Surrealism

One hundred years after the publication of André Breton's Manifesto, the exhibition Surrealism at the Centre Pompidou until 13 January 2025 takes us on an unprecedented journey to the heart of the creative effervescence of the avant-garde movement born shortly after the First World War.

The most symbolic works of Surrealism

Divided into fourteen chronological and thematic chapters that evoke the figures of Lewis Carroll and the Marquis de Sade, the exhibition presents the most symbolic works of the movement, including The Great Masturbator by Salvador Dalí , The Personal Values by René Magritte,The Child's Brain and The Song of Love by Giorgio de Chirico, The Great Forest by Max Ernst, Dog Barking at the Moon by Joan Miró and many others.

These works, on loan from leading international private and public collections, are displayed alongside those by Women Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Ithell Colquhoun, Dora Maar and Dorothea Tanning, as well as by international artists who joined the movement, including the Japanese artist Tatsuo Ikeda, the American Helen Lundeberg, the Danish Wilhelm Freddie and the Mexican Rufino Tamayo.

Around the original manuscript of the manifesto, on exceptional loan from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and displayed in a central ‘drum’, the exhibition combines paintings, drawings, films, photographs and literary documents with the poetic principles that structure the surrealist imagination (the artist as medium, the dream, the philosopher's stone, the forest, etc.).

Rather than offering us a conventional exhibition, the centre Pompidou takes us into the lair of dreams and nightmares of the greatest artists of the 20th century, into fantastical and hypnotic worlds that are hard to resist.

The best exhibitions in the Paris Region.