Surrealism began as a literary movement in Paris in 1924 and became the most recognisable art style of the twentieth century. Melting clocks, bowler hats, lobsters on telephones: the images are so familiar that it is easy to forget how radical the idea was. This guide covers where surrealism came from, the artists who defined it, the techniques they invented, and how the movement lives on in art today.

Where surrealism came from

The ground was prepared by Dada, the anti-art movement born in Zürich during the First World War. Dadaists like Marcel Duchamp, who exhibited a urinal as sculpture in 1917, rejected reason itself, since reason had produced the trenches. Surrealism inherited that anger but gave it a direction.

That direction came from Sigmund Freud. His work on dreams and the unconscious, published from 1899 onwards, suggested that the mind hides its real contents and lets them out only sideways, in dreams, slips and free association. The poet André Breton, who had worked in psychiatric wards during the war, saw an artistic method in this. His Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 called for thought freed from the control of reason.

Within a few years painters joined the poets, and surrealism spread from Paris across Europe, to Mexico and to the United States, where many of its artists fled during the Second World War.

The key surrealist artists

Salvador Dalí

The movement's showman and its most technically gifted painter. The Persistence of Memory, 1931, with its soft watches on a Catalan beach, is the surrealist painting. Dalí called his method paranoiac-critical: inducing a dreamlike state and painting what appeared with photographic precision.

René Magritte

The quiet Belgian. Magritte painted ordinary things, pipes, apples, men in bowler hats, clouds, with a sign painter's clarity, and used them to ask what images actually are. The Treachery of Images, 1929, a pipe captioned This is not a pipe, and The Son of Man, 1964, a man with an apple in front of his face, are among the most quoted paintings ever made.

Max Ernst

The inventor. Ernst developed frottage, rubbing pencil over textured surfaces to generate images, and grattage, scraping paint across canvas laid over objects. His collage novels and bird-headed alter ego Loplop pushed surrealism towards the uncanny.

Joan Miró

The one who took surrealism towards abstraction. Miró's floating shapes, stars and biomorphic figures came out of automatic drawing and hunger-induced hallucination, by his own account. His work is where surrealism and modern abstract art meet.

Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo

Two women who did some of the movement's most original work, largely in Mexico. Carrington's paintings are full of hybrid creatures and alchemical ritual. Varo's are precise, dreamlike scenes of women at strange tasks, often in towers and laboratories. Both were long overshadowed and are now considered central.

Frida Kahlo

Breton claimed her for surrealism. Kahlo refused the label, saying she painted her own reality, not dreams. Her work still sits in every surrealism survey because of its symbolism and impossible anatomy, as in The Two Fridas, 1939.

Surrealist techniques

Automatism: drawing or painting without conscious control, to let the unconscious lead. Frottage: rubbing over textures to find images in them. Grattage: scraping paint to reveal patterns. Decalcomania: pressing paint between surfaces and pulling them apart, which Ernst and Óscar Domínguez used for landscapes. Exquisite corpse: a group game where each person adds to a drawing without seeing the rest. Collage: cutting and recombining found images. Juxtaposition and dislocation: placing familiar things in impossible relationships, the core of Magritte and Dalí.

Surrealism after the surrealists

The movement as an organised group faded after the Second World War, but its methods became part of the toolkit of all visual culture. Abstract expressionists took automatism. Pop artists took collage and the bowler hat. Filmmakers from Buñuel to Lynch took dream logic. Album covers, advertising and contemporary illustration run on surrealist juxtaposition every day.

Contemporary independent artists are the direct heirs. Phantasmagoria by Mat Miller for Rainforest Trust, Storch Und Hausboote by Daniel Artx for WWF, Eternal Grace by Frank Moth for Smile of the Child and Crossing Those Hills by Anttoni Salminen for WWF all use dislocation and metamorphosis the way the 1930s did, with colour the 1930s did not have. All are fine art prints, and every order supports a charity partner. Browse the surreal wall art collection for more.

If you want the definition and the characteristics rather than the history, start with What Is Surrealist Painting? Surrealism Explained.

Questions about surrealism art

When did surrealism start?

1924, with André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto in Paris. Painting joined the movement over the following few years.

Who are the most famous surrealist painters?

Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Joan Miró, with Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Yves Tanguy increasingly recognised alongside them.

What are the main surrealist techniques?

Automatism, frottage, grattage, decalcomania, collage, the exquisite corpse game, and the juxtaposition or dislocation of familiar objects.

Is surrealism still used today?

Constantly. Contemporary illustration, film, advertising and album art all rely on surrealist methods, and many independent artists work squarely in the tradition.