THE PERSISTENCE OF SURREALISM: A CENTURY ON, THE DREAM ENDURES AT THE PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUM

Loosed from the mind of André Breton, with a little help from Sigmund Freud’s revelations about the unconscious and a push from Dadaist anti-art, Surrealism is a bell that can’t be unrung. In his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, Breton — who visited Freud in Vienna in 1921, interrupting his own honeymoon to make the pilgrimage — recognized the psychoanalyst’s theories as giving permission to artists to “express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought.” Freed from the strictures of waking logic, Breton and his circle delved into their dreams and explored the power of automatic drawing and writing, seeking a truer reality by turning away from its traditional representations.

A century later, this foundational pillar of modernism is being celebrated across the globe in a major survey soon to arrive on American shores. After debuting at Paris’s Centre Pompidou last year and traveling to three other European museums, Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100 will open in a new iteration at the Philadelphia Art Museum on November 8. The exhibition — its only U.S. presentation — features 200 works, including highlights from the museum’s collection. One such jewel from the PhAM collection is Joan Miró’s Dog Barking at the Moon (1926), an early effort on the artist’s part to “assassinate painting,” as he later described. In this pared-back nocturnal vision, a vaguely canine creature sits beside a ladder stretching dramatically to the sky, as if the moon were within reach. Miró here détourns the Catalan landscape paintings he studied in the 1910s, reimagining them through a spare dreamlike vocabulary.

Salvador Dalí’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936), also in the museum’s collection and on view in Dreamworld, communicates a much more gruesome side of the Surrealist vision. Set in a desolate landscape, a mangled human figure tears itself apart, its face twisted in agony. A miniature Freud looks on from the ground, surveying the carnage and a cascade of legumes that inexplicably dot the painting’s foreground. Dalí spilled the beans, letting it slip — alongside Miró, Leonora Carrington, Méret Oppenheim, Giorgio de Chirico, and countless others — that there is more to human experience than meets the eye.

Contemporary manifestations of the Surrealist impulse are innumerable; what began as a radical refusal of artistic tradition has become a shared vocabulary for artists across all disciplines. Earlier this year, director Claus Guth refracted Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera Salome through a Surrealist lens, positioning six identically costumed Salomes of different ages on stage together as a haunting embodiment of Freudian regression, reminiscent of René Magritte’s doppelgangers. Since taking the helm of Schiaparelli in 2019, designer Daniel Roseberry has picked up its founder’s Surrealist baton, propelling the house into a new era of couture that pushes materiality to the brink of fantasy. His Spring/Summer 2026 collection, for instance, introduced a fabric studded with small patches of hair, recalling the fur-lined spoon accompanying Oppenheim’s Object (1936, Museum of Modern Art), a gazelle-pelt cup and saucer that remains one of Surrealism’s most indelible icons. On the literary front, Solvej Balle’s seven-novel series On the Calculation of Volume — a critic’s darling first translated into English in 2024 — unfolds over an endlessly repeating day that grows more uncanny with each sunrise.

By cracking open Pandora’s box and spilling its contents across canvases and notebook pages, the first Surrealists inaugurated a way of looking at the world askance. A hundred years on, the bell still rings — a reminder that the imagination is not an escape from reality but a way of seeing it more clearly and preserving the wildness at its core. As reality continues to shift and fragment, our dreams evolve alongside it, reverberating through every corner of today’s culture.