Reconciling dreams with reality

Should you be waiting in line at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the exhibition Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, don’t be put off by “Tête” (1974), a sculpture by Joan Miró that is big and ugly and plopped down directly at the entrance. Be aware that Miró’s true métier was painting; “Tête” was cranked out long past his prime. You can’t blame an old man for cashing in on his reputation, particularly when his formative years were burdened by poverty. You can blame a curator for including a flagrant piece of product as a how-do-you-do to a centennial celebration.

Then again, one shouldn’t be too hard on Matthew Affron, the museum’s Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art, or his assistant Danielle Cooke: they’ve put together an otherwise exemplary accounting of an inherently vexing school of art. Working in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Affron and Cooke do right by a movement that sought to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality” – or so the poet, propagandist and cultural arbiter André Breton stated in his 1924 Manifeste du surréalisme.

The critic and writer Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term “surrealism” to describe Léonide Massine’s 1917 ballet Parade, but its tenets had already been filtering through advanced artistic circles of the time. The devastation caused by World War One and the theories of Sigmund Freud had a profound effect on a creative class that sought escape from the disappointments of a world that once presumed to be civilized. Dreams, hallucinations and the indulgences of desire – that is to say, interiority – were subsequently explored in ways that could be skittish, daring, sexy and puerile.

Add to that list of adjectives putrefact – a term employed by Salvador Dalí to describe the soft, squishy, decaying objects dotting his compositions. There are myriad such unpleasantnesses throughout Dreamworld, particularly in Dalí’s magnum opus “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)” (1936). Avida Dollars – the anagrammatic name Breton bestowed upon the avaricious Dalí – is seen in some abundance at “Dreamworld,” as are such mainstays of the unconscious as Miró, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy and André Masson. Marcel Duchamp is on hand as “one of surrealism’s most influential guiding spirits,” which is something of a stretch, but, hey, what do you expect from an institution that’s the main repository of the man’s oeuvre?

Social-justice warriors will be doing the requisite bean-counting to determine just how ideologically on-the-beam our curators have been in shaping this blockbuster effort. Truth to tell, surrealism lent itself to individuals who were inherently off-the-beam and who took pride in their outlaw status. Among them is the artist born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob who, working under the pseudonym Claude Cahun, was a gender-bending photographer without whom post-modern doyenne Cindy Sherman is unimaginable. “Openly gay” Pavel Tchelitchew is seen to discomfiting effect in “Leopard Boy” (1935), a painting that imbues its own kind of putrefaction within the milky, electric light for which he is known.

That is, anyway, to the extent that Tchelitchew is known at all. Affron and Cooke have done yeoman-like work in globalizing the reach of surrealism by unearthing figures who are worthy of a seat at the table. Among the best of these discoveries are Suzanne van Damme, Wilhelm Freddie, Raoul Ubac, Gordon Onslow Ford and Maria Martins, all of whom distinguish themselves more forthrightly than Frida Kahlo, whose diminutive and desultory “My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree)” (1936) does her ubiquity no favors.

Dreamworld ends on a one-two gambit that is adroitly calculated, stemming, as it does, from the prerogatives of feminism and succeeding, in the end, as a display of technical prowess. Leonora Carrington will need little introduction to fans of surrealism, but Remedios Varo may. Both painters were of European descent – Carrington was born in the United Kingdom, Varo in Spain – and they found in Mexico a haven from the vicissitudes of World War Two. The two women became fast friends, sharing a fascination with cooking, casting spells and pranking their pals.

Carrington’s standing has increased significantly in the last few decades. A recent exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art, Leonora Carrington: Dreamweaver, confirmed her idiosyncrasies as an image-maker and expanded our knowledge of her abilities as a paint-handler, which are considerable. Possessed of a delicate manner that is nonetheless scruffy at the core, Carrington built up her pictures through a patient accretion of tone and color that differentiates even the stickiest of her fantasies from the slick, licked surfaces of Dalí or Magritte’s workmanlike facture. “Pictures of Dagobert” (1945) will be a bit arch for those who prefer their fantasies cut-and-dried, but a tender strain of magic can be divined within its nooks and crannies.

Varo is represented by a handful of pictures in the same gallery and, at first glance, they could be mistaken for Carrington’s. Great minds may think alike, but touch tells: Varo is more linear in approach, more clarified and sharper in focus. Claiming that the “dream world and the real world are the same,” Varo spent a significant amount of time and effort honing the former, working from preparatory drawings that were almost as exacting as the resulting canvases.

How true a souvenir of the unconscious might be when it is consciously configured is a complaint that has invariably dogged Surrealist painting, but what Varo’s work lacks in spontaneity or relish is recompensed by intensity and intricacy. “Papilla Estelar” (1958), with its maidservant spoon-feeding a caged crescent moon, is a cosmological origin story that could be viewed as some kind of biographical metaphor. The interpretative wiggle-room allowed by Varo is of a piece with an exhibition that makes a vivifying case for the “waking dream” without which 20th-century culture would be poorer. Dreamworld is a must-see.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.