Surrealists were fascinated by dreams, desire, magic, sexuality, and the revolutionary power of artworks to transform how we understand the world. Learn more with this tour of our internationally renowned collection of Surrealist art.
Please note: artworks occasionally go off view for imaging, treatment, or loan to other institutions. Click on the images to ensure the work is currently on view.
After he moved to Paris in 1920, Joan Miró met a group of avant-garde artists and writers who advocated merging the everyday world with dreams and the unconscious in order to produce an absolute reality, or surreality. In The Policeman, Miró derives a childlike image of a mustachioed policeman and his horse from seemingly unplanned stains on the canvas and graffiti-like strokes and squiggles, as if composing without conscious intention.
The Policeman (How to Make a Surrealist Artwork)
Caitlin: The title “The Policeman” clues you in that we’re looking for things that are figural and we’ve got the gentlemen with the mustache. Just a really humorously long mustache and two eyes. And then we’ve got in profile a really lovely horse.
Jennifer: It really does present a challenge a sort of challenge to authority this idea of a humourous rendering of an absurd looking policeman, his red hand with five fingers coming up as if to say “Stop!”
Narrator: Surrealists like Joan Miro, sought to discover new and distinctive methods of artistic creation that often involved access to the unconscious. Curator Cailtin Haskell.
Caitlin: Pure psychic automatism. I mean that’s the phrase that Breton uses in the Surrealist Manifesto that is what each of these artists is trying to achieve.
Narrator: Automatism a type of automatic creation took many forms in Surrealism. You could have automatic writing that created poems built from fragments or collage composed of seemingly random imagery.
Caitlin: Or you could have automatic drawing where the artist is not working in the typical authorial way—it’s really the hand doing what it wants to do—and then later on you can go in and lift out certain iconographic elements or make something that seems more pictorial.
Narrator: This was a method frequently used by Joan Miro. Research Associate, Jennifer Cohen.
Jennifer: So Miro would produce automatic drawings in a journal and he would produce them in various ways, letting his pen wander or characterizing images from his dreams.
Narrator: This painting, The Policeman, and other paintings from this period may seem to be done on the fly, but it’s far more meticulous than that.
Jennifer: They are in fact in a very traditional way enlarged and reproduced from his sketchbook onto canvas. So you can kind of see in this work the grid that he would have used to create that reproduction.
Narrator: Miro, perhaps more than any Surrealist artist, aggressively pushed the limits of painting.
Jennifer: He’s famously known as saying that his aim was to kill or assassinate painting, which is a very odd thing to hear him say because he’s painting for his whole career.
Narrator: Miro attributes he desire to transcend painting in part to poets, which he discusses in an interview from the 1960s.
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Max Ernst, one of the most gifted and prolific artists associated with Surrealism, produced works in an unusually wide range of styles and techniques. Beginning in 1925, he developed numerous new methods for making pictures including frottage, which involved placing paper or canvas on a textured surface and rubbing evenly to create an unpredictable image. In Forest and Sun, the abstract patterns produced by wood grain have been transformed into a cluster of towering forms recalling a forest, a source of fear and fascination for Ernst since his youth.
Forest and Sun (How to Make a Surrealist Artwork)
Narrator: An important part of being a Surrealist was discovering new methods for creating artworks. One way the Surrealists did that was by experimenting with placing the creation of the artwork outside the control of the artist. Curator, Caitlin Haskell.
Caitlin: And Ernst in particular had some really wonderful ways of making textures, making marks that are totally new and don’t allow him to be completely in control of what’s going to arrive on the surface.
Narrator: We can see two such techniques here. One known as frottage, which involved placing paper or canvas on a textured surface, like wood, and drawing over the top of that surface to create shapes and lines. And grattage, technique where you scrape away applied oil paint, creating unexpected patterns.
These methods of creation would come to be known as automatism and would be foundational in the creation of many Surrealist artworks. Research Associate, Jennifer Cohen.
Jennifer: It originated in poetry, where you would write without stopping. And what they were looking for was something more authentic about themselves. It was a very Freudian exercise where I’m looking for a secret that my conscious mind doesn’t know about itself.
Narrator: By accessing the unconscious during the creative process a painting could become a mirror to one’s inner life. Notice for instance the forest.
Jennifer: It gets to the heart of who he is. You can see that the petrified forest comes to look like an ‘M’ and from a distance you can really get a sense that it’s really supposed to be the artist’s signature.
Narrator: As in his first name, Max. Ernst, like many Surrealists, wanted to move away from rational thought because they believed this way of thinking had lead society astray.
Caitlin: Ernst was someone who had fought in World War I. And you’re at one of these moments you get in the 20th century where there’s a sense that all of the rational might that Europe had, all the forces of civilization had led to something quite tragic and horrific.
Narrator: In using automatism, Surrealists believed we could uncover and present something profound about ourselves that rationalism had failed to produce.
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A key example of Francis Picabia’s Transparency series, this multilayered picture was inspired by the effects and spatial distortions of early 20th-century experimental cinema. The painting presents a view of the world as if seen through multiple film exposure, with at least four faces superimposed over a Mediterranean landscape. The background and foreground appear to merge, with mountain ridgelines functioning as facial contours and seawater doubling as discolored skin. Throughout his career Picabia remained skeptical of stylistic designations, and in 1924 he memorably quipped, “The only movement is perpetual movement.”
Inspired by the biomorphic forms of his colleagues Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy developed his own vocabulary of organic, amoebic shapes populating mysterious, dreamlike settings. This painted wooden screen depicts an uncanny vision of a primordial landscape, which can be manipulated when the screen is folded to provide closure within a room or interior space.
With his wood reliefs made of curvilinear, organic shapes, Jean Arp invented a new stylistic language of “biomorphic” abstraction that carried titles evoking things in the world. This work, a particularly playful example from this series, is entitled Manicured Relief, suggesting that the gray-green fields might represent painted fingernails. The artwork’s first owner, Mary Reynolds, was a central figure in the Surrealist milieu in Paris and an artist known for her pioneering work in avant-garde bookbinding.
Claude Cahun challenged traditional ideas about gender and sexuality through intimate photographic self-portraits, collages, and sculptures. For Object, Cahun altered a number of seemingly unrelated components—a doll’s hand, a cloud-shaped piece of wood, and a tennis ball painted with a wide-open eye—to produce a startling image. This is the artist’s only sculptural work known to exist in its original form.
Object (How to Make a Surrealist Artwork)
Caitlin: It’s startling for any number of reasons. It’s kind of primal and it’s just, I don’t know, it’s sort of repulsive.
Narrator: Curator, Caitlin Haskell.
Caitlin: You’ve got this eye that’s turned verticle, you have a hand, and then you have a base where there’s a text.
Narrator: We’ll come back to each of these elements in a second. First, it’s helpful to know that for the artist of this piece, Claude Cahun, contradiction was a frequent interest. Cahun often explored gender expression, playing with social norms of what is masculine and feminine.
Caitlin: if you’ve ever seen pictures of Claude, you know, she was a rather petite woman and would kind of be making this gestures like she was a body builder and you know doing very humorously masculine activities. But was also very serious about wanting to escape the social
Narrator: In this sculpture, Cahun isn’t confusing gender so much as our senses and desires. Research Associate, Brian Leahy.
Brian: And I think the conflation of the eye turned vertical and then the hair confuses the sense of sight and touch. You both want to and don’t want to touch the object. And the hand of course is the other element in the object that is insisting on this other sense.
Narrator: The text on the base of the sculpture also fits with this theme of contradiction, though in a more overtly political way. Research Associate, Jennifer Cohen.
Jennifer: It consists of two phrases which come from different sources. So the first says “The Marseillaise is a revolutionary song.” So the first comes from the leader of the French communist party, who in 1935 gave an important speech sort of appropriating the idea of the Marseillaise or the French national anthem as a revolutionary song and not just a nationalist anthem.
Narrator: The second phrase comes from Belgian currency and stated a punishment of hard labor for counterfeiting bills.
Jennifer: I think that Cahun was very interested in the way that these two phrases came together to produce something poetic. But also the way in which they sort of contradict each other. In the same way that she was interested in deconstructing her own identity and the idea of gender. She was also interested in deconstructing political identities, so the ideas of left and right as well.
Narrator: Undermining conventions, expectations, and bringing together numerous contradictions was a useful strategy for making Surrealist artwork, and perhaps no artist does this as evocatively as Claude Cahun.
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A member of the Belgian surrealist group, René Magritte approached painting as a philosophical and poetic art. In Time Transfixed, he transforms a stovepipe into a charging locomotive, situating the train in a fireplace vent so that it appears to be emerging from a railway tunnel. The surprising juxtaposition and incongruous scale of unrelated elements in Time Transfixed brings a sense of mystery to the everyday.
La durée poignardée (Time Transfixed) (How to Make a Surrealist Artwork)
Narrator: When art collector Edward James was choosing where to hang Time Transfixed in his home, the artist, Rene Magritte, provided a suggestion. Curator, Caitlin Haskell.
Caitlin: He wanted it to be at the bottom of a staircase so that when viewers were descending it would seem like they were being stabbed by this train coming through the fireplace at them.
Narrator: This may seem confusing at first, why would Magritte want you to have this violent experience of the painting? We get a bit of a clue from the original French title of the painting, which is actually quite different from the English title listed here.
Caitlin: So in English the title for this work is Time Transfixed, but in French it would be (french phrase), meaning basically time getting stabbed, punctuated in a very violent way.
Narrator: This painting is full of these twists of language and metaphor, and is a good example of an approach to painting that Magritte used that he termed Problematology. But he didn’t mean problems in the way that we typically talk about them.
Caitlin: He’s trying to evoke a particular idea in his viewer’s mind. So for example in this case you got a fire place and a train, which do not seem connected at all, they are disconnected in terms of their scale: One is domestic, one is industrial, one is moving, one is fixed, but what they share is smoke. And that is what allows this scene to be uncanny as opposed to just absurd.
Narrator: Though not every Surrealist used the method of Problematology, evoking a specific idea through unexpected images or metaphors is common throughout Surrealism. It comes back to a foundational concept for many Surrealists that there is truth accessible beyond rational thought that can be brought out of the unconscious through art.
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Narrator: Magritte is without a doubt one of the great Surrealists, but he was also unique within the movement. In contrast iconic image of the Bohemien, outlandish drug and alcohol crazed French surrealists, Magritte was actually fairly conservative.
Caitlin: He would paint wearing a suit, at very regular hours of the day, in his home. And I think he sort of enjoyed the dissonance between being an avant-garde artists and looking like you’re the man in the crowd, not doing anything exceptional.
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For approximately thirty years, Joseph Cornell worked in relative obscurity in the basement of his home in Queens, New York, creating a multitude of wondrous miniature worlds within his boxed constructions. Poetic assemblages of found objects and materials, these deeply personal and elusive boxes often prompt a dizzying array of associations. Despite the rigid and symmetrical organization of Untitled (Butterfly Habitat), each small compartment holds a paper butterfly suspended with string, allowing for some movement as the work is handled.
Roberto Matta’s best-known painting The Earth Is a Man is a type of imaginative landscape that he referred to as an “inscape.” It represents the culmination of a five-year project in honor of the poet Federico García Lorca, who was assassinated by agents of Francisco Franco in 1936. Exhibited shortly after its completion in New York City, where Matta had immigrated at the onset of World War II, the mural-size canvas enthralled and influenced a new generation of American artists, who would come to be known as the Abstract Expressionists.
With the outbreak of World War II, Kurt Seligmann became the first Surrealist to arrive in New York and was instrumental in the emigration of most of the movement’s leading figures to the United States. As an acknowledged expert on magic, he infused his paintings with mythology and esotericism, and in the same year he made this work he published The Mirror of Magic, a history of the occult. The winding forms and mystical quality of this canvas influenced a new generation of American artists, including his student Robert Motherwell.
Marcel Duchamp began his career as a conventional painter, but by 1912 he set out to prove the end of “retinal” art, his term for works created to delight the eye. In its place, he proposed the “readymade,” an ordinary object transformed into a work of art by virtue of the artist’s selection. Duchamp’s Bottle Rack, first realized in 1914 using a mass-produced bottle rack purchased at a French department store, is the earliest work of this type. Duchamp transformed many other common objects into readymades, including a hat rack, a bicycle wheel, and even a urinal, and his counterintuitive invention provided an important precedent for later Surrealist artists.
Learn more about Duchamp’s Bottle Rack on the museum’s blog.
Bottle Rack (Porte-Bouteilles) (How to Make a Surrealist Artwork)
This is an interview with Dada artist Marcel Duchamp on the BBC in 1968.
Narrator: Where should we begin with this confounding artwork? Maybe the easiest place is explaining what is literally is. Curator, Caitlin Haskell.
Catlin: This is actually a functional object. In France people would drink wine and those bottles could be reused. And so after you finished your wine you’d rinse it out and the bottle would need to dry so you would put on one of these spikes.
Narrator: Duchamp called these sculptures “Readymades.” In the example we’re looking at, the bottle rack is presented as it was originally manufactured.
Caitlin: His hand is not involved in the making of this in the least, but he selected it and he had the idea to put it in the context of an art gallery. And it starts to provoke lots and lots of questions about, well, what is an artwork? Or you sort of find yourself asking ‘why couldn’t this be an artwork?’
Narrator: What complicates this question even more is that this bottle rack at the Art Institute isn’t the first bottle rack. See, Duchamp was in New York when he fully conceived of the idea of the Readymade, but the bottle rack he has purchased in 1914 was still in his studio in France, which he left in the care of his sister Suzanne, whose work is also discussed on this tour. Research Associate, Jennifer Cohen.
Jennifer: And he wrote to his sister about this “so called bottle rack” as he put it and he said that now he was going to call it a Readymade and he said “take the bottle rack for yourself, I will make it a Readymade remotely you are to inscribe it at the bottom and on the inside bottom ring in small letters painted with a brush in oil, silver/white color with an inscription.
He’s trying to distance the act of artistic intentionality to such a degree that he’s having his sister sign the work for him.
Narrator: Unfortunately for Marcel, his sister received the letter too late and had already thrown out the bottle rack, assuming it was junk cluttering up the studio. Not one to be discouraged, Duchamp would go on purchase and exhibit multiple bottle racks. This particular bottle rack was ultimately purchased by artist Robert Rauchunberg and signed by Duchamp, which you can see on the inside of the bottom ring.
Duchamp’s questioning of originality, artist intention, and what makes something artwork would become central for the Surrealist movement and shaped what it would mean to create a Surrealist artwork.
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Broken and Restored Multiplication is filled with visual and verbal metaphors of disorder and breakage: the Eiffel Tower is turned upside down and the phrases that run up and down the surface of the picture emphasize the upending of a sense of order. A translation of these phrases reads: “The mirror would shatter, the scaffolding would totter, the balloons would fly away, the stars would dim, etc.” Such images and words seemed fitting for artists like Suzanne Duchamp who embraced Dada, an anti-art movement that developed in response to World War I and set the stage for the emergence of Surrealism.
Broken and Restored Multiplication (How to Make a Surrealist Artwork)
Caitlin: This is a painting that I’m just really excited about. It’s by Suzanne Duchamp and it is one of the classic and one of the most important Dada paintings.
The painting actually functions at the same time as an abstract artwork and as a concrete poem. It’s talking about the stars are going to fall, the balloons are going to fly away, the mirror is going to break—and so you’ve got this sense of order that’s been upended and sort of rupture and breakage.
Narrator: This theme is continued through the visuals of the painting as well. Notice this architectural shape at the center the painting. You probably recognize it, though it’s shown here upside down. It’s the Eiffel Tower. Curator, Caitlin Haskell.
Caitlin: For me it’s really productive to think about what the Eiffel Tower symbolized when it was constructed. There was a very idealistic understanding that it would represent this union of art and engineering and science, and that if the artists and the engineers could speak in one language what a perfect modern world we would have.
Narrator: When Duchamp made this work 30 years later that idealism had fallen apart. Europe was is in the wake of World War I, during which they witnessed previously unfathomable levels of destruction due to advances in technological warfare. Research associate, Jennifer Cohen.
Jennifer: There’s sort of no overestimating that destruction and how it was felt for the French. So many men died, and that was felt by everyone.
Narrator: In reaction to this destruction, Dada artists like Duchamp had become skeptical of Western thought and its worship of reason and technological advancement. For them, our strict adherence to this form of thinking had lead us to the brink of extermination.
Caitlin: That technology is something that can be used to extremely horrific ends and that there probably isn’t going to be a reintegration of art and science.
Jennifer: Logic can only get us so far. So what can breaking apart language, breaking apart ideas, what kinds of opportunities might be there to mine.
Narrator: Duchamp’s critique of Western civilization and her combining of poetry and painting anticipate similar experimental artworks by Surrealist artists that questioned authority.
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Salvador Dalí, Surrealism’s most publicized practitioner, created monstrous visions of a world turned inside out, which he made even more compelling through his extraordinary technical skills. Painted near Vienna a few months before the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany, Inventions of the Monsters is filled with threats of danger, from the menacing fire in the distance to the foreboding hourglass in the foreground. The artist, whose native Catalonia was embroiled in the Spanish Civil War during the creation of this work, depicts anxieties about a world that had indeed allowed for the invention of monsters.
Salvador Dalí created this anthropomorphic cabinet from a half-size plaster reproduction of a famous marble statue of the ancient goddess of love, the Venus de Milo. As Dalí described, objects such as this should be created “wholly for the purpose of materializing in a fetishistic way, with maximum tangible reality, ideas and fantasies of a delirious character.”
Venus de Milo with Drawers (How to Make a Surrealist Artwork)
Narrator: The origin story of this sculpture begins when Dali purchased a reproduction of the famous Venus di Milo. Curator, Caitlin Haskell.
Caitlin: So it’s basically like a souvenir.
Narrator: Much like the artist Marcel Duchamp, who actually aided with the creation of this work, Salvador Dali alters this found object, turning a tchotchke into a work of art.
Jennifer: He drew out this drawers on the sculpture and then his friend Marcel Duchamp assisted him in hiring a cabinet maker in turning these into actual functioning drawers.
Caitlin Haskell: We had an amazing day with this artwork. We took it out of its vitrine and we actually removed the different drawers. Each of these pulls that you see on venus is an actual functional drawer. What’s interesting is that Dali has gone in and covered each of them with this fur that is mink or ermine. I don’t know, I just had a totally different psychological relationship with this because you’re going through the fur to find the drawer pull and it’s like oddly akin to like uncovering a nipple on a dog’s belly or something like that. And it’s a really sort of…I don’t know it’s not the type of experience you expect to have with an artwork.
Jennifer: And it has a lot to do, I think, with his reading of Freud and the idea that if only we could open up our bodies or minds like we can open a cabinet we could discover secrets. After seeing an object like this I definitely have not been experiencing the pockets on my clothes the same way (Laughs).
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