Celebrating more than forty years of artistic effervescence, the exhibition traces the period from 1924 to 1969, thus marking a vibrant tribute to the anniversary of the surrealist movement.
Date : 4 sept 2024 -13 january 2025
Lieu : Au Centre Pompidou
Envies : Retrospective, Surréalisme
Born in 1924 with the publication of André Breton's famous Manifesto, kindly loaned by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the journey of this retrospective unfolds like a labyrinth in 14 captivating chapters.
At the crossroads of a chronological and thematic approach, each chapter highlights the major literary figures who have nourished the surrealist imagination – from Lautréamont to Lewis Carroll, including Sade – as well as the fundamental poetic concepts that constitute its essence, such as the artist-medium, the dream, the quest for the philosopher's stone, or the mystical forest.
Paintings, drawings, films, photographs and literary documents respond to each other in a staging where the emblematic works of the movement, from the most prestigious public and private collections, dialogue to offer the visitor a total immersion in the surrealist universe.
Surrealism was rooted in the post-war context, where the traumas left by the First World War had profoundly changed the perception of the world. Artistic avant-gardes, such as Dadaism, had already begun to break with bourgeois conventions, but Surrealism went further by advocating a fusion between art and life, dream and reality. The goal was to reach a higher truth, that of the unconscious, by short-circuiting the mechanisms of reason and freeing the mind from any moral or social censorship.
The fundamental principles
Surrealism is based on several key concepts:
Psychic automatism: This technique, consisting of writing or drawing without the intervention of consciousness, aims to free the unconscious and allow the deepest thoughts to express themselves without any rational censorship. Automatic writing, popularized by Breton and his companions, is a direct application of this.
Dreams and the Unconscious: Inspired by Freudian theories, surrealism gives a central place to dreams and psychoanalysis. The dream becomes a privileged place where desires, anxieties and unbridled visions mingle, in a logic where the irrational is valued as the bearer of a higher truth.
Art as a means of subversion: Surrealism rejects the idea of a purely aesthetic or decorative art. It aims to be a tool for social transformation, a means of upsetting the established order, awakening consciences and denouncing the oppressive norms of society.
Major figures
Alongside André Breton, many artists and writers contributed to the blossoming of surrealism. Among them, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault and Benjamin Péret form the literary core of the movement. In the visual arts, figures such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Man Ray have made it one of the most influential movements of the century.
Aesthetics and style
Surrealist aesthetics are marked by strangeness, dreams, the absurd and the distortion of reality. Max Ernst's collages and Salvador Dalí's dreamlike compositions immerse the viewer in a universe where logic seems to dissolve, in favor of disturbing images that invite interpretation. Surrealist objects, such as those created by Meret Oppenheim, become tools of provocation, playing on unexpected shifts and incongruous associations.
Date : 4 sept 2024 -13 january 2025
Lieu : Au Centre Pompidou
Envies : Retrospective, Surréalisme
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