What Is Surrealism? A Guide to the Dreamlike World of Surrealist Art

We’ve all had THAT dream. Everything looks normal, but just one thing is slightly askew. And when that one small thing breaks our sense of reality, it captures a place in our memory. We often remember those weird dreams even after we wake up.  

Surrealism embraces that weird dream.

Surrealist art is an avant-garde movement that emerged in the 1920s. Driven by ideas presented by psychologist Sigmund Freud, Surrealist artists believed that dreaming, or entering a dream-like state, connects us more deeply to our inner passions, thoughts, and ideas.

These painters, writers, and thinkers explored how our minds work when we’re not in control of them with automatism, a free-from creative process that taps into the subconscious and reveals the truths we suppress in our waking lives.

Surrealist art sparks conversation like nothing else can. These pieces add a sense of playfulness and imagination to everyday spaces, without sacrificing rich symbolism and powerful messages. For many, surrealist wall art serves as a daily reminder to think differently and embrace the unexpected in life.

What Is Surrealism in Art? 5 Key Takeaways

• Definition of Surrealist Art: Surrealism in art is a creative movement that combines dreamlike and bizarre imagery to explore the unconscious mind, often featuring unexpected juxtapositions and transformations.
• Who Created Surrealism? André Breton, a French poet and critic, is credited with establishing it as a formal artistic and literary movement when he published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.
• Popular Surrealist Artists: The most famous surrealist painters include Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Frida Kahlo, Joan Miró, and Yves Tanguy.
• Types of Surrealism: The two main types of surrealism are absolute surrealism or automatism (spontaneous creation without conscious control) and veristic surrealism (spontaneous creation with conscious control).
• Why Surrealism Matters: Surrealism matters because it revolutionized how we think about art, explored the unconscious mind in visual form, influenced advertising and popular culture, and created a visual language that continues to inspire contemporary artists.

The History of Surrealism

Surrealism emerged from three pivotal influences that forever changed art: Sigmund Freud's psychological theories, a moral preoccupation with World War I, which drove visual artists to reject logical thinking, and André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. Together, these forces gave way to the surrealist movement, a revolutionary approach prioritizing the irrational and dreamlike over traditional reality.

Sigmund Freud Introduces Subconscious Exploration

Sigmund Freud’s foundational book on psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), paved the way for surrealist artists. In it, Freud theorized that people’s dreams reflect emotions and experiences their unconscious mind has repressed, and that analyzing those dreams helps understand their motivations and, in turn, “cure” them.

He felt that dreams and dream-like states gave insight directly into the subconscious, without self-censorship or judgment. These concepts inspired artists to experiment with pure psychic automatism. They broke down the walls between thinking about creativity and letting creativity flow.

World War I

The challenges that arose in the aftermath of World War I—from managing the loss of human capital to rebuilding with meager resources and coping with socioeconomic upheaval—sparked an artistic response against the structures that had existed pre-war.

Two multi-disciplinary movements emerged in visual art and literature: Dadaism around 1915, then Surrealism following.

What's the difference between Dadaism and Surrealism? Both rejected the mainstream conformism they felt contributed to the recent war and its horrors, and embraced absurdity in making sociopolitical statements. While very similar in style, only one embraced the focus on dreams and the unconscious that had come out of Freud’s work: Surrealism.

Critic André Breton Releases the Surrealist Manifesto

French writer André Breton officially “launched” Surrealism for the first time in 1924 in his Surrealist Manifesto, a treatise that defined the movement as, “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, using the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought.” 

Inspired by Freud, Breton felt that there was “omnipotence,” a greater understanding, to be found in dreams. It suggested that the spontaneous or rapid expression of an emotion or state, translated into art, would allow expression of inner thoughts or the unconscious mind, without self-censorship.

Surrealist Ideas Arrive in Visual Art & Writing

Surrealism was co-founded by groups of visual artists and writers alike.

There initially was a division between writers and artists of the movement, though, as writers felt the mere act of painting too rule-constrained and time-intensive to achieve the spontaneous creation needed. Indeed, throughout the movement, there continued to be low-simmering tensions between all factions, with changing movement goals and morphing affiliations causing conflict. 

However, there were principles of thought spanning both writers and artists. They both focused on dreams and inner, unconscious thoughts, especially as brought out by psychoanalysis; the rejection of dominant, forced structure and reason; embracing humor and silliness; and commentary, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, of sociopolitical themes. 

Yves Tanguy in his Mama! Papa is Wounded!, for example, specifically highlighted the violence of war and the psychological issues facing shell-shocked soldiers returning home. While the symbolism may seem hard to follow, the abstract images have a powerful meaning.

Surrealist Painting Techniques 

Unlike many other modern art periods, Surrealist painting was less about technical aspects like specific brushwork styles or use of light or the other components we think of as representing a movement. While the key elements of Surrealism tend to be more ideological, there are a couple of notable practices.

Automatic Drawing and Painting

Automatic writing, sometimes referred to as Surrealist automatism, is a form of involuntary writing. Surrealist artists aimed to remove intellectual interference between the subconscious brain and the pen, writing rapid-fire in a stream-of-consciousness freeform manner, without a deliberate direction, for as long as possible.  

A similar theory of automatism was a mainstay of Victorian mediums in the late 19th century, who claimed it let them use their psychic abilities to unconsciously channel words spoken from the beyond. The Surrealists removed the mysticism and focused instead on using it to bring hidden, inner thoughts forward. 

However, while Surrealist writers were originally skeptical that it could port over successfully to other media, the automatic method found an easier companion in pen and ink. Artist André Masson initially began experimenting with the technique, and in 1923, released a series of automatic drawings that are generally considered the point where the two worlds combined. 

Like the writers before him, Masson started each drawing without any pre-determined ideas, letting his pen travel unrestrained across the page until intriguing bits emerged from what he had drawn, which he then enhanced and embellished. 

Surrealist painters also began incorporating the automatic method in a variety of ways. One practice was to try to let paint flow freely in a completely unplanned manner. Rather than incorporating one specific type of brush stroke method, they would paint however they were moved to, be it in dots, drips, or slashes. Is it any surprise that Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism are so related?

They also experimented with different materials, with Masson even playing with sand. Like the drawings, they also incorporated accidental marks or errors into the final compositions.

Hyperrealistic Technique

Hyperrealism is an artistic style that focuses on representing the subject of a composition with such intense detail that it seems true to life, in some ways blurring the line between art and reality. This is almost the exact opposite of the Impressionist art movement, which was literal in its subjects but less so in its depictions. 

Surrealists employed near-photorealism to make some of their more illogical, strange, and dreamlike imagery appear as if those components could be real. These hyper-unrealistic objects' precision and attention to detail make them even more disconcerting. 

This is particularly showcased in Salvador Dalí’s famous The Persistence of Memory. A contradiction of real-life locations near the artist’s home in Catalonia, Spain, and weirdly melting clocks, which Dalí compared to “a Camembert cheese melting in the sun”, are painted with the same detail as the mountains, which look like they could’ve been pulled from realism art. That uniformity in technique makes the absurd clocks seem like they could be real, even though our brains tell us it’s physically impossible.

Key Characteristics of Surrealist Painting

Surrealist painters aimed for an observer to know a scene wasn’t real immediately, but the fine brushwork and incredible attention to detail compel people to take a second look. In a way, Surrealist art blurs the lines of reality and fantasy, similarly to our experiences in dreams. 

Strange and distorted images are juxtaposed with familiar objects, each purposeful and laden with meaning. The combination seems otherworldly—sometimes a fantasy, sometimes a nightmare.

Dream Imagery: Exploring the Subconscious Mind

 Through Freud’s influence, Surrealists felt that true creativity was locked away inside the subconscious mind. Only through dreams and dream-like states were artists able to release their imaginations and access inspiration and ideas previously suppressed. Surrealists were also interested in exploring lucid dreams, aka conscious dreams, which are a more vivid form of daydreaming where the dreamer can potentially control their movement within that dream world. 

But it wasn’t just that they wanted to reveal their dreams; they also tried to depict those feelings on the canvas. Surrealists painted illogical dreamscapes filled with the strange and wonderful. Their paintings often take on the feeling of those lucid dreams, where the images seem dream-like but are still based on a kernel of reality. 

Yves Tanguy, one of Surrealism’s primary artists, particularly portrayed recognizable, yet odd, distorted shapes and items placed against imagined backdrops.

Juxtaposition

 At a more granular level, Surrealism’s interest in dreams was often highlighted by depicting contradictory items. The cognitive dissonance between the differing images draws the viewer’s attention and curiosity, highlighting the clashing symbolism. 

Life or death, soft or hard, light or dark. It’s like a puzzle the viewer needs to solve to understand the allegory. Dalí’s melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory, for example, feature the juxtaposition of a clock, hard and mechanical, full of gears and working pieces, and something that melts in the sun, which suggests an item without a solid core.  

Similarly, Belgian Surrealist René Magritte utilizes the juxtaposition in a classically Surrealist way in The Treachery of Images. The simple image of a pipe on a light yellow background features the words, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” (“This is not a pipe,”) directly contradicting what the viewer “knows” they are looking at. 

Psychoanalytically-Influenced Symbolism 

 Throughout his conclusions on dreams and the subconscious, Sigmund Freud identified a number of images he felt symbolized different concepts in dreams and the unconscious. Inanimate objects like keys and bread had just as much meaning as animals and humans, suggesting everything from physical infirmities to emotions of hope and horror.

Freud wasn’t the only practitioner to focus on symbology, however. Fellow pioneering psychoanalyst Carl Jung also felt symbolism was important, as he documented in his Symbols of Transformation. Similar to Freud, he felt that symbols are the language of the unconscious, a way to communicate thoughts and ideas to the conscious mind, but that what they represented was changeable, depending on the personal and cultural experiences of the dreamer. Jung even applauded Tanguy for his use of powerful symbology and hidden signs. 

Salvador Dalí extensively utilized symbology in his work, especially drawing on the influence of Freud’s symbolism. In fact, in 1930, André Breton himself complimented Salvador Dalí on using Freudian symbols. Dalí regularly featured animals in his works, and in one, The Ants, Dalí depicted a swarm of said insects, a Freudian allegory to both desire and death and decomposition. 

Collage was also an important technique that Surrealists used. There was artistic collage, combining a disjointed set of objects into one composition, and there was also physical collage, incorporating other found or cut objects into a painting. 

In Accommodations of Desire, for example, Dalí utilized a cutout, not painted, image of a lion’s head—a symbol of power and instinct. But he then utilized the shape of the lion’s head in multiple ways, as a silhouette in white and red, but also as just the mane with the lion’s face cut out. 

Illogical or Impossible Perspectives

 For painters in Surrealism, the laws of physics were optional. By releasing themselves from the constraints of the physical world, Surrealists allowed themselves to portray the strange things people see in dreams: worlds they know can’t exist, but experience anyway. Time and logic, reality and reason were concepts they utilized or discarded as they chose. 

People often talk about the suspension of disbelief regarding theatre. Patrons watching a show have to choose to enter that reality the moment they sit in the seats. Similarly, Surrealist paintings force their viewers to suspend their disbelief and enter a dreamlike world, where the distortions or unreal qualities of components are accepted as normal, letting the viewer focus on what they’re seeing, what it makes them think, and how it makes them feel. Whether it’s via distorted landscapes or impossibly-sized objects, the detachment from reality opens people up to new ideas and concepts. 

Famous Surrealist Artists and Their Work

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989)

The Spanish master of dreamlike precision, Dalí created meticulously detailed visions of impossible scenarios. With his iconic mustache and flair for self-promotion, he became surrealism's most recognizable figure. His technical brilliance combined with bizarre imagination produced unforgettable images that explored time, identity, and the unconscious mind.

• The Persistence of Memory (1931) - The famous melting clocks draped over a desert landscape
• Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee (1944) - Sleeping figure with tigers and an elephant on stilts
• The Burning Giraffe (1937) - Figures with drawers protruding from them
• Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937) - Double image illusion combining swans and elephants

René Magritte (1898–1967)

The Belgian painter created simple, often witty images that challenged perception and meaning. Magritte worked cleanly, illustratively, placing ordinary objects in extraordinary contexts. His deadpan surrealism questioned the relationship between images, objects, and words.

• The Treachery of Images (1929) - Pipe with text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." (“This is not a pipe.”)
• The Son of Man (1964) - Bowler-hatted man with apple obscuring his face
• Empire of Light (1953–54) - Nighttime street scene beneath daylight sky
• The Human Condition (1933) - Painting within a painting that blends with the landscape
• Golconda (1953) - Men in bowler hats raining from the sky

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954)

Though she rejected the surrealist label, Kahlo's intensely personal paintings fused Mexican folk art with surrealist elements. Her work explored identity, gender, class, and chronic pain through dreamlike self-portraits and symbolic imagery drawn from her difficult life experiences. Today, she’s considered one of the most famous Mexican artists of all time.

• The Two Fridas (1939) - Double self-portrait with exposed hearts connected by veins
• The Broken Column (1944) - Self-portrait with steel column replacing her spine
• Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) - Surrounded by symbolic animals
• The Wounded Deer (1946) - Self-portrait as a deer pierced by arrows

Max Ernst (1891–1976)

German-born Ernst pioneered surrealist techniques like frottage (rubbing over textured surfaces) and decalcomania (pressing paint between surfaces). His work, influenced by his World War I experiences, created mysterious landscapes and bizarre hybrid creatures, often with dark humor. By mixing media, he gave way to techniques used in Pop Art later on.

• Europe After the Rain II (1940–42) - Petrified, eroded landscape-like formations
• The Elephant Celebes (1921) - Mechanical elephant-like figure in a strange landscape
• Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924) - Mixed media with wooden elements
• The Robing of the Bride (1940) - Bird-woman figure with mysterious attendants

Joan Miró (1893–1983)

The Spanish artist developed a playful, abstract surrealist style featuring biomorphic forms, childlike figures, and bright colors. His spontaneous approach balanced conscious and unconscious creation, producing joyful yet mysterious compositions that bridged surrealism and abstract art.

• The Farm (1921–22) - Detailed depiction of a family farm with surreal elements
• Harlequin's Carnival (1924–25) - Colorful figures in a playful, dreamlike scene
• The Tilled Field (1923–24) - Landscape with symbolic animals and objects
• Dog Barking at the Moon (1926) - Simplified forms with a ladder reaching to the sky
• Blue II (1961) - Minimalist blue canvas with simple black line and red accents

Surrealism Continues to Reveal Hidden Truth

Surrealism as a movement was bookmarked by the two World Wars. Finding its heyday in the roaring ‘20s after the end of World War I in 1918, the movement dissipated as the early shadows of World War II started to cross Europe. The movement found a home in New York City, centralized around a few primary galleries, including Peggy Guggenheim’s. A 1940 Surrealist exhibition in Mexico City was joined by artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera as well, though neither were officially Surrealists. 

Despite its limited window of activity, Surrealism nevertheless influenced multiple movements and methodologies, from Modern and Contemporary art to graphic design to film and television. Its emphasis on thinking beyond the obvious, breaking from rules, and exploring the unconscious are themes that still resonate in modern art.