59 Fun Facts About Surrealism

Who coined the word 'surrealism' in 1917?

Guillaume Apollinaire. He never saw what became of his word: weakened by a war wound, he died of Spanish flu in 1918, six years before André Breton took it up for his manifesto.

Which earlier movement, born of disgust at World War I, most directly influenced Surrealism?

Dada. Breton and his friends threw themselves into Dada's stunts after the war, then broke away, wanting to build something from the unconscious where Dada only tore things down.

In the word Surrealism, what does the French prefix 'sur' mean?

Beyond. The aim, in the words of the 1924 manifesto, was to join dream and waking life in 'an absolute reality, a surreality'.

Breton's 1924 manifesto defined surrealism as pure what?

Psychic automatism. Painters took the idea up as well: André Masson let his pen move across the paper with no plan at all, drawing straight from the unconscious.

Before founding Surrealism, André Breton had trained in what field?

Medicine and psychiatry. Posted to a wartime military hospital in Nantes, he met the young Jacques Vaché, whose scorn for art and convention marked him for life: 'it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most.'

Which thinker's ideas about the unconscious underpinned Surrealism?

Sigmund Freud wrote that he had been inclined to think the Surrealists, who had adopted him as their patron saint, complete fools, until a visit from Dalí changed his mind.

What was The Magnetic Fields (1920), Breton's joint work from four years before his manifesto?

A text of automatic writing, the first of its kind: Breton and a fellow poet wrote it at speed, refusing to censor or correct a word, to catch thought before reason could tidy it up.

Which long-neglected poet's line about a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table became a Surrealist touchstone?

Comte de Lautréamont was the pen name of Isidore Ducasse, dead at 24. Man Ray paid tribute to the line by wrapping a sewing machine in cloth, tying it up and calling it The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse.

What was the name of the journal launched in 1924 by the Bureau of Surrealist Research?

La Révolution surréaliste ran for twelve issues. In the last, in 1929, Breton printed his Second Manifesto and denounced former members, several of whom had gathered around the rival review Documents.

In the Surrealist game exquisite corpse, what does each player do before passing the paper on?

Folds over their part, so nobody sees what came before. The first sentence the Surrealists made this way, 'The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine', gave the game its name.

Which artist's 'metaphysical' paintings of arcades, long shadows and mannequins influenced the Surrealists?

Giorgio de Chirico lost the Surrealists' favour in the 1920s when he turned to a traditional style, and took his revenge by painting backdated copies of the early pictures they loved.

Which self-taught Surrealist took up painting on the spot after seeing a canvas in a gallery window?

Yves Tanguy was a former merchant sailor who had never had a lesson. He was riding a bus when the window display caught his eye, and he jumped off to get a closer look.

In which Catalan town was Salvador Dalí born in 1904?

Figueres is also where Dalí rests: he turned the burnt-out shell of the town's old theatre into his Theatre-Museum and is buried in a crypt beneath its stage.

Dalí said the soft watches in The Persistence of Memory were inspired not by relativity but by what?

Camembert melting in the sun was Dalí's own account of the limp watches. The dream has a real address, though: the golden cliffs behind them are the coast of Catalonia near his home.

Which museum owns Dalí's The Persistence of Memory?

Museum of Modern Art, New York: in 1934 an anonymous friend of the museum bought the little canvas from the dealer Julien Levy purely to give it away, and it has stayed in the collection ever since.

What covers the orange watch that does not melt in The Persistence of Memory?

Ants meant decay to Dalí, so here they swarm over metal as if it were rotting flesh. He had already used them in the film Un Chien Andalou, crawling out of a hole in a man's hand.

What did Dalí call his technique for finding the double images in his paintings?

The paranoiac-critical method meant working himself into a delusional state while staying sane enough to paint what he saw. 'The difference between a madman and me', he said, 'is that I am not mad.'

What did Dalí wear to deliver a lecture at the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition?

A deep-sea diving suit, he said, showed that he was plunging into the depths of the human mind. He began to suffocate mid-lecture and had to be freed from the helmet.

Breton's mocking nickname for Salvador Dalí, 'Avida Dollars', is what kind of play on the painter's name?

An anagram: the same twelve letters, rearranged to mean 'eager for dollars'. It was Breton's verdict on a painter who had taken to designing jewellery and shop windows for money.

Dalí designed the dream sequence for which 1945 Alfred Hitchcock film?

Spellbound came out of Dalí's years in America. His next film job there, the cartoon Destino for Walt Disney, was shelved in the 1940s and not finished by the studio until 2003.

Which sweet brand's logo did Dalí design in 1969?

Chupa Chups went straight to the top for its wrapper: the founder asked Dalí himself, who set the brand name inside a bright daisy shape, by one account in under an hour.

What kind of animal was Babou, the pet Dalí took to restaurants on a leash in the 1960s?

An ocelot. When a fellow diner took fright at the spotted cat tethered to his table, Dalí assured her it was an ordinary cat that he had painted over in an op-art design.

Which sea creature sits on the receiver of the telephone Dalí designed in 1936?

A lobster. Dalí made the telephones for the English poet Edward James, who supported him for two years and had them installed around his own house in Sussex.

Dalí's wife and muse Gala was born Elena Diakonova in which country?

Russia. Born in Kazan, Gala was married to the poet Paul Éluard when the couple came to visit Dalí in 1929; she was ten years older than the painter, and she stayed.

What French caption is painted beneath the object in Magritte's The Treachery of Images?

Ceci n'est pas une pipe means 'This is not a pipe', and the caption is right: what hangs on the wall is a painted image, and nobody could fill it with tobacco and smoke it.

What hides the man's face in Magritte's 1964 self-portrait The Son of Man?

A green apple floats in front of the face because, Magritte said, everything we see hides another thing, and we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.

In Magritte's The Lovers (1928), the kissing couple's heads are wrapped in what?

White cloth. Legend says Magritte, as a boy, saw his drowned mother pulled from the river with her nightdress over her face, but later research has discredited the story.

Magritte's Golconda (1953) fills the sky over red-roofed houses with dozens of what?

Men in bowler hats and overcoats, the suburban uniform Magritte wore himself: his hatted figures are often read as self-portraits of a painter who chose a quiet middle-class life.

What was Magritte's nationality?

Belgian. Magritte spent three years near Paris among Breton's Surrealists, but when his gallery contract ended in 1930 he went home to Brussels and back to advertising work to pay the bills.

According to his friend Marcel Mariën, what did Magritte secretly do with his brother to raise money?

Forge paintings and banknotes: Mariën said he sold the fake modern masters himself while Magritte's brother printed the money. Scholars still dispute how much of the tale is true.

What worn surface first gave Max Ernst the idea for frottage, his pencil-rubbing technique?

An old wooden floor: years of scrubbing had raised its grain into shapes that looked to Ernst like strange creatures, so he laid paper on the boards and rubbed it with a soft pencil.

Which American heiress and collector married Max Ernst and promoted the Surrealists in the 1940s?

Peggy Guggenheim spent the first months of the war in Paris trying to buy a picture a day. In 1941 she brought Ernst to New York, married him that December and gave the exiles a gallery.

Which American painter married Max Ernst in 1946 and lived with him in Sedona, Arizona?

Dorothea Tanning won Ernst over when he came to her studio to choose work for an all-women show. They played chess, fell in love and married in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner.

Which Catalan painter made the Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun for UNESCO's Paris headquarters?

Joan Miró struggled to sell his early picture The Farm until Ernest Hemingway, then an unknown, won the right to buy it on a roll of dice, by his own account, and paid in monthly instalments.

Which series of small night-sky pictures did Miró start in Normandy in 1940 and finish after fleeing to Spain?

Constellations left France in a portfolio under Miró's arm as his family fled the German advance. Painting them, he said, felt like working in secret, a liberation from the tragedy all around him.

What did Man Ray call the camera-less photographic prints he named after himself?

Rayographs revived an old darkroom trick he stumbled on by accident: he laid objects straight onto light-sensitive paper and switched on the light, and by 1922 he had published a book of them.

Man Ray's photograph Le Violon d'Ingres superimposes f-holes on the back of which model?

Kiki de Montparnasse was Man Ray's lover and muse. The title is a French idiom for a hobby, because the painter Ingres famously loved playing the violin, so the picture calls her his pastime.

With which Surrealist photographer and lover did Man Ray reinvent the technique of solarisation?

Lee Miller told it as an accident: something ran across her foot in the darkroom, she switched on the light in mid-development, and the spoiled negatives came out with the eerie dark outline the pair made their signature.

Un Chien Andalou (1929) opens with a notorious shot of a razor slicing what?

A woman's eye. The shot began as a dream of Buñuel's, in which a thin cloud cut across the moon like a razor through an eye, and the film shows that very cloud just before the blade moves.

In Un Chien Andalou, a man drags two grand pianos containing what?

Dead donkeys, hauled along with two priests and the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Buñuel and Dalí had one rule for the script: nothing in it could have a rational explanation.

Buñuel and Dalí's 1930 film L'Age d'Or was banned in Paris after what happened at a screening?

A right-wing riot: members of a nationalist league threw ink at the screen, attacked the audience and wrecked the Surrealist paintings hung in the lobby. A week later the film was banned.

Meret Oppenheim's famous Object (1936) is a teacup, saucer and spoon covered in what?

Fur. Friends at a café table were admiring Oppenheim's fur-covered bracelet, and the talk turned to what else could be covered the same way, so she bought a cup, saucer and spoon and did it.

Leonora Carrington was born in Lancashire but spent most of her adult life in which country?

Mexico was her way out of wartime Europe: giving her keeper the slip in Portugal, she ran to the Mexican embassy and married a diplomat she knew, the poet Renato Leduc, purely to get away.

Which Spanish-born painter fled Nazi-occupied France in 1941 with the poet Benjamin Péret and never went home?

Remedios Varo spent years in exile living off commercial work, including adverts for the drug firm Bayer, and gave herself to painting full-time only in her forties.

How did Breton describe Frida Kahlo's work when he claimed her as a Surrealist in 1938?

A ribbon around a bomb was Breton's phrase, but Kahlo refused his label: they thought she was a Surrealist, she said, but she never painted dreams, only her own reality.

The Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art was signed by Breton and Diego Rivera but co-written with whom?

Leon Trotsky, then in exile, wrote it with Breton in 1938 as a demand for the complete freedom of art from any party's control. It went out under the two artists' names instead of his.

Which 1936 New York exhibition introduced the movement to a broad American public?

Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism so struck one young American illustrator that she travelled to Paris in 1939 to meet the artists, only to find that most of them had already fled.

Which fashion designer worked with Dalí in the 1930s on a hat shaped like a high-heeled shoe?

Elsa Schiaparelli built the hat on a joke: Dalí's wife had once photographed him with a shoe balanced on his head. Four years later he sketched it as a hat, and it went into her winter 1937 collection.

Which 1928 book by Breton recounts his chance meetings with a troubled young woman in the streets of Paris?

Nadja follows the days Breton really spent with her in 1926. He used photographs in place of description, and closed the book on the line: beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

Which political party did Breton and several fellow Surrealists join in 1927, only to fall out with it within a decade?

The Communist Party never knew what to do with them: Breton's group would not put the workers' struggle ahead of free creation, and after a few stormy years poet and party parted.

Dalí's 1937 red lips sofa is shaped after which Hollywood star's mouth?

Mae West's lips became furniture because Dalí's English patron, the poet Edward James, liked the idea enough to commission real sofas from it and live with them in his house in Sussex.

Max Ernst's alter ego Loplop, who turns up throughout his work, is what kind of creature?

A bird. Ernst traced the obsession to a night in his boyhood when, by his account, he found his pet bird dead and minutes later heard that his sister had been born; he never untangled the two.

In Magritte's Empire of Light paintings, a lamplit street at night lies beneath what kind of sky?

A sunny daytime sky. Neither half is strange on its own, yet together in one picture night and day make a quiet paradox, and Magritte painted the scene again and again.

Which Spanish poet, a friend of Dalí and Buñuel since their student days in Madrid, was shot by Nationalist forces in 1936?

Federico García Lorca shared a student residence with the two, but the friendship soured: he took their film Un Chien Andalou as a jibe at himself. Seven years later he was dead.

Which painter, hailed by Breton as 'one of ours', showed in the first Surrealist exhibition in 1925 but never joined?

Pablo Picasso let the group hang his pictures beside Klee's and Man Ray's, but what he sent was Cubist: the group's methods never really appealed to him, and however Breton courted him he stayed outside.

The Surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen began many of his pictures by trailing what across the surface?

Candle smoke: Paalen let the soot leave ghostly trails, then worked the smoky marks up into a picture. He called the method fumage, and Dalí was among those who later borrowed it.

At the 1938 Paris Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, what hung from the main hall's ceiling?

1,200 coal bags hung over a stove, just as Duchamp's title for the installation says. They turned the gallery's main room into a sooty grotto with the cellar on the ceiling.

At London's 1936 Surrealist exhibition, which young poet went round offering visitors a cup of boiled string?

Dylan Thomas asked each guest whether they took it weak or strong. The show needed no such help: on opening day the crowds were big enough to stop the traffic on Piccadilly.

Which sculptor's Suspended Ball, a globe hanging in a cage, won him an invitation to join the Surrealists?

Alberto Giacometti was a Surrealist favourite for a few years, until the group expelled him in 1935. He went back to studying the human head, and the stick-thin figures that made his name came later still.