A major surrealism exhibition that premiered in Paris in 2024 will make its only American appearance at the Philadelphia Art Museum from November 8, 2025, through February 16, 2026. Titled "Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100," the large-scale exhibition celebrates the centennial of a movement that has become deeply embedded in everyday language yet remains widely misunderstood.
In contemporary speech, Americans routinely use "surreal" to describe anything unbelievable, fantastic, or bizarre. People say things like "I found myself in the surreal position of explaining who I am" or "In the middle of the story, things turned surreal." According to art historians and critics who have closely studied 20th-century avant-garde movements, it's remarkable that a word originating in the specialized jargon of Paris modern art circles a century ago has become so universally familiar, traveling from 1920s cafes and studios into common usage while touching a shared nerve about the strangeness and absurdity of modern life.
However, surrealism as an artistic movement encompassed far more than ostentatious strangeness. While many people think only of Salvador Dalí's melting clocks covered with ants, his extravagant mustaches, and his even more extravagant public behavior, they're missing the essential elements that continue to make surrealism one of the most compelling art movements of the 20th century and the lessons it still offers today.
Surrealism was founded by a group of young Parisian artists, primarily writers, who gathered around the charismatic poet André Breton. During World War I, Breton had treated front-line soldiers suffering from what was then called shell shock and is now understood as PTSD. This experience opened him to altered mental states and introduced him to revolutionary ideas from Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud about the structure of the human mind. In states of psychosis, as well as in daily occurrences such as dreams and slips of the tongue, Freud identified glimpses of an uncharted region of the psyche: the unconscious.
Breton questioned why life and art shouldn't take these aspects of human experience into account. He wondered why the portion of existence spent dreaming shouldn't also be recognized as having value. In a manifesto published in 1924, which is considered the birth of the surrealist movement, Breton called for "the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak."
For the surrealists, the movement represented much more than an artistic project—it was a means toward larger political transformation. Freud had coined the term "dreamwork" to describe the activity that transformed residues of daily memories into vehicles for expressing unconscious desires. The surrealists similarly understood that dreaming was no simple realm of idle fantasy. They believed the synthesis of sleeping and waking life promised a liberation as sweeping as that of the revolutionary workers' movement of their time.
The surrealists believed that overcoming the contradiction between dream and reality would complement the class struggle between the global proletariat and its bourgeois oppressors. From today's perspective, these may appear to be grandiose, even delusional claims. But 1924, the year of surrealism's founding, came only seven years after the Russian Revolution. The surrealists placed their bets on the power of both the revolution in modern art and poetry and the political transformation of society.
As Breton told a group of writers in Paris in 1935, "'Transform the world,' Marx said; 'change life,' [French poet Arthur] Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us." In other words, the uncompromising project of remaking social existence would not be complete without the artistic reimagining of the human psyche, and vice versa. However, by the time Breton articulated this succinct formulation, the surrealists' gamble on revolution had already effectively been lost.
With Joseph Stalin's purges underway in Moscow and Adolf Hitler consolidating power in Germany, the window for radical change that had seemed to open in the years after World War I was definitively closing. Soon, the surrealists would find themselves scattered into exile by a new global conflict. All that remained was for museums and libraries to collect the relics of that ambitious ideal and preserve the artworks and ephemera that documented surrealism's brief quest to unleash the forces of the unconscious in the name of a new, freer world.
The surrealists aimed to seduce their audiences, but this seduction wasn't undertaken to sell paintings or even to provide audiences a moment's respite from busy lives. It was done in the name of subversion. They wished to shatter people's complacency through artworks, films, and books, moving them to change their lives and the world. The artwork wasn't merely a window through which to look onto a distant dreamworld—it was more like a revolving door that viewers were invited to walk through.
Breton and his colleagues desired a world in which individuals could live poetry, not just read it. Surrealist works of art, even as they hang peacefully on museum walls or sit quietly on library shelves, retain at least residues of that transformative power. According to current art scholarship, the best recent writing on the movement manages to recapture that urgency and allure for contemporary times, including translator and author Mark Polizzotti's 2024 book "Why Surrealism Matters" and art historian Abigail Susik's 2021 volume "Surrealist Sabotage."
The centennial of surrealism serves as a reminder of the movement's unfinished business of revolutionary seduction. As Breton reminded his readers at the close of his 1924 manifesto, life is not bound to the realities of the world as currently given. Existence, he insisted, "is elsewhere." The upcoming Philadelphia exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to engage with this enduring challenge to conventional thinking and social structures.
