This post was originally published on artnews.com
In the summer of 1924, the roses of France turned a shade of blue. Wood became glass, and words transfigured into beings, rapping at windows to let people know they were there. That, at least, was how André Breton described the state of things in the first version of his famed “Surrealist Manifesto,” the text that codified the modernist movement that remains influential today.
This year sees Surrealism turning 100 and it is being feted accordingly. The movement seems by now so familiar that its name conjures an array of famous images: melting clocks, floating boulders, a furry teacup. For an avant-garde engaged in exploring the value of the unknown, Surrealism had for a while started to seem very familiar.
The last decade has brought change to that view, as the movement’s canon, long centered around Western Europe, has gone global with blockbusters such as “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” which opened at Tate Modern in 2022. Meanwhile, women now occupy a central place within histories of Surrealism, due in no small part to art historian Whitney Chadwick’s reissued book on the subject and a female-focused 2022 Venice Biennale. Surrealism as we know it has begun a dramatic shift.
Across the whole of the movement, similar conceptual concerns recur: the value of irrationality, the lure of dreams, the importance of sexual liberation, the necessity of overthrowing the bourgeoisie. To these considerations, many beyond the West further add fighting colonialist oppression and undoing Europe’s obsession with empiricism and reason. And women, whose male colleagues sometimes shunted them out of the spotlight, found in Surrealism a pathway toward freedom from the patriarchy.
In taking stock of the newly expanded view of the movement, ARTnews has endeavored to map out its finest 32 works, a ranked list of which follows in descending order.