Surrealism for beginners: dreams, chance and magic

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Surrealism is the art movement that felt most like magic to me when I first met it, and it turns out that was no accident. Its founders wanted to free the mind from logic, and they reached for the same tools witches use: dreams, chance, symbols and the tarot. The movement’s leaders were mostly men who talked about women as muses. Some of the most magical work came from the women themselves.

Three layers

Historical What the records show. Later tradition The legends. Modern How we use it now.

The manifesto

Historical In 1924 the French poet André Breton, who had worked with shell-shocked soldiers during the war and read Freud, published the Manifesto of Surrealism. He defined it as “psychic automatism”, thought expressed without the control of reason. The group practiced automatic writing, recorded dreams and played games like the exquisite corpse, in which each person adds to a drawing or sentence without seeing what came before.

Painting the dream

Historical Max Ernst rubbed pencil over wood grain and leaves to find creatures hidden in their textures. Joan Miró let shapes float like stars. Salvador Dalí painted dream images with photographic precision, like the melting watches of The Persistence of Memory (1931), now at MoMA. René Magritte in Brussels painted calm, impossible scenes: a pipe labeled “This is not a pipe”, a night street under a daylight sky.

Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo

Historical The English painter Leonora Carrington (1917 to 2011) and the Spanish painter Remedios Varo (1908 to 1963) both escaped wartime Europe and settled in Mexico City in the early 1940s, where they became close friends. Their paintings are full of alchemists, witches, tiny kitchens that are also laboratories, and women weaving the world. They studied alchemy, the Kabbalah, Gurdjieff and the tarot together. Carrington painted her own Major Arcana, published in facsimile in 2020, and wrote the wonderful novel The Hearing Trumpet. In 2022 the Venice Biennale took its title, The Milk of Dreams, from a book of her stories.

Who counts as a Surrealist?

Historical Breton liked to welcome artists into the movement whether they wanted it or not. When he visited Mexico in 1938 he called Frida Kahlo a natural Surrealist. She rejected the label and is widely quoted as saying that she never painted dreams, only her own reality. Dorothea Tanning and Kay Sage, both American, worked alongside the group but kept their own voices. Being near a movement is not the same as belonging to it, and the women knew the difference.

The esoteric angle

Historical In 1940 and 1941, waiting in Marseille for visas to escape the war, Breton and his friends designed a card game, the Jeu de Marseille, with suits of flame, star, wheel and lock, and Surrealist heroes in place of kings and queens. Breton’s book Arcane 17 (1945) is named after the Star card of the Tarot of Marseille and meditates on hope after catastrophe. The Swiss Surrealist Kurt Seligmann wrote a history of magic, The Mirror of Magic (1948).

Later tradition Surrealism is sometimes remembered as a men’s club with women as models. The women’s own work, long overlooked, is now at the center of the story.

Modern For the history of tarot, see the history of tarot and tarot in art history.

Try it yourself

Play an exquisite corpse with a friend. Fold a paper into three. One draws a head, folds it over, the next draws a body, the last draws legs. Unfold it. What creature did you summon together?

Before and after

Before this: Dada.

After this: Abstract Expressionism.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.