Surrealism and precursors: 100 paintings where dreams disturb reality

Surrealism is born from the desire to free the image from reasonable habits. Dreams, unconscious, chance, automatisms, unforeseen associations, displaced objects, transformed bodies and impossible landscapes also become materials serious than an official portrait. The painting no longer only describes what is in front of us; it shows what is insistent behind the eyelid. It's less practical for storing keys, but much more effective for waking up imagination.

Yves Tanguy gives movement an immediately recognizable inner geography. Its low horizons, its mineral shapes, its soft or pointed objects and its silent spaces resemble planets where thought would have left dragging your stones. Nothing is really explainable, but everything seems constructed with worrying precision. At Tanguy, even emptiness seems to have an appointment.

Frida Kahlo belongs to a more personal constellation, often close to the surrealist imagination without letting herself be locked into it. His self-portraits, wounds, doubles, broken columns, animals, roots and symbols transform the biography in interior theater. She does not dream to escape reality: she gives it a sharper form. The result looks the viewer straight in the eye, which is rarely comfortable and often unforgettable.

Picabia, Schwitters, Arp and Dada legacies bring a freedom of sabotage very useful to surrealism. Absurd machines, collages, floating shapes and incongruous encounters break reading habits. The picture stop answering questions nicely; she asks better ones, sometimes with a tram ticket, gear, or shape that looks innocent but probably knows several secrets.

Klee, Gorky, Miro, Savinio, Pierre Roy and Wols show that surrealism can be graphic, poetic, biomorphic, metaphysical or almost childish. The signs become characters, the objects behave badly, the colors follow side roads. A simple line can become a thought, insect, constellation or very discreet joke. The dream doesn't have to be noisy to become oddly convincing.

Visionary roots matter enormously. Rousseau, Redon, Moreau, Böcklin, Klinger, Ensor, Munch, Blake, Goya, Füssli, Khnopff or Schwabe are not all surrealists in the strict sense, but they prepared the ground: visions, monsters, apparitions, nightmares, inner mythologies, haunting symbols. Surrealism comes after them like a guest who finds the house already full of secret doors.

In a decoration, a surrealist or visionary work immediately gives conversation to the wall. Tanguy brings strange silence, Kahlo symbolic intensity, Klee graphic poetry, Rousseau mental exoticism, Redon sweet mystery, Ensor masked irony, Goya the moral night. These are perfect images for a library, an office, a curious living room or a room that refuses to be just a very tidy place.

This Top brings together works where dream, vision, unconscious, strangeness, symbolism, humor, unease and visual poetry intersect. Some come from the surrealist core, others from its sources or its immediate neighborhoods. It is precisely what makes the journey exciting: we see how the surrealist imagination was nourished by romantic nightmares, fin-de-siecle symbols, learned naiveties and mocking avant-gardes. Reality still stands, but he clearly moved a few centimeters.

The charm of surrealism lies in this double sensation: everything seems carefully painted, and yet something is deliciously wrong. An island floats in the head, an eye becomes independent, a forest becomes theater, a face tells of pain that is impossible to put into a normal sentence. Painting doesn't ask dreams to become logical. It just gives him enough room to sit down, put down his weird shoes, and start talking.