, when it characterized it as an essentially European movement, emerging from a Parisian institution. Since then, a great deal of research by universities and museums has broadened that view, says Marie Salle, the Centre’s curator who conceived the project. “This centennial exhibition aims to show the diversity of Surrealism,” she says.
“We must remember that Surrealism was a movement that spread throughout the world, not just in Europe, but also in America, South America, Asia, the Maghreb, and elsewhere. This is unusual for an avant-garde movement.”
What all these artists have in common, she says, is Breton’s call to live according to the imagination: “to pay attention to the wonders of everyday life.” [Surrealism] I want to provoke, I want to shock, [to show] The wonderful aspects of everyday life that come from accessing consciousness and dreams.”
The centrepiece of the exhibition will be Breton’s First Manifesto, with its original pages on loan from the National Library of France, which acquired the document after it was declared a national treasure in 2021.
Iconic names from the Surrealist movement will be on display, including works by René Magritte and Salvador Dali, but visitors will also encounter some lesser known figures, including Japanese artists. Tatsuo Ikedawhose art recalls the horrors of war and the harmful consequences of Japan’s postwar reindustrialization. Rufino TamayoA mid-20th century Mexican painter known for fusing modernism with pre-Columbian motifs in his vibrantly colored works.
Reflecting a growing trend, the Centre Pompidou will once again exhibit neglected women artists such as Leonora Carrington, Dorothy Tanning and Dora Maar, long relegated to girlfriends and muses who played glamorous bit parts in the Surrealist story rather than complex creative figures in their own right.
Maret also suggests that the exhibition will show Surrealism’s contemporary resonance, citing its obsession with forests as a reflection of modern environmentalism. Surrealism’s anti-colonial message is also prominent, and the Paris exhibition will include pamphlets by artists protesting against France’s 1954-1962 war in Algeria.
At the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, he looked back at the concept of Surrealism, noting its connections with the Symbolists and Surrealists of the late 19th century, long considered separate movements.
“There was no real disconnect between what happened before and after World War I,” said Francisca Vandepitt, curator of the Brussels show, which closed at the end of July. “Our basic approach is to show for the first time the connections,” she said, citing Fernand Khnopff’s stark, somewhat unsettling late 19th-century paintings as an example. Portrait of a Younger Sister It is said to have influenced Magritte’s 1932 work “An Unexpected Answer,” which similarly features a man-sized hole in a bleak doorway.
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Many of the works shown in Brussels will be sent to Paris, but the exhibition will continue to evolve as it travels: the Royal Museums of Fine Arts will loan one of the jewels of its collection, a work by René Magritte, to Paris. Domination of LightThere, a clear blue sky and fluffy white clouds frame the trees and houses bathed in the evening light: “If the Sun Would Shine Tonight,” is a 1923 Breton poem quoted by Magritte.
But “this is not a typical traveling exhibition,” Vandepitt says. Instead, themes suggested in Breton’s manifesto — dreams and nightmares, night, forests, space — will be featured in some, but not all, of the museums. “Each partner will mount an exhibition based on the richness of their own collections and traditions,” she says.
After Paris, the exhibition will move to Madrid’s Mapfre Foundation, shining the spotlight on Iberian Surrealists such as Dalí and Miró, before moving to the Hamburg Kunsthalle to explore the legacy of German Romanticism before arriving at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in late 2025, telling the story of the Surrealists’ exile in the Americas during World War II.
Fleeing the Nazi invasion, artists traveled to the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean, where they encountered new influences: In Mexico, for example, the Surrealists discovered traditional myths about volcanoes that were “great fodder for the Surrealist mindset,” says Matthew Afon, the Philadelphia exhibition’s curator.
“If you’ve seen all five versions [of the exhibition] You will gain a fascinating and diverse understanding of the themes and stylistic features of Surrealist art. [and] “That’s the main concern,” he said.
Perhaps the exhibition’s shifting nature suits Surrealism, in its strange and transgressive varieties, particularly well. “There is no such thing as a Surrealist style,” Afron says. “It’s almost a philosophy of life, a way of thinking. One of the key ideas of Surrealism is that you have to let your imagination go free and take you to places you’ve never been before.”
