Surrealist Art Guide: 6 Famous Surrealist Artists

Surrealism was an avant-garde art movement that sought to release human creative potential from the restrictions of reality or rationalism. In the visual arts, Surrealism often juxtaposes unexpected images together in absurd and mysterious ways meant to channel dreams, hallucinations, nightmares, or simply the artist’s imagination.

The word “Surrealism” comes from the French sur (‘above’) and real (‘reality’), and refers to the “superior reality” of the subconscious. The term was coined by the writer Guillaume Apollinaire, but the Surrealist artistic movement wasn’t established until the poet André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. Famous surrealist artists include Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Frida Kahlo, Man Ray, and Max Ernst.

The immediate precursor to Surrealism is Dadaism, a Paris-based art movement that embraced non-traditional modes of art to mock and antagonize the conventions of art itself. Like the Surrealists, artists of the Dada movement were heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and the socio-political views of Karl Marx.

Following the chaos of World War I, artists found an emerging scene that prioritized experimentation and absurdity in Paris. These proto-Surrealists would meet in cafes where to play collaborative drawing games and invented techniques that would challenge their creativity and embrace experimentation. In 1917, writer Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term “Surrealism” in reference to the ballet Parade, for which Pablo Picasso designed the costumes and sets.

In the 1920s, Paris was once again the world’s cultural center of art, which is where the surrealist movement was born in earnest. Writer André Breton, the literary leader of the Surrealist movement, published the manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, which stated—”I believe in the future resolution of these two states, seemingly so contradictory, of dream and reality, in a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, so to speak.” Surrealism quickly spread across the globe to become an international intellectual and cultural movement.

There are a few key characteristics of surrealist art:

1. 1. Spontaneously-created: Surrealist techniques encouraged spontaneity in the artistic process. Automatic drawing challenged visual artists to create images without planning a composition or envisioning the final product, which was similar to how writers in the surrealist literary movement practiced automatic writing. Drawing games like “exquisite corpse” encouraged artists to collaborate with each other to create improvisational drawings on the spot. Surrealism also took a page out of Dadaism, assembling found objects spontaneously to create unexpected works of art.
2. 2. Subverting convention: One of the most popular modes of creating surrealist art involved the juxtaposition of unrelated, recognizable imagery rendered in typical conventions of western painting—like perspective, shadows, modeling—to create strange, dreamy, or absurd compositions. For example, René Magritte’s painting The Lovers (1928) shows a couple kissing, but both of their heads are draped in white fabric, transforming this intimate action into an unsettling symbol of isolation and frustration.
   
3. 3. Manifesting the unconscious mind: Another popular convention of Surrealist painting is to create completely abstract images, led by subconscious desires and not grounded in reality. Relying on automatic painting or drawing, abstract painting became highly influential to the younger generation of artists, especially the American Abstract Expressionists working in New York during the 1950s.

The Surrealist artists pushed the course of art history to an experimental place that opened up the conventions of what fine art is. Here are some of the most famous surrealist artists.

1. 1. Salvador Dalí: Spanish artist Salvador Dalí developed a colorful artistic personality working in Paris between World War I and World War II. He is known for his hallucinatory and dream-like paintings, such as The Persistence of Memory, which is a fantastical image of clocks melting in a barren desert landscape.
2. 2. Max Ernst: German painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Max Ernst had a long career that spanned the eras of Dadaism, Surrealism, and Abstract-Expressionism. In his Surrealist period, Ernst represented himself in a series of paintings as a cartoonish bird called Loplop. Other surrealist contemporaries are even referenced in some of these works like The Virgin Chastises the infant Jesus before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Painter. Later in his career, Ernst would flee Europe for the United States to escape the Gestapo, which was pursuing him in France.
3. 3. Frida Kahlo: Mexican painter Frida Kahlo took the teachings of surrealism and fused them with Mexican folk art imagery. She’s best known for her series of colorful self-portraits.
4. 4. René Magritte: Belgian painter René Magritte led the autonomous group of Surrealists working in Brussels. His paintings—like The Son of Man, Golconda, and The False Mirror—trace a series of recognizable motifs that are repeated throughout his work such as a man in a bowler hat, a green apple, and white clouds against a bright blue sky.
5. 5. Joan Miró: Spanish painter and sculptor Joan Miró created abstract images driven by his inner instinct, manifesting his unconscious imagination on the canvas in paintings like Horse, Pipe, and Red Flower—which appears at first as a simple still life on a table, but incorporates out-of-place elements like a carousel horse.
6. 6. Man Ray: Man Ray was a surrealist and dadaist photographer who was famous for manipulating his photographs to create strange and surreal compositions. He lived and worked in Paris in the 1920s, and his work was exhibited in the first Surrealist exhibition. One of his most famous photos is Ingres’s Violin, which shows a seated nude woman pictured from behind who has the F-holes of violin superimposed on her back.

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