60 Fun Facts About Surrealism

Who coined the word 'surrealism' in 1917?

He used it in his programme notes for the Ballets Russes production Parade, with music by Erik Satie.

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

Many future Surrealists took part in Dada's anti-art gatherings in Paris after the war.

Who wrote the Surrealist Manifesto of October 1924 and led the movement for four decades?

A rival, Yvan Goll, had published his own surrealist manifesto two weeks earlier but lost the battle for the name.

Breton's 1924 manifesto defined surrealism as pure what?

The aim was to express 'the actual functioning of thought' free of reason's control.

Before founding Surrealism, the movement's leader had trained in what field?

He used Freud's methods on shell-shocked soldiers in a wartime neurological hospital.

Which thinker's ideas about the unconscious underpinned Surrealism?

Breton had used his psychoanalytic techniques during the war.

What was The Magnetic Fields (1920), the earliest work produced by Breton's circle?

Breton called it the first work written and published by his group.

Whose line about a sewing machine and an umbrella meeting on a dissecting table became a Surrealist touchstone?

Breton called his Les Chants de Maldoror the first Surrealist work.

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

Littérature was Breton's earlier Dada-era magazine; Documents was Georges Bataille's dissident rival.

The Surrealist game 'exquisite corpse' takes its name from a sentence that ended with what?

Players write or draw in turn, folding the paper so nobody sees the earlier parts.

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

Magritte said seeing his The Song of Love was the first time 'my eyes saw thought'.

Yves Tanguy decided to become a painter after seeing which de Chirico painting from a bus?

He had no formal training and had served in the merchant navy.

In which Catalan town was Salvador Dalí born in 1904?

His Theatre-Museum stands there today.

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

He gave the answer when the physicist Ilya Prigogine asked him about Einstein.

Where has The Persistence of Memory hung since an anonymous donor gave it in 1934?

It had first sold at the Julien Levy Gallery for $250.

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

Dalí revisited the picture in 1954 with The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory.

What did Dalí call his technique for tapping the subconscious by inducing paranoid delusions?

The Surrealists hailed it when he joined the group in 1929.

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

He nearly suffocated inside the helmet.

Breton's mocking nickname for Dalí, 'Avida Dollars', is what kind of wordplay?

Breton coined it in 1949, disgusted by Dalí's commercialism.

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

Ingrid Bergman plays a psychoanalyst treating Gregory Peck.

Which lollipop company's logo did Dalí design in 1969?

He also worked with Walt Disney on the unfinished animated film Destino.

What exotic pet did Dalí frequently take out in public alongside his anteater?

He was equally famous for his upturned moustache.

Dalí's Lobster Telephone was made in 1936 for which English collector and poet?

It is also known as the Aphrodisiac Telephone; James also commissioned the Mae West Lips Sofa.

Who was Gala, whom Dalí met in 1929 and married in 1934?

She had previously been married to the poet Paul Éluard.

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

The 1929 painting hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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

The picture plays a key role in the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.

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

Some link it to his mother's drowning, when her wet nightgown was found wrapped around her face.

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

It hangs in the Menil Collection in Houston.

What was Magritte's nationality?

He was born in Lessines in Hainaut in 1898 and worked in a wallpaper factory before painting full-time.

What did Magritte, along with his brother, secretly do to make money in the 1940s?

Belgium later put him on a 500-franc note; his 'Vache period' of crude Fauve-style pictures came in 1947-48.

Which German-born artist invented frottage, making images from pencil rubbings of textured surfaces?

He also devised grattage, scraping paint across canvas over objects, and used a bird alter ego called Loplop.

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

She had bought a number of his works for her London gallery in 1938.

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

He was enchanted by her self-portrait Birthday; she died in 2012 aged 101.

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

Ernest Hemingway bought his early painting The Farm.

Miró's series of 23 small gouaches painted between 1940 and 1941 is called what?

He made them in Varengeville, Palma and Mont-roig while fleeing the war.

Man Ray named his camera-less photographic prints after himself. What did he call them?

He was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia and spent most of his career in Paris.

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

He also made a metronome with an eye, originally titled Object to Be Destroyed.

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

Their affair began in 1929; she later became a celebrated war photographer.

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

Luis Buñuel directed it and co-wrote it with Dalí, using dream logic and free association.

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

Two priests and the Ten Commandments are tied to the same ropes.

Buñuel and Dalí's 1930 follow-up L'Age d'Or was banned in Paris after what?

The Vicomte de Noailles had financed it as a birthday gift for his wife; it did not get a legal US release until 1979.

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

The idea came from a café conversation with Picasso and Dora Maar; MoMA bought it the same year.

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

She fell for Max Ernst after seeing his work at the 1936 London exhibition, and later suffered a breakdown that put her in an asylum in Santander.

Which Spanish-born painter, partner of poet Benjamin Péret, fled Nazi-occupied Paris in 1941 for good?

She was born in Anglès, Catalonia, in 1908 and died in Mexico City in 1963.

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

He arranged her first solo show at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York that year.

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

Breton met him in Mexico in 1938 while staying with Rivera's ex-wife.

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

First Papers of Surrealism, designed by Duchamp, followed in 1942.

Which city was the movement's most important centre?

From the 1920s it spread worldwide, from London and Prague to Mexico City and Tokyo.

In what year did the movement's founder die, after which surrealist groups carried on without him?

He had published a 'Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto or Not' in 1942 but never a third manifesto.

Which political tendencies was Surrealism associated with?

Breton insisted it was above all a revolutionary movement.

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

Five originals were made; one is in the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres.

Whose fascination with birds produced the alter ego Loplop, who appears throughout his work?

He won the Grand Prize for painting at the 1954 Venice Biennale.

Which symbolist painter's The Blind House influenced Magritte's Empire of Light series?

The series shows a night-time street beneath a daylight sky.

Which Surrealist poet did Breton found the journal Littérature with, alongside Louis Aragon, in 1919?

The three began experimenting with automatic writing and publishing accounts of dreams in the magazine.

Where was the first Surrealist exhibition, La Peinture Surréaliste, held in 1925?

It showed Masson, Man Ray, Paul Klee and Miró; the dedicated Galerie Surréaliste opened the following March with a Man Ray show.

Which Austrian-born Surrealist contributed the automatic technique of fumage, using candle smoke?

Gordon Onslow Ford added coulage at the same time; Paalen later split from Breton and launched the magazine DYN in Mexico.

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

Duchamp and Paalen designed the cave-like room, lit by a single bulb over a brazier, and visitors were handed flashlights to see the art.

Which short-lived magazine did Breton co-found in the US in 1941 with Ernst, Duchamp and David Hare?

It was Charles Henri Ford's magazine View, though, that gave Breton his real channel to promote Surrealism in America.

In which country was the Surrealist group La Mandrágora founded in 1938?

Founded by Braulio Arenas, Teófilo Cid and Enrique Gómez Correa, it later influenced the novelist Roberto Bolaño.

Which sculptor's 1925 Torso marked his move to simplified, preclassical forms within Surrealism?

Giacometti's Surrealist period included Suspended Ball before he turned to his famous elongated figures.